Stepping Out (On A Sea Of Uncertainty)

"Stepping Out (On A Sea Of Uncertainty)
Matthew 14:22-33


A man was producing a film titled, “Circus.”  One of the acrobat members of the cast pointed to the high trapeze and said to the producer, “Why don’t you try it?”
The other performers heard the challenge and joined the chant, “Try it!  Try it!  Try it!”
Eyeing the large safety net under the swinging bars, the producer cautiously replied, “Well...why not?”

Very slowly he began to climb the small rope ladder.  Twenty feet...thirty feet..forty feet...until he crawled onto a minuscule platform.  He looked down.  Something I would have never done.  He felt like he was miles above the assembled cast below.  The once, large safety net had shrunk to an unbelievably small size.

“Go ahead, you can do it!” the performers shouted up to him.  Taking the trapeze bar in his perspiring hands and steadying his shaking knees, he prepared to jump.  Across from his platform, a young man was ready to swing out the empty trapeze.  Mustering up all his courage, he cried, “Go!” and went swinging out into space.

“Jump!  Go ahead!  Jump!”  On the third arc he did.  Flying through the air, he reached out and grasped the empty bar with his fingertips, went swinging to the other side, and was pulled safely to the platform, amid the applause and cheers of the cast below.

The producer, once safely back on the ground, made three observations.  First, you can’t hold on to one bar while grasping for the other.  You must let both hands go and leap.  Second, it is frightening and threatening to let go of your security.  And, thirdly, you don’t have forever to make up your mind.  It is a leap of faith and courage.

Not many get the chance to fly on the high trapeze.  I confess, I don’t know if I would have had the courage to do it.  But I think most of us can easily identify with the three observations the producer made following his experience.  We know his learnings are true because of the way life situations challenge us to take a great risk from time-to-time.  With that risk comes the possibility of upsetting the relative security of our lives.

The producers experience, and Peter’s brief walk on the water, are great examples of what is involved in the life of courage and faith with Christ.

The first thing we must deal with is the relative safety that is symbolized by the boat in the story of Peter and the trapeze bar in the story of the producer.  What we must always keep in mind is that in the boat, Peter is still in danger.  There was a storm raging, don’t forget.  That storm was pushing their little boat here and there, up and down, upon the waves.  Water was spilling over the sides.  The boat may have been floating, but the danger was real.  For the producer, there was danger just hanging on to the one trapeze, swinging back and forth, with the possibility of a long fall beneath him.

Both places, the boat and the trapeze are not safe.  There are many situations we get into where we think we are, or would like to be, safe.  But safety is a matter of degrees.  There is often a fine line between safety and tragedy.  Boats can be fine on a relatively calm sea.  But caught in the juggling waves of a sudden storm at sea, and you can feel like you’re only sitting on a cork.

Life is not a safe proposition.  Safety is one of our ultimate concerns as human beings.  A case could be made that the striving after safety is one of our biggest idolatries.  Think about how much we do in life trying to insure our safety and security.  We make the assumption that we can create for ourselves, for the most part, a life of safety.

But then something comes along that totally disrupts that assumption.  A car accident.  A house fire.  A tornado.  A life-threatening diagnosis.  Someone at a school with a gun opening fire.  Three boys in Oklahoma who killed a girl just for the fun of it while she was jogging.  Much of our anger in those kinds of life circumstances, really comes from that assumption that we thought we were safe.  All of a sudden we have to reassess our expectation that life should be safe, and that we have done a really good job to keep it so.

I remember an old “Frank & Ernest” cartoon that showed the two men in a fancy restaurant.  They are looking at the menu, while the waiter stood with pencil and order pad in hand waiting for their order.  Ernest says to the waiter, “I’ll have a plate of escargot and a blindfold.”

That’s often how we sit at the table of life.   We are actually being served something dangerous, and we think we can make it less so, if we just put on a blindfold.  We’re safe, we think, as long as we don’t look around at the storm, or down at the net.  We climb onto the platform, or out of the boat, and close our eyes tightly thinking that will somehow lessen the danger of flying out into mid-air, or walking on water in a storm on a lake.

All of this goes to say that life itself is not a safe proposition.  The multitude of little safety nets we carefully build under ourselves, and the ones we love, belie the fact that we need a lot of security to go on with what we do.  There is fear and there are misgivings in every minute of living every day.

I really like something Helen Keller once said.  This is what she said:  “Security is mostly a superstition.  It does not exist in nature, nor do the children of men as a whole experience it.  Avoiding danger is no safer in the long run than outright exposure.  Life is either a daring adventure or nothing.”

Hold that thought as we turn back to our stories.  Peter decides to take a walk out of the rattled safety of the boat and on to the darkened and raging lake.  The producer decides to let go completely of his trapeze bar and suspend his body totally free in mid-air, high above a “safety net.”  You might wonder why these two men would take such a risk.

