Third Sunday of Easter/Confirmation Sunday
John 21:1-19, Acts 9:1-20
Can't we just get back to normal? That was the gist of what one Virginia Tech student said to a TV interviewer last Thursday. I'm sure she expressed the feelings of many students when she said "We just want the press to step back, cool off and leave us alone to heal." She's a very wise student because that's often what we have to do in the face of a grievous dislocation and upset in our lives. We naturally seek the comfort of the familiar, the ordinary, the routine. I've seen grieving widows leave the hospital to go home and clean house, not because they need a clean house but because the familiarity of the task gives structure to life. I know people often return to work after illness much too quickly because they long for the stability of the ordinary. What are we supposed to do? What happens next? There is great solace in doing what we have always done--attempting a routine, filling time with the familiar.
Just so Peter says, "I am going fishing." Now the disciples had already seen the risen Christ. The joy of the resurrection had been allowed to settle in by then. But the question was, "What now? Life has changed, everything is different but nothing is different. What do we do now?
Peter says "I am going fishing." And immediately six of the other disciples jump on the band wagon, we'll go too." Thank goodness somebody is making a decision here. Thank goodness somebody has a plan.
Maybe in the back of his mind Peter was remembering how Jesus first called him from his fishing boat and made his life so full and productive. Now adrift and rudderless he's looking for some direction again. Maybe if he goes back to where he first met Jesus it will become clear to him.
And sure enough Jesus meets him there in the ordinary normal tasks of life--at work, on the beach, at breakfast. Jesus isn't confined to the synagogue or Peter's daily prayer time but intrudes right in the middle of the other things he's doing. For us, Jesus is not "on demand". Peter Berger has said "It is not given to us to make God speak. It is only given to us to live and think in such a way that if God's thunder should come we will not have stopped our ears."
But this story is not primarily about Jesus appearance to the disciples. After the breakfast communion Jesus gets down to the real business at hand. He turns to Peter. You'll remember it was Peter who in the time after Jesus arrest and before the crucifixion while he was warming his hands over a charcoal fire denied Jesus three times. So now sitting around this charcoal fire Jesus asks him the question that will unloose his heart. "Simon do you love me?" Sometimes there are things that need to be said. Some hurts can be absorbed into the rote of daily living and time heals them. Some relationship lesions can develop scar tissue and life can go on. But some rifts are so destructive that only real words, real spoken remorse can affect reconciliation. Peter would not have been human if he were not carrying around a bucket load of guilt. Even if he thought Jesus didn't know the particulars of his denial, he knew. He knew that when the girl at the door of the high priests courtyard had asked him, "You're not one of his disciples, are you? He had replied "I am not." He knew that while warming his hands at the fire someone else asked "You're not one of the disciples" he had replied "I am not" and when one of the high priests servants challenged "Didn't I see you in the olive grove? He denied it. At that moment, at that instant of confrontation, when he might have stepped up, he cowered. Could Jesus forgive him?
So Jesus asks, "Peter do you love me? Not once but three times. Peter do you love me?
Garrison Keillor writes about Larry, a resident of the fictional town of Lake Woebegone. Larry was saved twelve times at the Lutheran Church, an all time record for a church that never gave altar calls. There wasn't even an organ playing "Just as I am without one plea" in the background. Regardless of that, between 1953 and 1961, Larry Sorenson came forward twelve times, weeping buckets and crumpled up at the communion rail, to the shock of the minister who, for the twelfth time, had just delivered a dry sermon on stewardship. But now the minister needed to put his arm around this person, pray with him and be certain he had a way to get home. "Even we fundamentalists got tired of Larry," Keillor writes.
God didn't mean for us to feel guilty all our lives. There comes a time when we should dry our tears and join the Stewardship Ministry in grappling with the problems of patching the roof or escorting the bats out of the sanctuary. But Larry just kept repenting and repenting."
In Barbara Brown Taylor's book, Speaking of Sin, she writes, "...most of us prefer remorse to repentance. We would rather say, 'I'm sorry, I'm so sorry, I feel really really awful about what I have done' than actually start doing things differently...the guilt itself is so exhausting that it drives us right back into the arms of our sins, which may provide us with our only reliable comfort."
Jesus doesn't expect or allow that Peter will wallow in guilt. Instead he gives him a prime directive, a mission statement, a calling. "Feed My lambs."
Today's first lesson is the call of St Paul from Acts 9. Saul an enemy of the church, gets knocked down on the Damascus road and spoken to by the risen Christ. But what does the risen Christ say to him? Not, "Now Paul don't you really believe that Easter is true?" Instead he says "Paul (that's what I'm going to call you now) I've got big work for you to do. You are going to be my great missionary to the Gentiles." That's the way it is with Jesus every conversion to him is a call to do work for him. Revelation and call go together. The risen Christ does not just say to them on the beach that morning, "I'm Jesus raised from the dead." He says, "I am Jesus raised from the dead and I've got work for you to do."
He tells them to "feed my sheep. He tells them to care for the ones he cares . What a crazy thing that he entrusts his most important work to the very ones who have failed him in the past. Still Jesus calls on them to carry on.
In Courtney's baptism today as in all baptism God claims us as his own children. But that claim comes with the directive, "Let your light so shine...
So what work is the risen Christ calling you to do? When he says, "Feed my lambs," what does that mean for you?
Think about this tomorrow when you're at your desk, or in your car, in the conference room or in the classroom. The risen Christ comes to you, seeks you, reveals himself to you, and then gives you work to do. "Follow me," are his last words to them on the beach, his first and last words to us as well.
Amen