Sisters & brothers, grace to you & peace from God who knows, Christ who saves, and the Spirit who tests the heart.

Amen

Poor Peter. He was doing so well last week, confessing Jesus to be the Messiah, the son of the living God, and all that. So well, in fact, that Jesus told him that upon the rock of that bold confession the whole church would be built and against which the very gates of Hades could not and would not prevail. Well, not so fast, not so fast.

Today’s Gospel, which follows immediately after the verses from last Sunday’s, paints a picture of eager Peter which looks an awful lot like the same guy who, in the Gospel text a few weeks ago, started walking on water toward Jesus and then, realizing what he was doing, started to sink. It’s sort of like watching a beginning water-skier from the perspective of the speedboat: “Yepp, yepp, he’s up, he’s up! Oh. No, no. He’s not. He’s down. Pull back around.”

Today Peter goes from being hailed as the one whose confession not even hell could conquer, to a fearful advisor who gets put in his place by his boss, a major demotion, in fact, to Satan status.

For when Peter realizes what Jesus is saying: that he must go to Jerusalem, and undergo great suffering at the hands of the institutionally-religious, and be killed, he instantly begins attempting to set Jesus straight. St. Matthew writes that “Peter took Jesus aside and began to rebuke him, saying “God forbid it Lord! This must never happen to you!”

But you see, there was this one little oversight on Peter’s part. He heard the part about going to Jerusalem. He heard the part about undergoing great suffering. And probably most of all he heard the part about being killed. But the part his ears missed were those seven last words, “and on the third day be raised.”
Peter got distracted by the messy stuff: Jerusalem, suffering, the elders, chief priests, and scribes, the killing. It was as if those seven last words hadn’t even been spoken. Did someone say “and on the third day be raised?” St. Matthew doesn’t come right out and say it, but I do think our Lord Jesus pretty much goes off on Peter, whose attempts to negate the necessity of all these things elicit this visceral response from Jesus: “Get behind me, you Satan! You are a stumbling block to me; for you are setting your mind not on divine things, but on human things.”

Which, if we are being honest with ourselves, is where we can all probably enter the story without much coercing.

In the words of the prophet Jeremiah as the first reading begins: “O Lord, you know.”

In other words, it’s of no surprise to Jesus that Peter’s confession is the rock on which the church is built on one day, and on the next Peter’s fear and cowardice are a stumbling block. From “built on a rock” to “stumble on a block” in less time than it takes to say, “God forbid it, Lord.”

“O Lord, you know.”

Now there’s a confession for you. Centuries before Peter came along, the prophet Jeremiah spells it out with his simple prayer. We can’t hide. We can’t escape. Try as we might, we are so busted. For, the indictment on Peter is the no different than ours: “you are setting your mind not on divine things, but on human things.”

The problem is: we’re human. We have human minds and our minds naturally turn toward human things.

I’m afraid Jesus words are going to fall flat on the ears of the humans who are the victims of Hurricane Gustav which continues to gain frightening strength in the Caribbean as it moves into the Gulf of Mexico and closer and closer inland. Tell that to the already-battered people in the Caribbean: Jamaica, Haiti, the Dominican Republic, and Cuba. “You are setting your minds not on divine things, but on human things.” Try that one on those in the Gulf Coast states who are, once again, bracing themselves and evacuating their newly-built homes in the wake of Katrina just 3 years ago.

Today, with the weeping prophet Jeremiah, we cry out with our minds directed toward very human things, with our minds burdened by the painfully-human suffering in the world and upon our sisters and brothers in harm’s way: “O Lord, you know.” With his mind set on human things, Jeremiah point blank asks the Lord, “Why is my pain unceasing, my wound incurable, refusing to be healed?” The words of the prophet echo in the human cries we hear this morning from Caribbean to the Gulf Coast, from Iraq to Afghanistan, from the Gaza Strip to quaking China, from flooding India to besieged Georgia.

To those of us who find that “setting our minds on human things” is about all we can do these days, St. Paul’s words in our second reading help point us toward the divine amid our human struggles: “Rejoice in hope,” writes the apostle, “be patient in suffering, persevere in prayer…Rejoice with those who rejoice, weep with those who weep…(and) Do not be overcome by evil, but overcome evil with good.”

Like Peter, in our humanity we too can become distracted with the human details: going to Jerusalem, undergoing suffering, being killed. But Jesus would have us be mindful today of the truth of the end of his story (and ours): the part that Peter overlooked, the part that, in our human suffering, we tend to forget because we get hung up on going to Jerusalem, we get sidetracked with suffering at the hands of evil, and distracted by all that would put us to death: Jesus reminds us those seven last words “and on the third day be raised.”

19 years ago this summer, when I was ordained into the ministry of Word & Sacrament, the pastor of my home church penned these words for me which I’ve spent the last 19 years both contemplating and being haunted by:

He asks not for our success nor our power…

Jesus, the one who must go to Jerusalem, undergo great suffering, be killed, and on the third day rise again, invites us to take the journey with him.

With Peter, some days we will shine with our minds set on divine things. While on others, perhaps like today, not so much.

“O Lord, you know.”

Amen.