There are a number of aspects of our Peter story that arouse our sense of danger and a feeling of a lack of safety.  For one thing, it was late at night--the fourth watch.  The fourth watch was between 3 a.m. and 6 a.m.  It was the last watch of the night.  If you’ve ever been out during that time period, think what the world looks like at 3 a.m.  Think how it feels to be up at 3 a.m., tired but unable to sleep, looking out the front window of your home at a world that is dark, lonely and inactive.

Next, into that 3 a.m. world, a fierce wind blows in.  Being out on the lake, it’s not just the wind that’s the problem.  It’s the waves that are being blown and frothed by that wind as well.  The word that Matthew used to describe the lake surface literally means “tormented.”  These waves are not just semi-mild white caps.  This was a scary, foamy mess.

When I was on my trip in Israel, we took a boat trip out on Galilee lake.  It was a beautiful day when we started out.  But then, just as suddenly as that night with the disciples, a wind storm blew across the surface of the lake.  Everything changed, and it was scary.  And we were in a big tour boat, not a little fishing boat.

It was so severe, that the dock at Capernaum where we were to land, was sunk by the waves and the wind.  Our tour guide, Joseph, got on the boats intercom and announced what happened.  Then he said, “Well, folks, we are in the middle of a storm out in the middle of the lake.  We will all have to get out of the boat and walk from here.”
Everyone laughed.
Then he got back on and said, “What? You have no faith?”  We had to go back to where we started and take a bus up to Capernaum.

Because Matthew tells us what time the disciple left, and then tells us what watch of the night it was, we know the disciples had been rowing six to nine hours.  Galilee isn’t that big of a lake.  Six to nine hours of rowing on a calm day would have taken you across the lake and back, and maybe back again.  But rowing that long during the storm had only gotten them to the middle of the lake.

All these factors put together create one scary scene.  Any sense of safety went overboard hours ago.  But all of that wasn’t what put the disciples over the top, in terms of dealing with the fear factor.  It was when they saw Jesus walking on the water and thought he was a ghost.  Matthew tells us, “When they saw him walking on the water, they were terrified.  “It’s a ghost!” they said, and screamed with fear.  It’s kind of fun to think of a little boat full of disciples screaming like 10 year old girls.  But there was nothing they could cling to that was going to make them feel safe at that point.

So what does it take to do so?  The first word Jesus speaks to his disciples from atop the frothy lake was, “Courage!”  That’s what Jesus assessed the disciples needed.  Courage.

Peter hears that word, and decides to take a risk or courage.  “Lord, if it is really you…”  Peter isn’t sure.  “Lord, if it is really you…”  If it truly is Jesus standing upon the aggressive waves, then what must Peter, or any of the others do?  The answer is simple.  If you want to see if it’s Jesus, and you have the courage to do so, you must go to where Jesus is.  Out on the chaos of the waves.  You have to go out on the deep and storm-tossed lake, in a 3 a.m. darkened night.  You have to go out into the chaotic world, not stay in the assumed safety of the boat.

The question we must ask ourselves, as individuals and as a congregation, is, “Would we take such a step out of the boat?”  Would we climb from the safety of having our feet on something solid, and climb out on the liquid surface of the water?  Would we take the trapeze bar in hand and swing out away from the platform?  Would we show that kind of courage?  Because courage is going places with Jesus, and toward Jesus that are totally unsafe.

Most people can stay within the relative safety of their ordered lives.  Most people can keep their feet on the ground and watch others take daring risks. Most people can marvel, while watching the TV news from their couch, at how others are so courageous.

A few decades ago, a wealthy woman from New York city was touring the west.  She arrived one day in Santa Fe.  She noticed an old Native American with a necklace made of curious looking teeth.  “What are those?” she asked.
“Those are grizzly bear teeth, madam,” the man replied.
“Ah, yes,” she nodded.  “And I suppose they have the same value for your people that pearls have for us,” she said snootily.
“Not exactly, madam,” the man replied calmly.  “Anyone can open an oyster.”

When an extraordinary opportunity presents itself--like seeing and meeting the Lord out in the chaos--which involves facing grizzly sized problems and danger--getting out of the boats of our false security so that we can come face-to-face with Christ, how many step overboard?  And how many stay in the boat opening oysters?

What gives a person the ability to walk not through seemingly impossible challenges to go out and meet Jesus where he’s at, but to walk over and on top of those challenges in courage and faith.  That’s the point Jesus was trying to get across, not just to Peter, but the others in the boat.

Two guys were riding a tandem bike when they came to a long, steep hill.  It took a great deal of struggle for them to complete what proved to be a stiff climb.  When they got to the top, the guy in front turned to the other and said, “Boy, that sure was a hard climb!”
The guy on the back seat said, “Yeah, and if I hadn’t kept the brakes on all the way, we would certainly have rolled down backwards!”

