Break Fast Alfresco

Sunday, April 18, 2010

Easter 3C

Jerusalem Baptist Church (Emmerton), Warsaw VA

John 21:1-19

“After these things Jesus showed himself again to the disciples by the Sea of Tiberias; and he showed himself in this way. ²Gathered there together were Simon Peter, Thomas called the Twin, Nathanael of Cana in Galilee, the sons of Zebedee, and two others of his disciples. ³Simon Peter said to them, “I am going fishing.” They said to him, “We will go with you.” They went out and got into the boat, but that night they caught nothing. ⁴Just after daybreak, Jesus stood on the beach; but the disciples did not know that it was Jesus. ⁵Jesus said to them, “Children, you have no fish, have you?” They answered him, “No.” ⁶He said to them, “Cast the net to the right side of the boat, and you will find some.” So they cast it, and now they were not able to haul it in because there were so many fish. ⁷That disciple whom Jesus loved said to Peter, “It is the Lord!” When Simon Peter heard that it was the Lord, he put on some clothes, for he was naked, and jumped into the sea. ⁸But the other disciples came in the boat, dragging the net full of fish, for they were not far from the land, only about a hundred yards off. ⁹When they had gone ashore, they saw a charcoal fire there, with fish on it, and bread. ¹⁰Jesus said to them, “Bring some of the fish that you have just caught.” ¹¹So Simon Peter went aboard and hauled the net ashore, full of large fish, a hundred fifty-three of them; and though there were so many, the net was not torn. ¹²Jesus said to them, “Come and have breakfast.” Now none of the disciples dared to ask him, “Who are you?” because they knew it was the Lord. ¹³Jesus came and took the bread and gave it to them, and did the same with the fish. ¹⁴This was now the third time that Jesus appeared to the disciples after he was raised from the dead.

¹⁵When they had finished breakfast, Jesus said to Simon Peter, “Simon son of John, do you love me more than these?” He said to him, “Yes, Lord; you know that I love you.” Jesus said to him, “Feed my lambs.” ¹⁶A second time he said to him, “Simon son of John, do you love me?” He said to him, “Yes, Lord; you know that I love you.” Jesus said to him, “Tend my sheep.” ¹⁷He said to him the third time, “Simon son of John, do you love me?” Peter felt hurt because he said to him the third time, “Do you love me?” And he said to him, “Lord, you know everything; you know that I love you.” Jesus said to him, “Feed my sheep. ¹⁸Very truly, I tell you, when you were younger, you used to fasten your own belt and to go wherever you wished. But when you grow old, you will stretch out your hands, and someone else will fasten a belt around you and take you where you do not wish to go.” ¹⁹(He said this to indicate the kind of death by which he would glorify God.) After this he said to him, “Follow me.”

So we get into the last chapter of John’s account of the Gospel, and the writer jumps from telling about the events surrounding Thomas’ doubting that Jesus had arisen to another appearance of Jesus in which Thomas is also present, but not the central figure in the retelling. 

This time, it’s Peter.  SIMON Peter.  You know, the Rock, the brash, outspoken, mercurial follower of Jesus who gave a body to the parable of the sower’s rocky soil - he consistently receives Jesus’ teachings with joy and exuberance, but as soon as he is confronted with some sort of hardship FOR that teaching, he tends to abandon it … his denial of Jesus on the night before he was crucified is only one example.  In the Acts of the Apostles we find him accepting the vision that gave him permission to eat anything – with anyone – but as soon as the folks show up and tell him that the purity laws still apply, he seems to discard the vision without too much of a fight.

What are we to do with Peter? 

Do we laugh at his humanity, chuckle at his weakness?  Shake our heads at his impetuous nature, his second-guessing of his own beliefs? 

If we do any of that, then we must realize that we are doing it to ourselves.      

Ultimately, I believe that the narratives of the Gospels purposefully present a varied portrait of the disciples for one simple reason:  each of the writers wants the folks reading or listening to the story to be able to relate to the people they are reading or hearing ABOUT.  It is one of the critical ways in which we connect to the Gospel story:  where do we fit in?  Where do I fit in?

Here they are, having experienced the passion of Jesus, witnessed his resurrection, SEEN him appear in a locked room and SHOW them the nail prints and the wound in his side, and what do they do? 

They go home.  They retreat to the familiar, to the ordinary, to the everyday routine that they’d not experienced AT ALL over the last three years.

They had heard Jesus speak, watched him heal, and confront, and cleanse, and forgive, and even raise from the dead, and they turned from that and went back to what they had always known.

In a very real way, they were modeling what we do every week.

