Clueless
13 September 2015
Proper 19B
Homily preached at Trinity Episcopal Church
Ashland, Oregon
8:00 a.m. Spoken Mass
The Rev. Fr. Tony Hutchinson, SCP, Ph.D.
God, take away our hearts of stone, and give us hearts of
flesh. Amen
You have to feel sorry for Peter in today’s Gospel reading. He, first of every one of Jesus’ followers, confesses that Jesus is the Messiah. Jesus says that’s key, the rock upon which the faith will be built. But then he redefines “Messiah.” People were hoping for an ideal king of the future, one who would set Israel free from its foreign pagan occupiers, who would set things right in the world and go forth conquering the wicked. “No, that’s not it,” says Jesus. “I am going to go to Jerusalem with my message of God’s kingdom coming right here right now. The rulers just won’t stand for it. I suspect they’re going to torture me and kill me. But even if that happens, God will take care of me.”
Peter thinks Jesus has given up too
easily. He tries to give Jesus a pep
talk” “You just might end up overcoming
those bad guys! Have some faith,
Jesus!” And in reply, Jesus says “Get
out of my way, Satan! Did you hear what I said?
You are clueless, Peter, so back off!”
Clueless. When I worked at the State Department, one of
the worst insults you could throw someone’s way was “you just don’t get
it!” What is key, what is important, you
are overlooking. Clueless.
We are just like Peter here,
though. He believed that faith meant
trusting God and hoping against hope that God would care for us. God’s Messiah would fix what’s wrong with
the world, because God has promised to punish the wicked and reward the
righteous.
That’s how we tend to think about God
and Jesus: we think that God will
intervene and fix our problems if we are faithful and pray. We think that Jesus must have
superpowers: he turned water to wine,
after all, and stilled the storm, healed the sick, and even raised the
dead. He must be able to do such things
for us when we ask.
But Jesus doesn’t buy this view. “Peter, you’re clueless.” “Tony, you’re clueless.” “FILL IN THE BLANK,
you’re clueless.”
For Jesus, happiness is present where
we least expect it: blessed are the
poor, blessed are those who are starving, those devasted by a loved one’s
death, the oppressed of the earth. And
this is not because God is going to intervene, change the way the world is, and
set up his kingdom at some time in the future.
Jesus says, “the kingdom is already among you.” It is like a seed growing secretly, one
single tiny mustard seed that ends up a huge messy weed with lots shade for the
birds. It is like a little bit of yeast,
raising a huge amount of bread dough.
For Jesus, God’s care and love is already
implicit in the messed up world we live in.
Right living may threaten the powerful and bring suffering, even
death. But that’s O.K. God is caring and will care for us despite it
all. But that does not mean we know how
God will care for us.
Clueless: being dissatisfied with the
way God cares for us. Expecting that God
will be like some wacky great uncle, and do our bidding for the asking.
Clueless: not recognizing that God is beneath and
behind all, and is driving all things, despite suffering, to a happy ending
that we cannot imagine.
Clueless: thinking that God must behave thus and so,
and being hurt when that does not happen.
One of the great things I have learned
from Elena and her illness is this: if you are to have a chance at joy in life,
you must never regret loss and what you are unable to do. You must instead focus on the joy of what you
are able to do. Living in the present
moment and being thankful, not regretting things lost from the past or fearing
loss in the future, that is where joy lies.
You must embrace the unbearable while
wholly trusting God’s care, says Jesus.
Get out of my way, and stop trying to make me lose vision of God’s
present kingdom with promises of how things otherwise might be, how things
ought to be. Take up your own cross, and
follow me.
Later in the story, Peter learns
painfully. He is still clueless when he
denies Jesus three times, hoping to get off the hook, to escape what God would
prevent if God were running things as he ought.
But then he learns that the Messiah’s victory is something completely
unexpected, even though Jesus’s hope had implied it all along. And he learns to accept this messy life God
gives us, even to the point of accepting Gentiles into the Church and
redefining his faith completely, all because of a noonday dream about eating
disgusting and defiling food because that’s what God wants: despite scripture, the rules, and everything
that ought to be.
Peter is clueless no more when he
accepts death on a cross at the Romans’ hands, but asks that he be inverted,
since he feels unworthy to follow Jesus in the exact form of his death.
Acceptance is the heart of a healthy
and sound spiritual life. And that means
accepting what the world throws at us, and whatever form of support and
salvation God gives us rather than what we want.
The God Jesus called Father is love
itself. And accepting love at the root
of all life, despite the pains we might have, is the essence of having trust in
Jesus and his Father.
Thanks be to God.
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