Disruption

Sermon on John 21:1-19 offered to the people of the Church of the Redeemer in Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania.

The presidential campaign of 1920 introduced a new word into the American lexicon. After years of political turmoil at home and abroad, Warren G. Harding promised that his presidency would signal a “return to normalcy” in the United States. No longer would Americans have to worry about world wars and Leagues of Nations; instead, they could return to what they knew before the world fell apart. Americans responded enthusiastically to this neologism: Harding earned 60 percent of the popular vote and 404 votes in the Electoral College. For a time, it seemed that Harding’s pledge came to fruition. The Roaring Twenties were a time of economic growth and relative domestic tranquility. Though the twenties failed to roar for farmers and racial minorities, many people assumed that Harding’s promised “return to normalcy” was a permanent state of affairs.

Before long, however, it became clear that this was an illusion. By the end of the decade, the stock market had crashed, touching off the worst economic crisis in the nation’s history. Meanwhile, military dictators took power in Europe and Asia, setting the world on an inexorable path toward yet another global war. In some ways, it was actually the world’s haste to get back to normal that precipitated these crises. In the end, our collective desire to return to normalcy became part of the endless cycle of violence and retribution that has characterized all human history.

Returning to normalcy is what seems to motivate Peter and the other disciples in our gospel reading today. After years of following a charismatic and unpredictable teacher, the disciples returned to what they knew before they met Jesus. They returned their easy lives as fishermen. This is not to say that the life of a fisherman was easy in the first century: it was backbreaking, difficult work in which the line between starvation and subsistence was incredibly thin. The ease of this life could be found in its predictability. There was something familiar, almost comforting about the drudgery of mending nets, the stench of decaying fish, and the disappointment of a night without a catch. Peter and the other disciples understood how to deal with these challenges. As fishermen, they would not have to wrestle with the question of God’s purpose for them. They could live the rest of their lives governed by a predictable and timeworn routine.

Jesus disrupts this familiarity when he calls out to the disciples from the shores of Tiberias. Though they are initially excited, they become quiet when Jesus invites Peter and the other disciples to join him for breakfast by a charcoal fire. John implies that Peter and the other disciples eat their bread and fish in silence. Of course, there’s probably very little small talk to be made with someone who has been raised from the dead. There might be a deeper reason for this silence. Peter in particular may have been silent because the last time he saw a charcoal fire, he was in the courtyard of the high priest, the place where he denied Jesus three times. Peter had returned to his life as a fisherman to escape his rejection of Jesus, only to have Jesus return, reminding Peter of his faithlessness.

When Jesus finally disrupts the silence, he does it in the most revealing way possible. Fully aware of Peter’s guilt, Jesus turns to him and asks pointedly, “Simon son of John, do you love me?” Jesus doesn’t call Peter by his nickname; Jesus uses the name Peter’s mother gave him. Three times Jesus asks this question and three times Peter responds. The implication seems clear: Peter erases his triple denial with a triple confession of love. While this may seem obvious to us, Peter doesn’t seem to get it. John tells us that he was hurt, that he was grieved by the repetition of Jesus’ question. On one hand, this may be a classic example of Peter’s thick-headedness: perhaps he just forgot what happened on that fateful night before Jesus died. On the other hand, we human beings have an extraordinary capacity to remember the times we failed. How often do we worry about how our relationship with someone has changed because of something we have said or done? Peter does not feel hurt because he has forgotten his failure; Peter grieves because he is apprehensive He is waiting for the other shoe to drop, he is anticipating a torrent of vengeance and righteous indignation from man he had so recently scorned. Peter wants to get these questions about love out of the way so that he can receive the judgment he so richly deserves. What Peter fails to understand, what we fail to understand is that the Resurrection is the judgment of God. What we fail to understand that the resurrection is the fullest expression of God’s love. In a way, the questions that Jesus asks Peter are irrelevant. It doesn’t matter whether Peter loves Jesus or not; what matters is that Jesus loves Peter. I don’t mean for that to sound glib, because it is of ultimate importance. Jesus loves Peter and all of us with a fullness that transcends all of our expectations. We would expect Jesus to punish Peter for rejecting him. We would at least expect him to require some extraordinary act of penitence. In the resurrection, however, God disrupts our assumptions about repentance and divine punishment and announces that even our rejection of God can be redeemed. In the resurrection, God liberates us from the endless cycle of vengeance and retribution and offers in its place a love that restores and renews all things.

This resurrection appearance is not just about Peter’s restoration. In his anxiety, Peter failed to recognize the true purpose of Jesus’ questions, which was to call Peter to a new vocation. Peter’s vocation changes in the other gospels, but only in its direction and emphasis.“You’re a fisherman? Follow me and I will make you fish for people,” Jesus says at the beginning of Matthew, Mark, and Luke. In John’s gospel, however, Jesus invites Peter into an entirely new vocation: “If you love me, take care of my flock.” In light of the resurrection, Jesus instructs Peter to shift his vocation from that of a hunter to that of a shepherd, from one whose work depends on violence to one whose work is shaped by love. What difference does the resurrection make to us? How will this redemptive and restorative love change our vocation?

