When they finished eating, Jesus asked Simon Peter, “Simon son of John, do you love me more than these?”
Simon replied, “Yes, Lord, you know I love you.”
Jesus said to him, “Feed my lambs.” 16 Jesus asked a second time, “Simon son of John, do you love me?”
Simon replied, “Yes, Lord, you know I love you.”
Jesus said to him, “Take care of my sheep.” 17 He asked a third time, “Simon son of John, do you love me?”
Peter was sad that Jesus asked him a third time, “Do you love me?” He replied, “Lord, you know everything; you know I love you.”
Jesus said to him, “Feed my sheep. 18 I assure you that when you were younger you tied your own belt and walked around wherever you wanted. When you grow old, you will stretch out your hands and another will tie your belt and lead you where you don’t want to go.” 19 He said this to show the kind of death by which Peter would glorify God. After saying this, Jesus said to Peter, “Follow me.” (Common English Bible)
Mayday 2022
You could see the chef standing with his food, neatly lined up on trays and in ramekins, casually dressed in jeans, pullover, and ballcap, with a mask on to protect his customers. It’s a job he took up almost on an impulse for the sake of his kids. But it’s not at his kids’ favorite restaurant, it’s at their elementary school. His customers are the students. And he’s not a professionally trained chef, but a monstrously sized, recently retired NFL lineman.
Jared Veldheer’s career ended ingloriously—he tested positive for a banned substance and retired—and he needed something completely different, not at all related to football, to dedicate himself to. When the kitchen manager at his kids’ school stepped down just weeks before the start of the school year, he took the $15/hour position after playing professional football for tens of millions of dollars.
Like most pro athletes, Veldheer was unaccustomed to doing the bare minimum—competing at so high a level means you must demand excellence of yourself—and he did his best to introduce the children to new foods, like Korean bulgogi and Indian tikka masala while keeping the cost of lunch as accessible as possible at $3.50 a student.
It was a profound shift to go from the bright Sunday stadium lights to the duller fluorescent cafeteria weekday lights, but such is also often the case for professional athletes—after dedicating themselves so singularly to their craft for decades, suddenly in their thirties they find those careers ended and a new purpose required. Many go into coaching; others may go into commentary. And Jared Veldheer went into feeding our children.
I empathize with athletes having to answer that “what next?” question in their thirties, because after preparing myself for ministry pretty much since I was eighteen, fully half of my life ago, I am now in the position of looking at doing something significantly different with my life, at least for the foreseeable future. And you as a congregation are looking at perhaps a different future now.
And maybe, just maybe, the subtext of this story of Jesus and Peter is that…that is all okay.
The context of this famous story matters greatly—Jesus asks Peter three times if Peter loves Him and to feed His sheep, and that number is not just pulled out of a hat. It mirrors the three times that Peter denied Jesus just days prior. Each affirmation of love, each “feed my sheep,” is meant to match up to, and overcome, an “I don’t know him.”
And because of that, even more than Peter’s commissioning of Jesus in Matthew 16, I believe this represents the turning point for Peter. Up to this point—which is to say for pretty much the entirety of the Gospels—the male followers of Jesus have been failures of discipleship. They send away children, bicker amongst themselves, and fail in the miracles that Jesus empowers them to perform. Then, come the Passion, one betrays Jesus, another denies Him, and the other ten vanish into the ether while the female followers remain as witnesses. Then when the tomb is discovered empty, the male followers dismiss the women’s accounts as idle fairytales. All in all, they prove disappointing.
That begins to change here. Peter is ultimately wounded that Jesus seems to doubt Peter’s love of Him, and while certainly understandable, it surely must betray a lack of self-awareness on Peter’s part after everything I just said concerning the male disciples’ failures and shortcomings.
But the Peter of Acts is not the Peter of the Gospels. The Peter of Acts is a preacher who reaches thousands, who performs miracles with great success, and who shepherds the embryonic church through its first three tumultuous decades.
Peter, as so many of us who have been saved and shepherded by Jesus, is transformed. A fisherman has become a shepherd. A disciple has become the first pope. But even more fundamentally, a child of God becomes a saint of God.
Valley has a lovely All Saints Day worship tradition, and I am very sad that I will not be here come the last Sunday in October or first Sunday in November for the remembrances of Joan Noland and Hattie Belle Lester, each of whose funerals I was humbled to officiate. But I do hope today that we can imagine together the transformation from sheep being fed by shepherds to saints—the shepherds who feed the next generation of sheep. We are fed as sheep so that we in turn can feed others as shepherds. Our being fed was always meant to beget our transformation in Christ.
