August 30, 2026
I was a terrible student. And I mean, like, awful student.
High school, I managed a GPA of around three-ish.
In college, I took one semester to almost fail out, but managed to get it back together. I was still a terrible student. I just managed to pull myself together just enough.
By the time I graduated college, I actually graduated with honors. In spite of the first-semester GPA of 1.3, I pulled it together. Graduated with over a 3.3 and from the honors program.
But I never became a better student.
I learned how to apply myself in ways to get the grades that I needed to get to cover up how bad I was as a student because I thought that was the goal: to get good grades, right?
Isn't that what we are supposed to do as a student? To graduate with honors?
I didn't make it to any of the cum laudes, but, you know, after a 1.3, that was a pretty solid turnaround.
By all appearances, I had actually become a decent student, if not a good student.
But I still waited until the last minute. I figured out exactly how little it would take for me to get those A's, and I did it.
I figured out how fast I could write a paper that the professors found acceptable, even if others probably wouldn't have found it acceptable.
I had it down to an art.
I was very good at writing a paper in the least amount of time possible and still getting a B+.
Twenty-page paper? I could write at three pages per hour. I needed seven hours. And so I would start the paper seven and a half hours before I needed to get it in because I still had to drive it to the office.
I'm not kidding when I say I was a terrible student.
But I understood the goal. Good grades meant I got to keep going to college and meant that I would get the degree that I needed so that I could live whatever life I was thinking I was going to live.
I got to seminary, and I was not any better as a student.
The problem is, the work got a little bit harder. Just enough. Just harder enough.
But I still didn't know how to tell anybody that I was bad at this. I didn't know how to admit that maybe I needed a little bit of help, a little bit of guidance, a little bit of something.
I thought the job of the student was to get the good grades, whatever it took, and that was it.
Boy, was I wrong.
I lived so much of my life thinking I had to achieve on my own in spite of my learning disabilities. Y'all know, dysgraphia, dyslexia, ADHD—all of those things held me back.
And maybe if at some point in time I had said, “I need some help,” somebody would have said, “Yeah, 20-page papers aren't the best idea for somebody with dysgraphia.”
Maybe if I had asked for help, a professor would have said, “Okay, let's get you some help or change the way that we're grading you.”
I don't know because I never asked, because I thought I knew what it meant to be a good student: get good grades.
Anybody else in here think that being a good student means you get good grades?
Yeah.
That's how I spent most of my life.
But then I got kicked out of seminary.
Literally failed out of seminary.
I was there at Brite with Reginald. Then I wasn't.
I don't know how many of the people who were there with me knew what happened, but that's the way it happened.
And I thought it was the end of the world because the facade had dropped.
This time I couldn't make up what I had done. I couldn't fix it. I couldn't turn it around.
I was out.
And, like, literally, they weren't letting me back in either.
I was serving a church, United Memorial Christian Church in Euless, Texas, as their youth minister.
And I dreaded telling them.
I thought I had them convinced that I was this good, successful student and good, successful youth minister, and that they loved me because of how good I was at what I did.
And I found out that I had failed out the week of VBS.
Well, VBS had to go on.
So, we did VBS.
But one night afterwards, I asked the youth and parents to hang around after. And I faced them and I told them I failed out of seminary.
I was fully prepared. I was certain, y'all, this was going to be the end here, too.
I'm going to be fired.
And when I finished telling them, one of the moms raised her hand and she said:
“Can we keep you?”
Can we keep you?
Why would you want to keep me?
I'm a failure.
I didn't understand it.
I was fabulously wrong.
And boy, let me tell you, I have never been so happy in my life to have been wrong.
To have found out not just how wrong I was in that moment, but how wrong I had been living, how wrong I had been thinking.
It had caused not just problems in me hiding stuff like that. It had caused problems in my unwillingness to admit when I was not measuring up as a person.
And it took facing that moment that I thought was it, that moment when I thought it was all going to be done, for me to find out what it meant to be wrong.
In that one moment, everything turned.
I'm not going to say I got perfect immediately, but I realized how terribly—not just I was living, but how terribly so many of us are living in this world—thinking that it is only in our own righteousness, our own abilities to succeed, our own abilities to do it the way we're supposed to do it, and put on a facade that was actually robbing me of life itself, of the chance to learn and to grow.