I think that’s what Jesus was trying to tell Peter and the disciples once they got back in the boat, after Peter lost courage and sunk.  Jesus called him “Faintheart” asking him why he lost courage and faith, why he put the breaks of doubt on when he was in the midst of an adventurous challenge.

The challenge is going out to meet Jesus where Jesus is at.  It’s not waiting for Jesus to come to us, to show up for us.  Jesus is out there.  On the waves.  In the chaos.  It’s interesting that the boat was an early Christian symbol for the church.  Many wonder, in telling this story, if Matthew was encouraging early Christians to get outside the safety of the church, and get out into the scary world where Christ really is, and is at work.  It’s an important question for the church at any time.

Why climb to the platform of the high trapeze, but then just stand there and never swing out?  Or, at least, as Peter did, taking a few courageous and faithful steps toward Jesus out on the stormy lake.  We are to be bold and courageous in taking steps that will eventually lead us to a greater and deeper faith in what Christ can do in us.  We, as individuals or as a congregation, must be willing to take courageous risks, in which we step from the relative safety of the boat.  Only then will we discover what is possible.  That is our challenge.

Decisions, Decisions

"Decisions, Decisions"
Genesis 3:1-6


How many decisions do you think we make each day?  Take a guess.

According to several articles I read this week, the average adult in the USA today makes about 35,000 decisions each day. Most of them rather simple ones. Where will I sit, what will I have to eat, which spoon to take out of the drawer, what shirt will I wear (even though it may or may not go with my pants), which morning show to watch, should I call to let them know I'm late.  Or while driving a car, what lane to be in, looking for other drivers, music or talk show on the radio, putting on makeup while driving or not.  And there are sub-decisions within those decisions as well.

Most of those decisions are seemingly inconsequential.  Until you rear end a driver because you were concentrating on putting your mascara on instead of watching what was happening on the road.  But, I would guess a lot of our decisions out of that 35,000 are basically not the kind that rock your world.

There are those kinds of decisions.  What to major in in college, what career path to follow, whom to marry, what kinds of friends to hang around with, move to the United States from Germany to spend a year with a family in Pratt, KS.

Those are all huge, life altering, decisions.  The inconsequential decisions we make in seconds or less, assuming there will be few if any life-shattering consequences.  The big decisions, we may mull over for weeks or months trying to decide.  And there are some people, who when faced with even small decisions are like the comedian, who said, “I’ve been having trouble with decision making.  Last week I was at a four-way stop and ended up spending the night.”

And not making a decision is a decision in itself, with it’s own ramifications.  As in the following cartoon:

A case could be made that life is about decisions.  That life is basically about the decisions we make and how things shake out after those decisions, and what we decide after the consequences of prior decisions are experienced.  Maybe even, at the end of life, as you look back, who you are and what you’ve become is the sum total of all the decisions you have made throughout your life.

C.S. Lewis, in his book, Mere Christianity, wrote:
...every time you make a choice, you are turning the central part of you, the part that chooses, into something a little different than what it was before.  And taking your life as a whole, with all your innumerable choices, you are slowing turning this central thing either into a Heaven creature or into a hellish creature…

So our decisions also have eternal consequences.

And, our decisions don’t effect just ourselves--they will have ramifications for many others as well.  With the scripture story we’re looking at this morning, we find out some decisions effect the rest of humanity and all of human history.

John Gardner once said,
We cannot evade the necessity to make decisions.  I was discussing these matters with a young man recently and he said, “I don’t mind making decisions that involve myself alone, but I object to making decisions that affect other people.
I had to tell him that would make it impossible for him to be a second-grade teacher, a corporation president, a husband, a politician, a parent, a policeman, a chef, a doctor, or a horse-race bookie--in fact, it would force him to live a hermit’s life.


So let’s look back at where it all began--with the first decision makers, Adam and Eve.  If this story teaches us nothing else, it teaches us that making bad decisions has been with human beings from the beginning.  Even living in an ideal place like Eden does not help the first humans from making flawed decisions.  So the question is, why have we not evolved into better decision makers after eons of bad decisions?  Evidently making decisions has nothing to do with heredity.

Part of the answer to that question has to do with the truth that we have yet to gain mastery over our primal urges or our unconscious needs or our basic human insecurities.  Those are the primary drivers of our history of poor decision making.  We will see them in operation in Eve’s first and fatal beg decision to eat the fruit from the forbidden tree.

Combine these with a whole bunch of mental biases, such as selective attention, or rationalization, and it seems we are mentally and psychologically fated to make flawed decisions.  In other words, we are fated to be human beings.

So let’s look at the first human beings and see how they made those first bad decisions which has been called “original sin.”

