Peter's Story: Our Story
Sermon
RESTORING THE FUTURE
First Lesson Sermons For Lent/Easter
Frederick Buechner described Peter's vigil outside the high priest's place on the night of Jesus' arrest this way:
"Listen," [Jesus] said, "the cock won't crow till you've betrayed me three times," and that's the way it was, of course — Peter sitting out there in the high priest's courtyard keeping warm by the fire while, inside, the ghastly interrogation was in process, and then the girl coming up to ask him three times if he wasn't one of them and his replying each time that he didn't know what in God's name she was talking about. And then the old cock's wattles trembling scarlet as up over the horizon it squawked the rising sun, and the tears running down Peter's face like rain down a rock.1
By any reckoning, it's a long journey from that sorry courtyard denial to the day in Jerusalem when Peter stood up before God and everybody to declare himself for this man Jesus. How did he get from here to there? How could we get there too? Would we want to? These questions pestered the people milling about Jerusalem that day. They ought to pester us as well.
In the Sundays of Easter this year there are seven selections from the books of Acts. That may sound like a lot, but consider this — Luke reports 28 speeches in Acts all together — that's four times the number we have in our lectionary! Lloyd Ogilvie wrote a well-known and — if many libraries' well-thumbed copies are any indication — well-loved volume2 that has 26 chapters on this single New Testament book. On a bookshelf in his study, a pastor friend of mine has five commentaries on Acts. Obviously, it is a New Testament book with much to say to us, for so many are listening to its words and writing about them for others. And, like so many of the Gospel stories, it is Peter who, speaking for all the disciples, said what needed to be said, or asked what needed to be asked.
Acts picks up where the Gospel of Luke leaves off, and was written by the same person. But what a change takes place from one volume to the next! At the close of the Gospel of Luke, some of the disciples have seen the resurrected Jesus, and they have busily shared the news with others. Then Jesus appeared to them and spoke to them of things in scripture, reminding them that they were witnesses to the momentous events of Holy Week in Jerusalem. The final verse of Luke's Gospel has the disciples in Jerusalem continually in the temple blessing God, but apparently keeping most of the news about Jesus to themselves.
At the beginning of Acts, we see Jesus with the disciples again, physically present for the last time, telling them, "You shall be my witnesses in Jerusalem and in all Judea and Samaria and to the end of the earth." As it turns out, this was not so much a command to be obeyed, but a trustworthy promise. At the very moment in which he said it, even given the excitement of the resurrection, we can just imagine disciples like Peter wondering to themselves, "Wherever will I find the inner courage to be such a witness?" — especially one who could not make himself constant for even the one night of the cross. How was he then to become a faithful witness to his fellow Jews, to foreigners like Samaritans, and even to Gentiles whose language and culture he neither knew nor particularly appreciated?
All those questions were set aside by the empowering Holy Spirit that came upon them. No one knows for sure how many days passed between one of these events and the other. It doesn't matter. What matters is that the disciples were given a gospel to which they were to be witnesses, and they were given a power quite outside themselves by which to become witnesses to that gospel. How do the weak become strong? How did the mute ones of Good Friday become the public proclaimers of Pentecost Day? In particular, how did Peter cease to feel like a betrayer and begin to feel like an apostle?
It is really through Peter's sermon that all this becomes clear. While it wasn't a sermon as we may be accustomed to sermons — three main points, poem, humorous story at the beginning — it was still every bit a sermon, a proclamation of the Good News. He chose for his text Psalm 16. It was a perfect choice, really. As you may or may not know, there is little hope about a life after death expressed in the Old Testament. The standard belief was in a shadowy sort of post-death existence called Sheol. But Psalm 16 represents an Old Testament breakthrough. And it achieves its new point of view because of the poet's sense of intimacy with God.
