David A. Renwick
Second Presbyterian Church
Sermons: April 30, 2006

Meeting the Risen Christ: I.
"Getting Rid of the Noose"

The Bible tells us of a number of occasions in the days and the weeks following the first Good Friday and first Easter, when the crucified Jesus was seen alive again by his followers - and by groups of his followers in particular. This Sunday and next Sunday, we’re going to be looking together at a couple of these occasions. Next Sunday, we’ll think of the occasion in which two of Jesus followers are walking from the city of Jerusalem to a village called Emmaus, and there, along the way, they meet a stranger who comes up to them -- a stranger whom they discover to be Jesus.

This morning, though, we’re going to be thinking about the occasion we read of in our second scripture reading, in the twenty-first chapter of John’s gospel, where Jesus meets with a handful of his followers, and they are there beside the Sea of Galilee. They have returned there from Jerusalem. They have resumed their daily jobs as fishermen, as if they don’t quite know what to do with what they’ve experienced over these past few days. And on this particular occasion, Jesus concludes the visitation/appearance by speaking to Simon Peter, singling him out, and asking him this three-fold question: "Do you love me? Do you love me? Do you love me?" And, each time, Simon Peter responds by saying, "Yes, yes, Lord, you know that I love you." And he’s hurt by this three-fold request. And Jesus follows it up each time by summoning Peter into his service once again. "Feed my lambs. Tend my sheep. Take care of my flock." Three times.

It’s no accident, of course, that it’s three times. It’s a reminder, a graphic reminder, of who Peter was and what Peter had said and what he had done just a few days before. A graphic reminder of how Jesus had told his followers that one of them was going to betray him. And that happened. Judas betrayed him. A graphic reminder of how Jesus had spoken to Simon Peter himself, and said to Simon Peter: "you are going to let me down. You are going to deny me three times. And it will happen soon, before the dawn comes. You will deny me."

Simon Peter, of course, was belligerent in his response, and said, "I will never deny you. I will follow you all the way to death but I will never deny you." Despite his vehemence, of course, despite his insistence, it was not Simon Peter who was right but, sad to say, it was Jesus. So that before dawn the next day, before the rooster had time to crow, Peter, who had seen Jesus arrested, seen his dear friend taken away, and had followed Jesus to the court of the high priest, before dawn, he had been confronted three times by those ‘wretched people’ who kept on insisting that he was a Galilean, that he was one of Jesus’ followers, that he was a disciple. And, each time, Simon Peter turned to them and denied that he had ever known this man who was standing there. Three times he had done it, just as Jesus said.

It was like a noose around his neck, what he had done in that moment, how he had let Jesus down in that moment. The regret. The memory. The look of Jesus lifting up his eyes, bowed down, and catching Simon Peter’s eyes, just at that moment. It just takes that – a moment – doesn’t it? And the noose tightens tight around the neck. And the cock began to crow.

It’s no fun, living with a noose around your neck. I know that, of course, because I wear this noose (my clerical collar!) Around my neck Sunday by Sunday. It could be a thought, a memory, a regret that at any moment could rise up and choke the life right out of you.

I suspect that, like Simon Peter, many of us wear beneath the surface a noose around our necks that haunts us, that makes us feel ashamed, that makes us feel at times fearful, and at times angry, and at other times useless, and at other times, trapped. And I’d like us to think this morning about the noose that we wear.

Like Simon Peter, our noose may have to do with a failure, perhaps long-term or perhaps just a momentary lapse of judgement, a mistake that we’ve made. Maybe it’s recent, or maybe it’s from way back in the past – but it still stings us, it still paralyzes us whenever we think about it. Maybe it had enormous consequences for us then, or, perhaps what is even worse at times, maybe it had very little consequence for us but a huge consequence for somebody else whom we love. What we did has touched their lives harmfully, and there is nothing we can do now about what happened. We walk away, as it were, almost scot-free but they, they are imprisoned by that moment within our lives, by that moment when we acted as we ought not to have done, or did not act as we ought to have done.

Or perhaps our noose around our neck is a weakness that we keep as a secret because we are scared to death that it will be revealed and that other people will find out what that secret really is and they will find out who we really are beneath the surface.

Perhaps our secret is an addiction. Maybe it’s an addiction to alcohol or maybe it’s an addiction to drugs, even to prescription drugs, a medication of some kind, and we know we’ve gone over the line . Or maybe it’s an addiction to pornography or to sex or to food. We just don’t want anyone to know.