The first thing we learn from this story is, when making a big decision, pay attention to who you’re talking to.  Consider the source.  Right off in this chapter it says, “Now the snake was the most cunning animal that the LORD God had made.”  The serpent was the king of subtleties.  The serpent could make black and white look so gray with just a few words.  As the saying goes, “If it sounds too good to be true, it probably is.”

Certainly Eve must have known this about the serpent.  You would think God warned her about the snake.  “See that slithering thing over there?  (shake head no)  Listen with both ears with that one.”  Or maybe God didn’t warn Eve, and God was just letting Eve find out for herself.  She certainly got a lesson about who to listen to and who not to listen to, didn’t she?  She listened to the snake, but she didn’t talk to God about what the snake was saying.  And we have been paying the price ever since.

Secondly, in making decisions know where your “hooks” or weaknesses are.  Eve told the serpent that God instructed her to not even touch the tree.  But that wasn’t in God’s original prohibition.  Eve added to it.  She must have known that, for her, if she even touched the tree or it’s fruit, that was enough of a hook for her to make an ill-fated decision.  Eve had a sense of her own vulnerability, growing out of a character weakness, that would lead Eve down the wrong path.

God’s boundaries apparently offered some latitude--possibly even touch, but not taking.  But Eve knew in herself, in order to make a good decision about following what God said, she had to take a step further back, and not even touch the tree or anything on the tree.

These hooks, fashioned by our vulnerabilities and character weaknesses, are different for each of us.  Two of the key hooks for many of us are limited information and self-interest.  Recall, for a minute, a couple of decisions you’ve made lately.  How much information did you really gather to make as well an informed choice as possible?  Usually we find that out after the decision has been made.  Darn, I should have looked into that a little more deeply, we think to ourselves.  Uh, yeah!

Or how much of those recent decisions were made simply out of your own desire?  When you get down to it, most of the time we decide for or against things because that’s what we want.  Our self-interest is what wins the day in our decision making process.

So one the keys, in making important decisions, is having enough self-knowledge about where your weak spots are, and giving those to the Lord so a better decision can be made.  Notice, Eve, even after adding an additional level of protection--not even touching the tree--still succumbs, still crosses her self-made boundary.  And she never said anything like, “I better talk with God first.”  She allows her weaknesses and vulnerabilities to have the day, rather than seeking God’s help.  Only after touching, and eating the fruit does she have that conversation with God, but then it’s too late.

Thirdly, when facing decision making dilemmas, don’t give in to mis-information.  God’s rule about the tree was simple and straightforward and clear.  But in conversation with the serpent, Eve was dished both mis-information and mis-interpretation of that simple, clear rule.

When making decisions, err on the side of simple directness rather than on complex mis-information.  Mis-information and mis-interpretation of the simple aspects of the decision redirects our attention away from the simple guidelines.  The serpent was a master at making the simple into the complex, the clear into the cloudy, the ordered into the muddled, meaning into mis-interpretation.

Jesus said, “I am the Way, the Truth and the Life” (John 14:6).  That statement is simple and direct.  It is the way that God has designed things from the start.  If Eve had abided by that, had checked out what the serpent was telling her, had Eve first gone to God who is the Way, the Truth, and the Life, and said, “This is what the serpent is telling me; I’m confused; what’s the truth,” she would not have been sucked in by the serpent’s misinformation and misinterpretation.  She allowed the serpent to interpret God.  Why not just go to the source and get the truth.  Eve failed that, and because of that made a fatal decision.

Fourthly, when making decisions, avoid rationalizations.  Rationalizations are the bugaboo of all good decision making.  Rationalization has to do with how we try to justify ourselves or our decisions with plausible sounding reasons, even though those reasons aren’t true or appropriate.

Eve was staring at the fruit.  The story says, as she stared at the fruit, she was thinking:  The tree does look beautiful and the fruit does appear tasty.  Those are rationalizations she’s using to justify her bad decision.  Those have nothing to do with God’s rule, which was simply, “Don’t eat the fruit from this one tree!”  It doesn’t matter if it looks beautiful or tasty, or if eating fruit would or wouldn’t make her wise.  Those are three rationalizations that seem to Eve to be reasonable and valid, but they are empty and hollow, having nothing to do with making this decision about eating the forbidden fruit.

Eve makes her decision.  We all know what it was.  It was the wrong one.  And where was Adam when all this decision making was going on?  Standing there like a doofus.  “Gosh Eve, you’re so beautiful and naked and all, I guess you must be doing the right thing.  Here, let me have a bite.”

That’s the last part of decision making--don’t get sucked into others bad decisions.  Eve may have handed Adam his own fruit so that now he was just as culpable, and now she doesn’t have to feel so bad if everything goes wrong because she got someone else involved.  Simply put, if you know what is right, and what the right decision is, man up.  It was Adam’s responsibility to not just stand there, but to say, “For all kinds of reasons, that would be a bad decision.  Just back away from the tree.  Just back away.”


