Scripture Readings:
Acts of the Apostles 9: 1-201
1Meanwhile Saul, still breathing threats and murder against the disciples of the Lord, went to the high priest 2and asked him for letters to the synagogues at Damascus, so that if he found any who belonged to the Way, men or women, he might bring them bound to Jerusalem. 3Now as he was going along and approaching Damascus, suddenly a light from heaven flashed around him. 4He fell to the ground and heard a voice saying to him, “Saul, Saul, why do you persecute me?” 5He asked, “Who are you, Lord?” The reply came, “I am Jesus, whom you are persecuting. 6But get up and enter the city, and you will be told what you are to do.” 7The men who were traveling with him stood speechless because they heard the voice but saw no one. 8Saul got up from the ground, and though his eyes were open, he could see nothing; so they led him by the hand and brought him into Damascus. 9For three days he was without sight, and neither ate nor drank.
10Now there was a disciple in Damascus named Ananias. The Lord said to him in a vision, “Ananias.” He answered, “Here I am, Lord.” 11The Lord said to him, “Get up and go to the street called Straight, and at the house of Judas look for a man of Tarsus named Saul. At this moment he is praying, 12and he has seen in a vision a man named Ananias come in and lay his hands on him so that he might regain his sight.” 13But Ananias answered, “Lord, I have heard from many about this man, how much evil he has done to your saints in Jerusalem; 14and here he has authority from the chief priests to bind all who invoke your name.” 15But the Lord said to him, “Go, for he is an instrument whom I have chosen to bring my name before Gentiles and kings and before the people of Israel; 16I myself will show him how much he must suffer for the sake of my name.” 17So Ananias went and entered the house. He laid his hands on Saul and said, “Brother Saul, the Lord Jesus, who appeared to you on your way here, has sent me so that you may regain your sight and be filled with the Holy Spirit.” 18And immediately something like scales fell from his eyes, and his sight was restored. Then he got up and was baptized, 19and after taking some food, he regained his strength.
For several days he was with the disciples in Damascus, 20and immediately he began to proclaim Jesus in the synagogues, saying, “He is the Son of God.”
John 21: 1-192
1After these things Jesus showed himself again to the disciples by the Sea of Tiberias; and he showed himself in this way. 2Gathered there together were Simon Peter, Thomas called the Twin, Nathanael of Cana in Galilee, the sons of Zebedee, and two others of his disciples. 3Simon Peter said to them, “I am going fishing.” They said to him, “We will go with you.” They went out and got into the boat, but that night they caught nothing.
4Just after daybreak, Jesus stood on the beach; but the disciples did not know that it was Jesus. 5Jesus said to them, “Children, you have no fish, have you?” They answered him, “No.” 6He said to them, “Cast the net to the right side of the boat, and you will find some.” So they cast it, and now they were not able to haul it in because there were so many fish. 7That disciple whom Jesus loved said to Peter, “It is the Lord!” When Simon Peter heard that it was the Lord, he put on some clothes, for he was naked, and jumped into the sea. 8But the other disciples came in the boat, dragging the net full of fish, for they were not far from the land, only about a hundred yards off.
9When they had gone ashore, they saw a charcoal fire there, with fish on it, and bread. 10Jesus said to them, “Bring some of the fish that you have just caught.” 11So Simon Peter went aboard and hauled the net ashore, full of large fish, a hundred fifty-three of them; and though there were so many, the net was not torn. 12Jesus said to them, “Come and have breakfast.” Now none of the disciples dared to ask him, “Who are you?” because they knew it was the Lord. 13Jesus came and took the bread and gave it to them, and did the same with the fish. 14This was now the third time that Jesus appeared to the disciples after he was raised from the dead.
15When they had finished breakfast, Jesus said to Simon Peter, “Simon son of John, do you love me more than these?” He said to him, “Yes, Lord; you know that I love you.” Jesus said to him, “Feed my lambs.” 16A second time he said to him, “Simon son of John, do you love me?” He said to him, “Yes, Lord; you know that I love you.” Jesus said to him, “Tend my sheep.” 17He said to him the third time, “Simon son of John, do you love me?” Peter felt hurt because he said to him the third time, “Do you love me?” And he said to him, “Lord, you know everything; you know that I love you.” Jesus said to him, “Feed my sheep. 18Very truly, I tell you, when you were younger, you used to fasten your own belt and to go wherever you wished. But when you grow old, you will stretch out your hands, and someone else will fasten a belt around you and take you where you do not wish to go.” 19(He said this to indicate the kind of death by which he would glorify God.) After this he said to him, “Follow me.”
“Nobody Who Is Called to Follow Jesus Is Called Just Once.”
