I can summarize what we can learn from Peter’s 3 denials that he knew Jesus in 3 sentences. The first sentence is: “Life is filled with broken promises.”
The 2nd sentence is: “Even knowing of so many broken promises, most of us spend significant time & energy choosing to do good anyway.”
The 3rd sentence… well, I’ve changed my mind about giving you the 3rd sentence. I’m not going to tell you that one after all. What can I say?” Life is filled with broken promises deal with it.”
Everywhere we turn in the material world we can see broken promises. Instead of hope, we are given hurt.
Instead of love we are handed fear. Instead of community we can find ourselves in isolation.
& I know that there are many outside these walls, in our own families, our friends & coworkers & others who face broken promises in far greater magnitude than you or I do.
As a response to this reality, I’d like to tell you 4 stories.
The first story is about 2 little boys. Their father was a truck driver. He was left to care for them one evening when he had to go down to the trucking company to unload & fill out the customary paper work. While the father unloaded, the boys had fallen asleep in the cab & when he had to go into the office to complete the papers, concerned with leaving the sleeping children visible in the cab, he carried the boys to the back of the empty truck, laid them on cargo blankets, closed the door. As fate would have it, the boys woke up & found themselves alone & trapped in a strange, dark place. The younger of the 2 boys was filled with panic. He couldn’t even see his brother in the dark. “Doug, are you here?” he asked. “I’m here,” came the response.
Left alone, feeling abandoned, cast out on their own, the 4 year old turned to his 5-year-old brother & asked, “So, what do we do now?” “I guess we’ll have to find a place to live,” was the response. But they both realized that this would require money, so the talk turned to what kind of jobs they could get. “What can you do?” the younger asked. “I think I could probably cut people’s grass,” the older replied. The younger felt a new sense of dread realizing that he didn’t know how to cut grass & he couldn’t think of anything he could do to make any money at all. Sensing his little brother’s anxiety the older said ,“You can help me.”
But that was, essentially, the extent of their plan – their entire hope for the future – hung on the possibility that they could cut someone’s grass. Not the way either of them thought their life would go. “Life is filled broken promises.”
The world never did find out if they could make a living cutting grass, for immediately following their moment of resolve, the door to the back of the truck slid up & there, standing in the glow of the parking lights, was their father. An immediate sense of rage fell over that younger boy as he realized what had happened. It eventually turned to relief but he never – ever - forgot what it was like to be trapped in that dark place & what it felt like to be abandoned.
The second story involves these same 3 characters a few years later - after ‘the divorce.’ Divorced & often separated from his children the father wanted to try & build some understanding & connection & feel closer to his children.
So, he did is what a lot of parents do – when his children visited, he read to them at bedtime. But contrary to stories other parents might choose, he didn’t read Winnie the Pooh, Peter Pan or other fairy tales. Each night he read from a book by a child psychologist about divorce. Neither of the boys could decipher much from that evening ritual. Nevertheless, the routine continued for many weeks. Until, one night, towards the end of reading time, the man came across a line that he read in a different kind of way. He slowed down. The line was, “Just because a father becomes divorced it doesn’t mean he doesn’t love his children.” Then the man stopped altogether. & he read that line again, this time with his voice quivering as though he might suddenly cry.
Then he closed the book, kissed the boys goodnight, and left the room. It’s probably not necessary to tell you that neither of those boys understood a thing that was written in that book. And yet, it doesn’t take much to realize that they understood everything about their father’s faltering voice, the line that he repeated & his goodnight kiss.
The youngest boy in these stories, after a difficult realization that “life is filled with broken promises,” eventually became a Unity minister & one day in a lesson he said, “Nothing of what I have managed to accomplish in my life could have possibly happened without the ‘unmistakable truth that “Life is filled with broken promises. I became a minister because I have experienced what it was like to be trapped in a dark place. & I became a minister because I was unwilling to live in a life where deceit & disappointment is the only rule.
The next story happened in the early 1400’s. A man lived in Bohemia (what is now Czechoslovakia). His name was Jan Hus. He was a scholar & priest in the Roman Catholic Church & what we would, today, call an activist. He was very popular among both young & old people for they saw his life as a symbol of hope.
Hus deplored the corruption that riddled church practices & took great pains to change them. Two points in particular were abhorrent to him. First, the belief of the Church that only priests could participate in Holy Communion. Hus believed that everyone was entitled to share the wine of the chalice during communion & deserved a chance to hold it & pass to their neighbor the elements of their faith. Secondly, Hus believed that worship should be spoken in the common language, instead of Latin which no one understood.
For this he was tried & convicted of heresy by the church. He was offered several opportunities to recant — but he refused to do so. The punishment for such heresy was death. On his birthday, July 6, 1415, he was stripped of his vestments, taken to a field outside Prague & burned at the stake. He never rescinded his beliefs. Instead, he sang a hymn as the flames mounted around him. However, before he died, he made a prediction in the form of a joke, based on his name. In the Czech language “Hus” means “goose.” As he was being tied to the stake, he called to his tormentors, “You may roast this goose today, but one hundred years from now a swan will arise, whose singing you cannot silence.”
He was right. Less than one hundred years later, the Reformation swept Europe & the fire of religious liberty swept throughout Western Civilization.
We have come a long way from those dark times. And yet it is obvious that many of the attitudes & broken promises, which create darkness & barriers between people still exist today. The question I have for you is: “How do you handle life’s broken promises?” My choice to become a minister was the only practical response I could see to the broken promises I knew in my own life.
Let me tell you now the 4th story. A little boy found himself locked in the bathroom. His cries brought his frightened mother to the other side of the door & when he heard her he began to cry louder. She tried to explain to her son how to unlock the door but he was crying too hard to hear what she was saying.
& then to make matters worse, in a panic of jumping up & down, the little boy inadvertently hit the light switch & turned out the light. Now it was dark. Louder cries came forth & then he started pounding on the door in frustration. Finally the mother could hear him slump down against the cold bathroom tile.
Getting down on her knees the mother tried peering through the crack at the bottom of the door & she saw his cheek as he too tried to get his face low enough to see through the small space. With an idea, the mother quickly got a flashlight. She knelt down & turned the flashlight on so that it shone through the crack at the bottom of the door.
“Do you see the light, honey? Can you see it?” The boy stopped crying for a second & said, “I can see it. ”
“That’s me!” she cried. “The light is coming from me. I’m right here!” “I can see you, mommy, but I can’t get to you.”
Then the mother took her other hand and slid 3 fingers under the door & wiggled them. “Can you see my fingers?” she asked. “I can see your fingers!” he replied. “I can see them.” “Grab hold of my fingers,” she said.
And he did – for the entire hour it took for the next door
neighbor to take down the door that kept them apart.
Everywhere around us it is the same. In this community, in history and in our lives: if we want to offer a real response to life’s broken promises we must be willing to be a light.
Which brings me, finally, to the 3rd sentence I promised you & that is this: The only success we will know of building from broken promises, a new dream of hope, will be measured by how & how far we are willing to carry our own light in what is often a dark & lonely world.
In a life full of broken promises, it is always within us to choose to do good anyway. Because we know, that the hardest of all broken promises to endure is the promise we break to ourselves by not making the difference in our own lives & in our world that Jesus told us that we are capable of & through the good work that we do, the hope that is ultimately restored may, indeed, be our own.
