At the end of the Gospel of John there is a campfire.  It’s a scene of laughter and suffering and wonder.  Jesus’ disciples are still trying to puzzle out what effect his resurrection is having on them.  They’re out fishing and he calls to them from the beach.  One of the disciples recognises Jesus and Peter, the disciple who denied knowing Jesus during his trial and was one of the first to run and check the empty tomb,  leaps out of the boat and splashes to the shore.  His spontaneity could make anyone reading the passage smile, or laugh or nod with understanding at the excitement of seeing a friend you thought dead alive and cooking.  Up until now in the story he has been conflicted and hasn’t lived up to his own image of who he wants to be, doubting Jesus and his commitment to him.

Jesus and his followers sit in the early morning hours and enjoy a fish fry.  It’s a good moment at the end of the story, the friends all gathered together, somewhat astounded that they are eating with a man they abandoned and were sure was dead.  It doesn’t stop there.  Peter is about to get wrung out again.

Jesus asks him if he loves him.  Peter, taken aback, answers “Of course!”  Jesus repeats the question, gets the same answer.  This is not a private moment, and Peter appears to be humiliated.  Or uncomfortable.  He wants it to stop, but this is Jesus’ campfire.

He asks Peter again.  Each time when Peter has answered ”Yes” Jesus tells him he has a job to do, to feed Jesus’ sheep. The third time Peter is hurt and frustrated:  “You know I love you!”   Jesus changes the subject, telling Peter the day will come when he is lead around like a child.

There are many interpretations of this passage but I think Jesus is telling Peter it’s time to grow up.  It’s time to leave the easy camaraderie of the campfire, time to leave the familiar family business, time to face his failures, time to take his place in the world.  Being told it’s time to grow up hurts.  It suggests a lack of maturity, makes us examine all the past choices we made.   But there it is.  Peter the impetuous and almost child-like has to become Peter the more responsible.

His namesake, Peter Pan, never wanted to grow up.  Growing up requires us to look at the world around us and make a decision about our part in it and then choose to do something.  Or nothing. 

I have presided at many funerals.  If I did not know the person, and that often is the case when someone had a very loose connection to the church, it was always a trick getting the eulogy right.  Most people who help you with a funeral want to put on a good public face.  So you get a catalogue of virtues, or just one or two lines:  “She loved to cook.” or “He was always a great host.”

Sometimes grief stops the flow of words: all of us are memorable but the memories don’t always rise to the surface.  Sometimes it’s a stretch to find good things to say.  Death doesn't always take away the hurt, although I always suggest to the living that those who have died have no unfinished business with them; they only have to come to terms with their own unfinished business with the person who has died.

That conversation may be public -- someone tells their story to others at the funeral.  Or private.  It may take place at the graveside when no one else is listening.

I have heard people eulogize someone who wronged them and told the people gathered at the service what that person really was like.

I have, based on limited knowledge, eulogised (said good words about) someone and then been approached afterwards to hear what the person really was like.  “She hated me for taking her daughter away, all through our marriage”, said one man of his deceased mother-in-law.  The community knew her as a generous and kind woman.  After the funeral he took me aside and in some sadness said “No matter how wonderfully I treated her daughter, I was always 'You son of a bitch.'”

Some of us pass judgement on others for what we have lived and how that did not square with our expectations.  There are too many stories about families who would not attend the funeral of a child who died of AIDS or who would lie about the cause of death.

I remember watching a woman in a palliative care unit clinging to life until she saw her youngest daughter.  She had more morphine in her than any of the medical staff could conceive of yet still she arched her back with only her head and heels touching the bed, so great was her pain, but she would not die until she saw her daughter.  But her daughter was the black sheep of the family and had wounded both her parents and all her siblings and they would not allow her in to see her mother.  One died in excruciating pain, the other still carries hers.

I know a woman who gets parked in front of a television every day to watch CBC Newsworld.  If she lived in a nursing home she would be in a lounge, usually with others, watching daytime TV:  talk shows, game shows, nothing consequential but generally upbeat.  “Babysitting TV” for people in wheelchairs to fall asleep to or that won’t agitate them.  Me, I’d be really agitated to be left in front of a large screen television to hear people who knew nothing about me offer tips on how to live my life.  But she doesn’t.  Her caregivers know she has a good mind and limited mobility so they set her in front of a screen on which she can literally watch the world whoosh by.

