14 April 2013

“Jesus, the friendly host”
John 21:1-19
3 Easter C
14 April 2013


If you enter this third week of April each year with some fear and trepidation … wondering, watching, waiting for something, anything to happen that’s bad news or tragic … well, I assure you that you’re not alone.
These days in April have become black days over the course of our lifetimes. April 19, 1993 ... twenty years ago this Friday ... was the Branch Davidian disaster in Waco, Texas – and two years later, the same day brought the bombing of the Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City. April 20, 1999 was the shootings at Columbine, and April 16, 2007, at Virginia Tech. And 2009’s April brought the much-feared swine flu, which made many of us quite ill.
And now, in 2013 ... “the spring of the year, when the kings of the world go to war,” as the Bible’s Chronicler so deftly puts it, we await the blustering of the world’s latest nut-job-dictator, Kim Jong-Un, as he holds us all hostage with the threat of nuclear war. And we have yet another flu pandemic threatening us.
Why this month – so often, these weeks so close to Easter, Passover, and Spring Break – why this time of year is so filled with tragedy, upheaval, and rumors of war, is anyone’s guess. Maybe it’s the end of winter or the lengthening days.
But whatever the cause, whatever the reason, unless we’re total pessimists, or afraid of our own shadows … most of us choose to go about our lives, day to day, thinking of the good which that new day might bring, without much thought to the other possibilities of what might be … that is, until events like these happen and then we react in whatever way we’re moved to react … fear, disgust, anger, grief.
And then – later – after it’s all over, as we reflect on it all, and try to adjust to a “new normal” we may remember what life was like “before” – the day before “it” happened. Wasn’t life better, easier, more carefree the “day before?”
But then came “the day of” … the accident, the tragedy, the diagnosis, the life-changing announcement.
And now, we have to live with what life is like “the day after.”
There’s a looking back, and a looking ahead. Maybe we’ll feel lost, or cast adrift. There’s a sense of danger, but also, hope; our spirits hunger for better days ahead; all the time as we are asking, watching, wondering, “What’s next for me, for us, on the day after?”
For Simon Peter and the other disciples, it was the day after Jesus had appeared to them in Jerusalem. On the “day of” … they had been there and seen their rabbi, their teacher, their friend be betrayed by Judas, one of their own … arrested, flogged and beaten, hung on a cross to die. They surely thought that “day of” that they would never see Jesus alive again.
But then … then he wasn’t in the tomb when the women went there that early morning three days later … and then Jesus appeared and spoke to Mary, and then he walked into that locked upper room where the disciples hid in fear, fear of what might come next for them. Peace Is Here! Jesus joyfully proclaimed to them. Jesus showed them his hands and his side, where the nails and spear had pierced him. He called them to believe that he had been raised from the dead. And then he gave them his Spirit ... here, catch my Spirit ... to send them out in his name to proclaim forgiveness, and life, and salvation to the world.
What a day! Whirlwind, alarming, shocking, frightening, exciting times.
And like all days, it had to end.
So now, it was the day after … the days after. The disciples went back home to Galilee – familiar surroundings to them, and life felt like it might settle back to the way it was before. Except that … NOTHING WAS THE SAME, EVERYTHING HAD CHANGED! Jesus had risen from the dead! Mary had seen it and proclaimed it, and they, the disciples, had seen him – twice, and begun to believe that it had really happened as Jesus said it would. Everything was and is all different now!
But these disciples were regular folks like you and me. They didn’t know what to do, what to make of all this. As our Gospel text begins, they are sitting around together, like nothing had changed … but it has changed, so who can sleep? So Peter … good old Peter … decides to go fishing. When all else fails, get in the boat, get out on the lake, maybe something will come to him – or, at least, maybe he’ll feel less confused.
And the rest of the gang says, “We’ll go with you.” What a bunch of guys!
So out they go, seven of them in a boat, bobbing around on the Sea of Tiberias - trying to fish, casting out the nets, pulling them back in - … “but that night, they caught nothing.”
We shouldn’t be too surprised at this. Their full attention likely isn’t on the fishing – it may be something to pass the time while they try to sort out exactly what had happened, what they had seen and heard. If they are trying, it’s probably increasing their frustration and anxiety that they aren’t catching anything.
They stay out all night in that little boat, bobbing up and down … and eventually, the Son comes up. They see Jesus on the beach but don’t recognize him. Perhaps it’s just another insomniac, out watching the lake instead of sleeping. So Jesus makes another miracle happen. “Fish on the other side,” Jesus tells them. And the nets nearly break, for all the fish.
John figures it out first – this is no neighbor, nor is it a friendly ghost … It is the Lord! And then … good old Peter, who has been fishing nearly naked for some reason – Peter puts on some clothes and swims to meet Jesus on the shore. This makes no sense. But Peter isn’t making sense here – after sleepless and fishless nights, seeing and hearing miraculous things – and now, his dead and risen Jesus standing on the shore before him.
It’s ... the day after. And Jesus is there for the disciples, just like he was in the days before – feeding them, teaching them, simply being with them.
By themselves, without Jesus’ help, trying to make sense of it all on their own, they’re just a poor group of guys drifting and bobbing around in a boat on a big lake … maybe hurt, maybe angry, frustrated … “why isn’t this working?” … they are confused.
But with Jesus there, with his presence, with his encouragement, they “haul it in.” Big time.
And once they get ashore, Jesus is still there, initiating, providing … Jesus, the friendly host, serves them up breakfast. And this time, none of those disciples have any doubt as to what this is all about. They see – they hear – and they eat. And believe. They get it, at last.
It’s “the day after.” And now, because of Jesus’ presence, initiating, providing, leading, guiding, life has purpose for these disciples and they will be able to go forward, forward in following him.
And maybe – maybe that’s the point of connection for those lost, drifting, skunked disciples – and us.
Because for us … it’s also “the day after.”
Try as we might, there’s no going back to the day before. We might want it so badly, craving the simplicity, the familiarity, the ease, the good memories of it all … it all, what life was like for us “before” … before the accident, the tragedy, the national mourning, the personal loss ... even the regular growing and changing that is life.
But to want to go back to the day before, like Mary, clinging to the risen Jesus in Easter’s Gospel reading, is to crave reincarnation rather than resurrection.
There is a big difference. Reincarnation means you have to die all over again.
Reincarnation might mean you could relive all those good times and good memories once again, but you’d also have to relive the bad ones … the Columbines, the Wacos, the Oklahoma Cities, the Virginia Techs … the Good Fridays. Over and over and over again. And see no end to this circle, this cycle, this downward spiral.
But resurrection says something different. It says, look around, everything may well look familiar but NOTHING IS THE SAME NOW. It’s a new day, a new era, things are different. Honor, respect, dignify the past by letting it be the past – but now we are in a new era where the downward spiral has been stopped … and things will be different from now on, forever.
In other words … you can still go fishing, Jesus says, just know that without me, you might have momentary successes, a hit, a bite, here and there, but you’ll never be able to make a really good catch.
Let me guide you, let me feed you, hear my call to you to be sent out – turn to me first so that I may guide you in all you will do, all you will be about … and your nets will be so full you won’t be able to haul them in.
That’s not to say that bad things, bad times won’t still happen. In that last section of today’s Gospel reading, Jesus prepares Peter for that day when his fate will meet Jesus’ head on. “Feeding my sheep” involves some risk, to Peter, to those others who will hear Jesus’ call to “Follow Me.”
If it sounds a little out of control, a little chancy, a little “unsafe” in the “we want it all nailed down and secured and controlled” sense of things … well … it is.
Because the control that it’s out of, is Peter’s. Is the other disciples.’ Is ours.
Surely safety, reason, prudence would call us to something else. Not listening to the advice of the stranger on the shore. Maybe staying put on the shore ourselves. Protected. Or better yet… locked up in our rooms. Doors closed and latched. Backs turned on the world around us. Maybe hiding. Maybe cowering in fear. It would be safe, yes.
But eventually, we’ll get hungry and bored. For this is no kind of life to live, and it surely isn’t resurrection living. Someone will want to go, get in the boat, and go fishing – to do, to live, the way we were and are intended.
Go with them!
One of those who went fishing, the way he was called by God to live ... was author Brennan Manning. Monk, author of the “Ragamuffin Gospel,” spiritual mentor ... Manning died last Friday. He wrote these words in his book “The Furious Longing of God,” about what he learned, while fishing ... what being a follower of Jesus is all about:

