About 3,000 new converts in one day. Can you imagine that?  What a spectacular success!  Peter preached to the crowd gathered on Pentecost, and explained the gospel to them.  The Holy Spirit was at work, wooing the crowd, filling the air with prevenient grace in the forms of tongues of fire, gusts of wind, and the sudden ability to speak in different languages.  The people were moved by the dramatic displays of the Holy Spirit and opened their hearts to the gospel message.  The combination of God’s grace plus open hearts always results in a new birth of some kind.  In the case of Pentecost, it resulted in the birth of the Church.  What spectacular alchemy!But Peter’s spectacular success at Pentecost comes just fifty-two days after one of the most spectacular failures recorded in Scripture.  According to Luke chapter 22, at the Last Supper, Jesus told his disciples that one of them would betray him.  Jesus said he was praying the faith of the others would not fail them.  Peter was insulted at Jesus’ lack of confidence in them. “Lord, I [for one] am ready to go with you to prison and to death!”  But Jesus knew differently and said, “I tell you, Peter, before the rooster crows today, you will deny three times that you know me.”  Hours later, when Peter was accused of being one of Jesus’ companions, Peter was quick to defend himself.  “Woman, I don’t know him!”  A little while later, someone else said Peter was one of Jesus’ followers.  “Man, I am not!” Peter exclaimed.  And then, an hour later, when someone pointed out that Peter was also a Galilean and was surely with Jesus, he said, “Man, I don’t know what you’re talking about.”  Just as Peter was saying this, the cock crowed.  Jesus turned and looked straight at Peter, and Peter’s heart dissolved into shame.  What Jesus predicted had come true.  Peter had denied him three times before the rooster crowed.  Peter went outside and wept bitterly.The one time in his life Jesus could have used a friend—and no one stood by him.  Not even Peter, who just hours before had boasted that he was ready to go to prison or even death for his Lord.  Talk about a spectacular failure!  But failure never need be our last word, because the winds of grace are always blowing.  After Jesus’ death and resurrection, one of his top agenda items was to make sure Peter knew he was forgiven.  In fact, he was more than forgiven.  Jesus gave him a new name and said that Peter would play a foundational role in the Church. Pentecost is an important holy day with many significant facets.  But what I would like to be sure we see today is how Pentecost represents the gospel coming full circle in Peter’s own life.  It’s one thing to know with our heads about grace and forgiveness and fresh starts.  It’s another thing to know this by heart.  And if it’s something we know by heart, we can bet it takes courage.  After all, our word courage comes from the Latin word for heart.This month we have been working on a rather long memory verse, Romans 5:3-5:  “We boast in our sufferings, knowing that suffering produces endurance, and endurance produces character, and character produces hope, and hope does not disappoint us, because God’s love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit that has been given to us.”  Without grace, there is no boasting in our sufferings.  Without grace, there is no hope of getting past our failures.  It’s true that hope never disappoints.  But people disappoint.  Circumstances disappoint.  And sometimes, we disappoint ourselves.  That might be the worst suffering of all, to know we let ourselves down.  Our sinful words and actions cause us pain.  Our pain is compounded if the Peanut Gallery inside our brains decides to focus on the sin and keep us in shame.  But the winds of grace are always blowing.  We just have to raise the sails and receive.Can you imagine the courage it took for Peter to trust that grace was real, and it was indeed much greater than his failures and sin?  I tell you, trusting in grace to cover our shame is something even lifelong Christians struggle with.  To illustrate, allow me to tell a story I heard about two pastors in Ohio, both serving small rural churches.  They were in different denominations and met through the local ministerium.  Over time they discovered they had a lot in common, including about a year into their relationship, finding out that they were both having their annual review on the same day.  As fate would have it, both received poor reviews from their congregations, with an uncanny similarity to the comments.  Both heard, “Our church is never going to grow with you as our pastor!”  Both felt terrible because they were working very hard, and trying their best, but they weren’t seeing much in the way of results for their efforts. They felt like failures, and instead of receiving an encouraging word from their churches, they were judged as inadequate.  The two pastors left their meetings, got into their cars, and wept bitterly.  Their hearts were dissolved in shame.They met a few days later and compared their experiences.  They were still very upset, but a little time was helping them see that they were being unfairly blamed by their congregations.  It is never the pastor’s job to “grow the church”.  Spreading the gospel is the responsibility of all baptized Christians.  They prayed together and agreed to meet again in a few weeks, just the two of them, to talk.  But that scheduled meeting never took place.  One of the pastors just could not get past his shame, and he resigned.  He heard the word “failure”—but then could not hear anything else.  I believe that pastor is now managing a McDonald’s, which of course, could be a place of ministry, too.  