When the Story Turns

Learning to follow when life doesn't unfold the way we expected

Coffee with Mother Nicole: What do we do when the story turns?

One of the things I’m discovering in these first weeks at St. Paul’s is that preaching doesn’t really end when the final “Amen” is spoken. Often, the sermon is only the beginning of the conversation.

This week’s Gospel has stayed with me because I recognize something of Peter in myself. Peter knows who Jesus is. He has a story about Jesus, and it is a good and faithful story. But then Jesus says something that doesn’t fit: the Messiah will suffer. He will be rejected. He will die. And Peter says, essentially, No. That cannot be how this story goes.

I know something about that “God forbid it” response. I’ve had moments when life became something I never would have chosen, and I had to wrestle with whether the God I believed in was large enough to hold what was happening. I’ve also found myself, in much smaller and more ordinary ways, trying to get ahead of God, to figure things out, make plans, solve problems, and move the story along.

Maybe you know that feeling, too. What happens when the story we thought God was writing turns out to be different from the story we imagined?

What happens when suffering or disappointment doesn’t just change our circumstances, but changes our understanding of God? And what if faith isn’t about having a story that can explain everything, but becoming the kind of person who can follow Christ when the story turns?

Those are some of the questions I’m still sitting with.

So, consider this the conversation after the sermon—the part where we linger over coffee for a little while longer. In this space, I’ll go a little deeper into the questions behind the Sunday sermon and explore what they might mean for our lives beyond the walls of the church.

Watch

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CoMYeTprJMw

Read

I wrote a reflection this week on my website about what life feels like four weeks into parish ministry. In it, I said that I have learned that there is a particular sensation that comes with beginning a new call. It feels a little like drinking from a fire hose.

There is so much to take in and learn about a church community. There are people to meet and stories to hear. You begin to discover what people love, what they miss, what they hope will change, and what they hope never will. And trying to absorb it all at once can feel like a lot.

Maybe you know that feeling. We have a way of imagining what a new season will be like—whether it is a new school year, college, a move, a job, or a relationship. We build a picture in our minds, and then we step into the reality of it.

Sometimes that reality is more complicated than we anticipated. Sometimes it asks more of us than we expected. Because there is a difference between knowing about something and actually stepping inside it.

The story becomes bigger once you are living it.

And I think something very much like that happens to Peter in today’s Gospel. To understand what happens today, we have to remember where Peter was in the story last Sunday. Jesus and the disciples were in Caesarea Philippi, and Jesus asked them, “Who do you say that I am?” And Peter answered: “You are the Messiah, the Son of the living God.” It is one of Peter’s great moments. Peter has recognized something true about Jesus. He has a story about Jesus that he fits into.

And then, in today’s Gospel, Jesus begins to tell Peter what that story actually means. Jesus says he must go to Jerusalem. He will suffer. He will be rejected by the religious authorities. He will be killed. And on the third day, he will be raised.

And Peter says: “God forbid it, Lord! This must never happen to you.” I love that Peter doesn’t say, “I don’t believe you.” He doesn’t walk away. He doesn’t say, “Well, I guess you’re not the Messiah after all.” He says, “God forbid it.”

Peter believes in Jesus. What Peter cannot believe is that this could possibly be the way God is working. His problem isn’t that he has the wrong Jesus. It’s that the Jesus he knows is still too small for the story God is telling.

In his understanding, the Messiah wins. He overthrows the powers that oppress God’s people and brings victory. The Messiah does not get arrested and humiliated and killed.

Peter has the right idea according to the story he has inherited. And yet, Jesus says to him, “Get behind me, Satan! You are a stumbling block to me.” It is a startling response. But Jesus isn’t simply correcting Peter’s facts. He is confronting Peter’s entire understanding of what God is like. I don’t know about you, but for me, there is something deeply relatable in Peter’s response.

We all carry stories about God. Not just theological ideas, but stories about who God is and how God works. Based on our upbringing or our experience, we think we know what we can expect from God.

