Booster Shots

Had an interesting thing happen today. For the first time in a while I actually made it to church twice. Morning and then again in the evening. The services are quite different but surprisingly, and I have never experienced this, the sermon was the same. Now you may think this would be a bit of a pain but it wasn't. Ok I will admit we have the benefit of a fairly gifted preacher and so he is rarely hard to listen to. Also, thankfully, we don't have the 40min + sermons that were popular when I was growing up. And while I still forgot to ask the outcome of the amusing anecdote that was used there were still things that I had missed on the first pass.

Hearing it again gave me the opportunity to fill in the gaps caused by my own lack of concentration and also to re-enforce the bits that were the most encouraging. I realise that it is in this area that preaching has changed so much since my youth. The readings today dealt with Peter's denial of Jesus, something he swore he would never do and did anyway. Now most of us who were churched from a young age know this story well and have heard at great length what a terrible person Peter was and how he did this terrible thing, and that we must constantly be on guard to make sure we never do it, and if we do do it, we must feel appropriately terrible. That is pretty much how it went for every story where someone in the bible did something bad.

One of the great things I discovered when studying theology was that there was a lot more people doing bad stuff than there was doing good stuff. Just about all the great heroes of the Bible were deeply flawed human beings and yet God kept using them. This is very encouraging when one is oneself a very flawed human being. So today we heard about a flawed human being, Peter, but it was not just to reiterate his failure and unworthiness, but to remind us that we are all flawed and that that is ok because God is not flawed and s/he is always faithful and will continue to use us and to trust us and to love us regardless. Now that you can never hear too many times. Like the vaccines we get when we are kids... A booster shot every now and again is a good thing.