Standing in the Flow (Trinity Sunday - Year C)

A lot of pastors, and other ne’er-do-wells like theologians, don't know what to do with the Trinity.  So the passages we’re offered in the Lectionary readings for Trinity  Sunday tend to be like the one I just read*: they mention all three members of the Trinity in more or less the same breath.  Any actual information about the matter is incidental.  That's because, of course, the doctrine isn't in the Bible, a fact that allows groups that are nominally Christian, such as the various Churches of God of various places, to not “believe” in the Trinity, whatever that means.

And though our passage from Paul is nominally about suffering, it does mention the activities of each member: “we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ”—that is, we are “saved” or justified through him—and hope doesn't disappoint because “God’s love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit that has been given to us.”  We are saved through Christ and powered by (the love of) the Holy Spirit.  It’s a classic formulation of the Trinity.  And notice that it makes no mention of one in three and three in one, no mention of persons or substance, it is based on the lived experience of the early Christians.  It describes the activities of the Father, Son and Holy Spirit in the world, their interactions with us in salvation history, sometimes called oikonomia, literally “economy,” and translated sometimes as God’s “plan.”

Exciting stuff, really . . . We're made right with God through our faith in Christ, and our hope, our life, our becoming more and more like God, is powered by love, by the love of the Holy Spirit.  And we’re right there in the mix . . . it is not only through Christ but through our faith that we are saved. In a way we don't fully understand, we cooperate in our own salvation.  The oikonomia, the economy, the plan of God sent God's divine Son to become one of us, to experience all that creaturely life has to offer, and it brought the Holy Spirit, that blows where it will, strong as a gale, light and playful as a zephyr, to power our Christian endeavor.

And this is how the New Testament consistently speaks of what would become the Trinity, and if it had been left at that, it might not have become the moribund, dead-end idea that it was for over a thousand years.  Unfortunately, the great early theologians got ahold of it, in the great quest to figure out just who this Jesus Christ we worship is.  You see, there’s a problem: we are monotheists, and yet we professed to worship this Jesus fellow in addition to God, whom Jesus called Abba.  Doesn't sound very montheistic to me. And to make matters worse, in the plan of God, Jesus Christ is clearly subordinate to God’s own self, because God sent him, and the sender is always subordinate to the sent.

 Oy vey.  What's a theologian to do?  Well, what they did was develop the doctrine of the Trinity, where God subsists as three hypostases—that’s the Greek word  we rather unfortunately translate as “person”— where God subsists as three persons in a Godhead.  And in that Godhead, God the Father is of the same substance as God the Son and God the Holy Spirit, no subordination there.  But in the economy of the Trinity, in its activities in the world, the Son is still clearly subordinate to the Father. But only in the actions: in the actual theology of the Trinity, all are equal.  In fact, they are considered one God in three persons.

And as the first millennium progressed, the gap between the two ways of looking at the Trinity—the economic, dealing with its members’ actions in the world, and the immanent, dealing with its internal structure and dynamics—the gap between the two grew ever wider, until it became absolute.  The economic Trinity became subordinate itself, shoved aside in favor of the immanent (or theological), and the intra-divine life was declared impenetrable, the nature of its members and their interrelationships unknowable, and thus it became walled away in its hermeneutic shell.  And if an idea is like that, if it's completely opaque, of what interest could it possibly be?  Of what good could it possibly be?

Then along came Catherine LaCugna, who in 1991 published the book “God For Us: The Trinity and Christian Life.”  Miraculously, it didn't sink into oblivion in some academic publishing house, but it was published by Harper Collins, and with that one book, she changed the course of Christian theology.  It opened the flood-gates of Trinitarian research, and single-handedly restored the Trinity to its rightful place at the center of our faith.  She did this by restoring the Trinity to one thing, by demonstrating that the economic and immanent Trinities were really one and the same, linking its activities in the world to its intra-divine life and relationships.  Suddenly, the notion of the Trinity as a dynamic, ever-changing picture of the divine was restored, along with renewed research and thought that continues to this day.

Meanwhile, in other theological news, another notion gaining increasing traction is one realized by the Mystics thousands of years ago: God is nothing.  Zip.  Nada.  But hold your cards and letters and pitchforks.  I didn't say God doesn't exist, but that God’s not a thing, as in God’s “no-thing” or nothing.  Since the time of Augustine, 1500 years ago, the notion that God is a substance has held sway.  Not that God is matter, but that God is some-thing nevertheless.  Further, though God indeed has substance, it ain’t nothing like what you and I have.

But increasingly, it looks like good ol’ First John had it right, lo these many years ago: God is love, and though it's hard to say exactly what love is, one thing it's not is substance.  You can't pick it up and bounce it off the wall, or give it out like a sandwich, or steal it like a car.  And the New Testament bears this out.  Although it does talk about love as a noun—the familiar agape, of course—it uses it as the verb agapaow more than three times as much.  In the New Testament, love is first and foremost an action verb, and to say that God is love is to say that God is action, God is activity.

But what kind of activity is God?  What constitutes this “love?”  Well, let's look at it in our own, earthly life, specifically in a relationship between two individuals.  Each partner typically has to adjust his or her life for the other, they have to give up some of their independence, they have to let their partner know where they are all the time, for Pete’s sake, what time they’re going to be home, and etc.  You have to give up some of your favorite foods for the sake of meals together, compromise on where you want to live, what to watch on TV, and these seem trivial, and perhaps they are, but the point is, love is giving up, surrendering things that we consider ours for the sake of the other or the relationship.

How does it go?  God so loved the world that God gave his only begotten son . . . note that little old verb “gave,” as in “to give.”  God gave of God’s own self, God's own flesh and blood or, as Paul put it, “emptied himself, taking the form of a slave, being born in human likeness.”  And the Gospels show that the incarnate Christ, Jesus of Nazareth, demonstrated this self-emptying, this surrender of part of himself in every practically every interactions know of: every healing, every demonstration of the kingdom, every refusal to retaliate, to fight his way enemies, leading up, of course, to the ultimate surrender, giving up of his life.  (In one story, he actually felt part of himself –his power—leaving as he healed the hemorrhaging woman.)

So.  We know what God is, God is love, and like Forrest Gump, we know what love is—at least in the context of the divine—it's emptying, or surrender, of self.  And so taking out the middle-man—the word love—we can say that God is self-emptying surrender.  God is “no thing”—not a thing, nothing—and is instead an activity, an action, a movement, and that movement is self-emptying, or the surrender of self.

So Catherine LaCugna—remember her?—seems onto something when she says the Trinity is relationship in action and motion.  And that action, it seems, is self-emptying surrender.  In other words, love.  And so a profitable image of the Trinity is a big circle dance, where self-emptying love is poured like life-giving water between the members.  The Father empties himself into the Son, who empties himself into the Spirit, who empties herself into the Father, and round and round, love flowing between the members, who are not substance but love themselves, round and round through all eternity, without beginning or end.