Have you ever had a time when you’ve “missed the forest for the trees?” Have you ever gotten so caught up in the details that you’ve missed the larger or the whole picture? I know I have. That was the feeling that I had when I first read today’s gospel story. We hear Jesus say to the disciples, “Children, you have no fish, have you?”3 Then reading further I learn that after making a large catch, the disciples haul it in “dragging the net full of fish, for they were not far from the land, only about a hundred yards off.”4 …only a hundred yards? That’s the length of a football field (I should know; I’ve run across enough of them!). I just can’t easily imagine Jesus saying from that distance, “Children, you have no fish, have you?” What we all need to remember is that we’re dealing with a storytellers interpretation here, and a resurrection-appearance myth that can only be affirmed through the eyes of faith. Perspective, then, becomes the name of the game.
When it comes to so much of the Bible – but particularly The Gospel According to John, though – I’m one of those heretics who wants to keep my 21st century perspective. So I’m always helped at a time like this by the “Storyteller’s Creed,”5 which says:
I believe that imagination is stronger than knowledge.
That myth is more potent than history.
That dreams are more powerful than facts.
That hope always triumphs over experience.
That laughter is the only cure for grief.
And I believe that love is stronger than death.
That’s what’s going on in these stories. It’s one more reason why we’re not always that comfortable with people who suddenly “see the light” – like Thomas last week or Paul this week. We’re skeptical, maybe even a little bit cynical. And yet grace cracks our world wide open and calls for us to see things in a new way. It creates the kind of space where even the dead live, and the one we feared the most becomes our spiritual companion and friend.
These kinds of radical changes brought about by our sudden realization of the presence of the Holy in our midst affect the body as much as the mind and spirit. Celeste Schroeder put it this way:
Our God dances into history with a fierceness that is compelling and sometimes repelling at the same time. When we truly come face-to-face with the presence of God, we are stunned to the bone. Is this not why postures of awe accompany hearing and seeing God’s presence in the biblical text? Moses hid his face when God was revealed to him in the flame, Miriam dances in the midst of God’s miracle of parting the Red Sea, Elijah hides his face in the cleft of the rock on the mountain at Sinai, Paul falls off his horse in the presence of God, and Mary of Bethany wipes the feet of Jesus with her very hair. Coming near to our wild and passionate God calls something very deep in us, something that calls our very bones to respond to this fire of love.6
This is what’s going on when Peter goes wild and jumps out of the boat into the lake and later confesses his love. One of my favorite authors, Annie Dillard, knows how to convey this kind of unbridled joy (Well, come to think of it, so do my granddaughters!). She writes of one of her memories from childhood:
Just this once I wanted to let [my joy] rip. Flying rather famously required the extra energy of belief, and this, too, I had in super-abundance.
I ran the sidewalk full tilt. I waved my arms ever higher and faster; blood balled in my fingertips. I knew I was foolish…. You can’t test courage cautiously, so I ran hard and waved my arms hard, happy.
A linen-suited woman in her fifties did meet my exultant eye. She looked exultant herself, seeing me from far up the block…. Her warm, intelligent glance said she knew what I was doing – not because she herself had been a child but because she herself took a few loose aerial turns around her apartment every night [just] for the hell of it, and by day played along with the rest of the world and took the streetcar.7
How can you and I ever learn how to recapture that kind of unbridled joy and love of life? It’s worth remembering that beginning with Peter’s denials, the disciples first reacted to Jesus’ death by running away and hiding behind locked doors – desperately afraid. But gradually, day after day, week after week, the power of resurrection broke through their defensive walls and showed up (seemingly at random) all over the place. Odd, but the risen Jesus is never recognized at first. Why do you suppose that is? The idea of recognizing success in the midst of failure, of life coming out of a dying, doesn’t seep into us all that easily or quickly. But once we begin paying deeper attention to ordinary things – fishing, cooking a meal, having breakfast with friends, moving with unleashed joy into our world – suddenly he’s there. And in those moments of recognition come a deeper emotion, a lingering touch, a love made tangible – a love that embraces us all. Jesus, as this Christ-figure, is still available to us all – just as he was to Peter, who knew him very well, and Paul, who never even met him. It brings to my mind the prologue to The Rule of St. Benedict at which he says to us, “Listen carefully; attend …with the ear of your heart.”8
We here in the northern hemisphere are particularly blessed to share Easter with springtime. With the coming of more light comes the bursting of new life all around us. I think that’s what’s going on in Mary Oliver’s poem that I read as our Call to Worship for this morning:9 learning “to go easy, to be filled with light, and to shine,” ourselves.
One of the reasons why I like to go kayaking very early in the morning (and the earlier the better) is the way that the morning light creeps across the low hills of coastal California and plays across the water and through the trees. Light is incredibly generous, but also very gentle, at this time of the day. When you sit quietly and pay attention to the way that the dawn comes, you may learn how light can coax away any shadow that may still lurk within your soul. The first shades of light appear on the horizon and gradually they nudge the mantle of darkness away from the world. Quietly, a birth happens right in front of you, the mystery of a new dawn, a new day. To me the dawn is a refreshing time, a time of possibility and promise. It is one of the tragedies of modern culture that we’ve lost touch with such primal thresholds of nature – like the dawning of a new day.
