To remember is a sacred thing, a necessary thing, as vital to our lives as breathing or eating.

This past week I was in Wilmington, North Carolina, with my covenant group. We are officially called the National Church Growth Pastors Prayer Covenant Group. What we really are is a group of about 45 guys who are mostly senior pastors of larger membership churches across the country who gather every year to talk. Over the past 15 years I have gotten to know most of these guys pretty well, some extremely well. Are you wondering what we talk about? Well, our conversations are confidential, but I can give you a general idea. Let me tell you about Pastor X. Pastor X is a fascinating guy. Every year he shares with the group about some of the successes and also some of the failures of his personal and professional life. He worries that he is not doing enough of the right things to pastor his church. He worries that some of his personal shortcomings are hurting his ministry and his family. He knows some of his strengths, but also is aware of some glaring weaknesses. He loves his family and friends and church more than anything, and sometimes he thinks he does well by them, but he also knows he could do better. He struggles with certain kinds of sin more than others, and he often wonders if he is making any progress at all in his walk with Christ. I won’t go into any more detail than that—the confidentiality thing, you know—but suffice it to say that if you did know the detail you would know he is just a regular guy with all the temptations and limitations and also all the good qualities that you would expect in any regular guy. There is one detail that I will share with you. Pastor X is named…Jack Baca. And, truth be told, every one of us in that group could be Pastor X, too.

I know that you already knew that pastors are just regular guys, and regular gals, too. I don’t think that you necessarily spend much time thinking about that fact, but it is interesting to note today, especially in light of the fact that the most visible Christian leader in the world is visiting here in the United States and part of his visit is about trying to heal the wounds caused by the all-too-human failings of some of the priests now under his charge. The headline of Friday’s local paper was, “Pope meets with victims of sexual abuse.”ⁱ Pope Benedict XVI was quoted as saying, “No words of mine could describe the pain and harm inflicted by such abuse. It is important that those who have suffered be given loving pastoral attention.”ⁱⁱ And one of the victims with whom Benedict met said, “My hope is restored today.”ⁱⁱⁱ

We are still walking on a journey here at The Village Church of discovering more of what it means to be a bonafide disciple of Jesus Christ. We are grateful for Scot McKnight’s book about discipleship that emphasizes a traditional Christian set of teachings that are rooted in what Jesus himself said about what it takes to be in a relationship with God. Jesus said that the most important word about God and us is that we are to love God and to love others. And Jesus said that we learn that kind of love by following him. We have focused the last few weeks on our need to believe in Jesus and to trust him, and about our need to surrender control of our lives over to him. Today we want to look at our need to allow him to restore us when we fail, to heal our wounded souls and our wounded lives, so that we can have a relationship with God through him through all the ups and downs of a normal, human, Christian life.

I started off this morning by telling you about Pastor X and some of his shortcomings in the Christian life because the scriptures are very clear about this simple fact: every single person who has ever tried to follow God has experienced failure. The latest scandals in the Roman Catholic Church are surely lamentable but they are also just as surely nothing new. By that I mean to say that every Christian person, ordained or not, in every era of Christian history, has failed God and themselves in some way. And the list of failure begins in the Bible. Today’s lesson from John reminds us of one of the most notable examples in our history. Peter, the one whom our Catholic brothers and sisters claim as the original Pope, and the one whom even we Protestants recognize as one of the pivotal leaders of the early church, is a person who is named in every Who’s Who list of Great Christians, and he is also a person whom we know as having experienced miserable failure in his relationship with Christ.

In John’s little vignette we see one of the post-resurrection appearances of Jesus. Peter and some of the other original disciples have been fishing. They have caught nothing. Though they do not know who it is, Jesus appears on the shore, and tells them to cast their nets again, and this time they catch a huge catch of fish—153, to be exact. By this sign they recognize Jesus, and Peter can’t wait to meet him. He jumps in the water and swims to shore. When they all gather, Jesus feeds them with fish and bread that he has cooked on a charcoal fire beside the sea. And then Jesus and Peter talk.

Jesus and Peter badly need to talk. One of their last encounters had been on the other side of the crucifixion, when Peter deserted and denied Jesus, beside another fire. You remember the scene: Jesus has been arrested and taken to trial. Peter, always the brave one, followed from a safe distance, but when someone in the crowd recognized him as one of Jesus’ followers, Peter denied any knowledge of Jesus. The brave and bold one turned coward and ran. The one on whose faith Jesus said the church would be built and whose very name meant “rock” ended up just like the rest of Jesus’ friends, a weak and pathetic excuse of a disciple. But that was before the resurrection. Jesus was back and there needed to be a reckoning. And so Jesus said to Simon Peter, “Do you love me?” Jesus asked the question three times, the same number of times that Peter had betrayed him. Each time Peter answered with what he wished he had said a few days earlier, “Yes, Lord; you know that I love you.” And each time Jesus came back with a new job for Peter, “Feed my lambs. Tend my sheep.” And then Jesus capped it all off with two simple words which translate into one humongous command: “Follow me.”