But wait just a cotton-picking minute.  How is that any less hermetically sealed than the static, person-based classical doctrine?  Where are we in the equation, what difference does this make for us?  Ah . . . that’s where the passage from John from a couple of weeks ago comes in.  Remember?  It was Jesus’ final prayer, in the upper room just before he was arrested, tried and executed.  And we noticed that it was in large part about union with each other and union with God.  Jesus prayed to his Father that his followers be one in the same way he and the Father are one, and as we have seen, the father and son, together with the Holy Spirit, stand in eternal, self-emptying relationship with one another. Further, because Jesus is in us and we are in him (I in you and you in me, he tells us), it looks like we stand right in the middle of that flow, receiving—and passing on—the self-emptying flow.  As creatures of a self-giving God, who are adopted as Children of God through Christ the Son, we are right there in the midst of it all, we are standing in the flow.

Cynthia Bourgeault has called the Trinity a “mandala of love in motion” and I, who can be as literal as the next person, said wait a minute: a mandala has four sides, and the Trinity only three, but then it struck me: we, along with the rest of creation, are the fourth side.  It's like Andre Rublev’s famous painting of the Trinity, which has a perspective that draws you in, and at one time had a mirror affixed to the canvas just where we would be.  We are part of the Trinitarian structure of reality, we are standing in the flow.

Richard Rohr says that this is the point of the incarnation, that we are invited into the great relational flow, into the great cosmic dance that is the Trinity-infused universe.  He says that the nature of sin is when we block the flow, when we refuse that mutuality, that relationality. How do we know when we’re blocking the flow?  Here’s what he says: “Whenever you find yourself being self-preservative, holding in, resenting, blaming, accusing, or fearing” you're blocking the flow.  You can actually feel it as a hoarding, a drawing-in energy, sometimes as a clenching of the gut.  When that happens, you can release it, you can surrender it, you can let it go.  And, of course, that is exactly the movement, the surrendering, the self-emptying.  When we let go of the self-preservation, the blaming, the resentment, we are restarting the flow within us, and fully taking our place in the great, Trinitarian dance.  And I say these things in the name of the God who creates us, the God who redeems us, and the God who teaches to pray with sighs too deep for words.  Amen.

*Romans 5:1 - 5

Spirit Movings (Pentecost 2016)

Spirit is a very special word, in the multiple languages of the church, anyway  . . . in Hebrew, it’s Ruach . . . that acccch  on the end is a consonant found only in the semitic languages, and it gives a breathy, almost whispery sound to the word . . . it’s a word that’s onomatopoeic . . . it sounds like what it means, and what it means is breath, it means wind it means spirit . . . Can it be a coincidence that it’s found in the very first scene of the very first book in Scripture?  “In the beginning when God created the heavens and the earth, the earth was a formless void and darkness covered the face of the deep, while a wind, while a spirit, while a ruach from God swept over the face of the waters.”

And what does this spirit do?  What does this breath make?  Order out of the deep, out of the roiling, rolling anarchy that was there before creation . . . and without that order, without the particles being organized in regular and useful configurations we call matter, humankind cannot exist, it cannot live, it cannot sustain itself . . . and so this spirit that swept across the waters, across that ancient metaphor of unrest, creates the very stuff of our being, the very order that keeps us alive . . .

And there’s another face to the metaphor . . . ruach means breath, and breath means respiration—res-pir-ation, itself made of spirit—the stuff of life . . . all of life, plants and animals, takes in oxygen and through a kind of combustion, a kind of fire, a kind of burning that produces heat, life motive force, it's motivated.  This force is nothing less than stored energy, in the form of ordered matter, that life needs to power itself, that it needs to function . . . and I hope you’re beginning to get the picture, I hope you are beginning to understand the depth of our spirit-metaphor, and why it is such a rich source of poetic force in the Judeo-Christian tradition.  Breath, spirit, ruach is the stuff of life’s existence, the power that makes us go . . .

And although it’s more romantic in Hebrew, more primitive and elemental, in Greek it’s no less meaningful . . . in Greek it’s pneuma, from whence we get the term pneumatic, of course, air-powered, air-filled, filled with the breath of God . . . and so the apostles gathered together on that first Pentecost encounter living metaphor, actualized experience of ruach, of pneumatic force rushing down upon them, an exquisite embodiment of what was happening to them . . .

Of course, they weren’t gathered there by accident . . . the apostles were gathered together for the Jewish festival of Shauvot, one of the three great pilgrimage festivals of the Hebrew people, traditionally calculated as fifty days (thus the “pente” in Pentecost) from Passover.  And although it originated as a festival marking the beginning of harvest—of the first fruits of the harvest—it had gradually, over the centuries, come to commemorate the founding of the Jewish people in the giving of the Torah, the law, the force that bound them together as a nation and a people.  And can you see where we’re going with this?  Can you see where we’re headed?  On Pentecost, on Shauvot, on the very day the Hebrew people celebrate their formation as the people of God, the spirit of God, the breath of the Lord, comes down upon the apostles, like the rush of a violent wind, and fills the entire house where they were sitting.

And every time I see read this image, every time picture this in-rushing of the respirative ruach of God, I think of a tornado, and all of those reports of people who have survived them . . . what did it sound like?  They are asked, and invariably what they say is that is sounded like a rushing wind, like a freight train . . . and so the tornado of the Lord, the freight train of the holy spirit, the breath that gives us life as a people, came barreling down upon them, rattling the windows, shaking the eaves, raising the roof . . . but unlike a tornado, unlike some F5 monster from the plains of Texas or the depths of the Mississippi Piney Woods, it is not destructive, but creative, and it entered them, it powered them, it gave them respiratory life . . . it made them a people.

On the very same day that the Hebrew nation celebrates their people-hood, their coming together as a nation of the children of God, the apostles experience their own formation, and so . . . a new people is born, a new identity is forged . . . on Pentecost we celebrate the formation of the church and—mark this well—it is all dependent upon that rushing wind, that freight-train ruach, the holy spirit promised by Christ.  Fifteen hundred years later, Calvin would use an apt metaphor about the spirit, he would say that it binds us to Christ—just as the Law does for the Jewish people, just as respiration does for the cells of the living universe—it binds us to Christ and thereby to each other.  Without the breath we would not be bound together as the body of Christ.

The self-same breath of God, that created order out of primordial disorder, that self-same breath creates the order that is the church.  And that image has fed a stunningly deep well of meaning over the years . . . in Paul’s vision of the church as Christ’s body, it is the breath of God that animates, that in-spires, in-breathes that body . . . but that’s not the first bodily image of a people . . . remember those old dry bones of Ezekiel?  “I will cause breath, ruach, to enter them,” says the lord, “I will cause ruach to infuse them, to dwell within them . . . Come from the four winds, the four ruachs, and breathe on them, that they might live” . . . and the ruach comes into them, and they live and they stand on their feet, a vast multitude, a coherent people of God.

But there’s another metaphor at work here, as well, and it’s dancing around the Apostles there in the room where they gather . . . “Divided tongues, as of fire, appeared among them,” Luke says, “and a tongue rested on each of them.”  And this is where we get that red that’s in our banner and paraments, and in the stole hanging around my neck, and the image is of spirit as a fire that burns within us, that warms our hearts, that powers us like the flames of a coal-fired boiler.

