Where I Don't Want to Go

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 bind you and take you where you do not wish to go.

-Jesus to Peter in The Gospel According to John 21:18

The myth of our culture tells us that our goal should be greater and greater independence.  When we are young, most of us longed for the next open door: a driver's license, a college degree, and the horizon of a future filled with possibility.  I don't remember anyone, in my teens and early twenties, who really looked forward to "settling down."  It seemed we all wanted to blast off, and the major frustration always seemed to be that there was one more gate that needed unlocking, and even if we got through it, it just took time.

It took enough time that, now in my early 40's I wonder how I got here:

Enjoy that taste of back when MTV still played music and nerds discovered video cameras. 

Seriously, I find myself in a beautiful house, with a beautiful wife, and some beautiful kids, and behind the wheel of a (less large than before) automobile.  But I now think of my youth as the time when I was free, weird.  Because I don't remember feeling free then, and when I get a dose of realism, I understand that all the things that bind me are the things that really matter.

John tells us that Jesus was implying something about the fact that Peter was going to die violently at the hands of the same sort of people who had crucified him, and that is one way you can interpret that text, the literal, plain sense that is popular with modern and postmodern folk.  But back in the early days, and I mean really early, like second century early, there were wise and holy men who knew that scripture has layers and levels of meaning, and that once we have dealt with and grasped certain things that are said, we can dive deeper and find more truth.

On a bigger level, Jesus was describing for Peter what the path of descent, or the Way of the Cross was going to be like.  It's no longer going to be about you and what you want.  Your desire for control needs to be crucified and surrendered for the sake of something more, something holy.  So much of the stress of adult life is created by things we cannot control.  It is often only in traumatic moments like when we lose things and grieve that we realize how small and trivial all our worries really are.

My job puts me in contact with those moments probably a bit more often than the average bear, but exposure is not a vaccine.  There are things that still hit me in the solar plexus with a stunning blow.  Sometimes it's obvious, like when my friend John died of cancer a few months ago.  I knew that was coming, and I knew it was going to hurt, it always would have. But there are also things that are a bit more at arms length which now seem to draw blood too.  A former colleague, younger than me, passed away from a rather sudden and aggressive cancer over the winter. A young woman who I knew as a kid in my Dad's church also went down to cancer last week. Just a few days ago, a friend and colleague's husband took his own life.  These were more distant relationships, and in my younger years I probably would not have really thought much about them, because I had not allowed myself to be bound yet.

But now they bind me, and they stagger my sense of control, and they remind me that none of us are guaranteed much of anything by this world, no matter how hard we work or how much power we think we have, or even by how good we are.  The peculiar thing about it is that, while this would have put a dent in my faith in whatever idea of God I had as a young person, that feeling of uncertainty does not push me away from the Jesus that I have come to know and follow as a grown up. I don't quite know why that is.  Trying to sort it out is sort of what I do here, and in the pulpit on Sunday mornings, and in my prayers all the time. I think, as far as I can tell, it is because those connections and bindings are what really give life meaning.  It is understanding that God did not avoid or sever those bonds, even though we certainly give enough reason to do so.

I can try and fall back on all sorts of religious jargon and platitudes, but none of them really do justice to the underlying mystery of a God who would get so intimately involved with all of our brokenness and pain.

(He said this to indicate the kind of death by which he would glorify God).

After this, he said to him, "Follow me."

-John 21: 19