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RCL YEAR C, EASTER THREE, April 22nd, 2007
Acts 9:1-20; Psalm 30; Revelation 5:11-14; St. John 21:1- 9
St. Edmund’s Episcopal Church
The Reverend George F. Woodward IIIThe Roman Catholics, we learned this week, are finally revising their odd doctrine of limbo. It reminds me of the story of the Pope who arrived at the Pearly Gates. St. Peter asked him if there was anything he’d wanted to do on earth and hadn’t been able, and the Pope said, why yes, he’d love to see the original autographs of the Scriptures. So St. Peter shows the Pope to the Huntington Library wing, and returning an hour later finds the Pope weeping inconsolably. “There’s an “R” in the word, there’s an “R” in the word,” weeps the Pope. “Whatever do you mean?” asks Peter. “It says “celebrate” NOT “CELIBATE!” answers the Pope.
Maybe in 500 years or so they’ll revisit that odd doctrine as well!
It took fifty days for the resurrection of Jesus to leaven the community of His followers. The accounts we read in the Gospels portray the first disciples in equal measure, fearful, astonished, diffident, unbelieving and just plain puzzled in the face of the news of Christ’s rising from the grave. These first-century folk were, if anything, better acquainted with the finality of death than we are. Infant mortality rates were high, as was death in childbirth. A fifty year old was considered a graybeard, and folks expired in the family home, not in a distant facility. They would have been no more inclined to believe in a resurrection than we, which is why our earliest Gospel (St. Mark) shows the women fleeing from the empty tomb in terror, and why John’s Gospel makes such a point of the unbelief of Thomas.
Whatever the resurrection was, it was not the resuscitation of a corpse. We are shown a Jesus who eats fish in the presence of His disciples to demonstrate His corporeality, and who presses Thomas’ fingers into the wounds of His crucified hands and side. Yet He appears and disappears and passes through doors to stand in their midst. The resurrected Lord is no spirit, no incorporeal ghost. He enjoys some sort of continuity with the earthly frame of His body, and yet that body has been transformed into something entirely new.
It is interesting that the resurrection appearances of Jesus weren’t private affairs. They occur as the disciples gather together in a room, when two are walking along a road; even, we are told, to more than five hundred in a field. In many of these encounters, we are presented with the ambiguity of the moment as an essential component of the revelation. Jesus walks some miles with a couple of fellows heading to Emmaus and dines with them in the waning hours of the day. Though their hearts burned at His words, it is only as He breaks bread with them that they come to recognition.
Today’s story is perhaps my favorite. The disciples don’t know what to make of themselves following the events of Jesus’ arrest and crucifixion, and even after the visitations they have received from Him they are at a loss. Walker Percy poses a question in his book Lost in the Cosmos. “Why is it possible to learn more in ten minutes about the Crab Nebula in Taurus, which is six thousand light-years away, than you presently know about yourself, even though you’ve been stuck with yourself all your life?”
The disciples, it’s safe to say, feel “Lost in the Cosmos;” more lost for having known Jesus than they ever felt before meeting Him. They aren’t intellectuals given to puzzling matters out at a desk, they’re men of action, and so they go back to doing what they did before they met Jesus. “I’m going fishing,” Simon Peter announces…
So you notice Simon Peter has two names? Early in the Gospel he is called Simon, later in the New Testament he is called Peter. During his long and progressive conversion he is called by both names. Maybe all of us should have two names…(you’ve heard about the two Mexican fireman…Jose and Hose “B”)…maybe we should have two names in the course of our progressive conversion to Christ…a before conversion name, two as we get on with the process, one again when we finally settle in to our calling.
There’s the tale of the pregnant woman who suffered an accident on her way to visit her family in Bakersfield. She was in a coma six months as wakes up to find she is no longer pregnant. “Don’t worry,” says the nurse, you had twins. Your brother from Bakersfield named them and has them at home. The woman says, “My brother named them? My brother’s an idiot! What did he call the children?” “Well he called the girl “Denise,” says the nurse. “That’s a beautiful name!” says the woman. “What did he call the other?” “Denephew,” says the nurse.