It's crazy because it's been almost 25 years, y'all, since I failed out of seminary.
And I still have a hard time standing before you and saying that.
It is so deeply ingrained in us that we don't fail, that we don't mess up, that we don't do certain things or act certain ways, to react, in fact, as though things are bad that are just normal and natural.
And maybe even good.
As Jenna was crying this morning—sorry to call it out—but we all know that's what babies do.
And here's the thing: they can teach us that it's okay for us to cry, too.
How often in your life have you heard, “Don't cry,” as though the goal of someone being hurt is to get them to stop crying and not to actually help them?
We are so fabulously wrong about so much in this world, and it's okay.
Being fabulously wrong doesn't mean we are fabulously bad.
In fact, what it means is that we haven't yet learned how good we are or how good we can be.
We see this same kind of fabulously wrong in Peter's response to Jesus this morning.
Look at that sentence, y'all, that Peter says: “Lord, let it never happen. By God.”
He is so upset. He brackets it with appeals to God.
“Please, God, never let this happen to you, Lord. No. Uh-uh. Not going to happen. I can't allow this bad thing to happen.”
And none of us would have responded differently.
Let's be 100% clear here.
If you heard that someone you loved was about to have to die a painful death, would you think you could allow it to happen?
It's easy to look at Peter and forget that just prior to this story, he was the first to declare Jesus the Messiah, the Son of the living God.
But now he's got to learn what that means, what the Messiah is.
You see, when Jesus says he must go to Jerusalem and suffer at the hands of the chief priests and the elders and then die on a cross, that's the whole kit and caboodle.
That is the end of the world if he is your Messiah.
What Jesus seems to be saying to the disciples is his power cannot overcome the power of Rome.
That's what the cross symbolizes: the power of Rome to punish and kill any who oppose it.
And if he is the Messiah and even he must go through the cross, what hope is there? What chance is there?
But Peter, like we would have, doesn't hear the whole story.
He's so busy hearing about the suffering and death, he doesn't hear what Jesus finishes with:
“And on the third day be raised.”
Jesus tells his disciples that I am going to go face the greatest power that this world knew at that time, and it is going to throw the worst at me, and it'll take me out of commission for three days.
That's it.
But so often we don't want to go through that suffering. We don't want to face that power.
And it convinces us.
It convinces us that we have to live smaller lives, lesser lives, lives where we can succeed, where we can put on the right look, help people think we've got it all together.
It convinces us that we can just stay just enough so that we don't have to hurt, so we don't have to go through it, so that we don't have to be inconvenienced, so that we don't have to face things.
When Jesus says to the disciples after this, he turns and he says, “It's all y'all.”
He doesn't say, “Oh, Peter, you're the only one thinking this.”
He knows what the other disciples are thinking, and he says, “You must be willing to take up your cross and follow me.”
Y'all, we've all probably at some point in time misused this phrase, take up my cross.
“That's just my cross to bear,” right?
When you're stuck in traffic, that's just my cross to bear. When things aren't going your way, or when you've got to go through something that maybe you don't have to.
The cross to bear is something far more than just an inconvenience or even a mild discomfort.
It is the symbol of the powers of death and the powers and principalities of this world that will convince us we cannot go up against it. We cannot confront it.
And when Jesus tells us to go and pick up your cross, he's saying, go and face that thing.
It is the thing that I faced with those parents and youth, telling them that I had failed.
That, to me, felt like the end.
And it was only by actually facing it rather than—you know, I'll be honest, there was probably a part of my mind that was like, “I'll just quit and never face them. I'll get us through VBS and then I'll just disappear.”
Kind of like I did at Brite.
I didn't want to have to face it.
But it was only in facing it that I found out what the true power and glory of God was like.
Jesus tells us to take up our crosses not because Jesus wants us to suffer and die, but because Jesus wants us to see, to find out, that there are limits to that power and that God can overcome it.
That God's love, God's forgiveness, God's goodness—I love the song JC sang this morning—God's goodness is running after us.