And so while church can be familiar to us, a place to feel at home, it was never meant to be a place to keep us in stasis, the same always and forever. We are dynamic creations of a dynamic God, called by Christ in the Sermon on the Mount to perfect ourselves just as God in heaven is perfect.
Peter, especially in the Gospels, was not perfect. But Jesus does not call upon Peter to feed His sheep based on perfection. Jesus calls upon Peter based on Peter’s ability and willingness to perfect himself—not to be perfect, but to perfect.
In other words, what if we stopped thinking of perfect as a state of being and started thinking of it as a verb, as a state of doing?
Call it peer pressure, or trying to keep up with the Joneses, or whatever you wish, but I can see the pressure to be perfect, at least outwardly, if not inwardly. To appear put together to whomever you come across even if inside you’re a mess, or to seem like you’ve got the answers or it all figured out when inside you haven’t a clue, those pressures are real, especially in a context that expects a certain standard, a certain degree of success. And consequently, if you feel like you aren’t meeting that standard—even if you really are!—it can feel just devastating.
What if, instead of trying to project and broadcast perfection, we worked on perfecting ourselves, and each other?
More than anything else, I think, this is what I would wish for you as our paths soon part—that we are able to perfect ourselves each along our own soon-diverging paths, but that especially you would not feel the need to project or broadcast perfection to your next minister, but instead partner with them so that they can perfect you, and you them.
Or, to put it in John 21, you can each feed each other.
I do hope with all my being that I have been able to feed you in some form or fashion during my time with you—even if my particular Scriptural or homiletical diet was not always to your liking. But most of all, I hope that I offered to you a diet of deeper understanding of God’s Word such that you felt even a little bit more secure in feeding yourselves. We are Disciples of Christ after all, noncreedal to our core and trusting in each believer’s ability to study the Word of God, and I hope that I have given you something to strengthen your own study of God’s Word.
Because when Jesus says to feed His sheep, we are called not just to feed but to teach how then go feed others. It is the difference between a parent feeding their child directly and teaching their child how to eat. We are called to do both, because the former meets the immediate need when we are at our most helpless and vulnerable, and the latter cultivates sustainability and longevity. So we feed while also teaching. We nourish while also enriching. We nurture while also building up. Put another way, we feed the children in the school cafeteria…but not just by meeting their nutritional needs, but by expanding their horizons, honoring them as entire people and not merely mouths to feed, and in so doing communicate to them that they are worthy of our very best.
We do what a retired NFL lineman disgraced into retirement by a positive drug test chose to do. Jared Veldheer could afford to do so without thought to the monetary reward. We might not be so fortunate, and it is important to say that on Mayday. I did not set it up this way intentionally, but my first sermon with you fell on Labor Day weekend, and my final message falls on another day celebrating the dignity of well-compensated work in Mayday. An integral, indispensable aspect of the dignity that work is meant to provide is that it should be rewarded accordingly. And the spiritual reward of feeding the sheep, of empowering them to transform from sheep to shepherd to saint, to go out and feed others, is beyond measure.
Feeding one another begets transformation. If we want to see ourselves made into new creations in Christ, if we want to see the church grow into a new way of being, if we want to see a world that is more loving and equal, more concerned with matters of justice and peace than matters of selfishness and showboating, that begins with the three-word commissioning of Peter by Jesus: Feed. My. Sheep.
More than anything else, Valley, that is my hope for you going forward, because from those three words comes everything, just like from the four words “Let there be light” in Genesis 1 came all of creation.
It is uncommonly rare that so few words contain so much. And yet these do. Power to inspire, to imagine, to perfect beauty from ashes, life from dirt and wind, and blooms from the parched desert. Their sheer creative power stands against the power of other words to destroy and destruct.
And in response to that destructive power that had sentenced Him to the cross just days earlier while His foremost disciple abandoned and then denied Him, Jesus has three words: Feed. My. Sheep.
Do you love me, asks the Lord.
We can protest all we want that the Lord knows that we love Him, but the true test of whether we do, and whether we will, is boiled down into some very short sentences that nevertheless communicate multitudes: worship God, follow Christ, and feed the sheep.
Valley Christian Church, I give you back to God. Amen.
Rev. Dr. Eric Atcheson
Birmingham, Alabama
May 1, 2022