But there’s another, less exciting figure of speech—no pun intended—here . . . tongue of course has a double meaning, we say “tongues of flame” to indicate the flickering, leaping blaze, but tongue has a more mundane connotation, as in a mouth-part, and indeed the next line indicates that that double meaning is in Luke’s mind as well “a tongue rested on each of them,” he says, and suddenly “all were filled with the holy spirit and began to speak in other languages, as the Spirit gave them ability.”  And the word our NRSV translates as languages is the same in Greek—glossais—as for tongue, so a more literal translation is “divided tongues appeared among them . . . and they began to speak in other tongues, as the spirit gave them ability.” And so this second image, of divided tongues, of divided languages is a quite graphic metaphor of the human tongue, split into multiple languages . . .

And so the coming of the Spirit, here in Acts at least (the Gospel of John has other ideas, of course), this coming of the Spirit revolves around two images, two movements, if you will: one a gale-force wind, strong and loud, which creates order from chaos, it binds us to one another, as the body of Christ . . . but what good is that binding if we cannot understand one another, if we cannot work together because we are so different, because we speak different languages, literally as well as metaphorically?  And so the second spirit move, the multiple tongues, the multiplicity of voices within the body . . . divided tongues, each division speaking a different language, a different dialect of the body of Christ.

But note:  it doesn’t say they all began to speak the same language!  It doesn’t say that everybody started speaking Greek or Aramaic or Hebrew, it doesn’t say they all began playing the same hymns, using the same translation of the scripture . . . all began to speak in other languages, ones they didn’t know, ones they weren’t comfortable with . . . and did they then go their separate ways?  Did those who spoke Aramaic go over here, Greek over there?  Did those who sang 5^th-Century lyre-chants go across town while the ones who played on tambourines stayed put?  No . . . they gathered together and they worshiped together, they respected the diversity and Luke tells us they were astonished at it.

I think there’s a lesson for our situation today . . . when an organization—a corporation, a denomination, a church—is in decline, the human inclination is to circle the wagons, to turn inward, to cling to familiar ways, comfortable ways . . . but brothers and sisters, that’s not the way the strongest churches are, and that’s not the way shown to us by the Spirit.  The fact of the matter is, diversity breeds strength, not weakness . . . the strongest organizations are those with the most diverse interests, for they are the ones that can stand the vagaries of changing context, changing fashion, changing times.  And when those divided tongues—they were divided, people, they had components that were different from one another—danced around the apostles’ heads, and wove in and out of their company, that’s when they were the strongest, that’s when they were the most resilient, that’s when they were the most alive.

But you say “Preacher”—I get called that a lot, you know—you say “Preacher, what’s to keep us from fightin’ amongst ourselves over the diversity?  What’s to keep us from shakin’ apart over what kind communion to do—intinction or in-the-pews?—or where to spend that ten thousand dollars extra we may have—on paint for the fellowship hall or a mission trip for the youth—or how often to use guitars in the service.  What’s to keep us from fighting like banshees over these and other questions?

Ah . . . that’s where the breath comes in . . . that’s where that creative force, that wind like a freight train that binds us together in Christ.  The spirit we celebrate is what creates order out of chaos, that sustains that order, that nourishes it and maintains it . . . it’s the infrastructure that maintains the house, the glue that ties us together.  The very spirit that brings on the diversity, that lights us up with with those divided tongues, is the same spirit that can hold us together as a body.  We just have to let it.  Amen.

Mystic Sweet Communion (John 17:20 - 26)

Our passage is from the last prayer of Jesus before his arrest; it's also the last part of what scholars call the Farewell Discourse, that great teaching at his final Passover, there in the fire-lit upper room.  And make no mistake: our passage is a teaching, even though at the same time a prayer.  Jesus apparently didn't have any teachers who told him not to preach in a prayer, like I did in seminary.  If he did, he ignored it, as I occasionally do as well.  Rules, sometimes, are meant to be broken.

The entire discourse, including the prayer, has the sense of the final teachings of someone who knows he’s going away, and would never see his followers again.  Indeed, Jesus knows that is the case, he knows he's heading shortly to his death on a cross, he knew it before they sat down at dinner, before he washed the disciples’ feet, before good old, literal Peter vehemently refused, and then just as vehemently recanted when he learned you couldn't get into the kingdom without it, saying “well if that's the case, wash my hands and head as well.”

Jesus knew it was his last supper before he handed Judas the bread, before he explained that it was all over but the shouting, that he had been glorified, though only he seemed to know exactly what he meant by “glorified,” that it wasn't in any way shape or form what society thinks of as “glory.”  And because he knows what is coming next, his last words take on additional significance, additional weight, as last words usually do.  And that final teaching is all about “being one.”  In this, the final section of his final prayer in his final sermon, he prays to God that his followers may be one.

In the first part of the prayer, he asks for protection for the ones that God has given him, I.e., the twelve disciples.  Minus, of course, Judas, who has slunk off to do the deed, and whom Jesus calls “the son of destruction,” though our translation renders it, inexplicably, “the one destined to be lost.”  Jesus asks for God, whom he calls Father, to take care of them, that their joy in him would be complete, and that God would “sanctify them in the truth.”

In our part of the prayer, he shifts his focus from the twelve to those who would come after.  “I ask,” he says, “not only on behalf of these, but also on behalf of those who will believe in me through their word,” through the original disciples’ preaching of the Gospel.  And he asks “that they may all be one.”  Much of the rest of the prayer is elaboration on this idea: as you are in me, he says to God the Father, and I am in you, may they also be in us . . . He tells God the Father that the glory given to him, he has given to his followers, so that they may be one, just as he and the Father are one, Jesus in them and the Father in Jesus, that they may become completely one . . .

And the placement of this request at the end of Jesus’ earthly life gives it urgency, and its theme, that Christians be one, has resonated with fractious congregations, theologians and church leaders almost from the beginning.  In the fourth century, John Chrysostom, Bishop of Constantinople, paraphrased this passage, saying if disciples would but keep the peace among themselves that they had learned from him, the people around them “would know the teacher by his disciples.”  He went on to suggest that their quarrelsomeness would cause others to deny that they are followers of a God of peace and not believe that Jesus has been sent from God.

Modern interpreters have suggested that the prayer for oneness has the same urgency and application today that it had 20 centuries ago.  They are no doubt thinking of the doctrinal squabbling and controversies over marriage and ordination standards, the authority of scriptures, and the sufficiency versus the necessity of Christ that have divided congregations and denominations for many  years.  They pray, like Jesus did, for God to make us one, just as Jesus and the Father are one.

And it's when I read that last qualifier that I begin to question the standard interpretation of this prayer as a call for unity among believers, as a fervent desire that, as Rodney King might have put it, we all just get along.  Don't get me wrong: I believe we are called to do that, I believe we are called to share in the peace of Christ, to work together in spite of our differences, that the old tension of purity versus unity must be weighted heavily toward the unity.

But through this prayer, we are called to be one just as Jesus and the Father are one, and so we have a model of what this oneness is to be like: it's to be like that between the Father and the Son (forgive the patriarchal language . . . I’m speaking of the formal relationships within the Trinity).  And that oneness goes far beyond just getting along, or working together for the Kingdom of God: it is an absolute oneness, a mutual indwelling, a non-dualistic wholeness where the Son is not the Father and not not the Father at the same time.  In other words, if we are to be one as Christ and the Father are one, it is not just unity we are talking about, not just getting along despite our differences, but union, one with another, as Christ and the Father.

