Do You Love Me

This sermon was preached for the Third Sunday of Easter at McLean Baptist Church in McLean, VA. My wife, Meg, is the Minister to Youth and Young Adults. You should check them out at: http://www.mcleanbaptist.org/

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“Do you love me?” No four words can cause more problems in my house than those. Meg and I use them all the time, in different situations. Often, I use them to shame her into feeding our dog. I will ask the dog, “Do you love me? Does your mother love you?” Of course, Meg pets him and walks him often…it’s the feeding part that I bug her with though. At times, we uses those words in those quiet moments where we need reassurance that we are not alone. We both use them when we are trying to get out of the frustration of not having done that “thing” we were asked to do. 

“Do you love me?” Every person on the planet wants to feel love. We crave it as one of the things that completes us and allows the individual to recognize their value. Interestingly, we, in this community, live in a culture that has for generations tried to downplay the need of love in our lives. Sure, we have always communicated a strong message that the idea of family is what completes our existence, or shows that we have truly succeeded in life. But in order to achieve those goals, we must toil and strive alone, hiding our need to be loved because we view it as a weakness that can hamper us from reaching our cultural goals. In order to be seen as successful in a world we describe as “dog eat dog,” “needy” is an adjective we can not afford to have hung on us. 

“Do you love me?” It’s a question that can leave you feeling vulnerable. The question expresses need and lays bare feelings of inadequacy. Can you truly be deserving of love? But in a world with so many swirling questions of race, gender, nationality, socio-economic concerns, religion, and politics, could this question be any more important to our very existence as children of God? 

Just a few weeks ago, I read a blog from a young minister talking bout how they feel in church. Like myself, this person is a millennial. We vaguely remember Reagan, we were there when all the cultural icons of the 90s were huge, and now we are the ones trying to find our way in the world post-college or grad school. Every church is struggling with what to do now that the largest generation in America doesn’t attend church. Whether you are reading the Barna Group, Pew Research, or any of a number of blogs by millennial writers, the word is out that my generation is post-Christian. Depending on the commentator, we are called lazy because many of us return to live with our parents, entitled because as a group our sports leagues started the practice o recognizing participation alongside victory, technology addicted because many of us do not remember a time without the internet, or disruptive because we have very few issues with asking questions of authority or our culture. Never mind that we are also the most highly educated generation, with more college graduates than any group before us, or the most indebted generation because we were encouraged to go and get that education, or the one with the fewest options because entry-level jobs do not pay on the same scale as they did before us.

This minister is trying to reconcile that existence with a world where the church is also struggling to know what to do with us. How can the church attract millennials when they don't join things? What new program can we put together to get them thought he door? However,  they asks questions of the Church, the one with the big “c”, and some of these questions are great because they express feelings I have heard from others. Will the Church treat us as more than props to show that you are growing, and allow us to actually find our place? Will you allow us to define ourselves instead of labeling us into groups such as “single,” “married without children,” or “married with children?” Can this Church be a place where we can ask our questions, or is that too much to ask? I have asked these questions, point blank, of the church that ordained me, and I heard the stories of heartache as my friends who are ministers, and millennials, were asked the same. 

“Do you love me?” A question that flows beneath all of the searching of a generation who is seeking its place in the world. It’s a question that cuts deep to the heart. As we read the story this morning, there are things that stand out in the telling. The disciples, after having caught nothing the entire night of fishing, follow the advice of this person they don’t know who is telling them to drop their nets just a few feet from where they had just pulled them up. Though they had caught 153 fish, this person they now know to be Jesus is already cooking fish for them when they arrive. And then, Jesus ignores the other disciples to talk only to Simon Peter. This is a story we know, fairly well. Though growing up, my church didn’t follow the Lectionary, we still heard a sermon on this passage at least once a year. To say nothing of the many Bible studies that would have something about this passage during Sunday School. While it may not be as strongly burned into your memory as say John 3:16, we at least feel familiar with the story. 

We are familiar with how Simon Peter’s three denials during Jesus’ trial are echoed here in Jesus’ three questions. This is the place where Peter is restored after having failed so painfully on that most painful of days. For most of the Gospel story, Peter has been one of the most inconsistent of followers. He is able to to both inspire those around him with strong declarations of faith and fidelity, and then able to fall so horribly short of the standard that he becomes the subject of sermon jokes. When we read the Gospels many of us both want to be Peter, and also want to smack him on the back of the head. Though we recognize that we are the outsiders looking into this story where we already know the ending, Peter still makes us cringe with his naïveté. After hearing those parables and seeing the miracles, how does he not get where Jesus is going? When the Christ reaches out and touches the outcaste, dines with the socially reprehensible, undermines cultural leaders, embraces people who are not considered people, chooses to associate with the poor instead of the rich, and casts disparaging remarks toward Caesar as the king, how did Peter not see what was coming? 