Or perhaps our secret is a lack of skill or a disability of some kind of which we are deeply and profoundly ashamed.

In one of the small churches I served in Virginia, we had just elected some officers and I was beginning the officer training class. And I was teaching away merrily, enjoying this class with these new officers, until I discovered (and I don’t remember how I discovered it), until I discovered that one of the new officers did not know how to read. Out of the blue. It was stunning. He was about sixty years of age. And he had covered it up. In fact, he had spent his whole life covering it up. He was a master at covering it up. He had taken his homework home and with his wife together had done it – and done and done it and done it – until he knew it so well that I would never find out that when he opened the book, he was not reading. He knew where to go. He knew how to do it perfectly. Can you think of the energy, indeed, the ability involved in this exercise? This was a capable person. The ability of this person to hide from all kinds of people this weakness in his life of which he was ashamed. So fearful that people would mock him if they found out that he could not read. What a noose around his neck. Every moment of his day that he carried with him.

Sometimes, the noose is a failure. Sometimes it’s a weakness. Sometime it’s an addiction. Sometimes it’s a disability or a lack of skill.

And sometimes it’s not a thing but a person who is to us like a noose around our neck, who dogs our steps. No matter what we do or where we go, they are there to press us down. Even though we would long for that person to be the person to lift us up.

Joyce Heatherly wrote a book some years ago which has been helpful to me. It’s not an academic book but a very personal and useful book called Irregular People. . . .just like irregular garments! Irregular people! People with just a little twist in their lives who happen to be a part of our lives (and maybe we’re like that to somebody else but maybe somebody else is like that to us). She had an irregular person in her life who was there with her throughout the years and sucked, as it were, the life out of her. On one occasion, for example, her son was getting married. He was a fine young man and he had met a wonderful bride and the family was delighted with the whole affair. There was nothing wrong with this. There was no regret anywhere. It was a wonderful occasion and all the announcements had gone out.

And this person, this irregular person, received the invitation and came by to say that particular date he couldn’t attend the wedding. Well, this is a person close to the family. She never does tell us who it is but really close to the family. He had a prior engagement and could not come to her son’s wedding. And what was this prior engagement? Well, it was a picnic. He had planned a picnic and he could not change this picnic for this wedding. She writes these words. She says,

"Instantly, my mind went back to all the important times in my life, when I needed, or at least would have loved to have seen this person. The plays I was in as a child, the musicals, the recitals, my graduations, but he always had someone else to see or somewhere else to be. When I was younger, I had tried telling myself that he loved me and that it was just a line of work that he was in that made me and others in my family come in second. Later, I’d rationalized that his priorities were just different from others, but on this fine April day, in the midst of my joy, I could not see any love in him. A picnic? She blurted it out. For a picnic. She shouted. She lost her cool.

But there was barely a response. No understanding. No communication. Just an ignoring of the outburst. And not just an ignoring, but a turning of the problem onto her as if the whole outburst was her fault. So that the issue now was not the wedding, and the issue was not that he couldn’t come, and the issue was not the picnic. The issue was now that she had lost her cool, and she was to blame for all of the ‘scene’. It happened in a flash and it happened many, many times, where the whole thing was twisted round. A noose around her neck. One whose love she needed but could never get, but kept on going back to – one from who she could not detach herself."

All the way through scripture we find people with nooses around their necks. Nooses they have to deal with.

ABRAHAM. You go back to the beginning of the story of the creation of the people of Israel, to Abraham, the forefather of the Jewish people, and the Christian people, and the people of Islam. Abraham, held up as a beacon of faith, and yet there are occasions in his life in which you just shake your head and you wonder how he made it, or how his wife Sarah made it with him. I don’t know if you remember the story. They go down to Egypt and Abraham is afraid of the Pharaoh, the king of Egypt, and he sees that Pharaoh has eyes for his wife, so Abraham turns to Pharaoh and says without much subtlety, "Oh no, she’s not my wife. She’s my sister. You can have her." Imagine living with that afterwards? Pharaoh wises up to this, but Abraham doesn’t quite wisen that quickly. He does it again. On another occasion. You would think he would learn. But there is this weakness and – and though we may not have the same weakness there but there are times in our lives when we repeat that "same old thing" again and again and again, and we don’t know whether we can conquer it or whether we’re going to do it again, or what the effect is going to be.