Jesus says “As you, Father, are in me and I am in you, may they also be in us . . . "  And I am reminded of that other place in John, near the beginning of the Farewell Discourse, as a matter of fact, where the disciples—minus Judas—are told “you will know that I am in my Father, and you in me, and I in you.”  And this mutual indwelling is a characteristic theme of John.  A bit later in the discourse, in the metaphor of the vines, Jesus tells us to abide in him as he abides in us, and that those who abide in him and he in them bear much fruit, and further, the Spirit, the Advocate, will abide in them as well.

And here in our passage, God the father is entreated to make us one—you and me, John and Bob, Betty and Pam—just as are God the Father and God the Son.  And so—unless the Father somehow refused the prayer, saying “Sorry Son, I don't think so”—I suspect we are one in the same way that they are, whether we know it or not, indeed, whether we like it or not.

In a couple of weeks, when Trinity Sunday rolls around, we’ll explore some of the ramifications of this—if we are in Christ, Christ is in us, and we are one with each other, do we not all stand directly in the Trinitarian flow?—though we’ll explore some of these issues then, what about the remarkable conclusion that we are one with each other as are God the Father and Son?  That each one of us both is each one of us and is not each one of us at the same time?

Well, mystics would say that it only seems weird because the phrase “each one of us” is inapplicable: there is no such thing as “each one of us.”  Oh, there is a thing we think of as an “each,” as an individual, but that’s what Thomas Merton called the “false self,” though the term “lesser self” is more accurate.  Jesus said we must die to this lesser self, this idea that our differences in hair color, gender, income, achievements, weight, mortgages, even our DNA, defines who we are, is our true identity.  Our true identity lies in our divine, innermost quality of aliveness, where what is us is intertwined inextricably with what is divine.

It is there—if it can be said that there is a “there”—that Jesus abides in us, in the full, intimate sense of “abiding.”  And because divinity is at the core of each of us, there is no individual in the truest sense, no “I” and “thou,” we are all one—in the most literal sense—in Christ Jesus.

And though Christian unity should flow from death to the lesser self, and the divine union at our core, what I’d like to leave you with is something else that flows from it as well.  James Finley—trauma therapist, theologian, and one-time student of Thomas Merton—puts it like this: our dying to our lesser self reveals to us, makes it undeniable that in even our apparent brokenness, we are invincibly precious in our being.  Amen.

A Tale of Two Healings (John 5:1 - 18)

The lectionary, as you know, is a cycle of appointed scripture readings followed by much of the Christian world.  It is a wonderful thing.  No … really!  It offers four passages a week over a three-year cycle, and helps keep preachers honest.  It helps keep us from choosing our own little favorite corner of the scriptures and staying there Sunday after Sunday, world without end, amen.  It makes us preach passages we may not want to preach, that make us—or others—uncomfortable, or are just downright boring.  But the Lord giveth and the Lord taketh away, and sometimes the lectionary does us a little bit wrong, and this is such a time.  The lectionary passage was verses one through nine, and if you read only that, we see just another miracle account, of a kind that’s repeated over and over in the gospels.  Ok, ok, we know Jesus performed miracles, I’m always tempted to say, so what else is new?

It’s only when we go beyond the bounds of the lectionary, on either side of verses one through nine, that we begin to see the larger picture, where this fits in with what John—and God!—are trying to teach us.  So I read verses nine through eighteen, but in the interests of not reading all day skipped the passage before, as it is equally important.

  That’s because there are actually two back-to-back healings, this one and the one in the passage just before it, and as you know, it’s common for the gospels to place stories back-to-back, that create new meaning by their placement.  Thus, we should ask the question: what does the preceding healing story tell us about this one?

Well . . . the first one is about the royal official who, when he heard Jesus was in the vicinity, goes and begs him to heal his son.  Jesus, who especially in John is leery about belief based on viewing miracles—says to him: “Unless you see signs and wonders you will not believe."  But the man persists: “Sir,” he says, “come down before my little boy dies.”  So Jesus says: “Go; your son will live.”  And when the man’s slaves meet him on the way home, they tell him that the boy recovered, just at the hour Jesus said it.  And as a result, he believes, along with his whole family, thus making what Jesus predicted come true.  He saw signs and wonders, and believed.

Contrast that with the present story:  Jesus comes up to Jerusalem at festival time, and for some reason comes to the Sheep Gate, where there’s this pool, surrounded by porticoes, full of invalids.  John says they were blind, lame and paralyzed.  Now, you might notice that verse four is missing; most scholars think it was a later inclusion, added by some helpful scribe.  The best Greek manuscripts don’t have it, but it does provide more information:  seems that an angel would come down and stir up the water.  Whoever first stepped into the pool would thus be healed.  And this guy had been there 38 years—just two short of a long time—because every time the waters were stirred, he’d been beaten to the punch.

And note that unlike the royal official, this guy doesn’t beg, or  even ask.  As a matter of fact, he seems downright diffident about it.  When Jesus asks him “do you want to be healed,” he doesn’t say yes, he just launches into the story of how he has no one to put him in the pool and how someone else gets there first.  But even so, even if the man doesn’t say he wants it, he heals him anyway.  “Get up,” he says, “pick up your sleeping-mat and walk around.”  And he does, and John makes sure we know it is on the Sabbath.

And so we have two contrasting miracle stories, two tales of grace being dispensed by Jesus in the name of God.  In one, the recipient begs for the healing, begs for the grace, and in the other, the recipient doesn’t ask for it, doesn’t beg, but is healed anyway.  And to further the distinction, John tells us that the healing made the first guy—and his whole family—believe.  But he doesn’t say that about the second guy, just that the healing occurred.  And that it was on the Sabbath.

So here we have two examples of grace being bestowed: one after being asked, and another where the recipient doesn’t ask for it.  Not only doesn’t he ask for it, he gives no indication he knows know who Jesus is.  What's more, he doesn’t even show any gratitude.  Just the opposite, in fact: when the Jewish authorities accuse him of working on the Sabbath by carrying his pallet, the man blames Jesus, saying “the man who did this said I could do it, he said I could walk around, carrying my mat.”  He passes the buck, just like Adam, who when God asked who it was who disobeyed, passed the buck to Eve, who did it again, saying “the serpent made me do it.”

And what’s worse, after he runs into Jesus again, and finds out who it was who healed him, he goes running back to the religious authorities, telling them who it was.  And because of that, because of this little ingrate telling on Jesus, the authorities begin to persecute Jesus, because he had healed on the Sabbath.

And so we have another tale of undeserved favor, of un-asked for grace.  Nobody deserves forgiveness, nobody can work for God’s grace.  In fact, the guy by the pool not only doesn’t ask for it, but is profoundly ungrateful about it, the little weasel.  He behaves rather poorly, and yet still gets the goodies.  Kind of reminds me of some of those Old Testament guys, who do all kinds of rotten things, and are still blessed. Like Abraham, who gives up his own wife to another man—twice!—save his own skin.  And he still gets to be the father of a great people.

