(continued from above)

Remember how Jesus asks the disciples to stay awake with him while he prays? Doesn't happen in Luke. Remember how they nod off because they're tired? Not in Luke.
 
For me, the variations in this story as told by Matthew, Mark, and Luke, are not a sticking point. Goodness knows how often I change, forget, or embellish the details in some family story I'm telling my children. You know, like how that hill I walked up to get to school somehow reversed itself so I had to walk uphill to get home too? And how sometimes when I'm telling a story about something really bratty I did when I was young becomes a story about my brother instead? That's the way we are, as multiple eyewitness accounts of an accident will verify.
 
So I have no qualms whatsoever that in the books of Matthew, Mark, and Luke there are discrepancies in this story of Jesus praying in the garden/on the mountain. (John leaves this part of the story out altogether.) What I have qualms about is how stuck I get in a single version of the story and end up losing significant pieces of the story.
 
Pieces like this: According to Luke, do you know why the disciples fall asleep while Jesus prays? Because they are exhausted with grief. Exhausted with grief! That changes a few things, doesn't it?
 
I guess my point here is that we don't spend enough time immersed in the scriptures, looking into the stories, adjusting our lenses. We go with what we've heard, what we remember, what the preacher says, what we make up...This week I want you to do me a favor. Before you come to church on Sunday and listen to my sermon from Luke, take the time to read the two other accounts of this story in Matthew 26:36 -46 and Mark 14:32-42. After that, you'll find the disciples in Luke's story much more endearing.
 
Sometimes we get caught up in all the flaws of the disciples. We're quick to judge them for their lack of loyalty, their selfishness, their inability to "get it." But you know what? The very things we criticize them for are the things that make them so beautiful. They were unreliable sometimes. They talked when they should have been silent and they kept silent when they should have spoken up. They needed lots of do-overs. They needed lots of grace.
 
And they got it. Not because they earned it. Not because they always made the best decisions or behaved perfectly. But because they loved. In their imperfect, beautifully human way. Just like us. They loved, and that's what endures, even to this day.
 
Love Always and Imperfectly,