JACOB. Or there is Jacob. Jacob who will become Israel, the father of the tribes of Israel, who cheats his older brother. But more than that, the noose around his neck is the fact that he deceived his father and had no opportunity to sort it out. And there are some of us who live with such regret as that, – there is someone whom we could have said something to, but we never have.

WOMAN AT THE WELL. Or think of the story we read as our first scripture reading in John chapter 4: the story of the "woman at the well." In the verses that follow John 4:15, Jesus is deep in conversation with this woman whom he meets at the well. And he speaks to her about living water. And then he seamlessly changes the topic, and asks her to "Go and get your husband." And she says, "I have no husband" and Jesus says, "You are right. You have no husband. You’ve had five husbands and the man you are living with is not your husband at all." He sees straight through her, and understands that she has made a mess of every relationship in her life that she’s ever had with men. Aah, but it’s not just about men. She’s in trouble with all the women as well! We know this because in her culture, going to get water was a communal event. You went with the women to get water. But here she was alone. Relationships. She’s a zero when it comes to relationships. And she carries that lack of skill into her present relationship and would probably do so into the next one as well. But how does she handle this? It’s like a noose around her neck.

APOSTLE PAUL. Or think of the Apostle Paul, who in time became the greatest missionary of the early Christian church. Before he became a believer, he believed that the followers of Jesus were committing blasphemy by claiming that Jesus was the Son of God. And in order to wipe out that blasphemy, Paul seeks to wipe out Jesus’ followers. He puts them to death. Then he meets Jesus on the Damascus Road and everything changes! Jesus says to him, ‘You were wrong.’

Well, for us perfectionists, being told we are wrong is murder. We hate it. But Paul wasn’t just ‘wrong.’ He had actually put people to death along the way. But it was all a mistake. The pain he had caused! The sorrow he had caused! Like having a noose around his neck for the rest of his life, it seemed.

SIMON PETER. Or there’s Simon Peter in John 21, with his ‘noose,’ standing by the seashore. He was sure that Jesus was alive, but

• not quite sure that Jesus loved him, at least in the way that Jesus had loved him before Good Friday and Easter, before he put his foot in his mouth.
• Not quite sure whether he still had a role to play in Jesus’ mission and ministry, as once he’d had as the leader.
• Not quite sure that his life could ever be effective again as once it had been or whether he had blown it so significantly that he could never get back to where he had been before.
• Not quite sure perhaps that he could live with himself, knowing what he had done. Despite his remorse, despite the energy in him that wanted to be faithful, knowing that he had not been faithful, not quite sure that he could live with himself.

And there was Jesus who opened up the wound. Opened up the with his three-fold question – it was like a dagger piercing Peter’s life:

"Do you love me? . . . Do you love me? . . . Do you love me?"

Again and again and again. Three times. Jesus skillfully exposing Peter’s pain. As if Jesus was doing it so that he then could go in and judge Peter. As if Jesus would then go into his life and condemn him. As if Jesus would then go into his life and mock him. Tear him down.

But Jesus doesn’t. He doesn’t take that next step. Instead, he unties the noose and he takes it off Peter’s neck. And he moves straight past the shame and the embarrassment and the regret and the fear and the failure and the weakness. Moves straight past it to summon Peter, to take up where he had been before: "Tend my flock. Care for my sheep." As if to say, "You are the one I want to lead." It’s as if he takes that noose, unties it and then takes the rope and binds up Peter’s hands, and with a smile on his face, he says to him, "Now, follow me. You are my friend as you ever were." It is Peter, forgiven, yes, but still Peter the denier: "Peter it’s you whom I want. Peter, with all your baggage. You’re my person."

And if Jesus could so use Peter, what about us?
Do we love him? Not as much as we ought!
Do we love him? We could do better!
Do we love him? Yes! . . . So he says to us, too: "Follow me."

Let’s bow before God in prayer. Let us pray,

Lord most high, what a crowd of characters you have known and loved and called into your service. Beyond whatever noose is around our neck, whatever dogs our path, whatever causes us to fail repeatedly, may we know that yours is a love which always wants to loosen the noose and still call us with deep passion into your service. May we hear your voice. May we know the depth of that love, and find a freedom in you. Amen.