Sometimes those stories are born from beautiful experiences—the prayer that was answered, the person who showed up at exactly the right moment, the season when God’s presence felt unmistakable, or the community that carried us through something hard.

Those stories matter. Peter’s story matters. His confession is true, but it is not the whole story. Sooner or later, most of us encounter something that doesn’t fit inside the story we have been carrying. For Peter, it is the idea that the Messiah could suffer.

For us, it might be a loss or disappointment, a failure, or a change we didn’t choose. Sometimes the way people in the Church treat us shifts the way we see God. Sometimes the beliefs we had as children don’t make sense anymore in a suffering world. Maybe it is a prayer that isn’t answered in the way we hoped. These moments force us to ask whether our understanding of God is large enough to hold the reality of our lives.

And when that happens, we can find ourselves saying something like Peter: “God forbid it. This cannot be part of the story. This cannot be what God is doing.”

I know something about that kind of “God forbid it.” When my brother-in-law, Daniel, experienced a brain aneurysm in his forties, he became bed-bound for more than three years before he died. There was a long stretch of time when I wanted God to intervene. I wanted the story to be different. I didn’t know how to make sense of a God who would allow that story to continue.

During that time, I further immersed myself in contemplative Christian teachings, and my understanding of Jesus deepened. One important teacher for me was Franciscan priest Richard Rohr. He writes that “only love and suffering are strong enough to break down our usual ego defenses, crush our dualistic thinking, and open us to Mystery.” He says these two teachers—great love and great suffering—launch us into a space that forces us to wrestle with our previous understandings of God. (Go deeper with Rohr on this in Falling Upward).

And the important question when the story turns from what we expected to what truly is becomes: Who will we become when suffering, loss, disappointment, or opposition comes?

Because suffering can change us in more than one direction. It can move through us and become bitterness. We can become cynical and protective. We can transmit our pain to others.

But suffering can also expose something in us: the limits of the stories we have been telling ourselves about God, about ourselves, and about how life is supposed to work.

And when those stories begin to break apart, we face a choice. We can cling more tightly to the certainty we had before, or we can allow the breaking open to make room for a God who is larger than the God we thought we understood. In the presence of Christ, even suffering can become a place of transformation.

I learned through those years of wrestling with my own narrow stories about God that this is not a new idea. The contemplative tradition of Christianity has long understood that there are moments when our ideas about God have to give way to an encounter with God who exceeds our ideas.

The mystics called this the “divine darkness”—not the darkness of God’s absence, but the darkness we experience when God exceeds our capacity to understand. We enter what the tradition calls unknowing. We move toward God not only by learning more, but also by discovering the limits of what we can know.

And that is where Peter finds himself. He has entered the darkness of unknowing. Peter wants to get in front of Jesus and tell him how the story should go, but Jesus says, “Get behind me.” And I don’t think that is only a rebuke. It is also an invitation: “Follow me.”

I can imagine Jesus saying to Peter, “Remember when you laid down your nets and followed me even though you didn’t know where it would lead? You don’t have to understand the whole story. You don’t have to know where every road leads. But you do have to follow. So, get behind me. I will lead the way.”

And that is where Peter finds himself. He has entered the darkness of unknowing. Peter wants to get in front of Jesus and tell him how the story should go, but Jesus says, “Get behind me.” And I don’t think that is only a rebuke. It is also an invitation: “Follow me.”

I can imagine Jesus saying to Peter, “Remember when you laid down your nets and followed me even though you didn’t know where it would lead? You don’t have to understand the whole story. You don’t have to know where every road leads. But you do have to follow. So, get behind me. I will lead the way.”

God’s victory does not look like the victory Peter imagined, and the cross will become the place where Peter’s understanding of God is turned inside out. Jesus isn’t asking Peter simply to change his mind. He is asking him to change his posture toward the whole of his life.