Or Jacob the trickster, who scams his poor blind father into giving him his blessing, even though it belonged to his older brother Esau.  Who he’d already taken advantage of by making him give up his birthright for a measly bowl of stew. And yet, God gives him wives and slaves and flocks and twelve sons, who go on to found a great nation.  God does indeed give grace to the strangest people, people whom the world would lock up in jail rather than award one, thin dime.  And of course, that’s the nature of God’s grace, the scandal of it: none of us deserve it, none of us are worthy of it, we don’t even have to ask for it.  It is God’s gift to us, unconditional, un-looked for, undeserved.

And yet … just preceding today’s story is the one about the royal official, who begged him, pleaded with him, traveled to meet him, and when it works, when Jesus heals his little boy, is so grateful as to believe, taking his whole household with him.  And how inconsiderate can one god be?  How whimsical, how out-of-left-field, how unpredictable that is.  It should be one way or another, don’t you think?  Reliable, steady, decently, even, and in good order.  How can we tell what’s what?  How can we rely on things to be the same?  How can we put God in our little theological boxes if God insists on doing things one way one time, and another way the next.  How inconsiderate of God, how downright inconsistent.

But you know what they say: consistency is the hobgoblin of small minds, and in comparison to God’s, if God can be said to have a mind, ours are pretty small.  But we persist in trying to pin God down, trying to tame the divine, trying to make it conform to our ideas of what’s fair and what is not, our ideas of what is just and what is not.  It’s what Paul might label a stumbling block—in Greek a scandal—about the gospel.  He might call it, in fact, a stumbling block to the Jews and foolishness to the Greeks.

Esther de Waal, in Living with Contradiction, her marvelous little book on Benedictine spirituality, sees our lives as full of paradoxes like the one that informs our scriptures.  God’s grace, God’s largesse, comes both to those who ask for it, and those who do not.  It comes to those who work for it as well as those who do not.  It comes to those who are grateful for it, but in the end, to those who are not.  And for de Waal, it is our faith that enables us to live with these contradictions, these tensions, in ourselves, the world around us, and of course in our relationship with the divine.  She quotes a passage from Colossians we sometimes use as an affirmation of faith: “[Christ] is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn of all creation; for in him all things in heaven and on earth were created . . . all things have been created through him and for him.  He himself is before all things, and in him all things hold together.”

Christ is the glue in the middle, the paste that holds us together, in all our messiness, all our brokenness, all our contradictions.  Christ is the ground of our being, the solid middle of our hollow shell.  Christ holds the universe together, and only in him is paradox stable.  Only through him do we have life.  Amen.

Commandment and Tableau (John 13:31 - 35; Acts 11:1 - 18)

This morning, in the passage from John we read, we jump back in time, to before the crucifixion, before the weeping and wailing, before the disciples disappeared on Calvary like so much Hebrew smoke . . . they’re gathered in an upper room, lamp-light low, digesting their food, maybe picking a bit of it out of their teeth, and suddenly Jesus says “one of you will betray me . . .” and after good, old, impulsive Peter gets the disciple whom Jesus loved to ask who is going to do it—maybe he was tired of getting rebuked, of being made an object lesson—after the disciple whom Jesus loved popped the question, he says “the one to whom I give this piece of bread when I have dipped it in the dish.” And he dips the bread in the dish, hands it to Judas Iscariot, who practically knocks over the table getting out of there.

And that’s where today’s passage begins, right after he leaves.  And as usual in the gospels, what comes before any given passage colors its interpretation—or at least it should—and this is no exception.  And so what we have here is the aftermath of Judas’ betrayal—or at least of Judas’ dramatic exit to do the deed, and the first thing Jesus says is “Now the Son of Man has been glorified, and God has been glorified in him.”  Notice the past tense: when Judas got up from that table, after John says Satan came into him, the die was cast.  Things were set in motion, it was all over but the shoutin’.  Now the Son of Man has been glorified—and by “glorified” he means crucified, hung up to die on a tree—now the Son of Man has been crucified, and God has been crucified in him.

Oops … did I say “God has been crucified?”  Well … yes.  It was God in Christ who was murdered, who was killed … if as the doctrine of the Trinity says the work of the father is the work of the son is the work of the Holy Spirit—it was indeed God who was crucified there with the Son . . .

Anyway, Jesus has been glorified, God has been glorified, and not a soul around the table knows what he is talking about.  But he plows right ahead anyway, they’ll understand some day, and he tells them “Little children:  I am with you only a little longer, and you will look for me, but you will not find me, because where I go, you cannot come.”  And then he launches into one of the most famous sayings in the bible: “I give you a new commandment, that you love one another. Just as I have loved you, you also should love one another.”  And it is almost as if one causes the other, as if Judas’ leaving prompted the new commandment . . .you shall love one another as I have loved you. And how has Jesus loved them?  What is the exemplar of that love?  Well, it is seen in the fact that the Son of Man has been glorified.

How is it that Christ has loved them?  By dying for them, by being spiked to that Golgotha tree.  And Jesus commands us to love one another the very same way: and that is that we lay down our lives one for another.  And in fact, he says, that will be the mark of my disciples: that they show this love for one another.  I wonder how often we think about that when we sing that song . . . they’ll know we are Christians by our love, by our love, yes they’ll know we are Christians by our love . . .

But if the song doesn’t quite do justice to the extent of that love, it also doesn’t quite cut it in another way: the song defines the boundaries of that love very broadly.  Or rather, it doesn’t give any.  It just says they’ll know we are Christians by our love … period.  No qualifiers. But in this passage, Jesus defines it as “love for one another,” for other disciples.  This is not quite the broad mandate it seems:  Jesus’ mandate is for Christians to love one another, to be “glorified,” to lay down their lives for one another, not necessarily for anyone else.  In this passage, Jesus lays down a community law, a rule for being a Christian family, for being—as Paul would put it—the body of Christ.  Christians are to be a body bound together by love.

Saint Benedict of Nursia knew this.  He spent a whole lot of time as abbot at a monastery in Subiaco that had, shall we say, a small problem with this concept of loving one another.  He’d lived a solitary few years in a cave in the cliff just below that monastery, and he’d gotten to know the monks, and they’d gotten to know him—I guess maybe they borrowed sugar from each other or something—and the monks had come to believe he was a stand up guy, so when their Abbot passed away they asked Benedict to take his place.  And he did.  He became their leader, but it wasn’t long before he discovered that they didn’t exactly live the love command, and what might have clued him in was the fact that they tried to poison him.  Maybe their copy of John didn’t have that part, or maybe they just got it backwards, and were trying to make Benedict give up his life for theirs, but the fact was they tried to kill him.

Now, I don’t know for sure, but this seems to have had an effect upon Benedict, so much so that he began thinking about what it meant to live in community, what it meant to love one another as Christ loves us, and eventually—after having founded and led thirteen monasteries—he began to write his rulebook on how to live in Christian community, and it was so well-thought-out, so balanced, that eventually the majority of monastic orders adopted it, whether they called themselves “Benedictine” or not.