Each of us is being called into the presence of the Holy at every single moment. In the biblical stories of resurrection, though, we’ve been conditioned into believing that they’ve got to be accompanied by “a voice from out of the sky” or that there has to be some kind of physical contact with the risen Jesus. Experiences of resurrection, on the other hand, almost never happen in those ways.
The gentle invitations from God happen every single day, but in more ordinary ways: like when we hear the exuberant call of a small bird as it sways in the breeze perched on top of a stalk of blooming mustard, or as we make eye contact with someone who loves us – unconditionally. The voice and call of God can be heard in the passionate phrasing of a Chopin piano etude. And, yes, the call to new life comes in the ecstatic greeting of a little child screaming, “Grandpa!” as she runs into your waiting arms. These moments happen over and over and over.
Nobody who is called to follow Jesus is called just once. You and I who are called to love, nurture, forgive, heal, teach, and offer aid and sustenance to those in need in his name are called to that discipleship again and again and again – throughout our lives. Like the stories of his birth, the resurrection stories of Jesus aren’t just a one-time historical event. We come to know him in those undeniable events in which we discover that he’s being embodied in us – in those moments of love that take our breath away. That’s what this fish story is all about. We hear his voice inviting us again, “Come and have breakfast.” and feel the warmth of his gaze as he asks us, yet again, “Do you love me?”
Both of our stories today, then – about Paul, about Peter – tell us that Easter is not a one-time-only event. It’s an ongoing counter-story which challenges our assumptions about things as they are. Easter is not done yet. And maybe, if we’re paying attention, it could become our story as well.
1 The focus on Saul here (Paul being his Roman name) not only gives a glimpse of the suffering that will be his as a follower of Jesus, it also reminds us of his former role as a religious zealot who’s “still breathing threats and murder against the disciples.” For some time it was this same Saul who was a renowned persecutor off Christians, handing them over to be tried in religious tribunals and thrown into prison (cf. Acts 9: 2, 14). He’s about to experience a dramatic conversion, however. The Damascus road experience becomes a kind of paradigm by which all authentic conversion experiences are measured in many conservative Christian fellowships. Our text here, though, is just one of ten conversion encounters in the Book of Acts – and just one of three versions involving Saul (cf. Acts 22: 3-16 and 26: 4-18).
There are all kinds of religious imageries here: of being struck down as we wander down the wrong road, of the power of God overcoming the enemy, of the bright light of comprehension leading to salvation, and of having one’s blindness turn to eyes opened in faith. Luke offers us quite the theological treatise here!
2 Today’s gospel account is from a chapter that most biblical scholars believe is a much later addition to the Gospel According to John. It presents us with a number of different scenes: a miraculous catch of fish embedded in a story of an appearance of the risen Jesus, a story about being fed (After all, if you have a body you’ve got to eat, right?), and a kind of commissioning – an explanation of just what it must mean to be a follower, a disciple, of Jesus.
His words on suffering, here, are specifically addressed to Peter, but the others are also referred to as “disciples” – mathētai, in Greek, which literally means “students.” Peter, student of the master shepherd then, is charged with shepherding and feeding the flock as Jesus leaves this earth, but it’s also a call (not unlike the one made to Saul) to enter into a new relationship. And yet even as it looks to the future, like all good biblical theology, it echoes the past: Jesus calls Peter “Simon son of John,” just as he had when he first called Peter to follow him. And when questioned by Jesus about his love for him, Peter replies affirmatively three times – clearly a reversal of his denials of Jesus on the night before Jesus was crucified (John 18: 17, 25-27, et al.). We find ourselves, finally, standing on the beach with Peter. Like him, when we admit our own love for Jesus as the Christ – the anointed one, the one to whom we owe our ultimate loyalty – we don’t give up our former identities; we bring them with us when we meet this risen One, and in that experience they’re all made new. Again, this too is a masterful theological treatise!
3 John 21: 5.
4 John 21: 8.
5 Robert Fulghum, in the preface to his book, All I Really Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten (New York: Villard Books, 1988), p. viii.
6 Celeste Snowber Schroeder, Embodied Prayer: Harmonizing Body and Soul (Old Brookville, New York: Triumph Books, An Imprint of Liguori Publications, 1995).
7 Annie Dillard, An American Childhood, in The Annie Dillard Reader (New York: HarperCollins Publishers, 1994), pp. 184-185.
8 Quoted by Mary Collins in Contemplative Participation (Collegeville, MN: The Liturgical Press, 1990).
9 The poem is entitled “When I Am Among the Trees” in Thirst: Poems by Mary Oliver (Beacon Press, Boston, Massachusetts, 2006), p. 4.
When I am among the trees,
especially the willows and the honey locust,
equally the beech, the oaks and the pines,
they give off such hints of gladness.
I would almost say that they save me, and daily.
I am so distant from the hope of myself,
in which I have goodness, and discernment,
and never hurry through the world
but walk slowly, and bow often.
Around me the trees stir in their leaves
and call out, “Stay awhile.”
The light flows from their branches.
And they call again, “It’s simple,” they say,
“and you too have come
into the world to do this, to go easy, to be filled
with light, and to shine.”