BEING HUMAN

My sermon today at Skelya Church, on Luke 22:31–32 and John 21:15–19: “that your faith should not fail.” Six contemplations…

One

I step into Advent for the fourth time, on the 1376th day of this war. Watching empires trade Ukraine like property, our land and our mineral resources and our people treated as merchandise because business matters more than the lives of the victims, I am confronted with a question. Is hope still reasonable? Will Christ bring justice to my nation? I do not ask this abstractly. I ask it with funerals and shelling in the background. Will this cherry night end? Is a dawn still possible?

Our family buried my brother Andrii last year. He now belongs to that cloud of witnesses among the six members of our family killed by russians, including my nephew Sashko, shot by pro-russian snipers on the Maidan in February 2014. Five more relatives are at the front as I write. So the question of whether my faith fails is not theoretical, and I carry it to the text.

“And the Lord said, ‘Simon, Simon! Indeed, Satan has asked for you, that he may sift you as wheat. But I have prayed for you, that your faith should not fail; and when you have returned to Me, strengthen your brethren’” (Luke 22:31–32, NKJV).

Jesus speaks to Peter hours before the betrayal and the crucifixion. He does not say, stay strong and everything will be fine. He says: you will break, you will deny Me, and I have already prayed for you.

Two

I remember helping my grandfather sift grain as a boy. It was rougher than I expected, the sieve shaking hard, the grain beaten and tossed, chaff flying everywhere, and what remained looked bare and small. I think of that picture now when I look at Ukraine, and at where the so-called Christian democratic world is going. Sifting is not gentle. It strips. Everything that does not belong gets shaken loose, and what remains has been through something.

Jesus does not promise Peter protection from the sifting. He promises something else: that after it, grain will remain. Naked, vulnerable, small, and real.

I sometimes imagine that a genuine faith is an untouched faith, that the faithful evangelical stands firm and unbroken, without cracks or doubts. Scripture tells a different story. The faith that lasts is not the faith that avoided suffering but the faith that went through fire and survived, even through its own failure. Not armor I hide behind, but honesty I live from.

Peter, one of the closest disciples, was vulnerable despite standing next to God in the flesh. He was still afraid. He still broke. He wept bitterly. War has stripped me bare too, and I do not pretend to have everything under control. Perhaps you recognize this, wherever you are reading. My faith is not what it was. I cannot pray as I once did. I do not feel God as I once did.

I keep reminding myself that this does not mean my faith has disappeared. It means my faith is being sifted. The chaff is flying, and the grain is still there, even when I cannot see it. God does not expect from me a faith untouched by war and loss and postponed grief. He looks for a faith that faces the darkness honestly and still holds on.

Three

“But I have prayed for you.” Notice the tense. Not I will pray if you fall. Not I will pray when you repent. I have prayed, before the breaking, before the collapse, before the failure. Christ’s prayer precedes my falling. He knows my weakness better than I know it myself, and loves me no less, and enters my brokenness in order to be present inside it rather than to erase it.

When I crossed back into Ukraine from Moldova on 25 February 2022, I knew nothing of what lay ahead. The war was two days old. Everyone I loved was still breathing. Andrii was alive. The others were alive. I did not know our family would bury six of them. I did not know what shape the following years would take. At that border crossing, grief was still abstract and loss was still a word, and I thought my faith was strong enough.

That night, Peter was convinced of his own strength: “Lord, I am ready to go with You, both to prison and to death” (Luke 22:33, NKJV). And fear had already broken him, or perhaps pride, or his inability to accept that the Messiah had to suffer. Hours later, by a charcoal fire, in front of a servant girl, he said that he did not know the man. When the rooster crowed, Christ turned and looked at him, and that look broke him completely.

How many of us have lived through something similar? I thought my faith was strong. Then came news that brought me to my knees, not in prayer but from the blow. I carry a broken heart. Broken by loss. Broken by injustice. Broken by a world that is not what it should be, and by a Christian civilization and a global evangelicalism that have not responded to this war the way they should have. Broken by my own failure to be who I wanted to be. And I still cry out: where are You, God, and why?