Then Jesus says something more. He doesn’t simply tell Peter to rethink his theology. He says: “If any want to become my followers, let them deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me.”

That word “deny” can be difficult for us. It can sound like Jesus is asking us to reject ourselves, to become smaller, to ignore our own needs or desires. But I don’t think that is what Jesus means.

Peter’s problem isn’t that he thinks too much of himself. His problem is that he is trying to put himself in charge of the story. He wants to tell Jesus what the Messiah should do. And Jesus says: Get behind me.

Stop trying to lead me. Follow me. So when Jesus says, “Deny yourself,” I hear an invitation to loosen our grip on the self that needs to know, needs to control, needs to have the story come out a certain way.

And then he says, “Take up your cross.” The cross is not simply something terrible that happens to us. It is the shape of a life given over to love. Jesus is inviting Peter into his very life, a life that does not preserve itself at any cost but that life willing to give itself away in love.

And then Jesus says something that sounds like a paradox: “Those who want to save their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake will find it.”

We spend so much of our lives trying to save ourselves. We try to protect ourselves from disappointment. We try to control outcomes. We try to make ourselves secure. We try to preserve the version of ourselves we think we need to be. And Jesus says there is another way.

Let go. Follow. Give yourself to love. Not because your life doesn’t matter. But because your life is found precisely there. The life Jesus offers is not the life we create by controlling everything around us. It is the life we discover when we allow ourselves to be drawn into something larger than ourselves.

That is what Peter is being invited into, and it is what Jesus invites us into, too. This invitation Jesus extends to Peter and the disciples is an invitation into his very life, death, and resurrection. It is an invitation to lose the life we are trying so desperately to control and discover the life God is already giving us.

But we don’t do this by willpower alone. We need God to form this life in us, to make the life of Christ our own. And that is exactly what we are praying for in the Collect we prayed at the beginning of this service:

Listen again to these words: “Lord of all power and might, the author and giver of all good things: graft in our hearts the love of your Name.”

I love that image of grafting. To graft one living thing onto another is to join them so closely that, over time, they grow together. That is what we are asking God to do—Not to erase us or to make us less ourselves. But to join the life of Christ to ours until his life begins to grow in us, until his love becomes our way of being in the world.

And maybe this is what Jesus means when he says that those who lose their life will find it. We do not lose ourselves by following Christ. We discover ourselves more deeply in him. The life we have been trying so hard to protect can give way to a life we could never have created on our own. And when we graft ourselves into the life of Christ, when the story turns, we have something deeper than certainty to hold onto.

We have Christ. Because the story will turn. There will be things we do not understand. There will be times when the God we thought we knew becomes larger than our understanding. There will be moments when we find ourselves, like Peter, saying, “God forbid it.”

And Jesus will say: “Get behind me. Follow me.” Not because you understand everything, but because I am going ahead of you. And maybe that is what faith looks like when our stories begin to break open—not knowing exactly where the story is going, but trusting the One who is leading us.

So, may God meet us in all the places where our stories have broken open. May Christ lead us when we cannot see the way ahead, and together may we pray:

Lord, join your life to mine so deeply that I begin to grow in the shape of your love.

So that when the story turns, I can follow.

So that when I encounter suffering, I do not have to become hardened by it.

So that when I encounter uncertainty, I turn to you.

So that when I am wounded, I can remain open to love.

So that, over time, the life of Christ becomes recognizable in the way I move through the world. Amen.

Let’s Talk: When God Becomes Larger Than Our Understanding

So, now that you’ve heard the sermon, let’s sit with it for a little while. There is one part of this story that I find myself wanting to linger over: what happens when our understanding of God breaks open?

Peter thought he knew what it meant for Jesus to be the Messiah. We do the same thing. We develop a picture of God from Scripture, worship, childhood, experience, suffering, answered prayers, unanswered prayers, the people who have shown us love, and sometimes the people who have wounded us.

