How have you encountered the risen Christ in your life? Is your experience more like Peter’s, or more like Paul’s? Our scriptures today give us the life-transforming experiences of Peter and Paul as they encounter the risen Christ.
Christian tradition remembers them together, twin giants of our faith: both leaders of the community of the risen Lord, both plain-spoken, opinionated. The scriptures tell us that they had at least one major, history-making argument, yet for all their disagreements they remained brothers in the faith, and apparently ended their lives very similarly. According to tradition, both were executed for their faith in Rome around 64 or 65. Peter, sentenced to crucifixion, protested that he wasn’t good enough to die the same way as his Lord Jesus, so the Romans crucified him upside down. Paul was more fortunate – as a Roman citizen, he was eligible for a less painful, less humiliating death, so he was beheaded, in the same city, quite likely in the same year as his brother apostle.
These two apostles and their experiences with the resurrected Jesus are so alike and yet so very different, that we should look at them more deeply. Because I suspect that when we look at these two remarkable stories in our Scriptures today, each of us may find ourselves in these stories somewhere.
Our story from Acts tells us about a man named Saul –we know him better as Paul. Well-educated, probably from a prominent Jewish family in Tarsus, part of the Roman world, fluent in several languages, an excellent writer, a logical thinker, a persuasive talker, confident, persistent, determined, courageous, unswervable: this man knows exactly what he is doing and where he is going. Saul was a Pharisee and was determined to wipe out the Christian heresy to preserve the purity of the Jewish faith he knew and loved. So the first time we see him in the Bible, he is holding the coats of the people who stone the first Christian martyr, Stephen, to death – and he approves. Now we see him for the second time. Unchanged in his determination, he now is pursuing the Christian heresy to Damascus.
On the road to Damascus, he has a stunning encounter with the risen Lord. He is blinded by a light from heaven, knocked to the ground, and hears a voice. The voice tells him it is Jesus, and it tells him what he is expected to do – and Paul’s entire life is transformed in an instant. He becomes in fact what Jesus has chosen him to be: a man on a mission, an instrument to bring Jesus’ name before Gentiles and kings and before the people of Israel, who will suffer great hardships for the sake of Christ. Never, through the remaining maybe 20 years of his life, does he swerve from his faith and dedication to Jesus – the determination he had put into persecuting Christ’s followers becomes the irresistible force that turns the Christian faith into a worldwide movement of transformation. And the world, and history, and the lives of millions, and the hearts of you and me, will never be the same – who we are as Christians, we owe to Paul, because Paul is the one who convinced the rest of the apostles that people who weren’t Jewish could still be Christians.
So back to the question I opened with: is your experience with the risen Christ like Paul’s? Have you had a moment when your life was changed, in twinkling of an eye (to use one of Paul's memorable phrases)? Have you been going along, determined on your own course, when suddenly God decided to knock you off your high horse and blind you with a new kind of light, an insight that remakes the whole world into something new? Many people have had some kind of life-transforming mystical experience like this: maybe a searing moment like John Wesley, the founder of Methodism, who wrote that on May 24, 1738, at 8:45 p.m, he felt his heart strangely warmed. Studies say 50% of mainstream Protestants say they have had a mystical experience with the risen Christ – a moment of self-transcendence, an experience in which there was no doubt that God was present. We don’t talk about it much – we have a hard time describing it – we say things like – strangely warmed or – I can’t describe it, I just knew God was there. These are moments that leave us, like Paul, with no doubt about who was speaking to us.
But only 50% of us have had those experiences like Paul had – the other 50% maybe are more like Peter. Here in today’s gospel is Peter, the blunt, outspoken, impetuous, emotional, changeable, leader of the disciples, the plain, uneducated fisherman, the one Jesus called the Rock he would build his church on – the first to speak in any situation, the first to act before thinking, the first to drop everything and follow Jesus, the first to confess his faith in Jesus as the Messiah, yet the one to deny Jesus, 3 times. After the death of his teacher, the one he believed was the Messiah, Peter chooses to go back home, to return to the familiar, to engage in work he knows how to do – he gets in his boat and goes fishing. And there, in his familiar, everyday world, he meets the risen Lord.