And in the prologue to that Rule, he describes the monastic life as running “the way of God's commandments with expanded hearts and unspeakable sweetness of love,” and the first and second “instruments of good works,” the bases for doing the work of God, are loving the Lord God “with the whole heart, the whole soul, the whole strength... and then, one's neighbor as one's self.”

But the foundation of the Rule, and thus the foundation of monastic life, is not love, but rather obedience … obedience to God’s commands.  The very first sentence of the Rule goes like this: “Listen, O my child, to the precepts of thy master, and incline the ear of thy heart, and cheerfully receive and faithfully execute the admonitions of thy loving Father . . .”  All the commandments in the world, whether they be new commands or old, don’t amount to a hill of beans if they are not followed, if they go in one ear and out the other.  Listen, Benedict says, don’t just hear the words of the master, but truly listen, with your whole heart, with your whole self . . . he uses intense imagery, designed to catch hold of the reader, to make her sit up and take heed: incline the ear of your heart.  He knew—as did the ancients and those who've been on my current Adult Ed class—that the heart is an organ of perception, and what he is saying is listen with your whole self, your body, mind and heart.  Lean your whole being, your entire psyche, into the precepts of God.

And Benedictine monks spend a lot of time listening to the commands of God … their day is balanced between work, prayer and study . . . and the study is intense meditation upon the Word—what we call lectio divina, divine reading—and as they immerse themselves in God’s word for hours each day, they surely do incline themselves toward God’s will, they lean into it and reorient themselves to God’s precepts and will like a plant bends itself to grow into the sunlight.

Well.  This sermon certainly has bent itself to go in a direction I hadn’t planned … I thought I’d talk about the love Jesus prescribes in this passage of John, circumscribed by the bounds of community, and then how it is expanded first by Jesus himself—love thy neighbor as thyself—and then by God in the tableau presented to Peter in the passage from Acts that Jim read: all things are clean and, thus all people as well.  All people are to be loved, all our neighbors.  It started out being an ebony and ivory, we are the world kind of thing, and it ended up as … what?  A treatise on obedience?  On listening for God’s word?

Sometimes it happens like that . . . sometimes the Spirit—or at least I hope that’s who it is—leads us to where we least expect.  And the upshot of this leading, I think, is the thought that all the scripture passages I and our liturgists stand up here and read week after week, and all the interpretations I might give, however cogent and to the point, will do no good if we—and I include myself here intentionally, you’d be surprised how easy it is to not really listen to a passage you’re preaching on—they will do no good if we don’t really listen to God’s word, if we do not incline our hearts and minds and souls to it.  The word of God does no good if we don’t hear it in the fundamental deep sense Benedict is talking about, and then as he puts it, faithfully execute it.  If we do not hear and do God’s word, how are we a community of God?  How are we different from anyone else?

Over the past few years, we’ve been engaged in such a listening activity, such a discernment task … we’ve been listening to God’s will, trying to figure out what it meant for us.  One of the things we've felt called to do is reorganize so as to more efficiently operate as a church, and as our Transformation 2.0 process winds down, we are talking with community leaders about increasing our involvement with local issues.

But with all this comes a particular nervousness, a lot of tension as we try to come to grips with change that is happening.  People worry about the future, and the uncertainty can combine with the nervousness to blunt the mission of God.  But through it all, as the song says, they will know we are Christians by our love, and we’re not just asked to love one another, to let love overcome our fear, our tensions, our nervousness, but commanded to do so. We are commanded in today’s passage to love one another as Jesus loved us.

But these commandments, embodied in our Word from God—who is Jesus the Christ—do no good if we do not listen to them with the ears of our hearts and then execute them.  They do us no good—and they are given to us for our own good—unless we obey.  I say these things in the name of God the one who Creates us anew, every day, and God the one who redeems us, and God the one who comforts us and teaches how to pray, Amen.

The Story of Gazelle (Acts 9:36 - 43)

Acts was written by the author we know as Luke, and it was written as a sequel or a companion-volume to his Gospel. It relates the early history of the church, and in the first half, centers on Peter, but describes the witness of Phillip and Stephen's martyrdom as well. It's as if to say “look at the faithful witnesses, look at how the gospel spread, by many disciples of our Lord Jesus.” The second half of the book focuses on Paul, beginning with his first missionary journey in Chapter 13. But in our passage, Peter is once again front and center.

Last week, we saw Peter's commission on the beach, by the fire, as Jesus said “feed my sheep,” emphatically, powerfully and without qualification.  We noted that it was a reinstatement of sorts for Peter, after his denial and abandonment of Jesus at the hour of his greatest torment. There in John, Jesus told him to take over doing his work – not exclusively, not as the head of the church, but as a tender, a shepherd, a servant. Peter was to do the work of the Lord, the work of his master, feeding his sheep.

In today's passage, we see Peter going about this business of the Lord, and it's introduced by a passage that's not officially in the lectionary, but provides the context nonetheless. Verse 32 says “Now as Peter went here and there among all the believers, he came down also to the saints living in Lydda.” That's the impression Luke was trying to give -- Peter going here and there, to and fro, back and forth, moving from believer to believer, doing the Lord's work, feeding the Lord's sheep. And in Lydda, Peter heals a paralytic, one Aeneas, who Luke says had been bed-ridden for eight years.

And you might just recognize that name if you've ever read Virgil – it's the name of the central character in his epic poem, the Aeneid. The poem was written in about 20 B.C., and by Peter's time – and Luke's – it was a beloved and widely read classic. And so you've gotta wonder at the name Aeneas for this guy – at the least, he was undoubtedly Gentile. At the most, the name is symbolic, in a literary sense, and it looks forward to Chapter 10, right after our story, when Peter receives a vision and converts Cornelius, the first acknowledged Gentile Christian in Acts.

And so our passage is nestled in this context, a context of Peter's awakening to the fact that the Gospel is for everyone, not just the Jews, and in form it's a straightforward miracle story. It begins by introducing Tabitha, which means “gazelle” in Aramaic. (In Greek, gazelle is Dorcas, and thus the two names.) Tabitha is from Joppa, which is west of Jerusalem near Lydda, where Peter had just finished curing Aeneas. And what's remarkable about it is that she is called a “disciple,” a title always reserved for men. In fact, this is the only place in the whole New Testament that a woman is called “disciple.” We know that women held positions of authority in the early church – Paul had high regard for female leaders like Phoebe, for instance – but only here, in our passage, is a woman called “disciple.” Now, I don't want to make too much of this, but I think it's a remarkable show of openness for the time, and only serves to heighten Luke's reputation for inclusiveness and belief in the universality of the Gospel.  Within our story, it functions to underline her importance and general, all-around goodness – not only was she “devoted to good works and acts of charity,” but she was a disciple to boot!

And so it was a great loss to her circle of friends when she got sick and died, and they washed her and laid her in state in an upstairs room. Now, because Joppa, was near Lydda, the disciples heard that Peter was there, and so they sent two men to him saying “Do not delay in coming to us!” And across the ages we can hear the urgency in those voices as they send for the renowned Simon Peter, miracle worker, healer, one of the original twelve Apostles of Christ. And when he gets there, he goes up into the upper room – and does that sound familiar? – and finds all the widows there, weeping and mourning and, undoubtedly, gnashing their teeth.

