Repentance
Transcripts are computer-generated and may not be 100% accurate.
Our Scripture text this morning comes from the Gospel of John. Hear these words from the very last chapter, John 21, verses 15-19:
When they had finished breakfast, Jesus said to Simon Peter, Simon, son of John, do you love me more than these? He said to him, "Yes, Lord, you know that I love you." Jesus said to him, "Feed my lambs." A second time he said to him, "Simon, son of John, do you love me?" He said to him, "Yes, Lord, you know I love you." Jesus said to him, "Tend my sheep." He said to him a third time, "Simon, son of John, do you love me?" Peter felt hurt because he said to him the third time, "Do you love me?" And he said to him, "Lord, you know everything. You know that I love you." Jesus said to him, "Feed my sheep." Very truly I tell you, when you were younger, you used to fasten your own belt and to go wherever you wished, but when you grow old, you will stretch out your hands and someone else will fasten a belt around you and take you where you do not wish to go. He said this to indicate the kind of death by which he would glorify God. After this, he said to him, "Follow me."
This passage may sound familiar to you, John 21, since it was also the passage that rooted Debbie's sermon last week. This isn't one of those stress dreams I have where I'm preaching this wrong text. This is the passage that will come back to you again next week and sound familiar all over again, the same text that will be the basis for four consecutive sermons during the month of May at The Table. We're exploring some major themes in the Christian theological tradition through this single passage, the themes of confession, repentance, forgiveness, and reconciliation.
If you grew up in more conservative expressions of Christianity, as I did as a gay kid in Southern Baptist South Carolina, then the word repentance may fall like a weight on your chest. It's a word often spiritually weaponized against those who question, those who feel calls that the church says you couldn't possibly have heard, or those who show up in bodies, especially queer and trans bodies, that the church wasn't expecting and didn't know how to welcome.
When I was a teenager in youth group in the Southern Baptist Church where I grew up, we had intensive evangelism training. For weeks we would meet together with our teachers and mentors, and we would memorize passages from the New Testament that would systematically walk someone through the neatly laid out process of understanding their sinfulness and need for confession and repentance, and ultimately to pray the quote "sinner's prayer" in order to be saved. Then after our training was over, we would spend a few weeks visiting neighborhoods around the church, knocking on doors, asking if we could talk to people about Jesus. The Southern Baptists in Duncan, South Carolina were not going to be outdone by the Jehovah's Witnesses and Mormons! We went door to door, and the teenagers would take the lead in sharing the scriptures with our unsuspecting hosts, praying with them if they wanted to accept Jesus as their personal Lord and Savior.
So whenever I hear the word "repentance," that's the image that immediately comes to my mind. What about you? I'm sure many of you have similar associations with the term that make it a less than helpful concept to you, sometimes weaponized against us, sometimes so thin and oversimplified as to make it a trite checkbox in a prayer routine. And for many, repentance feels like a burden that is ours to carry and figure out somehow. You have to do something. Take the initiative. Know the right things about yourself and about God. Say the right words. And I get the appeal of that, don't you? You know where you start and you know where you end up. It's neat. It's tidy. It can even be quite profound for some folks who experience it.
But it provides only one very tightly choreographed window into what it might mean to be a disciple of Jesus that absolutely doesn't represent the fullness of the notion of repentance as part of that journey. For example, Peter, the quintessential disciple, a leader among the disciples, lived a different story of faith than that one. Peter's path of discipleship had been rocky up to this point in the story. And it's a gift to us that the gospel writers didn't try to sanitize his story too much.
This passage in which Jesus asks Peter three times, "Do you love me?" is a mirror of the text, just a few passages earlier in chapter 18, when Peter denies Jesus three times, refusing even to acknowledge that he knows Jesus as Jesus endures the trial that would lead to his ultimate execution while Peter lurks around the campfire outside. And that's where Peter's story ends in Mark's gospel, but not in John's.
Now, three chapters later, they are around a campfire again. The passage just before this one says:
When they had gone ashore, they saw a charcoal fire there with fish on it and bread. Peter hauled the net full of fish that they had caught ashore, and Jesus said to Peter and the disciples, "Come and have breakfast."
Now, remember a few weeks ago when I did Words of Institution and I said that there were Eucharistic texts all over the gospels, not just the Last Supper. This is one of them: “Jesus came and took the bread and gave it to them and did the same with the fish.” And they all ate together again with the resurrected Jesus around the fire with loaves of bread and fresh fish.
"And when they had finished breakfast, Jesus said to Peter, "Simon, son of John, do you love me more than these?" "Yes, I love you," he said. "Feed my lambs," Jesus replied. Peter ignored the "more than these" part of Jesus' question, you notice, but he answers without doubt that he loves Jesus. And Jesus asks again, "Do you love me? You know that I love you. Then tend my sheep." And a third time, "Simon, son of John, do you love me?" And the text says, "Peter felt hurt because he asked him a third time."