She can’t use the controller, and is only articulate about what she sees and hears if you ask.  Her hearing and vision are fine, it’s the rest of her body that won’t let her continue to explore her world.  She teaches me.  I’ve been schooled by reflective people from Job, who was not patient, by the way, who had enough courage to keep asking “Why?”, to this woman in her 90’s.  Like Job who sat in the dust and watched his life fall to pieces before his eyes, this woman can’t always escape the news that is broadcast seemingly directly to her. 

 She doesn’t ask “Why?” as far as I know.  She seems to know there isn’t much of an answer.  No one who might offer one feels at all accountable to her.  She grasps history and economics and could offer insightful commentary on the causes of much of what she watches.  Although I can’t say for sure I believe she may even have stopped asking God for an explanation.  She seems content to know, as Ecclesiastes wrote, “There is nothing new under the sun.”  Of course I am guessing in part;  it’s just that she is one of the few people I know who doesn’t always need to know why. 

I doubt she would put it in these terms, but I don’t think she believes that God or the universe owes her a reason, she doesn’t need to hold either of them accountable.  She continues to believe that she is accountable for her actions and attitudes.  She makes me think we’d all hurt a lot less if we were more consistent in being accountable to others than demanding they be accountable to us.

Faith helps us deal with hurt.  Our faith in God, our faith in the people who love us, their faith in us.  I understand there are many who view the concept of faith as a weakness or delusional.  Sometimes I lack the intellect to fully refute their insights.  But contrary to what many claim, faith is not a comfortable place to live.  It requires a degree of trust in a reality that is beyond what we can know with our senses or our science.

Faith does not displace science.  We need both. I am fascinated and engaged by the discoveries of neuroscience.  The more we know the better we are able to help each other. For example, the knowledge that people become hard-wired into our neural pathways helps me make sense of people’s telling me they can sense or even hear someone who has died.  The dead do live on with us because they become a permanent part of our memories.  And if we are wise enough to record what we knew and know of them then they live into another generation.

The writer of the Letter to the Hebrews tells us that faith is the evidence of things not seen, the assurance of things hoped for.  Faith is about living with the hope of more, more to discover, more richness (not riches) in a world that we are wise to treat as a gift, one not to be exploited.

My “definitions” of God, are really understandings that help shape my thinking and then develop or change as someone presents me with a clearer description.  They have changed over time.  As I write this the words that encompass, without limiting my understanding of the Divine, are that God is the informing compassion and wisdom of the universe.  Take the word informing in more than one way.  God is who or what not only informs us but in-forms compassion and wisdom in us.

This is something of a riff on Paul Tillich’s description of God as the Ground of Being, but it also relates to Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s writing about Jesus, the Man for Others who reveals God to us.  Some of you will understand that phrase as a description of a personal God.  Some of you will understand it as a description of a supra-personal reality.  Either should help us understand our current reality.  

[Whilst] everything around me is ever changing, ever dying, there is underlying all that change a living power that is changeless, that holds all together, that creates, dissolves and recreates.  That informing power or spirit is God....And is this power benevolent or malevolent?  I see it as purely benevolent.  For I can see that in the midst of death life persists, in the midst of untruth truth persists, in the midst of darkness light persists.  Hence I gather that God is Life, Truth, Light.  He is Love.  He is the supreme Good.  -Mahatma Gandhi 

Listening to a story means we might feel some of the hurt in that person's life.   Our own stories already have lots of pain.  Another tale of woe is the last thing we need.  There is more hurt, more sadness in this world than most of us can imagine.  There is more joy than we can imagine too, but we have a knack for focusing on the bad stuff.  It draws our attention. It exhausts us:  dealing with our own bad stuff and the suffering of the people we love and what the news brings us every day.

No one escapes.  We can’t because, as Harold Kushner wrote, bad things happen to good people.

I long ago gave up trying to offer explanations for why those things happen.  Most of what I have heard has been a lame attempt by someone to justify their own limited world view.  Or it lets them live with some comfort at having avoided most of that sadness.  Or they surrender control of their lives to a force greater than they because they want anything that isn’t benevolent in their lives to beyond their control.

This is not the same surrender of people in a twelve-step programme who choose to confess to the reality of a higher power of some description.  They do this not to evade responsibility or thinking about the destruction they have to take responsibility for, but for the sake of discovering that they are not alone in their journey away from that destruction.

No, this is making God responsible for everything, and then being able to slough it off as His Will:  God needed that person to die, God needed to build character in you, God needed to glorify himself by showing how that person could transcend their suffering until their death.  Why do we think God needs any of that?  Why do we think God needs anything?