As I said at the start, we are the sum total of our decisions.  For good or for ill, our lives will go the way of the decisions we make throughout life.  Each decision determines what you can decide next.

T.S. Eliot in the play, The Cocktail Party, the guests are discussing if people are free.  One of the guests says, “You are not free.  Your moment of decision was yesterday.  You made a decision.  You set in motion Forces in your life and in the lives of others which cannot be reversed…

So it was for Eve and Adam.  So it is for us.  The only recourse is to make great decisions based on what we learn from Eve’s life changing decision making.

The New Peter Principle

"The New Peter Principle"
Luke 22:54-62
Acts 4:13-14


In the early 1970's there was a book written titled The Peter Principle.  One of the main ideas of the book had to do with the observation that in many large companies (I'm sure companies of all sizes) people get promoted to a level they are unable to handle.  They just aren't adequately trained for that level of expertise.  They've been elevated to a position for which they have no passion nor desire to excel.  They ultimately fail, and the company suffers under the mismanagement of this inadequate person.

From the verses read a moment ago, coming from Luke's gospel, it appears we have found the forerunner and namesake of "The Peter Principle."  Here we see the disciple, Peter, promoted up the ladder by Christ from fisherman, to disciple, to leader of the disciples.  But he couldn't handle it.  He blew it royally.

How would you feel if you were Peter standing there in the courtyard, after the third denial, and have Jesus turn and look at you.  I don't know about you, but I would have crawled out of there feeling like worm.  How could he live with the fact of such a visible act of falling on his face?  One professional ice hockey goalie said, “You think you have a tough job.  Try mine.  Mess up and a red light goes off with sirens, and thousands of people watching boo you.”

If we were to look only at these verses in Luke's gospel, we would all agree, Peter is the embodiment of the Peter Principle.  But another verse was read from Acts of the Apostles that makes us stand up and take notice.  Here we see a Peter who has been arrested for simply preaching the Good News about Jesus.  Here we see a Peter arrested for restoring a lame man back to walking health.  Here we see the arresting council amazed at the boldness of this "uneducated man."

Because we see the two stories together, we realize that something happened to Peter between the time he buried his face in his big fisherman's hands, weeping, and the time when he emerged as the bold and fearless leader of the infant church.  You might say, he got an education.  I believe his education came, not through his great success as a disciple, but by his failure as a disciple.  He learned from his mistake.  He was willing to get up and try again.

That's what makes the difference between Judas and Peter.  In their own ways they both failed their Lord.  Under the weight of their failures, they reacted the opposite.  Judas went out and took his failure to the nth degree, hanging himself.  Peter learned something about himself, and went on living, in a stronger and more vital way.

On New Years Day, 1929, Georgia Tech played the University of California in the Rose Bowl.  In the first half of that game, a California player, Roy Riegels, recovered a fumble, but started running in the wrong direction.  One of his teammates, Benny Lom, overtook Reigels and tackled him 65 yards down the field, just before he scored for Georgia Tech.  California, with their backs against the goal line, ended up having to punt after 3 downs.  The punt was blocked and Georgia Tech scored a safety, which was the ultimate margin of victory.

As I mentioned, that happened in the first half.  After Coach Nibbs Price gave his halftime talk, all the players got up and started out back to the field.  All but Riegels.  Coach Price went and sat by Riegels.  "Roy, get back out there; you'll be starting the second half."
"Coach," said Riegles, "I can't do it to save my life.  I've ruined you.  I've ruined the University of California.  I've ruined myself.  I couldn't face that crowd in the stadium now."
Coach Price reached out and grabbed Riegels by the shoulder and said, "Roy, get up and go back out there; the game is only half over!"

Riegels went back out.  Those Georgia Tech players would tell you they never saw anyone play football as hard and as well as Roy Riegels did in the second half.

We take the ball God's given us and we run the wrong direction.  We stumble and fall and are so ashamed of ourselves that we never want to try again.  Then The Lord comes to us and puts his hand on our shoulders in the person of Jesus Christ and says, "Get up and go on back; the game is only half over."  That's the gospel of the grace of God.  It's the gospel of the second chance, of the third chance, of the hundredth chance.  It's the New Peter Principle:  The game is only half over!


Let's take a moment to examine some of the qualities a person needs to participate in the New Peter Principle--the kind of characteristics needed to play in the second half after a first half failure.

Probably the first characteristic is the willingness to admit we make mistakes, that we do fail sometimes, and that as human beings we mess up.  The saying is certainly trite, but nonetheless true:  no one is perfect.

Part of our willingness to pick ourselves up and get back into the second half after falling on our faces means abandoning any attitudes or notions of perfection.  No matter how we try and avoid it, we can't help but having our failures brought up before us.  The only way out is to admit them and move on.

