“Examination”
St. Matthew 26:69-75
Palm Sunday, March16, 2008
Pastor Chip Winter

            Grace to you and Peace, from God our Father and from our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ, Amen. The text for our sermon is from the Gospel according to St. Matthew, the 26th chapter.
            My dear family in Christ, she doesn't have a name. She is only mentioned for a few verses and only one place in the Bible. I don't know where she came from or anything about her, except that she was "a servant girl." She is a paidiske, that is, a young woman who is in service.
            Here is the scene. It is late at night, toward the end of this Holy Week. It is after the last supper when Jesus had gathered with his disciples in an upper room. The Passion of Christ has begun. The soldiers have seized Jesus and have led him away to the palace. At the palace, Jesus stands before Pontius Pilate and is on trial. But out in the darkness, in the courtyard, down below, another trial takes place. Judge and jury at that trial is a servant girl. And though we don't know much about her, if she is only a girl, but also only a servant, we know that she is a small, insignificant, powerless person. She is not only a woman in a patriarchal culture, but she is also a servant woman. And she is young. Some of you are young and you know that also means you are powerless, on the bottom. And this little, powerless girl is the one who puts Peter, the premier disciple, through his paces.
            Earlier in the evening, when Jesus and his disciples were in the upper room at dinner, Peter declared that he would stick with Jesus, no matter what. Jesus had said to his disciples, "All of you will fall away." Peter blurted out, "Though all the rest of these losers will desert you, I am behind you all the way, Jesus." As it turned out, he was behind Jesus, far, far, behind Jesus. When the soldiers came to take Jesus, all the disciples fled into the darkness. Peter kept behind at a safe distance. But though he could not closely follow Jesus, he couldn't leave him either. He therefore ends up, in the middle of the night, in a courtyard where some soldiers warm themselves around a fire.
            And there in the courtyard, this servant girl has Peter squirming. "You also were with the Galilean," she says. And Peter replies, "Woman, I don't know what you are talking about." Note that he doesn't just say, "I don't know what you are talking about." He says, "Woman, I don't know what you are talking about." Perhaps he said this to ridicule her before the bystanders. She is a woman, she is young, she is a servant, what does she know?
            Peter is clearly put on the defensive by her statement. She is not necessarily accusing him. She just declares a fact. "You were with Jesus."
            Before this assertion Peter was the one whom Jesus had nicknamed, "the rock," the premier disciple, the one who had been with Jesus from the very first and had heard all of his teaching and observed all of his action.  This same Peter says to her, "I didn't even know him." Three times he says,  "Woman, I didn't even know him."
            Oh, the power of that young woman! She may have been young, a woman, and a serving woman at that, but in three short sentences, she has completely crushed, "the rock." She has forced Peter to deny Jesus, not once, but thrice. And Peter stumbles out into the darkness beyond the fire and weeps like a baby.
            Some time ago, on a much brighter sunnier day, Jesus had asked, "Who do people say that I am?"    Peter's hand was the first to go up. "You are the Christ, the son of the God!"
            And Jesus had said in response, "I'll build my church on this rock." And from that day on Jesus had called him Peter which means in Greek "rock." Peter's confession is the very rock upon which Jesus will build his church.
            And when they were all seated around the table in the warmth of the upper room, when Jesus predicted that everyone would desert him, Peter blurted out, "Though everyone will desert you, I will stick beside you."
            But in the darkness of this dangerous week, with the soldiers on the prowl, and this impudent young woman, this serving woman interrogating him publicly, Peter appeared as anything but the rock.
            The power of that woman! There she stood before the best that Jesus could do, by way of disciples, the premier and most powerful of the disciples, and she made him testify, show what he was made out of. It was Peter's final and most important exam. And he flunked.
            In high school I had this math teacher, a demanding math teacher (perhaps that's a tautology). And part of his demanding nature was that he gave public exams. Not only did you have to know math, but you had to know it and write it on the chalk board in front of the whole class.
            In the course of this service, you will be asked to "rise and affirm your faith," repeating the words of the Creed. And you will be able. It is easy to affirm the faith, and to swear to the Creed, when we are here in the safe confines of the church. We are protected in this large, fortress-like building with its thick walls. We stand together and we say our creeds, and we sing our hymns, and we affirm our faith. But then we go out. And out there, out there is the exam. And the faith we have tried to hold very personally is forced to go public. And that's a different story.
