A flash of light.
A stroke of insight.
It only lasts a moment. And then it’s gone.
Don’t ask me to describe it or explain it or teach it or even understand it.
It’s like a lightning strike, or the sudden release and the baby is finally born. That moment when you see him across the chapel and you think to yourself, “That is the man I’m going to marry.” It was like that half a second my freshman year of college when I thought I finally understood calculus. And then, poof, it was gone. It’s the polaroid picture of your kids getting along at the amusement park, right before the first one pushes the second one into the bushes and the second one throws up cotton candy on your shoes.
It was that moment, ages ago, all of us kids crammed on benches at the dinner table, when Dad was trying to teach us proper, formal, table manners. We put our elbows on the table and switched our knives and forks and stuffed paper napkins down on shirts and spoke with horrible English accents and laughed and laughed. Dad wasn’t so pleased, but for half a second, we were all getting along. No one was punching holes in the walls or chasing each other with knives or throwing cutting insults across the room. There was plenty of macaroni and cheese, enough for seconds, and we all drank our milk and ate our peas without whining or threats or pleading.
These moments are just that, moments. Split seconds in time. The taste of creme brûlée on the tongue, or that first sip of coffee in the morning, and then it’s gone.
So much will go wrong after that. After those oh so brief half seconds of understanding or insight or just joy. I’ll lose my temper. I’ll say the wrong thing. I’ll let the baby cry too long and I’ll sleep too much and I’ll let the laundry pile up. I’ll get distracted and overwhelmed. I’ll take the final exam and forget that one important thing and then cry in the bathroom stall because of the A- that will result. I won’t have the skills to get through the hard stuff, so I’ll think catastrophic thoughts and make rash decisions and make everything even worse.
Or normal life will just simply take over and overwhelm. The cat’s puked another hairball in the sunroom and he keeps scratching at his ears. The groceries, the rent, the strange orange goo that’s accumulating in the corners of the bathtub. The kids whine. We worry about their reading levels and their social interactions and their emotional maturity. My car needs an oil change. We need to mow the lawn again and weed the flowerbeds and have the same unproductive conversation about hiring a plumber to fix the mainline in the basement. Maybe next year. Maybe with our tax refund. The boys are due for dentists appointments. We should probably take our cat to the vet someday soon.
Most of our lives consist of the mundane. The boring. The repetitive and the tedious. Or worse, the mistakes, the hurts and failures and screw ups that seem to undo all the good we’ve ever done or been. Or at least, that’s what we tend to focus on. Like Eeyore, we wander around the hundred acre wood thinking about all the uncomfortable things, all the tedious things, all the things that have gone wrong.
But once in awhile, sometimes, we get those oh so brief moments when things make sense, when we get something right, when we are exactly where we need to be, doing exactly what we need to be doing. Dare I say it? We feel good.
That’s why I find it so interesting that the lectionary splits up Peter’s messy humanity into two parts. This week, we get the moment when Peter gets it wondrously, gloriously right. We get his moment of triumph. We get a taste of the good. Next week, we’ll see him when he gets it all horribly wrong.
If you haven’t figured this out about me yet, I’m a “both/and” kind of person, rather than an either/or. Things are usually pretty grey for me, neither black nor white. Things are always more complicated than they first appear, and I try to hold on to the “dialectic” - this idea that there can be two opposing ideas, two opposing events, two opposing thoughts happening at the same time. And they could both be true.
We’re both sinner and saint. We’re living in an age of horrible atrocities and unprecedented hope. We can have mental illnesses inherited through our genes and we can also learn skills so as to change and improve ourselves. We can make all the right decisions and still have difficult lives. We can be both victim and perpetrator. We are stewards as well as pillagers of this place we call Earth. We have the capacity for horrendous hatred and misunderstanding, and we also have the ability the capacity to forgive and embrace and understand and sacrifice. The same earth that bears Hitler and white supremacy and antivaxxers and deadly tsunamis is also the same place where Yeats was born and penicillin was invented and democracy was, at least, attempted.
We get both sugar free gummy bears and Reese’s peanut butter cups. We get lima beans and sweet corn right off the cob. We get flowers and thorns. It’s all a dialectic. A both/and. We get the Rock, the founder of our church who is both an impulsive, fumbling idiot, and a faithful, devoted, beloved, follower of Christ.
But our lectionary splits it up. It splits Peter up. And today, we get his glorious moment, we get the peak of his career, the highlight of his life, his ultimate insight: Peter tells Jesus who he believes him to be: “The Christ, The Messiah, The Son of the Living God.” We get Peter’s half of a second when he actually gets it right. We get that moment. Even as we know, that soon, poof, it’ll be gone. But today, we get the snapshot of Peter getting it amazingly, gloriously, inspiringly right.