I read that there's a new computer coming out that is so human that when it makes a mistake it blames another computer.  Not being able to admit the fact that we are human, and that we do make mistakes, is the real and larger problem.

A guy became disenchanted with city life.  He decided to move to the country and start a chicken farm.  He bought a farmhouse with some land around it.  After he moved in he bought 200 baby chicks.  But they all quickly died.  He bought 200 more baby chicks but, again, they all died a short time later.

Puzzled and distressed he called up the county ag agent and described what was happening.  "I want to be a successful chicken farmer," he told the agent, "so can you tell me have I been planting the chicks too close together or too deep."
The agent replied, "I can't help you until I get a soil sample."

We don't help another person who has failed, by not helping them recognize real shortcomings.  We must courageously tell the truth, and face the truth.  Unrecognized and covered up, those mistakes will never be amended and we will continue messing up in life.

Secondly, getting back up and going out for the second half involves a certain amount of risk.  Risk that you just might fail again.  Certainly Peter had to risk that.  Faced with a similar situation, would he deny his Lord again?  Certainly Roy Riegels risked going out on the football field and making another error in front of thousands of people.

The truth of the matter is that we WILL make other mistakes.  Peter did.  But the paradox of that truth is that we often learn best by making mistakes and coming up short now and then.

A young man had been appointed Vice President of the bank.  He'd never dreamed he'd be Vice President at such a young age.  So he approached the venerable Chairman of the Board and said, "I was wondering if you could give me advice."
The old man came back with just two words:  "Right decisions."
The young man had hoped for a bit more than that, so he said, "That's really helpful, but can you be more specific?  How do I make right decisions?"
The wise Chairman simply responded, "Experience."
The young man said, "Well, that's just the point.  I don't have the kind of experience I need.  How do I get it?"
The Chairman's terse reply, "Wrong decisions."

That's the risk we take.  Making wrong and bad or hurtful life decisions, and then suffering the consequences.  But the other level of risk we then face is moving on after a bad decision and risk making more wrong decisions.

There was a landscape contractor who had his first full-fledged job.  One of the first tasks he had to tackle was blasting out some stumps with dynamite for a farmer.  Since the farmer was watching the landscape guy went to some length to measure out the fuse and set the dynamite just as if he really knew what he was doing.  The problem was he didn't really know how much dynamite would be just right to do the job.

When the landscape guy was all set up he breathed a prayer that he had enough dynamite packed under the stump, yet not too much to blow them both to kingdom come.  The moment of truth came.  The landscape guy looked at the farmer and gave him the thumbs up, and pushed down the plunger.  With a resounding boom the stump rose up in the air and arched magnificently over towards his pickup truck.  The stump landed right on the roof of the cab, demolishing it.

The farmer turned to the landscape guy and said, "Son, you didn't miss it by much.  Just a few feet.  With a bit more practice you'll be able to land those suckers in the truck bed every time."

Sounds like a Mark Graber story.    But that landscaper wouldn't be able to go on to the next stump or the next task if he wasn't ready to risk it again.  Peter could have said, "I've had enough.  I've done enough damage.  Enough with this bold experiment of a new gospel.  The risk is too great.  I'm going fishing."  Which is what he did for just one evening.  Then something happened to him that got him on his feet and ready to risk again.

And that's the third and final point of the New Peter Principle.  Getting back up and trying again after a failure means reaching out to God and allowing the Lord to pull us back into the game.  Without The Lord, we will never quite get all the way up, nor will our steps be quite as steady, nor will our foundation for the future be quite as sure.

Getting back up means letting someone else--that is, the Holy Spirit--help us up.  How many times had Peter seen Jesus do that for someone else.  Why did Peter ever think that couldn't happen for him?  In all aspects of life we must admit that without our Lord Jesus we fall hard.  But also without Him we can't get up either.

That's what the New Peter Principle is all about.  Here we see the difference between Judas and Peter:  Judas' hands were too tightly grasped around himself and his failure.  Each time he tried to get himself up he fell harder.  Until he fell to his death.

Peter fell, but during the fall reached out and grasped for forgiveness.  Like someone rolling down a hillside in a tumbled fall, grasping at shrubs and rocks, anything that you can hold on to to stop the momentum.

This third attitude encompasses the other two.  If we hold on to the misguided idea that we never make mistakes, that we are perfect and it's always someone else's fault, we will never know what God's forgiveness is all about.  We will never allow God, really, to be God--to allow God to do what God does best.  If we are unwilling to take a risk, we will never discover the blessings that come with the adventurous promises made by Christ.  We will never know how strong and limitless we can be if we don't take those risks with the promises of God.

This is the New Peter Principle.  May it be our guide as we move into the new ministries and goals we are setting for this church.