            Oh, the power of this woman!  Jesus had chosen Peter as his disciple, and he is clearly depicted as the chief disciple. Jesus nicknamed him, "Rockie," but look at him now. All of Peter's great declarations of faith wither in the face of three little questions by a little serving girl. She put him to the test. And he flunked the exam. Would we fare that much better?
            A few years ago a student was telling a campus pastor that he and his roommate were not getting along too well. When asked why, and he said, "Because he is a Muslim and I'm not."  "When we moved in together, he asked me what my religion was. I told him that I was a Christian. A Lutheran - I told him that my family wasn't the very best of Christians and that we only went to church occasionally and it wasn't that big a deal to me.  My roommate has this nasty habit of asking embarrassing questions." "What sort of questions?" "Well after we had roomed together a few weeks, he asked me, 'Why do you Christians never pray?'"
            "I told him, 'We pray a lot. We just sort of keep it to ourselves.'"
             "He said, 'I'll say that you do. I've never seen you pray.' He prays like a half dozen times a day on his prayer rug in our room, facing East. When I came in last Saturday morning, and he asked me, 'Doesn't your St. Paul say something about joining your body with that of a prostitute?'" I told him, "Look, she is not a prostitute…. I told you I am not the best Christian in the world. You shouldn't judge the Christian faith by me!"
            And the campus pastor, hearing of his torment said, "Well how should he judge the Christian faith? I think I need to write your Muslim roommate a thank-you note. If he keeps working on you with these questions, he may make you into a real Christian."
            This little serving girl gave Peter the opportunity to testify to what he believed, to take his faith into the real world.  I can think of two ways in which the world might judge the work of our Lord Jesus and one of them is by the sort of lives He is able to produce in us. The world is not being cruel or accusatory when it asks us, "Weren't you with Jesus? Does that make a difference?"
            A fellow pastor has a friend, an international economist. He grew up in the church, but he grew away from the church. But then he came back to the church and became active. His pastor asked him what propelled him back. He answered that on an academic visit to the former Soviet Union, he had a conversation with a colleague. She was a Communist. In the course of the conversation she asked, "Do you believe in God?"
            He said that he did. And then she asked, "What difference does it make in your life that you believe in God? I don't believe, but if I did, it would probably complicate my life. What difference does God make in your life?" And the economist said that he could not come up with a single thing in his life that was different because of his faith.
            He was embarrassed by having no ready answers. Isn't it odd how some people who don't know Jesus have an uncanny way of uncovering more about Jesus than we who do? Sometimes, in the odd workings of providence, these people expose the limits of our fidelity, and we are forced to say what we believe, or else appear embarrassingly out of step with our own professions.
            Maybe each of us, if we are to follow Jesus, need not only a prayer partner or a Bible study group, but also someone like that little serving girl who is there to question us, to challenge us, and to make us say what we believe.
            In the Creed, we mention that Jesus "suffered under Pontius Pilate." Pilate has a place in our Creed, because he was the one who tried Jesus and condemned Jesus to death on the cross. Pilate unwittingly enabled Jesus to shine forth from the cross, to show the world the depths to which God would stoop to save us.
            Maybe we ought to put this little nameless servant girl into our Creed. She was the one who put Peter on trial. She was the one who demanded that Peter confess before the world what he held to be true. Of course, Jesus passed the exam that Peter flunked, that we continually fail, and maybe that is why we do not give her the credit that she deserves or even remember her name. All of us could benefit, however, in the middle of the night, when things are dangerous, to meet some little servant girl, who demands that we say what we believe.
            I expect as you go forth from the safe confines of this fortress of faith, this Holy Week, there is a good chance that somewhere, sometime, you will meet someone like this young woman who can expose the vulnerability of our declarations. She forced Peter out in the open. He flunked the test that midnight. But after the crucifixion of Jesus, and after his resurrection, the Risen Christ appears to Peter. He forgives him, blesses him – as He does to us all - and puts him in charge of the fledgling church. Tradition has it that Peter paid for his faith by being crucified upside down. When it counted, at the end, Peter was the "rock" Jesus meant him to be.
            One reason we ask you to stand to repeat the words of the Creed, to affirm your faith, is the hope that if you get enough practice in doing that in the safe confines of this dear church, you will be able to do it when you are tested out there in the world.   Remember, our faith is strengthened when we have to explain ourselves, and the Holy Spirit will be with us to guide us.  Amen