It may be that this little conversation has come down through the memory of John and the translation of the ages in a somewhat summarized version, but the gist is there. And think about what kind of conversation they could have had. Jesus: “Peter, what are you doing here? You don’t belong in my presence. You blew it one too many times. You will never make it into the big leagues of my followers. If you had any sense you’d slink away and hide from history.” Peter: “Jesus, let me explain. I’m sorry, but you don’t know how rough it was. I needed to protect myself for another day. If you’ll just give me one more chance.” I think what Jesus did not say here is as important as what he did say. He did not say anything about anything except for one thing, and that one thing is what Jesus had been trying to teach all along. “Peter, do you love?” McKnight writes that “love is not about perfection but about relationship.”^iv What Jesus wants to know is if Peter still loves him, and if he does, then they can go on. Whatever has happened in the past can be overcome and they can move on, but it all hinges on love. Jesus still loves, of that there is no question. If Peter still loves, no matter how imperfect, how immature, how weak that love may be, there is still a relationship there that has the potential to grow. Peter still loves and Jesus still loves and so Peter is restored, his ruptured soul and his damaged discipleship healed.

One of the reasons so many people accept the witness of the New Testament as a reliable retelling of some rather amazing stories is that it is so embarrassingly honest about the foibles and shortcomings and failures of its principle characters. Who in their right mind would try to start a whole religion on the basis of such miserable folks as these? And why would you tell such stories unless they were true? And why would you not cover them up unless something in them is crucial to the whole enterprise? Indeed, the stories of the bumbling humanity of the founders of the faith are vital to our understanding of what the faith is about. Following Jesus and loving God are not so much about being perfect as about being in love. God knows we cannot be perfect and he can deal with that. The only failure in us that God cannot transcend is a failure to love, a failure to want to be in relationship with God. Peter is a hero of the faith because he is so average, so human, so just like the rest of us that he is a great example of all of us. Peter is but one example of this central dynamic of our faith: To love God and to love others is to learn to welcome God’s healing and restoring power in our own lives and then to become agents of that same power in other’s lives.

I love how Scot McKnight begins his chapter on this topic. “When we fall, Jesus picks us up. He’s busy.”^v Every one of us knows plenty about the falling part. What about the picking up part? How does that work? How do we welcome the healing and restoration that Jesus offers and that is a necessary part of continuing in the long journey of faithful discipleship? The pattern of imperfection and failure is well-established in every person’s life. Beyond that, what we see modeled in scripture and operational to the present day is that following failure there must be recognition of that failure, confession of the sin. When we confess then we must repent, which is a determination to do differently next time. When we repent God forgives and heals and restores us to his fellowship. And then, God calls us to do the same for others.

Let me tell you about another pastor in my group, this time it’s not me, but someone I’ll just call Pastor Y. Pastor Y is a talented, energetic, dynamic leader. He is recognized as an expert in certain fields of ministry and is published in the field. He has pastored some key congregations in our denomination. And he has also experienced a difficult marriage and certain issues in his personal life that contributed to certain inappropriate actions that for a time effectively ended his career, or so it seemed. After intense discipline and counseling, Pastor Y is now again working in a church, but this time, he says, it is very different. Whereas before he could only intellectually sympathize with the pain and brokenness of people’s lives, now he knows that pain and brokenness firsthand. He serves a church that prides itself on welcoming the most damaged members of our society: the homeless, prostitutes, addicts, losers, and all sorts of other folks too. And he knows he is one of them. And so he can help them discover what he himself has found: the healing, renewing, forgiving, restoring love of God. Whereas before Pastor Y’s pastoral care was theoretical and clinical, now it is actual and personal. And it is not just for pastors.

I’ve talked about pastors so much today because in some ways they are the people I know best because I am one of them. But what I’ve said is true for us all. The great Henri Nouwen wrote a classic book called The Wounded Healer. And that is what we all are, or should be, if we are disciples of Jesus. Every one of us is wounded, incomplete, a miserable failure in some ways and at some times, at the very least. But we also are healed, restored, strengthened and renewed every day because of our loving Lord, and the Lord expects us to extend his healing to other people. Just as Jesus had compassion for Peter, just as he understood Peter, just as he was not about to reject Peter but instead restore Peter, so Jesus expected Peter to take the same approach with others. Feeding the lambs and tending the sheep is all about becoming an agent of God’s healing love. For all of Pastor Y’s expertise and accomplishment and acclaim, he experienced a new level of effectiveness for God when he finally owned up to his own failures and finally opened himself to the restoring love of God in his life.

Two of the saddest things that I ever see in a person’s life have to do with our inability to learn to receive and to offer the restoring love of God. You and I both know people who will not accept the forgiveness and new life that God wants to give them, people who are so convinced that the sin and darkness in their lives is simply too much for God to overcome. There is nothing more defeating and discouraging than a person who will not be healed. If anything matches it, it is the person who will not extend the same offer of new life with which they themselves have been blessed. It makes you wonder if they really have understood and accepted their own forgiveness in the first place. To be an agent of the healing that God has already offered you is to begin to understand the costly love with which God blessed the world in his Son, Jesus. To be an agent of healing is itself a great blessing, for when you can help a person finally take the blessing of God’s love you sense something of the joy that must be in God’s heart when one of his children allows him to pick them up and set them to moving again.

Tomorrow, and the next day, and all the days after that, I want you to do two things: when you fail, as you surely will, let God pick you up and put you back together again. And then, when someone around you fails, give God a helping hand, and pick them up and put them together again. If you have received the first you cannot help but want to give the second.

Amen.

ⁱSan Diego Union Tribune, April 18, p. 1.
ⁱⁱIbid., p. 12
ⁱⁱⁱIbid.
^ivThe Jesus Creedp. 212.
^vIbid, p. 209.