The Psalm describes the faith of one who has, through his life, come to feel so intimately connected with God, so accompanied by God on his every step in life, that he cannot imagine a God so concerned about him and so faithful to him to be a God who would ultimately abandon him to death. Peter hastened to point out that David — whom tradition held to be the author of all the Psalms — did not fully inherit the promise of this Psalm, since his tomb was present even in their day, and anyone who wanted to could take a short walk through Jerusalem and go see it. The poet must have been writing of someone else. And Jesus, descended through the line of David, was the one. His tomb could not be found. Or rather, his body was gone and no one could produce it. The tomb of a dead King David, and the empty tomb of the Messiah Jesus were set alongside one another in Peter's sermon. But that's not all.
Having made this declaration that Jesus — the wonder worker they had all seen in Jerusalem — was claimed by scripture itself as the Messiah of God, it became shatteringly evident to the gathered crowd that when they had shouted for the death of Jesus, they had called for the death of God's chosen one, they had received God's messenger and had murdered him. Luke reported that at the end of Peter's sermon, they were cut to the heart. That's a vivid way of describing a heartbreak.
Their hearts were cut, they were bleeding spiritually. The One God had sent to heal them they had murdered; the One in whom the hope of the world was present had now been sent packing from the world. Once we have killed the very hope that lives among or within us, where will hope then be found? Isn't that the mark of a dead end, a life at the point of last resort, a people finally cut off from their own souls? What was there for them to do? All seemed hopeless, for even hope seemed to be lost.
You have known people who have done this. You hear them speaking all the time. "I know I really should do such and such, but I just never do." "I really should eat better and get exercise, but I never get to it," they say as their health deteriorates before our very eyes. "I really should take more time for my family, but right now I'm up to here at work," they say as precious moments slip away forever. "Perhaps I'll get to the things I really love doing once I retire," they say as the activities for which they are fit today slip silently away. In a thousand ways, we may not exactly be killing the Messiah, but we throw away the extravagant gifts of God to us as though we had all the time in the world, all the health to squander, all the resources to set aside for a time that never comes. Till one day we wake up and wonder why the remainder of our lives seems so crowded into a corner, why the openness and happiness and joy of our lives seems to have left us, and all we have is a sense of a remaining time that desperately needs hoarding.
Having killed the savior, we are powerless to save ourselves. No wonder the crowd cried out to Peter in despair, "What shall we do?" They truly didn't know. And when we get right down to it, there are so many times in our lives when we don't know either.
Now Peter answered, "Repent and be baptized in the name of Jesus Christ for the forgiveness of sins." That can sound to modern ears like a line from a tent revival meeting, but it is as desperately needed today as in any day. It is just that the familiarity of the language has caused us to think of it as quaint and old fashioned. But what is repentance? It isn't a command to say we are sorry. It isn't a demand for an apology, as though some groveling regret could ever bring back the savior they had thrown away.
Repentance literally means to turn around. Charging toward hell at seventy miles per hour, the evangelist Peter urges his listeners to make a 180-degree turn. This isn't just a change of mind, or a softening of the heart, but a turning around of life. Where before it had been work, goods, social relationships, sports, music, or whatever that had claimed top priority in life, Peter says it is time to be claimed by another priority, and be baptized in his name. While modern life often makes it seem as though the choice to follow Jesus is one of many great choices we are called upon to make in life, the sermon Peter preached makes it evident that without the choice for Jesus, all other choices are ultimately scarred and misshapen, no matter what our good intentions may be. With repentance and a turn toward Christ, is life. Without it is death. It is not a choice among equally valid choices; it is a choice without which there will cease to be other choices.