Today he and Jesus come face to face in personal conversation, perhaps for the first time since that searing moment the night before Jesus died, when the cock crowed and Jesus turned and looked at Peter, and Peter went out and wept bitterly. Jesus asks Peter a question, three times: Do you love me? And three times Peter has the chance to undo his denial, three times, Jesus offers him forgiveness – three times, Peter says, yes, Lord, you know that I love you. And three times, Jesus gives Peter something to do: Feed my sheep. Just as Jesus had a mission in mind for Paul – to bring Jesus to the Gentiles – so Jesus has a mission for Peter – to lead the flock of Christians, be their shepherd.
But notice something here: Peter’s encounter with Jesus is very different from Paul’s – Peter encounters the risen Christ in the same way he first encountered the human Jesus during Jesus’ earthly lifetime – in his ordinary course of business, in the middle of his everyday world. It’s not just mystical, transcendent experiences that make Jesus present to us. 50% of us never have those experiences. Many of us will go through life without being knocked from our horse or blinded by a dazzling light or hearing a voice from the clouds. Many of us will simply grow in faith in ordinary, everyday ways. We will worship and pray and learn, we will live and worship in communities of faith, we will work and raise our families and we will witness God’s love in action in our everyday lives, and we will be convinced of God’s presence with us because of the way our communities and lives become evidence for it. And that way of experiencing God is just as good as the miraculous encounter on the road to Damascus – because the important thing is not how we encounter Christ, but how the encounter with Christ changes our lives.
As different as Peter’s and Paul’s encounters are, notice what they have in common. Jesus not only forgives them, Jesus has no interest in discussing what they have done wrong in the past – no discussion of denying him three times, no discussion of violently dragging off Christian believers to prison. Jesus isn’t interested in going over what we have done wrong in the past. Jesus doesn’t bother to argue doctrines or theology, either. What Jesus does, is he gives them each a mission – something to do. Martin Luther was right when he said that we receive God’s grace completely unmerited and undeserved – there’s nothing we can do to earn it. But that doesn’t mean there’s nothing we can do.
We are each commissioned to live in a way that helps Jesus create God’s kingdom here on earth. We are each given a mission, based on our own talents and strengths, our own life histories and our passions – a mission to help transform this world. What Jesus is interested in is not what we’ve done in the past, but what we are going to do in the future.
I read a study recently on happiness: there are many small factors that influence whether we consider ourselves happy: wealth, our family situations. But this study found, two things are absolutely essential for a life of deep joy: a sense of belonging to a community and a belief that what you do matters – a purpose in life. This is exactly what Jesus offers to Peter and Paul – membership in a community of disciples and a mission and purpose in life. And this is exactly what Jesus offers to each one of us; each of us is called to ministry, in our own special way, using our own special gifts. We may not change the world, like Peter and Paul, but we can change the community around us, our work places, our families, our churches. And we can change ourselves. We can mold ourselves, and let Christ mold us, into deeply happy, deeply purposeful, deeply joyful people on a mission.
You will be hearing a lot over the next few weeks about Nativity's Spirit Quest campaign. It is our way of empowering each one of you to seek out God’s mission and purpose for your life. You will be hearing about the many missions and ministries of this Church, and you will be given the opportunity to think deeply about your own mission and ministry, whether it is joining one that already exists or creating one. In any case, the question is the same: how do you encounter the risen Christ? And what does that mean for your life? When we do encounter him, and when we do answer his call, we find miracles happening all around us. And we can say, with Paul in the letter to the Ephesians, “Glory to God, whose power, working in us, can do infinitely more than we can ask or imagine. Glory to God in the highest.”