Over time, all of those things become a kind of theology. We develop a story about how God works. And then life happens. A person we love dies. A marriage ends. A diagnosis comes. A child struggles. A prayer goes unanswered. The Church disappoints us. Something we believed with certainty no longer makes sense.

And suddenly, the God we thought we understood doesn’t seem to fit inside the life we are actually living. That can be frightening. But the contemplative tradition offers another way of understanding that experience.

When certainty gives way to mystery

In my own experience of shifting faith, I dove deeply into the contemplative tradition and spent the last decade studying mystical theology and practicing contemplative prayer. It has deeply impacted the way I understand God and myself.

There is a stream of Christian spirituality called apophatic theology, from a Greek word meaning something like “to speak away” or “to speak by negation.” It begins with a simple but profound conviction: God is always greater than anything we can say about God.

We can say that God is loving. God is good. God is merciful. God is light. All of those things are true. But God is not contained by any of them. The fourth-century theologian Gregory of Nyssa understood the life of faith as an ever-deepening movement into the mystery of God. As we draw closer to God, we don’t simply accumulate more certainty. We also discover how much larger God is than our concepts. This is what the mystics meant by the “divine darkness.”

Darkness here doesn’t mean that God has disappeared. It means that the God we encounter has become too large for our familiar categories. There is a strange paradox at the heart of the contemplative life: sometimes coming closer to God feels, at first, like knowing less.

The things that once seemed certain may become less certain. The explanations that once comforted us may no longer work. The God we could describe becomes the God we can only encounter. That can feel like losing faith. But sometimes it is actually the beginning of a deeper faith.

The dark night

This is where the tradition of the dark night of the soul becomes important. The phrase is most closely associated with the sixteenth-century Spanish mystic John of the Cross. And despite the way we sometimes use the phrase today, the dark night is not simply a period when you are sad, depressed, or having a difficult time. It is something more mysterious.

John of the Cross describes a process in which the ways we have learned to experience and understand God are stripped away. Even the things that once gave us spiritual consolation may no longer work. We cannot find God where we used to find God. And that can feel like abandonment.

But John believed that God may be drawing us into a deeper kind of union—one that is not dependent on our feelings, our certainty, or our ability to understand. The dark night is not necessarily evidence that God has left. It may be the place where we discover that God was never limited to the ways we knew how to find God.

That distinction matters because when something painful happens, we often ask: Where is God? That is a real question, but the contemplative tradition invites us into another question, too: What if God is here, but not in the way I expected God to be here?

That is Peter’s question. Jesus is not absent. Jesus is standing directly in front of him. Peter simply cannot recognize God’s work in the form it is taking.

When our stories break open

I think this is one reason suffering can be spiritually significant without ever being something we would choose. Suffering can break open our certainty. It can expose the places where we have made God too small. It can force us to confront the difference between the God we believe in and the God we actually encounter.

I think that is one of the gifts of the apophatic tradition. It gives us permission not to know. It reminds us that we do not have to rush to explain every mystery. We can sit in the darkness. We can say, “God, I don’t understand.” We can even say, like Jeremiah, “Why is my pain unceasing?” And we can still remain in relationship with God.

So let’s talk

Maybe the deeper question isn’t whether we have the right story about God. Maybe it is whether our relationship with God is spacious enough to survive when our story changes.

Where have you experienced a “God forbid it” in your own life?

Have you ever encountered something that made your understanding of God feel too small?

What happened when a belief you once held with certainty no longer made sense?

Did you experience that as losing faith, or, looking back, can you see that something deeper was being formed in you?

And perhaps most importantly: Can you imagine that not knowing might itself be a form of faith?

Peter wanted an explanation. Jesus gave him an invitation: Follow me.

There are times when that may be all we have, and it may be enough. I think the goal of the Christian life is not to become people who can explain God. It is to become people in whom the life of Christ can take flesh.

So, pull up a chair and tell me, what has your “God forbid it” been? And what happened to your understanding of God on the other side of it?