As Albert Winn, fine Southern Presbyterian preacher, once said, the news Peter delivers is not for sentiment or entertainment or curiosity, but to drive people into a corner where they must either believe and obey this Lord or reject him.3 Life cannot go on as it was. That urgency has not changed today. Christ has done something unique in the world, quite apart from our own striving, and our all-too-often striving against him. We cannot ignore it. We must take sides. Peter calls on his listeners to side with Jesus. Three thousand chose to do so that very day. And that was only the beginning. As far as he knew right then, the gospel was only going to help renew Israel. Peter had no idea yet that Gentiles would one day be welcomed into the fellowship of Jesus the Messiah. The Spirit had only begun with the church. New things were to come cascading down in great heaping splashes. In coming chapters there would be Gentiles baptized, the greatest persecutor of the church would turn his life around and become the world's greatest evangelist, kings would find their way to the throne of grace, even Gentiles would become preachers and evangelists themselves.
The Spirit was hardly finished with surprises on that first day, and it is hardly finished with us today. So if you find in your heart that the Spirit is calling you in a special way, won't you take the time to listen? Our Bible says Peter told them, "Save yourselves," but it would be better translated, "Let yourselves be saved!" That is what the Spirit has in mind for you if you are feeling that nudge today. Jesus has you in mind — always has. The sermon title is an encouragement to see it that way: "Peter's Story: Our Story." They are very much alike, really. We — like Peter — have things about which to repent — but even so, we can be witnesses. From traitor to witness in one day is a long leap, but Christ has that in mind. Christ has us in mind for his kingdom every bit as much as he had in mind Peter and the throngs in Jerusalem that day. All he really needs is our go-ahead to make all the difference in the meaning behind the lives we are living. Let's give him that today. Our fellowship will be all the richer for it, and our witness in our community will come to life in a whole new way.
The Acts of the Apostles might better be called the Acts of the Holy Spirit, since it is the Spirit that really empowers everything that takes place in this wonderful book. And that is just what the Holy Spirit can do among us: bring life such as few of us may have dreamed possible.
____________
1. Frederick Buechner, Peculiar Treasures: A Biblical Who's Who (Harper & Row, 1979), p. 136.
2. Lloyd Ogilvie, Drumbeat Of Love (Word Books, 1976).
3. Albert C. Winn, The Layman's Bible Commentary: Acts Of The Apostles, Vol. 20 (Louisville: John Knox Press, 1961), p. 39.
"Listen," [Jesus] said, "the cock won't crow till you've betrayed me three times," and that's the way it was, of course — Peter sitting out there in the high priest's courtyard keeping warm by the fire while, inside, the ghastly interrogation was in process, and then the girl coming up to ask him three times if he wasn't one of them and his replying each time that he didn't know what in God's name she was talking about. And then the old cock's wattles trembling scarlet as up over the horizon it squawked the rising sun, and the tears running down Peter's face like rain down a rock.1
By any reckoning, it's a long journey from that sorry courtyard denial to the day in Jerusalem when Peter stood up before God and everybody to declare himself for this man Jesus. How did he get from here to there? How could we get there too? Would we want to? These questions pestered the people milling about Jerusalem that day. They ought to pester us as well.
In the Sundays of Easter this year there are seven selections from the books of Acts. That may sound like a lot, but consider this — Luke reports 28 speeches in Acts all together — that's four times the number we have in our lectionary! Lloyd Ogilvie wrote a well-known and — if many libraries' well-thumbed copies are any indication — well-loved volume2 that has 26 chapters on this single New Testament book. On a bookshelf in his study, a pastor friend of mine has five commentaries on Acts. Obviously, it is a New Testament book with much to say to us, for so many are listening to its words and writing about them for others. And, like so many of the Gospel stories, it is Peter who, speaking for all the disciples, said what needed to be said, or asked what needed to be asked.
Acts picks up where the Gospel of Luke leaves off, and was written by the same person. But what a change takes place from one volume to the next! At the close of the Gospel of Luke, some of the disciples have seen the resurrected Jesus, and they have busily shared the news with others. Then Jesus appeared to them and spoke to them of things in scripture, reminding them that they were witnesses to the momentous events of Holy Week in Jerusalem. The final verse of Luke's Gospel has the disciples in Jerusalem continually in the temple blessing God, but apparently keeping most of the news about Jesus to themselves.