And you might well ask – what widows? Luke doesn't say, but uses the term as if his readers would know what he was talking about. Which doesn't help us, two thousand years later, but we do know that there were groups of single women, collectively referred to as “widows,” who formed guilds or associations to do charitable work. They were the forerunners of holy orders – nuns and the like – and Tabitha may have been a leading figure of such a group. So you can get a vivid picture of the scene – the room's darkness pierced  by dusty window-rays of the sun, perhaps falling on the dead woman's face; women weeping, holding out their sister's work, her robes and tunics and head-dresses, holding them out to show Peter, mute reminders of their loss.

And I can picture Peter gently herding them from the room, just as Jesus did when he healed the temple official's daughter, and kneeling there on the dirt floor, beside the dead woman. And what he prayed we do not know, but throughout Acts – begun in Pentecost fire –  the Holy Spirit powers the Apostles' mission, supporting and advocating and driving their ministries. Jesus had said he would send the advocate, the comforter, the empower-er, and at Pentecost it came, dancing and playing around the apostles' heads, and since that time, it had been there for them, helping in their weakness, interceding with sighs too deep for words. And so on that day, in that upper room in Joppa, Peter invoked the Spirit of God, and when he was done, he looked at Gazelle and said just two words: “Tabitha, arise,” or as the NRSV puts it “Tabitha, get up.” And it is of great importance that the Greek word for arise is the same Luke uses for Jesus' resurrection. And so we're meant to associate this action with that done by God for Jesus, only here Peter is invoking God's spirit to do the job.

And see!  Tabitha stirs and moves, there in the hush of the upper room. She twitches and opens her eyes, and there is Peter, standing over her, and she wonders at him, because he was not there when last she closed her eyes, and she wonders at where she is, and she arises, unsteady at first on her feet – for she has been dead for many days – and takes two faltering steps forward, wobbly, like a baby deer, like the gazelle whose namesake she is. Peter takes her hand and helps her up, and then calls out to the saints and the widows and brings her forth, and she is alive! And the sweetest hopes of her loved ones have come true, there in the dusty upper room, and there is rejoicing and weeping with joy, and praising the God of their mothers and of their fathers, and thanking Jesus Christ, their Lord and master, for this, his bounteous gift.

And word spread all over Joppa, and the miracle of Gazelle became known to all, and many came to new life in the Lord Jesus Christ because of it. As for Peter, he went to stay in another part of Joppa, with Simon, who was a tanner, and thus unclean. And it wasn't all that long before Cornelius, the first recorded Gentile convert, came to believe as well.

_________________________

 

Like many of the stories in Acts, ours shows the early church in action, doing the work of God, and it's of use, I think, to take a look at the dynamics of this ministry. The story is impossible to date with any accuracy, but it probably is set sometime in the first fifteen or twenty years after the crucifixion. Even if it reflects the time it was written – some 25 years later than that – it's a remarkable look at Christianity in the first century. It shows a faith that's already spread well beyond Jerusalem's walls. Joppa is almost 40 miles away, on the Mediterranean coast, and there's a well-developed community. In addition to the guild of widows already mentioned, there's probably at least one house church, for there's a group of disciples who can reach a consensus to send for Peter to help.

And look at Peter – last week, we saw his personal side, as he impulsively plunged into the Sea of Galilee and swam to shore to greet Jesus; as he was hurt when Jesus asked not once not twice but three times if he loved him, as if his master didn't believe him when he said yes the first two times. And now we have a Peter who seems all grown up, all business, a mature faith leader, who has taken Jesus' commission seriously.  It's less a personal Peter than an icon, an archetypical apostle, going to and fro doing God's work, seemingly without angst or emotion.

And this fits Luke's purpose in this book – his idea was to recount the story of the early church, but from a theological point of view, more than historical. So each story is placed just so, and is told in just the right way, to make theological hay.

This story of Gazelle is told in a way that's highly suggestive of several others in the bible. Scholars have pointed out the similarities with Elijah raising the widow's son in first Kings, and Elisha's raising of the Shunammite woman's son in Second Kings, and that this casts Peter in a prophetic role. But what it reminds me of the most is a miracle of Jesus, when he raised the temple official's daughter from the dead. Remember? Jesus was summoned to the house, but it was too late – the daughter had died. Sending the family out of the room, Jesus brings her back to life, commanding her to get up. And so to my mind, this is an example of Peter acting in Jesus' stead, carrying on Jesus' work. Luke is saying “See?  Peter obeyed God. He did the work of Christ.” And it's as if Jesus had never left – and in fact, Christ was still working on earth, Peter was just a vessel.

At the same time, we're just as clearly meant to associate Tabitha's resurrection with that of Jesus – at the Pentecost festival in Acts 2, it is Peter himself who declares to the crowd that “This Jesus God raised up, and of that all of us are witnesses.” And now, Luke describes Tabitha's resurrection using the same words, but with one important difference. In Jesus' resurrection, it is God who is the sole actor, God who is the one who raised up his son, but in Gazelle's case, Paul invokes the Holy Spirit, which in turn does the raising. It is clearly a resurrection in the light of and as a consequence of Jesus' resurrection. This miracle, this resurrection, this raising of Tabitha from the dead stands as a marker, a witness to the power of the resurrection of Jesus in all our lives.

Paul said that Christ is the first fruits of those who have died, and that the resurrection of the dead—whatever that means—is through him.  And these images are the key to understanding Peter's miracle, for it reminds us that all of the new creation, all of the new life comes by way of Christ. Because Christ was first raised from the dead, so was Tabitha.  Because Christ was first raised from the dead, so the people of Joppa came to believe, came to new life in the Lord. And because Christ was raised from the dead, so will we all be made alive in Christ.  Amen.

 

Fish or Cut Bait (John 21:1 - 19)

 

John tells us about four times when Jesus appeared to his followers. First Mary Magdalene, at the empty tomb, when she ran to tell Peter and that other disciple—the one Jesus loved—but it was only Mary who saw him, and even she didn't recognize him, not at first, not until he spoke her name in the crisp, morning stillness.  The second and third times were to the disciples, gathered at the house for dinner, doors locked for fear they were hunted, and Jesus was just standing there, plain as day. One minute he wasn't there, and the next he was—just like that! Right through a locked door!

He told Thomas he could put his hand in his side, and in the holes in his hands, but Thomas just looked and said “My Lord and my God!”  And now, John tells us one more story—it happened by the Sea of Galilee, which he called Tiberias. Seven of his disciples were there—Peter, Thomas, Nathanael, and John and James—the Zebedee boys—and two others. And Peter says “I'm going fishing” and the others think it's a pretty good idea, so they pile into a boat and put to sea. And they fish all night but don't catch even one measly little fish.