Sex, Sex, Sex!

"Sex, Sex, Sex!"
Genesis 2:20-25
Song of Solomon 4:1-7


I was going through confirmation class as a junior high kid.  The Associate Pastor who was leading the class was boring and dry.  As socially awkward as he was around adults, he was even more so around kids.  I’m not sure why he was put in charge of the youth program.

We had just finished up one of the chapters in the book he was running us through.  The next chapter was about human sexuality.  My friends and I, 12 and 13 years old, were anxious to get to that chapter ever since we thumbed through the table of contents and saw it.  But the youth pastor said, “Just read through the next chapter, talk about it with your parents this week, and for next week we’ll do the chapter after that.”

An audible groan went up from the boys in the class.  The girls just smiled.  My mother asked what we were studying in Confirmation Class and I told her about the chapter about sex.  She said, “Well if you ever have any questions about that, you can come and ask me anything.  We’ll talk about it.”  I took that as she meaning the opposite--she didn’t want to talk at all about it.  And what 13 year old boy is going to go ask his mom anything having to do with sex?

The message clearly was, “We don’t talk about this in church, and good luck getting anything useful out of your parents.”

Fast forward a bit to when I was a sophomore in high school.  We had a new Youth Pastor at the church, up from California.  He was cool.  He set up a couple of youth group sessions on the topic of sex, got all our parents permission, and we couldn’t wait.  The boys were split off from the girls and we had the sex talk.  But it was mostly about body parts and what they did.  We didn’t get into the morality of it, what’s appropriate and what’s not, and especially not the spirituality of sexuality, which believe-it-or-not, is what I wanted to talk about.  Again, the message was, “We’ve gone a step forward in talking about sexuality in church, but we’re still not comfortable talking about everything about sexuality.”

Fast forward again to the late 1980’s.  I’m a pastor up in Colby.  I was asked by the middle school principal to be on a select team that would write sex education curriculum for the middle school.  At that time, the state of Kansas mandated sex education be a part of all middle school curriculum, but it was up to the school how they decided to do that.

Our team worked for several weeks putting the sex education curriculum together.  During that time my fellow ministers, all left off the team, were badgering me constantly about what I was supposed to make sure got into the sex education curriculum.  Most of what they were bringing up were sexual morality issues they wanted to make sure the school was going to include--and these other pastors felt it was my personal mission to see to that happening.  I finally got sick of all their weaseling, and at a ministerial association meeting said, rather forcefully, “I’m done listening to you all.  Why are you demanding the school teach all this stuff!?  That’s your job as pastors and spiritual leaders.  Why don’t you include it in your youth group teaching at church?  That’s where it belongs, not in school curriculum!”

They got all huffy and puffy, but the comments they made back to me were along the lines of, “We can’t do that in church; we’d rather not do that in church; etc. etc.”  Again, the message, starting all the way back to when I was in Confirmation class hadn’t changed much over the years.  Clearly it was, “The church isn’t the place to talk about sex.”

So here I am today, confessing to you, that even though in all my youth groups we have talked about sex, talked about the sanctity and spiritual link with our sexuality, I have never preached about sex.  This is the first time.  I’ve never taken my own advice, at least during a sermon, and tried to explain some of the biblical and spiritual teachings about how God has designed us as sexual beings and what that means.

So, let’s jump in.  I want to start out by offering a prize.  Here’s a $20 bill.  I will give it to the first person who can tell me what the picture is on the back of this bill.  (Guesses.)  Well, the answer is a bit tricky.  Because I asked about the picture on the back of this bill.  If this were an authentic $20 bill, the picture would be the White House.  But since this is not a real $20 bill, there is white on the back, but not a house.  It’s a counterfeit.  Printed it on our own church copier in living color.

Most of what our culture displays, teaches, and inundates us with about our sexuality is just as counterfeit as this $20 bill.  If you’re getting your information about human sexuality from TV, the movies, magazines, books, and God-forbid--porn, then you are getting a counterfeit, you’ve been misled, and the sexual side of who you are as God’s human being will be tainted and skewed.

Most of what we see or read in popular media, displays sexuality as a tool or a weapon.  Sexuality in the media is used to sell, to seduce, to titillate, to entertain, to empower, and to disempower (especially through the violence of rape or sexual misconduct).  In popular media, sex is pretty much defined by our female and male body parts and what they do, and how vividly they can be displayed.

A family got together for a bit of a reunion.  There was lots of food and conversation.  Some of the conversation gravitated towards politics.  One side of the family was staunchly Republican and the other side was staunchly Democrat.  The conversation was spirited, but fortunately didn’t get too much out of hand.  As the day came to a close it was bath time for the kids.  A couple of young cousins were thrown into the bathtub together, a little boy and little girl.  The little girl looked the little boy over and said, “Boy, you Republicans are different aren’t you!”