And Christ was already praying for me, before I fell, before I asked, before I knew I needed it. My faith holds by His intercession rather than by my strength, since He always lives to make intercession for us, as the letter to the Hebrews says. My prayer may feel weak. I may barely be holding on. Unbroken evangelicals probably do not like hearing this. But Christ prays for me, and His prayer does not weaken. God is not afraid of my brokenness. He enters it. And His prayer is a promise that what is broken will be restored, perhaps not today, and certainly in His time.

Four

“And when you have returned to Me.” He does not say if. He says when. He knows Peter will break, and He knows Peter will come back. The breaking is not the end of the story.

Between Peter’s failure and his restoration lay the darkest days in history. Friday’s cross. Saturday’s silence. For Peter this was the time when everything had ended. He watched the One he loved die. He carried the guilt of his failure. He did not know the resurrection was coming. He sat in darkness, broken and guilty and hopeless.

I usually read the Gospels knowing the ending. Peter did not know it. And I live on that Saturday, between funerals and resurrection, between pain and healing, between loss and restoration. I know God promised victory, and I do not yet see it.

After the resurrection, Christ finds Peter where everything began, by the sea, with the nets. Peter had gone back to his old life, and perhaps he thought his failure had finished everything. And there, by a charcoal fire, the same detail again, Jesus asks three times whether Peter loves Him. Three denials, three questions, and each question opens a door that had slammed shut. Jesus does not heal Peter in a neutral place. He takes him back to the fire, the fire that reminded him of his failure, because that is where the wound lives, and that is where it can heal. I am not healed by avoiding the place where I broke. I am healed when someone meets me there.

What if the Church were a place of presence rather than of answers? Where grief carries no shame. Where doubt meets no condemnation. Where those who have fallen find a hand instead of a lecture. No rush toward resolution. No everything-will-be-fine. No pressure to forgive while the killing and the raping and the torture continue. Only space to grieve, to rage, to sit in the rubble. And somewhere inside that space, quietly, without demand, a question: do you love Me?

Five

“Strengthen your brethren.” Christ does not say: when you return, rest and withdraw and heal yourself first. He gives the one who broke and stumbled and was lifted up an immediate mission to support others. Not the one who never failed. Not the one who endured without cracks. The one who passed through darkness and survived it.

Who can better support someone in darkness than a person who walked through it? Who can better understand the doubts of a crippled evangelical like me than someone who doubted? Who can better hold the grieving than someone who knows the salt taste of tears? I do not strengthen my brothers and sisters because I am strong. I strengthen them because I know my own dark weakness, and I know the One who prays for me.

My wounds do not disqualify me from ministry. They are my qualification. Healing flows from the wounds of Christ, and through my wounds and my cracks His light reaches others. The church in Ukraine is passing through fire, and for exactly that reason we can carry hope to others, through our wounds rather than despite them, and say to the global Church and to a watching world: I have been in thick darkness, I have fallen while you perhaps remained strong and unbroken, and there is a Light the darkness has not overcome.

Six

Advent meets me where Peter sat, in the silence between falling and rising, between denial and restoration, on that long silent Saturday when he did not know how the story ended. I know that place. I live in it. Vulnerable, broken, not yet whole, waiting for a dawn I cannot see.

And Advent says that this is exactly where faith begins: in honest darkness rather than in certainty. I light candles not because the night is over but because the night is not the end. God came once into a broken world, and not into a world where everything had been sorted out. He came into the cold. Into a stable. To a people under occupation. He came as a child, the most vulnerable form of human existence. He knows the darkness from inside, and from the cross. And He will come again, even if I can hardly believe it now.

While I wait, Christ does what He did for Peter. He prays for me. Before I fall, before I rise, before I know what I need, He intercedes, that my faith should not fail. This is not a command for me to be strong. It is a promise that He is strong. The grain that passes through the sifting will remain, and what is real will survive.

Waiting is not weakness. Prophets died without seeing what was promised. Simeon waited a whole lifetime and finally saw. Advent sanctifies my waiting, and it holds space for the not yet.

So I light candles, one by one, small flames that do not cancel the night but bear witness to a Light that is coming. I am wounded, and so I can carry light to others. I am broken, and Christ prays for me. I am waiting, and my waiting is neither empty nor shameful.

The Ukrainian night is long, and it is not eternal. Morning will come, and no empire will be able to trade it back into night. When you return, He said, and not if.

Peace be with you, and keep your children away from war. Our Mission has not changed. Taras D., Ukraine