The gospel is absurd and the life of Jesus is meaningless unless we believe that he lived, died, and rose again with but one purpose in mind: to make brand-new creation. Not to make people with better morals but to create a community of prophets and professional lovers, men and women who would surrender to the mystery of the fire of the Spirit that burns within, who would live in ever greater fidelity to the omnipresent Word of God, who would enter into the center of it all,, the very heart and mystery of Christ, into the center of the flame that consumes, purifies, and sets everything aglow with peace, joy, boldness, and extravagant, furious love. This, my friend, is what it really means to be a Christian.

It means we’ll go fishing.
And what we’ll find once we go fishing ... once we push off from shore ... is that the resurrection future is never out of Jesus’ hands … the Son who rises and shines on that beach, who directs their fishing and fixes them breakfast, he does and will provide for us – as he did on the day before and the day of, so will he invite and provide for us on the day after, and the day after, and the day after that, until that final day after, when fishing and feeding and following are done, and Jesus has gathered us all to his final, everlasting feast.
But – until then – for now – we have an outpost of that feast right here. A foretaste, a teaser, a down payment on that promise … now, as then, with Jesus, the friendly host.
The bread, the wine, the water, the Word of forgiveness and hope, welcome and life and peace … these are always on, always ready, always For You. Served up with a smile, and an invitation … “Come, see and hear, go and tell ... Follow Me.”
Will you?