Perhaps it was at this moment when Peter recalled why he was asking at all that just a few evenings prior he had been asked a similar set of three questions. First, by a woman in a courtyard, "You're one of his disciples, aren't you?" "I am not," he said. And then a crowd, "You're one of his disciples, aren't you?" "I am not," Peter replied. And then the woman again, "You were with him in the garden just a while ago, weren't you? I swear I don't know him." And then the rooster crows.
Peter felt hurt because he was asked a third time, but he answers, "Jesus, Lord, you know everything. You know that I love you." And Jesus says, "Feed my sheep." Three opportunities in the courtyard in Jesus's hour of trial, all failures, failures of nerve, of courage, of discipleship. And three opportunities he never thought he'd ever have again, to speak words of love to a teacher, a friend, he never believed he'd see again. "I do love you."
But to understand the real profundity of this text, to get what it might have to teach us about our thin and spiritually deficit notions of repentance, you have to go back even farther than chapter 18. Because this passage at the very end of John's Gospel, the last chapter, chapter 21, hearkens back to a passage at the very beginning of John's Gospel, chapter 1, when Jesus first speaks to Peter, in the first words he ever says, "Jesus calls him Simon, son of John."
Those who started at the beginning of the Gospel and have listened to the story all the way to this point, here in this verse, in the very last chapter of John, echoes of that very first chapter of the Gospel. There in chapter 1, Peter's brother, Andrew, has been called to follow Jesus, and Andrew runs to get his brother Peter, who is at the time called Simon, to bring him to meet Jesus. At their very first meeting, Jesus looks at him and says, "You are Simon, son of John. You are to be called Peter, a new name."
Now, after being called Peter all along the way, for 20 chapters, at this, their last meeting in the Gospels, Jesus, for the first time since chapter 1, refers to Peter by his original name, Simon, son of John. He gets to start over. In those words, a name he hasn't heard on Jesus' lips for years, Peter may hear more than the words that are spoken, something like Simon, son of John, "I've known you from the beginning. I gave you the name Peter, but I've known you since your Simon days. We've been together all this way, and nothing you can ever do will diminish my love for you, Simon, son of John. Today is a new day. Do you love me?” “You know that I love you."
We often think about repentance as saying something like, "I'm sorry for our sins, for all the things we've done wrong." And that, for many of us, is an important part of the picture. There are things we regret, people we've hurt, ways we've lived life that have caused harm to ourselves and to others and to our relationship with the divine, traits that we've been carrying from our past that we need lifted from our hearts. And if we could do it ourselves, we'd have done it by now. So we turn to God in repentance, longing for another chance to follow the ways of Jesus more clearly in our lives.
But I want to invite you to think about repentance a bit differently this morning. Rather than what you've done wrong, repentance can also be directed at those places in your life where you've sold yourself short. Repentance can be an opportunity to let go of all of the spiritually wounding messages that you've internalized and believed about yourself that just are not true. Asking God to help release you from those burdens you should never have been made to carry in the first place.
In this very passage of Peter's failure turned to shame confronted by the sheer unsuspecting grace of a risen Jesus, you may see something of your own self. The doubts and fears you have about who you are transformed by hearing your name called again. “I have loved you all along the way. Do you love me?” You get to begin again, and that's the gift of grace. And we say it every week, “no matter who you are or what you've done.”
And the final words of this brief passage, "Follow me." It's the last act of the spiritual drama of repentance, of all the ways that we have theologically marred the notion of repentance by making of it a weapon to inflict spiritual harm, or making it a shallow spiritual movement about nothing more than our own morality or sin. The most harmful notion that we've done to the spiritual practice of repentance is that we've too often made it the final destination, or an end in and of itself. But repentance is just the beginning.
What comes next is a life of following the ways of Jesus into paths that you cannot predict. With many dangers, toils, and snares, as the old hymn puts it. Peter's own pathway is intimated in this text, the words that would lead toward his own death as a martyr of the Jesus movement. And in an era like ours that grows increasingly dangerous, and in a call like ours that summons us to put our bodies side by side in solidarity with the crucified of the world, our path may also be dire. It's the call of discipleship.
But we are not released from our burdens set free from the failures that hold us back in order only to go through life with a clean conscience or a spiritually pure heart. Repentance is not about something that is therapeutic. You can go to your therapist for therapy. We are summoned in this drama of repentance to discipleship in the ways of Jesus with the most dangerous words in all of the Gospels: follow me.
Can you hear your name being called this morning? It's the sound of grace. You get to begin again, no matter who you are or what you've done. You get to let go, unburden yourself from all that you're carrying that was never yours to carry in the first place. There's no systemic, systematic formula or scripted words to say in order to practice repentance. The only question you need to respond to is this: Do you love me?