At the beginning of Acts, we see Jesus with the disciples again, physically present for the last time, telling them, "You shall be my witnesses in Jerusalem and in all Judea and Samaria and to the end of the earth." As it turns out, this was not so much a command to be obeyed, but a trustworthy promise. At the very moment in which he said it, even given the excitement of the resurrection, we can just imagine disciples like Peter wondering to themselves, "Wherever will I find the inner courage to be such a witness?" — especially one who could not make himself constant for even the one night of the cross. How was he then to become a faithful witness to his fellow Jews, to foreigners like Samaritans, and even to Gentiles whose language and culture he neither knew nor particularly appreciated?
All those questions were set aside by the empowering Holy Spirit that came upon them. No one knows for sure how many days passed between one of these events and the other. It doesn't matter. What matters is that the disciples were given a gospel to which they were to be witnesses, and they were given a power quite outside themselves by which to become witnesses to that gospel. How do the weak become strong? How did the mute ones of Good Friday become the public proclaimers of Pentecost Day? In particular, how did Peter cease to feel like a betrayer and begin to feel like an apostle?
It is really through Peter's sermon that all this becomes clear. While it wasn't a sermon as we may be accustomed to sermons — three main points, poem, humorous story at the beginning — it was still every bit a sermon, a proclamation of the Good News. He chose for his text Psalm 16. It was a perfect choice, really. As you may or may not know, there is little hope about a life after death expressed in the Old Testament. The standard belief was in a shadowy sort of post-death existence called Sheol. But Psalm 16 represents an Old Testament breakthrough. And it achieves its new point of view because of the poet's sense of intimacy with God.
The Psalm describes the faith of one who has, through his life, come to feel so intimately connected with God, so accompanied by God on his every step in life, that he cannot imagine a God so concerned about him and so faithful to him to be a God who would ultimately abandon him to death. Peter hastened to point out that David — whom tradition held to be the author of all the Psalms — did not fully inherit the promise of this Psalm, since his tomb was present even in their day, and anyone who wanted to could take a short walk through Jerusalem and go see it. The poet must have been writing of someone else. And Jesus, descended through the line of David, was the one. His tomb could not be found. Or rather, his body was gone and no one could produce it. The tomb of a dead King David, and the empty tomb of the Messiah Jesus were set alongside one another in Peter's sermon. But that's not all.
Having made this declaration that Jesus — the wonder worker they had all seen in Jerusalem — was claimed by scripture itself as the Messiah of God, it became shatteringly evident to the gathered crowd that when they had shouted for the death of Jesus, they had called for the death of God's chosen one, they had received God's messenger and had murdered him. Luke reported that at the end of Peter's sermon, they were cut to the heart. That's a vivid way of describing a heartbreak.
Their hearts were cut, they were bleeding spiritually. The One God had sent to heal them they had murdered; the One in whom the hope of the world was present had now been sent packing from the world. Once we have killed the very hope that lives among or within us, where will hope then be found? Isn't that the mark of a dead end, a life at the point of last resort, a people finally cut off from their own souls? What was there for them to do? All seemed hopeless, for even hope seemed to be lost.
You have known people who have done this. You hear them speaking all the time. "I know I really should do such and such, but I just never do." "I really should eat better and get exercise, but I never get to it," they say as their health deteriorates before our very eyes. "I really should take more time for my family, but right now I'm up to here at work," they say as precious moments slip away forever. "Perhaps I'll get to the things I really love doing once I retire," they say as the activities for which they are fit today slip silently away. In a thousand ways, we may not exactly be killing the Messiah, but we throw away the extravagant gifts of God to us as though we had all the time in the world, all the health to squander, all the resources to set aside for a time that never comes. Till one day we wake up and wonder why the remainder of our lives seems so crowded into a corner, why the openness and happiness and joy of our lives seems to have left us, and all we have is a sense of a remaining time that desperately needs hoarding.