Our world once again seems to be falling apart. Between war, terrorism, economic disaster, and climate change, hardly a day goes by without reminders of how fragile life is. In the face of these calamities, it would be tempting to proclaim that we would like to go back to the way things were before everything fell apart. But that is not the gospel. The gospel calls us to come to terms with the realities of our fallen world. Indeed, the Church’s vocation is not to call for a “return to normalcy.” Our vocation is to proclaim the endless cycle of death has been marvelously disrupted by the resurrection of Jesus Christ. We are called to lift our hearts above shame, guilt, and resentment and embrace the resurrection love that Jesus shows Peter, a love that reorders and renews all things.

Disaster

I’m pretty proud of my ability to make pizza.

Since seminary, I have been perfecting my technique, refining my dough recipe, determining the best topping combinations, and figuring out how to get through the entire evening without the smoke detector going off.  The result is that I am a fairly competent home pizza chef.  It is only after years of trial and error, however, that I have been able to get to this point.  Along the way, pizzas have lost all their toppings, failed to cook all the way through, and turned into bizarrely misshapen piles of dough.  Of course, I accompanied all of these disasters with ranting and raving, using, in the opinion of a good friend, “words and sentiment completely inappropriate for a priest of God’s church.”  But all of this failure eventually led to success.  I don’t claim to make anything like what you can get at Modern in New Haven, CT (go, if you’ve never been) or Lombardi’s in New York, but I can reliably put together a tasty pie.

So it was with confidence that I accepted our Curate’s invitation to prepare pizza for the youth group last Sunday.  Not only did I think it would be fun to hang out with the youth, I figured I would teach them a new skill in the process.  I arrived with everything prepared: my carefully chosen toppings were ready, the dough had risen and been kneaded the appropriate number of times, and I had a generous amount of mozzarella and parmesan ready to go.  Members of the youth group showed up and I demonstrated how to stretch the dough and arrange the toppings.  Everything was progressing nicely until I went to slide the pizza in the oven.  I had committed the ultimate rookie mistake and failed to sprinkle enough cornmeal on the pizza peel.  I watched in horror as toppings fell to the floor of the oven and the pizza dough collapsed into a unwieldy mess.  It was an old fashioned disaster.  But for whatever reason, I resisted the urge to utter the few choice words running through my head and instead said, “We can fix this.”  I retrieved the pizza dough from the oven, laid it out once again (with the appropriate amount of cornmeal), and invited the youth to replace the toppings that now lay woebegone on the oven floor.  We slid the restored pizza into the oven and, ten minutes later, enjoyed an imperfect yet tasty meal.

Pictured: Hope for Redemption

It occurs to me that the willingness to say, “I can fix this” is what repentance requires.  When I first started making pizza, the disaster of last Sunday night would have impelled me to abandon the entire operation and call Dominos.  But after years of trial and error, after years of realizing that everything can’t be perfect, after years of failing, I realized that there was hope for restoration.  We often get caught up in the notion that our failures have insurmountable power over us, that we cannot possibly fix what is wrong with us.  We get overwhelmed by our problems and imagine that there is no place or no way for us to turn.  Lent, however, is a time when we are reminded that each one of us has the potential for transformation, that each one of us can be restored, that each one of us can, with God’s help, be redeemed.  But first, we must say to ourselves, “I can fix this.”

Finished

Sermon offered to the people of the Church of the Heavenly Rest on Good Friday.

One summer while I was in college, I worked in a group home for kids with intellectual disabilities, mental illnesses, and other special needs.  Most of the kids were high-functioning teenagers who had a difficult time adapting to mainstream academic and social settings; the group home was a place where they could be themselves.  While the work was enormously rewarding, it was also exhausting.  Not only were we responsible for all of the normal aspects of raising a teenager: cooking their meals, driving them to school, and making sure they did their homework; we also had to deal with some of the challenges unique to these young people: giving them their medications, supervising their hygiene, and dealing with the occasional catastrophic meltdown.  Every day had the potential to be physically and emotionally draining.  I remember that at the end of my first day, after all of the residents had finally gone to sleep, the woman I was working with, a veteran of the organization who was simultaneously maternal and tough as nails, handed me a cup of coffee and said, “Enjoy this.”  “Enjoy what?” I asked.  “The quiet,” she replied.  As I savored the bitter institutional coffee, a wave of relief spread over me as I realized that we were finished for the day.  The meds had been distributed, the residents were asleep, and everyone was safe.  We had done everything we had to do and my coworker invited me to acknowledge that accomplishment.  To this day, the taste of institutional coffee reminds me of that sense of accomplishment, the joy and relief I felt when I realized that for at least the next eight hours, all was right with the world, that for at least one night, the work before me was finished.