But last I heard he has yet to set foot in a church.  He is still struggling under the weight of that label, “failure”.  He is not at peace.Isn’t that sad?  Thanks be to God that Peter was able to hear the words of grace Jesus had for him in the days after Easter!  Thanks be to God that Peter did not let his spectacular failure prevent him from becoming a spectacular witness for Christ!  Thanks be to God that suffering—even the suffering of our own sins, of disappointing ourselves, of our own shame—can produce endurance that bolsters our character, refines our souls so we have the capacity to endure, and purifies us in hope.  But for this to happen, courage will always be required. This summer I will celebrate my 15th anniversary in ministry.  If on average I preach 44 times a year, come July 1st, I will be able to say that I have written and preached 665 weekly sermons, plus at least 100 funerals, and a few dozen weddings.  That is over 800 opportunities to preach grace and offer encouragement.  Hopefully I have indeed preached grace 800 times.  But I realized this week, I do not think I have ever preached specifically about failure.  I have never talked about how painful it is to fail, and how easily shame can take root, and how difficult it can be to open our sails to let the winds of grace blow through our lives.  I am not sure why.  What I do know, though, is, the pandemic has put many of us in the dangerously over-challenged zone, and it can be hairy up there.     We talked about this two weeks ago, how we do our best work in the green area, just above the line that separates over-challenged from appropriately challenged.  We do our best work in situations most of us wouldn’t put ourselves in on purpose.  But I didn’t have much time to say two weeks ago that above this green area—in the red danger zone–is where we do some of our worst work.  When things are seriously too hard, especially if they are seriously too hard for too long, that’s when we are apt to burn out, blow up, and fall apart.  We might find ourselves failing spectacularly.Clearly Jesus getting arrested put Peter and the other disciples in the dangerously over-challenged zone.  It was too threatening, too scary, too hard.  These eleven men who had the best of intentions, who had travelled with Jesus and endured constant scrutiny and weren’t afraid to go on mission trips with no food or provisions and were at times essentially homeless—the disciples were brave men.  They were good men. They were faithful men.  But they were not immune to failure.  They were intimately acquainted with the pain of disappointing themselves and their Lord.  And one of the most dangerous parts about being in the danger zone is we might lose the courage we need to see that God’s grace is bigger than even our biggest sins.  We might lose the courage we need to see that God’s mercy longs to redeem even our most spectacular failures. The good news of the gospel is really good news, because failure is part of life.  Even more so lately!  I am sure I am not the only person who has noticed this during the pandemic.  I’ve been up in that red zone more than usual during the last sixteen months.  When life is overwhelming, I find myself getting brittle and stingy.  Stingy about the grace I give myself and the grace I offer others.  I actually spent some time the other day researching on the internet what to do about tailgaters.  I feel like drivers are so angry these days, and when I’m up in that dangerously overchallenged zone, I don’t have the gracious cushion anymore, and now their anger makes me angry.  Do you know what I’m talking about?I’m not sure stinginess is the opposite of grace, but it’s definitely in the mix.  Some of my close friends have told me they are stingy with their money.  They just don’t feel comfortable supporting the worthy causes they have supported in the past.  Some parents I have talked to have shared their lament, their deep pain, for not being able to be patient and kind to their kids 24/7—and they are having trouble being compassionate toward themselves.  There is just not enough grace to go around it seems.  Even the Philadelphia Inquirer last Sunday had a full-page article titled, “There Is a Word for the Thing we Need Most Now:  Grace.” Thankfully, we know that the winds of grace are always blowing.  But grace requires courage and encouragement in order to be effective.  One of my favorite poems is, “The Grasp of Your Hand” by the Indian poet and playwright Rabindranath Tagore: Let me not pray to be sheltered from dangersbut to be fearless in facing them.Let me not beg for the stilling of my painbut for the heart to conquer it.Let me not crave in anxious fear to be savedbut hope for the patience to win my freedom.Grant me that I may not be a coward, feeling Your mercy in my success alone;but let me find the grasp of Your hand in my failure. We often refer to Pentecost as the birthday of the Church with a capital C.  But the Church as we know it—with buildings, and ordained clergy, and an institutional structure–didn’t start to take shape for another 300 years.  What that tells me is, as important as those things are, they are not the foundation of the Church.  Stripped to its core, the Church is a communion of believers who are freed by God’s grace in Jesus.  No matter how spectacularly you may have failed.  Now matter how frequently you may have failed.  No matter how intense the suffering of your own sin, or the suffering because others have sinned against you, let Peter’s Pentecost story encourage you.  Shame never need have the last word.  Thanks be to God!  Amen.