“Do you love me?” This Easter season, as the front page of the bulletin describes, is one of great joy and celebration lasting till Pentecost. Starting two weeks ago, we were given a great opportunity to remember and celebrate the joy of proclaiming, “He is Risen. He is Risen, Indeed.” In the development of Christian thought, there is no bigger event than Easter. Our forebears in the faith felt it was so important that it is recorded in all four Gospels. Not only are there four accounts, the community that has followed Christ has found them each so compelling that they kept all four. We are an Easter people. All that is our existence as the children of God comes from our Easter experience. As Jurgen Moltmann said, “All faith begins and ends at the Cross.” We find our place in Easter, we find our hope in Easter, we find our reason in Easter. 

Easter is the culmination of the story of God continually reaching out to those on the fringes, or even beyond the walls of society. Whether it’s calling children close, speaking to and being questioned by a Samaritan woman, healing leapers, or defending prostitutes, Jesus’ life displayed that God’s love is directed at lifting up those who are being pushed down. The life of Christ is one that called people to walk out onto the edges of their own existence and face the possibility of a world turned on its ear. In the words so often printed in red we find the call to seek out a world where all can come to the table. Jesus laid the first stones on a new path that pushed beyond the horizon to a new world where the banquet table was set for the beggar in the name of the King. The event of Easter itself, of death and resurrection wrapped around the question of being forsaken shows that God is on the side of those called God-forsaken. 

“Do you love me?” With those things in mind, we turn our eyes back to the disciple who had forsaken God by denying His son. It is here in this moment by the lake, when we look into the eyes of a disciple who had seen so much and failed so many times, that God reaches out to reconcile one who had forsaken God. Peter’s denials may have been to save his skin from certain association with the man on trial at the time, but their implications are much greater than that. We have to understand what it meant for Peter to say what he said before we can fully grasp how much forgiveness was really at stake. 

“Do you love me?” One of the things I have thought a lot about over the last couple of years as Meg and I have moved around is just how different I am now from how I was when I grew up. I’m sure each of you have experienced that feeling at some point in your life. We change as we grow up and have new experiences. Today, I stand over a thousand miles from where I grew up, and that is not just a statement of geography. When I think back on that place and time, I remember the friends I had. I remember the people from school that I don’t speak with anymore. We all grow up and change, but I think back to that ignorant, arrogant guy who said some mean things, and wish he knew what I now know. Which isn’t all that much.  But I pushed away people for rather unenlightened reasons. Those slight embarrassments are a part of my story, and who I am today just like similar stories make up all of our experiences. 

Simon Peter, though, wasn’t just distancing himself from the kids in his hometown and not calling them again. Jesus was the image of the invisible God on Earth, and Peter denied ever knowing him. What is at stake on that lake shore is not just forgiving a friend who said he had nothing to do with you when you went on an unpopular political rant on Facebook. Jesus was asking Peter, the man who had denied knowing God Incarnate, to come back. Come back and be a part of the story again. The story that was feeding hungry people, touching sick people, healing broken people, and comforting forgotten people.

“Do you love me?” It’s also a part of our story because the story doesn’t end on that lake shore. It exists in twenty-three other books in the New Testament. That story stretches from the Ancient Near East around the globe through 2,000 years of strife and struggle. Through persecution, heresy, Reformation, conflict, and awakening. In all those times, the story has moments where this scene on the lake is played out again and again. Where “Do you love me?” is not just a collection of letters on a page in different languages for different people, but the actual call from the Spirit of God. It rings out again and again for us.   In times of colonialism, Inquisition, racism, political discord, and war, the voice of God calls out to those who have forsaken God and asks, “Do you love me?”

Each time, the Church has found its way to say, “You know I love you, Lord.” Sometimes it caused us pain, just as it did for Peter. That pain is deep, for it would be simplistic to say that our failings were premeditated attempts to subvert the plot. Rather, we lost our way. We got scared because it was a moment where we were standing on the in the courts with others asking us if we knew the man, and we reacted out of our fear of being implicated. We did it without thinking, without considering, but because we felt something. For all that humanity would like to think itself a creature of rational logic, we are really making our decisions with our emotions. We were blind-sided by the moment where we were called to account. The Church found itself standing with an angry mob, just trying to get a better view of that thing over there when the mob turned and said, “Hey, aren’t you supposed to be a disciple like those out there?” And in a moment of panic because we saw how hard it was out there, we said, no.

“Do you love me?” Peter’s question becomes our question. Peter’s response, our response. “You know all things, Lord. You know that we love you.” The response is uttered through the pain of remembered betrayal. We squint in the blinding ray of forgiveness that is calling in those who have forsaken God. This penetrating question, that exposes the vulnerability of a betrayed God, exposes us as well. We can not run from it, can not give the non-answer answer. We look at our story. The question has been there through the ages. And it is at Easter we are called to rejoice that we are asked this question. God is offering an opportunity to move through the pain of betrayal into the joy of celebrating the Resurrection. “Do you love me?