 

      And I don't know about you, but I can relate to not catching any fish.  I mean, it's the story of my life—I can be using the same bait, the same rod, the same reel, the same aftershave of the fisherman right next to me, and he'll catch all the fish. I remember the last time I went fishing with my family—my Dad and I spent the whole day motoring around this little lake, not much bigger than the parking lot out there, and my brothers spent the whole day in another boat, on the same little lake, and guess who caught all the fish? So I know how the disciples must have felt—tired and discouraged and hungry.  But then something truly strange happens—just after sunup, they look over at the beach and there's this . . . man there. And we know it's Jesus, 'cause John tells us, but the disciples don't know who he is. Just like Mary, and just like on that Emmaus road over in Luke, his followers don't recognize him.  And Jesus calls to them and says “Children, do you have any fish?” and the disciples say “Nope” and he says “Cast the net to the right side of the boat” and just like that, they do it. And what's amazing to me is not that they catch fish—after all, it is Jesus, we're talking about here . . . anybody who could heal the blind and walk on water and raise Lazarus from the dead could certainly fill a boat with fish. No, what's amazing to me is that they do what he says!

Here's this guy, they don't know who he is, or what he is, and he says “Cast in your net on the other side, boys” and they do it. Without any kvetching or whining or back-talk, they just shrug their shoulders and do what they're told, and of course they haul in a mess of fish, a hundred and fifty three of them, to be exact, because he is the Son of God.  Of course, now they know him, now they recognize him, or at least the disciple Jesus loves does.  But note the sequence, the order of events—first they obey him—which takes faith—then they recognize him.  Obedience, faith, comes before the sign, before the miracle.  

And only when they fish as he tells them do they haul in a catch.  And good old Peter jumps right in, as he always does, like that other time in the boat, when he walked across he waves . . . But this time he doesn't sink, he makes it to shore, and finds Jesus frying up some fish, and after they've hauled their catch to shore, he sits them down, there on the beach, and feeds them. And John tells us that Jesus comes and takes the bread and gives it to them, and does the same with the fish.  And it's no accident that the scene seems familiar, that the words John uses resonate with us.

     It reminds us of the feeding of the five thousand, it has a sacramental feel, the feel of the Lord’s Supper, where we are nourished for our mission, sent out to do the work of God.  And, of course, that’s what this story is about—the sending-out of the apostles to do the work of God.

 

It was Jesus himself who said “I will make you fish for people.” And here Jesus is on the beach, not physically with the disciples, but directing operations nonetheless. When they look to him, they will be successful in doing the mission of God, even though he’s not with them in body.  But he's not far away—just a hundred yards, says John—and in the breaking of the bread, in the communal fellowship meal, they are reunited with their master. In their faith, their obedience, and in the sharing of the bread and fish, they know him, there on the beach in that Galilean dawn.

 

Finally, after breaking bread with his followers, Jesus sends Peter to do God's work. “Simon, Son of John,” he says, “Do you love me more than these?” And Peter seems indignant—“Yes, Lord, you know I love you,” as if it’s self-evident, as if it’s beyond argument. Of course I love you. Apparently, he’s forgetting the evidence to the contrary when he denied Jesus three times in just one night. As if to remind him, Jesus asks the same question three times. “Peter, do you love me more than these?”

     “Yes Lord, you know that I do.” “Then feed my lambs.” A second time: “Peter, do you love me?” “Yes Lord, you know that I do.” “Tend my sheep.” And finally, “Peter, do you love me?” and now Peter is hurt, and maybe just a little bit mad: “Lord, you know everything; you know that I love you.” But Jesus’ reply is the same: “Feed my sheep.”

      In a way, this marks the reinstatement of Peter.  He’s goes from Mr. Squirming Three-Time-Christ-Denier to a position of leadership. And it's clear what kind of leadership Jesus has in mind, and it's not exactly leading God's armies against the powers of darkness. He's asked to feed and to tend—in other words, he's asked to serve. And what will be the reward of this service? Will it be a seat at the right hand of Jesus as he rules in heaven? Will it be a mansion in the sky by and by? Will it be walking down those heavenly streets of Gold? Well, it might be, but Jesus doesn't say it  here . . . What he says instead is that Peter will suffer a terrible death, just as he did himself.  As my teacher Charlie Cousar put it, the Christian life is no Horatio Alger story of obstacles overcome and success achieved. It's dangerous and risky, and involves a loss of control as life is given to Christ. It is fundamentally kenotic: a pouring out of one’s life for another.  And Jesus' final command to Peter is: “Follow me.”

     The contours of Christian discipleship are laid out in our passage—its shape, its movement and its worth. It is the story of the church, of individuals bound in community, working together at a single task, in a single boat, with a single net. They work in harmony, casting the net and hauling in the catch, over and over and over again. And as the church looks to Jesus, as it casts its net as he directs, the fruits of its labor are overwhelming, they fill up the Christian boat to the sinking-point.

Albert Schweitzer wrote about this passage, and he said “He comes to us as one unknown, without a name, as of old . . . to those who obey him . . . he will reveal himself in the toils, the conflicts, the sufferings . . . and they shall learn in their own experience who he is.”  It is through our discipleship, through our obedience and our work that we come to know the Christ. Knowledge of him comes from experience, from doing, as much or more than from books.  And he calls us, the church, the community of God, into his company, into the presence of the risen Lord, to eat and drink with him, just as he did that day on the beach, and we are fed and nourished by his abundance, only to be sent out once again as emissaries of Christ to a suffering world.

And how is that mission to look?  What is it to be all about? Peter is a model, not only of Christian leadership, but Christian life and discipleship. Peter's love for Jesus is translated into service, it is transformed into acts of compassion. In the commissioning of Peter, Jesus equates Peter’s love for him with discipleship, servant-hood, with pouring himself out for the world just as Christ did.

There's a shelter for the homeless at First Presbyterian of Atlanta.  Every Sunday morning, the doors of the church open, and they file in, shabbily-dressed, almost all men, a few hundred of the twenty thousand street-people in that city.  And the director of the shelter said to me: “Most of these folks are not here because they were laid off, or mainstreamed or had their home foreclosed or any other reason like that. Most of them are here because they abused drugs, or alcohol, or just because they have a problem with authority, and can't hold down a job.”

And I struggled with this concept because like a lot of us, I was brought up with this notion of cause-and-effect, that what goes around comes around, and that somehow, if we mess up, or act badly, we get what we deserve. And in our economy, that makes a lot of sense, and you hear it all the time—why should the money of people like me, who work hard for a living, go to support those who don't?  But our passage stands over against that philosophy, because Jesus' command to Peter is absolute. It's cut and dry. There are no conditions to Jesus' love.  He doesn't say “If their situation is through no fault of their own, feed my lambs” or “have them fill out these forms in triplicate so we can means test them, then tend my sheep” or “make sure their pre-tax income is below the federal poverty level, then feed my sheep.” It's simply “feed my lambs."  “Tend my sheep.”  “Feed my sheep.”  Brothers and sisters, Christ's followers are called to continue his works of kenotic, self-emptying compassion.  In a real way, we are called to be agents of God's grace. And that grace is free, there are no conditions. No ifs, ands or buts about it. Jesus tells us “Feed my sheep.”  Period. End of story. 

But it's in the feeding, in the work and sweat and toil, in the fellowship that we are nourished. It's in the sacrifice and the suffering and, yes, the dying that we discover who Jesus is, and experience abundant life in Christ.  Amen.