What can we say about an existence that incorporates the worship of a living God, a risen Savior, a time of communion and fellowship with the creator of the universe, into a weekly routine? 

On the one hand, part of me would celebrate the fact that it IS part of the routine.  The fact that we are able to consistently gather and sing, read, pray, study, and hear the word of God for our lives together is a beautiful opportunity that not everyone who WISHES to in the world CAN.  On the other hand, the fact that it is part of the ‘routine’ in and of itself can be a dangerous thing. 

It is dangerous insofar as it becomes predictable.  It is dangerous in the sense that we can become immunized to the power of the Gospel IF we feel we have nothing new to learn from it – nothing different to understand from it, no new direction to explore at God’s prompting. 

The disciples – those seven that are mentioned in the passage, probably initially welcomed the chance to get BACK into a regular, familiar, KNOWN routine.  They’d been here before; they’d DONE this.  It came naturally to them.  Years of performing the same tasks meant that they hardly had to THINK about what they were doing, it was simply a matter of dropping back into that familiar boat, picking up that net, and throwing it over the side throughout the night to see what they could catch and sell at the market.  Nothing new there, nothing unknown about what to do next, they were the masters of that skill set.

The problem was, when they realized Jesus was on the shore, they ALL understood, not just Peter, that even retreating to the familiar, to the routine they’d all known before he came along and ruined them for the ordinary, that the rest of their lives were going to be marked by this radically new reality.  This fact that they had seen and spoken to the risen Jesus was not going to let them remain quiet about it.  They were going to be compelled to take that message – that Christ has risen – first INTO their lives, and then OUT OF their lives… in that they were going to be LIVING that truth out in such a way that people would wonder if they were even the same PEOPLE they knew BEFORE the crucifixion.     

It is difficult to understate the impact of the change in these disciples’ lives on the world.  Some critics would speak up and say that the only reason the church continues in existence today is because of it’s marriage to the powers – military and political structures – throughout the centuries, beginning with Emperor Constantine and continuing with any given church-state union in the intervening centuries. 

But do we really want to write off the fact that we are here today, that we are engaged in this business of working out what salvation means to the way we live our lives to some understandably questionable merging of faith and worldly power?  Can we step back from the historical baggage that we carry – and believe me, we DO carry some baggage, not ONLY within our Southern Baptist tradition but in almost any given denominational tradition – and tease out that thread of faith that runs throughout the tapestry of the work of God in the world throughout history?  That brightly colored thread that stands out from all the muted colors that bleed into the background and, while they DO make for a strong cloth, they also don’t add much to the beauty of the picture that God is weaving together with us?

Jesus’ first act when he reappeared to his disciples was to break bread with them.  In the passage this morning, he is again feeding them – broiled fish and bread cooked by the heat from the bonfire he built on the beach that morning.  They had been working all night, and had not eaten.  They had been fasting.  And Jesus called to them from the shore and told them to throw their nets on the other side of the boat. 

They were fishermen.  They’d done the work all their lives.  They understood on a gut level that what Jesus was asking them to do was nonsense.  If there hadn’t been fish on one side of the boat, it was because they weren’t biting PERIOD.  They had probably fished off both sides of the boat dozens of times throughout the night with exactly the same results each time.  Zip.  Nada.  Zilch.  Cipher.  Had it been anyone else’s idea, they would have laughed, if not cursed him for being so stupid as to suggest such a thing. 

But it wasn’t anyone else.  It was Jesus. 

And it wasn’t that he was asking them to throw the nets over the right side of the boat, even though those were the words he used. 

He was asking them to trust him.

He was asking them to be willing to do what to other fishermen – friends they’d worked with and lived beside all their lives – would seem to be utter and complete foolishness because HE was asking them to do it. And he wanted them to trust HIM with the results, not their own well-honed skills and knowledge. 

Ultimately, that invitation is the same one that Jesus extends to us everyday.  He invites us to break our fasting, to stop nibbling crumbs from his bounty of life that he has waiting for us and to start ‘tucking in’. 

The problem, if you want to think of it that way, is that, for all the exhilaration and astonishment and surprising and surpassing joy that he promises, there IS an element of risk in doing what Jesus asks.  Aside from that ‘foolishness’ that we could be accused of, there is the risk of being branded, being written off, being considered a part of the fringe rather than the mainstream.    

My question for us all here today is, looking at the Gospel story, and at the life of Jesus, when was following him ever perceived to be the norm? When was it ever mainstream to sacrificially offer yourself in the place of others?  When was routine to be in such strong communion with the Father that we would be willing to take the cup, and become the body of Christ?

Let’s pray.