Having killed the savior, we are powerless to save ourselves. No wonder the crowd cried out to Peter in despair, "What shall we do?" They truly didn't know. And when we get right down to it, there are so many times in our lives when we don't know either.
Now Peter answered, "Repent and be baptized in the name of Jesus Christ for the forgiveness of sins." That can sound to modern ears like a line from a tent revival meeting, but it is as desperately needed today as in any day. It is just that the familiarity of the language has caused us to think of it as quaint and old fashioned. But what is repentance? It isn't a command to say we are sorry. It isn't a demand for an apology, as though some groveling regret could ever bring back the savior they had thrown away.
Repentance literally means to turn around. Charging toward hell at seventy miles per hour, the evangelist Peter urges his listeners to make a 180-degree turn. This isn't just a change of mind, or a softening of the heart, but a turning around of life. Where before it had been work, goods, social relationships, sports, music, or whatever that had claimed top priority in life, Peter says it is time to be claimed by another priority, and be baptized in his name. While modern life often makes it seem as though the choice to follow Jesus is one of many great choices we are called upon to make in life, the sermon Peter preached makes it evident that without the choice for Jesus, all other choices are ultimately scarred and misshapen, no matter what our good intentions may be. With repentance and a turn toward Christ, is life. Without it is death. It is not a choice among equally valid choices; it is a choice without which there will cease to be other choices.
As Albert Winn, fine Southern Presbyterian preacher, once said, the news Peter delivers is not for sentiment or entertainment or curiosity, but to drive people into a corner where they must either believe and obey this Lord or reject him.3 Life cannot go on as it was. That urgency has not changed today. Christ has done something unique in the world, quite apart from our own striving, and our all-too-often striving against him. We cannot ignore it. We must take sides. Peter calls on his listeners to side with Jesus. Three thousand chose to do so that very day. And that was only the beginning. As far as he knew right then, the gospel was only going to help renew Israel. Peter had no idea yet that Gentiles would one day be welcomed into the fellowship of Jesus the Messiah. The Spirit had only begun with the church. New things were to come cascading down in great heaping splashes. In coming chapters there would be Gentiles baptized, the greatest persecutor of the church would turn his life around and become the world's greatest evangelist, kings would find their way to the throne of grace, even Gentiles would become preachers and evangelists themselves.
The Spirit was hardly finished with surprises on that first day, and it is hardly finished with us today. So if you find in your heart that the Spirit is calling you in a special way, won't you take the time to listen? Our Bible says Peter told them, "Save yourselves," but it would be better translated, "Let yourselves be saved!" That is what the Spirit has in mind for you if you are feeling that nudge today. Jesus has you in mind — always has. The sermon title is an encouragement to see it that way: "Peter's Story: Our Story." They are very much alike, really. We — like Peter — have things about which to repent — but even so, we can be witnesses. From traitor to witness in one day is a long leap, but Christ has that in mind. Christ has us in mind for his kingdom every bit as much as he had in mind Peter and the throngs in Jerusalem that day. All he really needs is our go-ahead to make all the difference in the meaning behind the lives we are living. Let's give him that today. Our fellowship will be all the richer for it, and our witness in our community will come to life in a whole new way.
The Acts of the Apostles might better be called the Acts of the Holy Spirit, since it is the Spirit that really empowers everything that takes place in this wonderful book. And that is just what the Holy Spirit can do among us: bring life such as few of us may have dreamed possible.
____________
1. Frederick Buechner, Peculiar Treasures: A Biblical Who's Who (Harper & Row, 1979), p. 136.
2. Lloyd Ogilvie, Drumbeat Of Love (Word Books, 1976).
3. Albert C. Winn, The Layman's Bible Commentary: Acts Of The Apostles, Vol. 20 (Louisville: John Knox Press, 1961), p. 39.