There certainly are differences in how males and females bodies are created and how they operate.  But our sexuality, as God designed it in our humanness permeates or influences much of who we are--in the way we think, in the way we act, in the way we handle our relationships, and who we are physically.  Sexuality has everything to do with how we fully live out our lives as women and as men.  It’s this all-encompassing view of our human sexuality that is totally missing in what’s thrown at us everyday in the general media.

A psychologist was in a session with one of her patients.  The psychologist was leading the patient through the Rorschach Test--the one with those weirdly shaped ink blots.  The psychologist showed the patient the first picture and asked, “What is this?”
The patient replied, “That’s sex.”
The next picture was shown, and she asked, “What is this?”
The patient replied, “That’s sex.”
The psychologist went through all the pictures with the patient and each time he had the same answer:  “That’s sex.”
After the test was over, the psychologist said, “Well, sir, you seem to have an obsession with sex.”
To which the patient replied, “Me!?  You’re the one with all the dirty pictures!”

That’s what sex is in our culture:  dirty pictures, revealing as much skin as possible, only about our bodies, and the sex act itself.   But sexuality is so much more, and the spiritual dimensions of sexuality are totally irrelevant and unheard of in general culture.

There are at least two ways that Christian spirituality and sexuality are in relation to each other.  First, sexuality is a symbol of our call by God to have deeper communication with each other.  The problem with strip joints and sex in the media and pornography is not that they emphasize sexuality too much but that they don’t emphasize it enough--to its fullest extent.  They totally eliminate relationship and thereby narrow sexuality to the confines of body parts.  They have made sexuality trivial.

How much richer and fuller is the biblical perspective of sexuality as relationship.  To chat over a cup of tea, to discuss a book together, to view a sunset together--that is sexuality at its best because it is about relationship.

There are so many great themes in the book, Song of Solomon.  One of which is the true mutuality of a loving relationship.  Nowhere in the book is there the dull story of a man simply sexually acting out and the woman being acted upon.  Both are intensely involved; both initiate; both receive.

The emphasis is upon the loving relationship.  The man speaks.  The woman speaks.  The choir heightens the joy of the relationship.  Both are giving and receiving in the act of love and love’s mutual relationship.

Lust produces bad sex, because it denies relationship.  Lust turns the other person into an object--a thing, a nonperson--to satisfy your desire.  Both Jesus and Paul condemned lust because it made sex less than it was created to be.  Lust--sex without relationship--creates a counterfeit.  For Jesus, sex is too good, too high, too holy, to be thrown away by cheap and lusting thoughts.

The second way that Christian spirituality and sexuality form a union is that sexuality is a symbol of our call by God into communion with him and each other.  Sexuality and communion are intimately related.

I like the word “intimacy.”  It’s a word that is rooted in the Latin word, intimus, which means innermost.  Intimacy is that connection between two people in the innermost parts of themselves.  It’s deeper than relationship.  The only word that suffices is communion.

Because, what is the innermost part of us?  From Genesis we learn it is the image of God.  In intimacy, especially sexual intimacy, between two people there is the deep connection with the image of God in each of those people.  It is two people, opening up the deepest part of themselves, “naked and unashamed,” giving each other access to the very image of God within them.

The mystery of our human sexuality is the mystery of communion where the holy and the physical come together in the image of God and is united between those two people.  When Genesis describes Adam and Eve coming together sexually, it says, “Now Adam knew his wife Eve…”  We may run over that statement, saying to ourselves, “Well of course he knew her; she was his wife.”  But the word “knew” in Hebrew means to know someone intimately, deeply, to the very soul of a person, to the depth of the person’s image of God within them.

The same word is used to describe our relationship with God.  That our communion with God is described in sexual terms, of “deep calling out to deep.”  It gives a whole new meaning to that part of the Sermon on the Mount where Jesus is describing people who said they did all kinds of great things for God.  But those people are turned away at the judgement, because, as Jesus said, “I never knew you!”  In other words, I never had communion with you, you never really connected with me in the depth of God’s image.  It was all surface and no depth.  No communion.  No intimacy.

Sexuality’s intensity, sexuality’s restraint, sexuality’s mutuality, sexuality’s permanence--all of these are amazing windows onto the communion and intimacy God intended not just for man-woman relationships, but also our relationship with God.



Christian ethics writer, Lewis Smedes wrote, “There are two situations in which people feel no shame.  The first is in a state of wholeness.  The other is in a state of illusion.”  Wholeness in sexuality has to do with communication and communion as I’ve described them.  But illusion in sexuality has to do with the counterfeit of communication and communion, which only create lust, pornography, sadism and sexism.  The counterfeits only dehumanize and destroy.  But the real thing, the wholeness of human sexuality takes us directly into the heart and image God.