“I’m going fishing,” Simon Peter announces, and Thomas the Twin and Nathaniel and the two sons of Zebedee and a couple of other disciples think that’s a pretty good idea; and that is what they do. I am a sometime fisherman, and I can tell you going fishing is the very best way to address an intractable situation! Seven of the disciples get in a boat and go fishing. They don’t catch anything, though. And in an event which echoes their first call to follow Jesus, when someone on the shore encourages them to cast their net on the other side of the boat, and, as Jesus did when He first called them away from their nets using this same technique, they make a huge catch. Peter jumps into the sea and swims to shore. The rest pragmatically bring in the catch, as though their lives weren’t in the process of being irrevocably changed, as though those fish were more important than the way they had been caught; just as we labor at our given vocations sometimes imputing to our work more weight than it deserves, even as true meaning waits for us there on the shore. Jesus lays some bread and fish on the charcoal He’s prepared, and once they dock He says to them, “Come and have breakfast.”
This is not the kind of stuff people make up if they want to impress others with news of a resurrection. Part of the authenticity of the Gospels, part of the reason they convince, is that they are prosaic and ring with honesty. The writers present the continuing confusion of the situation. None of the disciples, we’re told, dared to ask the man making them breakfast “Who are you,” because they knew it was the Lord! This was the third time Jesus has appeared to them, and even in the midst of the appearance there is something ambiguous, some way in which, as on the Emmaus Road, Christ remains hidden.
We should be encouraged by the ways in which Jesus manifest Himself repeatedly during those first fifty days of His post-resurrection life. Not many of us come to Faith as St. Paul did, met along the road by a blinding light and knocked to the ground with the voice of God ringing in his ears. I’ve not met anyone who came to Faith in Christ that way, and if I did, I’d keep my eye on them for awhile to see if they were crazy. As with the disciples, most of us require multiple signs of God in our lives before we are prepared to trust. As with the disciples, God discloses to us in the course of ordinary life, while we’re working and fishing and hoping for breakfast. We may notice God at work in times of difficulty or disappointment, at junctures when we have “caught nothing” and have nothing to lose when some at first unrecognized voice calls to us from shore telling us to cast our nets in a new direction.
You may remember the J.D. Salinger story called Franny and Zooey. Franny comes home from college where she has been trying to have a religious experience. It’s left her a nervous wreck, all these trying to feel closer to God. Her mother doesn’t know what to do, so she brings Franny a cup of chicken soup. This makes Franny very upset because she feels herself to be engaged in a sublime quest. Then comes the great moment of the story when Franny’s brother tells her that her approach to religion is all wrong: “I’ll tell you one thing, Franny—if it’s the religious life you want, you ought to know right now that you’re missing out on every single religious action that’s going on in this house. You don’t have sense enough to drink when someone brings you a cup of consecrated chicken soup—which is the only kind of chicken soup mother ever brings to anybody.”
Crucifixions reverberate still in the human experience, as any family associated with Virginia Tech could surely tell us this week, after so much loss of innocent life at the hands of a mentally ill student with easy access to deadly weapons. Richard Yohane will tell us of the suffering the AIDS crisis continues to inflict in Malawi at our Rector’s Forum following this service. But Mr. Yohane is also a sign of the resurrected Christ at work in the world, as he extends himself in service to AIDS orphans and in many other ways in time of great trouble.
The disciples knew it was the Lord there on the Galilean beach, because of the way the Lord treated them. He prospered their catch, and fed them breakfast. Then He asked Peter, “Simon, do you love Me?” Three times, the Lord asks this, and three times, Simon Peter says that He does indeed love the Lord. If so, says the Risen Jesus, then tend My lambs and feed My sheep. The resurrection was going to continue in the world through them.
Doubt is a good starting point, but we’re not meant to dwell there. We are to come to Faith in Christ and, as a community, be leavened with the hope of His resurrection. We are to love Him, and tend His sheep. I read notice of the Episcopal Chaplain at Virginia Tech who is doing just that this week, and Richard Yohane is surely so engaged. “Do you love Me?” Christ asks us. In what ways are you feeding Christ’s sheep and tending His lambs? Here, at last, there is no great mystery; just a matter of consecrated chicken soup, fish and bread and a hearty breakfast. It is in the ordinary rhythm of life that Christ shows Himself, and He is to be seen and known and found in those of us who call ourselves His disciples. Amen. GFW+
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