And we need to remember that so that we can face whatever it is that might be in front of us and so that we can overcome it with God's help.
Moses faces the same thing this morning.
And Moses has, honestly—he could have easily never had to go through all he ends up going through. He could have had a simple and easy life.
I usually tell our Bible study people that I'm going to say something before I say it, but Gina had a point this week in our Bible study that I hadn't really noticed.
Moses could have just walked right by the burning bush.
“Oh, there's the fire. Oh well. Not my problem. Off I go.”
She pointed out, actually, that maybe others had already walked past the burning bush.
Maybe there were others who had seen it who could have been called, but they didn't respond.
And again, it might sound kind of odd, but how many times have you driven past something kind of crazy on the road?
Some of us maybe as recently as this morning.
Because we've got other things to do.
It would be easy for Moses to be like, “Well, that seems bad, but I got sheep over here, and these are my father-in-law's sheep, y'all. I mean, like, this is serious. If he loses one of his father-in-law's sheep, he's never going to hear the end of that, right? Never going to hear the end of it.”
And yet, he stops and he turns and he notices.
And God takes note of that.
Go back and read it in the story. God noted that Moses had stopped and paid attention.
If only he just kept going with the sheep, he could have missed the rest of it.
But God calls Moses to the same thing that Jesus calls his disciples to and calls us to.
The power in Moses's day was Pharaoh.
And y'all, Moses doesn't want to go.
We don't get the whole story. We'd have been here for a while to listen to all of Moses's reasons he shouldn't be the guy going and talking to Pharaoh.
But he's got no interest in it.
He starts off kind of easy here with, “Well, you know, me? You sure about that? Okay. Well, who do I tell them you are? How am I going to build trust with them, right?”
And the next thing is like, “You know, I've got a stutter. You don't want to send somebody with a stutter to Pharaoh. You need somebody big and powerful, somebody who talks well. Send my brother Aaron.”
Maybe God's looking at Moses like, “That guy passed by the fire an hour and a half ago and he missed the whole thing. I don't need him.”
Moses wants any reason to not go and face the Pharaoh.
There are so many things in our lives that we don't want to face.
But it is only in facing that which frightens us, that which oppresses us, that which keeps us from being fully alive, that we will learn what it is to have life in God.
Life through Christ Jesus.
Think of it throughout scripture.
There are prophets. There are disciples. There are priests who don't want to do the thing that God tells them to do.
They're certain that it can't go well.
But it is only when we go that we find out how truly good God is.
If we want to be able to sing of the goodness of God, we have to experience the fullness of that goodness.
We have to be willing to face, to name, to call out those things, to see them and continue on and know that they do not have limitless power, that they cannot be the thing that will keep us down.
I don't know what it is for you, but whatever it is, face it, name it, and ask God to go with you to it.
Because that is what it truly means to take up your cross and follow Jesus.
Let us live.
Let us admit the ways in which we have made our lives smaller and less than are indeed fabulously wrong, and go and find out exactly how wonderful God is.
Amen.
Let's go together to God in prayer.
Loving Lord God,
We stand here remembering your presence with us, knowing that there are things we do not want to face, but knowing that with you we can face them.
It may be the silence or the darkness. It may be our own frailty or things that we have done to harm others.
It may be any number of things, O Lord.
But first, help us to face them with you, to name them in our hearts, and to know that you love us anyway.
Guide us to live lives that can stand up, that can say, “I trust. I have faith that God will indeed be with me.”
Fill us with your love, with your compassion, and with your goodness.
And remind us, O Lord, of how far we have come with you, of the times you have carried us through in a way where there seemed to be no way.
O Lord, help us to share your good news with those around us in word and in deed.
Help us to be with those who are suffering, who are facing their own darkness. To be present with your light, Lord.
Be with those who are hurting.
Be with those who are frightened.
Be with those who are going through far more than we could imagine.
Help them to know your love.
We pray all of this in the name of your Son, Jesus Christ, who taught us to pray, saying:
“Our Father, who art in heaven, hallowed be thy name.
Thy kingdom come, thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven.
Give us this day our daily bread, and forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us,
and lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil.
For thine is the kingdom and the power and the glory forever.
Amen.