It’s just a moment. That’s it. That’s all it is. One brief moment when Peter’s flailing around, shooting at whatever moves, making impulsive decisions and shooting off at the mouth actually hits the target. If he keeps trying, if he keeps showing up, if he keeps bending his bow and letting go, no matter how off his aim, no matter how blind he might be, he will, eventually, hit the bullseye. And Peter keeps trying. He keeps casting his net out there, because eventually he knows, no matter how many times he fails, someday, he going to catch something.
And boy does he like to cast his net out there. He jumps out of boats in the darkness in the middle of a raging storm, he denies Jesus’s suffering and gets called Satan, he wants to build three little houses on a mountain until God speaks and he falls on his face. He’s the first to offer answers to Jesus’s questions, and the first to question Jesus’s answers. He’s going to get in to big fights with Paul at the church’s inception. And when Jesus warns him that he will deny his love for him, Peter rejects the warning, insisting that he will be faithful to the end. And what does he do? He denies him. He rejects him. Three times.
Peter’s life is full of flailing around and mistakes and failures and sin and broken promises. It’s full of good intentions and missteps and impulsive decisions. But sometimes, not out of his own skill or knowledge or keen understanding, but sometimes, out of his sheer luck, out of his sheer pluckiness, out of his insistence on never giving up, out of his relentless attempts to try again, sometimes, he gets it right. He hits the target. Grace moves in front of him, and lets him hit it at its heart.
So let’s just take a moment to breathe it in, shall we? Let’s just take a moment to mark it. To note it. To engrave it in our minds. This one time, Peter got it right. It comes and goes in a flash. It’s such a surprise when it happens.
We’re so anxious to move on to the next thing that we often miss it when it happens. Everything gets lined up just so, everything is precariously balanced, perfectly aligned, for just a second, and then, just as suddenly, it’s gone. Everything is wrong again. Everything is broken. There’s more work to do. Back to the grindstone of tedium and boredom. Back to worrying about our retirement portfolios. Back to the apologies and tripping over our words and our feet. Back to regret and fear and so many mistakes.
Richard Rohr writes, “Dan O’Grady, a psychologist and Living School student, told me recently that our negative and critical thoughts are like Velcro, they stick and hold; whereas our positive and joyful thoughts are like Teflon, they slide away. We have to deliberately choose to hold onto positive thoughts so that they can “imprint.”
Neuroscience can now demonstrate the brain indeed has a negative bias; the brain prefers to constellate around fearful, negative, or problematic situations. In fact, when a loving, positive, or unproblematic thing comes your way, you have to savor it consciously for at least fifteen seconds before it can harbor and store itself in your “implicit memory;” otherwise it doesn’t stick.
We must indeed savor the good in order to significantly change our regular attitudes and moods. And we need to strictly monitor all the “Velcro” negative thoughts.”
Bad stuff sticks in our brains like Velcro. The good stuff slides away, like they’re on Teflon.
So let’s just take fifteen seconds to soak this in. Fifteen seconds to note that Peter gets it right. Jesus does. Jesus takes it in. Even as Jesus knows Peter to his very core, even as he knows that Peter is going to crumple under the pressure and betray and argue and question, Jesus stops, he takes a moment, and he praises him. He gives him a new name. Peter, “The Rock.” And on this rock Jesus will build his church.
It’s such a fascinating metaphor. Peter as a rock. Peter as a rock when in reality, he’s really just all heart. Soft, mushy, vulnerable, full of emotion. Peter, the cornerstone of the church. No, not the immoveable, unchangeable, quarried stone upon which towers and temples and political ideologies will be born, but rather the broken, flailing, impulsive, impetuous actions of a man, a human, a mind whose good thoughts will slide off like teflon, and whose bad thoughts will stick like velcro. It’s the ultimate dialectic. Peter as the firm foundation. Peter as the bedrock upon which all of this will be built.
Peter is not stable. At least, not at this moment. He isn’t strong. He’s far from unchanging. But he got it right. Once in his life, he hit the mark. The Church is founded by a guy who was so persistent, so stubborn and insistent and eager and idealistic that he always showed up, he always put it out there, he always took the risk, and one time, one time, he actually got it right.
The church is built, not of brick and mortar or four by fours or even limestone and marble, but of humans, people, and their soft mushy impulsive hearts, people, who keep trying, who keep putting themselves out there, folks who keep failing and trying and failing again. Folks who are all heart.
And the church is founded and funded and encouraged on by folks who, on the rare occasion that they actually get something right, take the time to savor it, to note it, to name it, to tell a story about it. The church is a bunch of people saying and doing the wrong things, being open to change, being willing to repent, and then taking fifteen seconds or so to pay attention when they actually do get it right. Fifteen seconds to focus on the good. Fifteen seconds to turn towards the good. To try again.
Our lectionary today reminds us that Peter gets it right. Once. He got it right. And our lectionary reminds us to take fifteen seconds to let it soak in. Lean in to the good. Lean in to Jesus, the Messiah. That’s our foundation.
That’s our start. That’s what we get. That’s our legacy. Let’s make it stick.
Thanks be to God.
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