"In His Steps"
I Peter 2:18-25
I want to share a true story with you that I heard at Columbia Seminary last week. It was told by the person who experienced it. The setting was 1984. A young female seminary student was working as a student pastor. It was her first Sunday at the church and she has a small part in the worship service. When she got up to pray, she walked over to the lectern and stood behind it. As soon as she began to speak three women who were sitting on the back pew stood up and walked out of the sanctuary.
The intern pastor was stunned. She was an only child. She thought everyone liked her. She made it through the service without breaking down but afterwards went into the senior pastor's office and cried. Her first response was that she was going to quit. She could not handle feeling responsible for people leaving the church. The senior pastor talked her into staying. She then told him her plan of action was to go and visit the three women thinking that her pleasing personality and warm smile would win them over. But the senior pastor forbid her to go see them. What I think he was saying by that was that you did nothing wrong, you had every right to stand before the congregation and pray. If there is a problem it is with the three women and they need to come to you. You don't need to apologize for being a servant of the Lord.
Every Sunday as they gathered for worship she felt remorse as the three women did not come back to church and she felt like she was responsible. As it got to be near the end of the summer the senior pastor was going on vacation and that left the intern pastor in charge. When she walked into the office on the first Monday that the senior pastor was gone the secretary met her at the door and said there was an emergency and that she needed to go to the hospital. One of the three women had a heart attack. The intern pastor's initial response was "I am not going." The secretary said you have to go, you are her pastor. The intern pastor responded, "I am not her pastor." Finally the secretary pushed her out the door. On the way to the hospital all kinds of scenarios went through her mind as to what would happen. When she arrived at the waiting room the woman's daughter was there. The intern pastor introduced herself by saying her name and that she was the intern pastor. Then she blurted out "And your mother hates me."
The daughter told her that wasn't so and they headed to the mother's room. When they got there the first thing the patient said to the nurse who was in the room was "Here's my pastor" and she broke out into a big smile. They both cried and hugged. The intern pastor later learned that the reason the woman had not been back to church was not because she disliked her but she was ashamed of what she had done the first Sunday she was there when she got up and walked out.
One of the things the intern pastor learned from that experience was that not everything was about her. Even though there is a happy ending, she suffered that summer. She was an example of what Peter was talking about, someone doing something right and suffering for it.
It is also an example of how times have changed in the church and how the change has been positive even though it seem goes against a scriptural admonition that Paul wrote in I Corinthians "As in all the churches of the saints, women should keep silence in the churches." The three women who walked out of church were strictly following that Biblical admonition. But the truth is that the church was in a different time and place than it was when Paul was writing, women were called to be elders and ministers and the church is better off because women do have full voice.
Peter was writing in a real situation when there were slaves. That doesn't mean he was saying that slavery was ok. What he was saying was that when you are wronged by another person the appropriate response is not an eye for and eye. Two wrongs do not a right make. If you suffer unjustly you aren't doing anything more than Jesus did. You are simply walking in his steps. That is an example all people can learn from if they pay attention.
No matter who we are, once we put on the mantle of Christian, we are called to respond to life situations in a different way. Paul Scherer once said in a sermon on I Peter, "You'll see that whatever else Christianity is for, it's not intended primarily to make life easier! In another sermon on the same passage Scherer said, "If you want something to worry about, worry because your life is too easy." Scherer went on to day that "Christianity is a storm in a golden frame."
We like to hear about the golden frame. We aren't real interested in the storm within the frame. But if we are to faithfully follow in the steps of Jesus can it be any other way as the ways of the world are so different from God's ways. Especially when we remember that Christianity is not about saving ourselves, it is about being a light so that others can see Christ more clearly. Are we a more effective light when we demand revenge, an eye for an eye, or when we suffer for doing right?
Somehow we have to get to the point when we recognize that it is not about me, it is about the
May God work through us as individuals and as a church to help people see Jesus more clearly.