Folks,
The
theme for my devotional readings last week was “Taken Where You Do Not Want to
Go.” I was struck, thinking about
that idea, by how many stories there are in the Bible of God taking people where
they did not want to go. Abraham
was taken to the mountain to sacrifice his son Isaac. Moses was taken back to Egypt to bring
Israel out of captivity. Elijah was
told to go back and face Queen Jezebel, after she had threatened his life. Jesus was led by the Spirit from the
waters of baptism to the dust of temptation, as well as from the cheering crowds
of triumphal entry into Jerusalem to the jeering mobs of crucifixion on
Golgatha. Paul’s vision of Jesus on
the road to Damascus led him in the exact opposite direction from where he had
been going. For none of these
people, and many others like them in the Bible, was this necessarily the desired
direction they wanted to go. All of
them, however, recognized the necessity of following God’s
leading.
There
are also times in life when it may not be God taking us where we do not want to
go. I’m sure very few of us were
hoping that sometime in our life we would get to isolate ourselves at home, and
wear facemasks and keep 6 feet distance from others when we went out. Few of us ever dreamed that we would not
be able to go to church for several months (see our bishop’s extension of the
suspension of worship until at least June 15, below). Yet, we have been taken there. I don’t believe God brought about this
death and disruption. I do believe
that in the midst of this death and disruption, God is with
us.
At the
end of John’s gospel, Jesus and Peter are eating fish cooked by a campfire on
the shore of the Sea of Tiberias.
Jesus asks Peter three times if Peter loves him, and Peter responds that
he does each time. After the third
response, Jesus says to Peter, “When you were younger, you used to fasten your
own belt and to go wherever you wished.
But when you grow old, you will stretch out your hands, and someone else
will fasten a belt around you and take you where you do not wish to go” (sounds like our experience today!).
John then inserts a parenthetical comment that this was to indicate the
way in which Peter would die. Jesus
then goes on to say to Peter, “Follow me.” (John 21:18-19,
NRSV)
I have
always heard this “Follow me” in the same way as when Jesus called his disciples
at the beginning of his ministry.
“Follow me. Be my disciples.
Travel with me. Learn my
teachings. Ask me questions if you
don’t understand something, and I’ll explain it to you.” But this time, and in this time, when I
read those two verses, I heard “Follow me” in a different way. Much like the children’s game, Follow
the Leader, where everyone lines up behind the leader and does whatever he or
she does (the leader skips, they all skip; the leader raises a hand, they all
raise the same hand), Jesus is telling Peter “Follow me. Teach what I have taught. Heal the sick. Feed the hungry. Cast out demons. Calm the sea. Raise the dead. Follow me. Do what I have done. I have died and I have been
resurrected. Follow me, through
death and into resurrection.”
Jesus
called Peter, and through Peter, each of us, toward death, and through death,
into resurrection. Jesus has
already done this ahead of us, and will be there with us as we go through it
ourselves. This Lent and Easter, we
have experienced the death of our lives as we have known them. Many in the world have experienced
physical death because of the virus.
We grieve the loss of those people, and the loss of our previous way of
being. As Easter people, though, we know there is new life ahead. We know that many of us will be forever
transformed by this experience. We
know that, even though we have been taken where we did not wish to go, God is
with us in this dying, ready to raise us to new life.
Shalom,
Bo