The gospel according to John tells us that the final word of Jesus from the cross reflects this sense of accomplishment.  Just before he bows his head and gives up his spirit, Jesus says, “It is finished.”  This actually translates a single word in Greek: “tetelestai,” meaning “it has been accomplished,” “the end has come,” or to put it another way, “my work here is done.”  In John’s gospel, we do not hear the agonized cry of “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” that we hear Matthew and Mark, nor do we hear the deeply comforting affirmation of “Into your hands I commend my spirit” that we hear in Luke.  Instead, the final word of Jesus in John’s gospel is ambiguous and a little unsettling.  What exactly has he accomplished?  There is a finality to “tetelestai,” a sense that everything is taken care of, that there is no more to be done, that everything that needs to be finished has been finished.  “Tetelestai” implies that there are no loose ends, that all is right with the world.

And yet, even as Jesus uttered this final word of accomplishment, very little was right with the world.  As Jesus hung upon the cross, struggling under his own weight, chaos swirled around him.  Though those closest to him had promised to stay by his side no matter what happened, his disciples had abandoned, denied, and betrayed him.  Though as the Messiah he represented the hopes and dreams of a subjugated and enslaved people, he had been executed as a rabble rouser by a cruel and powerful dictatorship.  Though he had affirmed that he was the incarnation of the almighty God, he died a criminal’s death, completely impotent and helpless.  As chaos swirled around him, it seems that there could not have been a less appropriate time for Jesus to affirm that everything had been accomplished.  The world was falling apart around him, questions were left unanswered, and his ministry seems to have been in vain.  Describing his work as “finished” seems to be a cruel joke worthy of the soldiers who mocked him.

Just before Jesus gives up his spirit, John’s gospel tells us that he addressed his mother and the beloved disciple, who were gathered at the foot of the cross.  As they stood in their grief, gazing at the gasping body of Jesus, Jesus said to his mother, “Woman, behold your son.”  To the disciple whom he loved, he said, “Behold your mother.”  John goes on to tell us that the disciple took Jesus’ mother into his home from that day forward.  Though this is a powerful message of love, an example of Jesus taking care of those he is leaving behind, there is more to it than that.  Scholars, for instance, have wondered why Jesus calls his mother “Woman,” which is not something that any of us would have been allowed to call our mothers as we were growing up.  While some have argued that “Woman” was actually a term of respect in first-century Palestine, I’m more inclined to agree with those who suggest that Jesus uses this word to recall the creation of woman.  By calling his mother “Woman,” Jesus is bringing us back to Genesis, back to the Garden of Eden, back to the first days of creation when Adam and Eve disobeyed the commandment of God and men and women were estranged from one another.  This is the reason that so many important events in John’s gospel, including the arrest and burial of Jesus, take place in a garden.  John wants us to remember that first garden, to return to the first moments of creation so that we can understand that God is bringing about a new creation through Jesus Christ.  The words of Jesus to his mother and the beloved disciple are words of love and affection, but they are also words of restoration.  By bringing these two people together, Jesus heals division, restores human relationships, and repairs what was torn asunder by our disobedience to the commandment of God.  By restoring the relationship between his mother and the beloved disciple, Jesus Christ restores all human relationships and inaugurates a new creation, a creation that is no longer subject to disobedience and death, but has been renewed by the self-giving love of God.  This is what Jesus accomplishes on the cross.  Jesus says, “It is finished” because he has completed this work of restoration; he has finished the work of recreating the world in the image of God’s redeeming love.  Even as the chaos swirls around him, there is a glimmer of hope, a whisper of restoration, a quiet promise that God will finish God’s new creation through the Christ who reaches out to us in love from the hard wood of the cross.

In a few moments, we will pray for a world that is in chaos.  We will pray for a world of geopolitical saber rattling, where countries threaten each other with nuclear weapons and refuse to engage in diplomacy.  We will pray for a world of political intractability, where politicians seem unable to communicate or find common ground.  We will pray for a world of suffering and affliction, where people are hungry, homeless, and oppressed through no fault of their own.  We will pray for a world where hundreds of millions of people do not have access to clean water, where tyrants massacre their people, and where children are killed in their classrooms.  In the face of these overwhelming challenges, we might be tempted to throw up our hands in despair, to conclude that there is nothing that we can do to alleviate such suffering.  We might be tempted to pretend that we do not care and turn away from those who face seemingly insurmountable obstacles.  But if the gospel that is proclaimed from the cross is true, then every act of kindness and generosity is a proclamation of God’s new creation.  Every person we feed, every child we comfort, every donation we make becomes a symbol of God’s great love revealed to us on the cross.  Not only that, every effort we make to reach out and participate in God’s work of restoration is an opportunity for the whole world “to see and know that things which were cast down are being raised up, and things which had grown old are being made new, and that all things are being brought to their perfection by him through whom all things were made.”  Jesus may have finished his work of restoration on the cross, but we are invited to share in that mission.  Even as the chaos swirls around us, we are invited to recognize and affirm that there is always a glimmer of hope, a whisper of restoration, and a quiet promise that God will finish God’s new creation though Jesus Christ working through us as we reach out in love to this world that needs it so desperately.