Third Sunday of Easter
John 21.1-19
This week a couple of parishioners have circulated online articles that I was on the list to receive. One of them had to do with what Christianity could mean or could offer with regard to the economy. Another had to do with what Christian identity could mean to a person trying to live life day to day in the world as it is now. Although they were very different articles, they had something in common and the content of both is reflected in today’s gospel lesson.
The story is told as a post-resurrection appearance in John’s gospel, but it has a remarkable similarity to a story in chapter 5 of Luke which takes place during Jesus’ ministry. It is odd in the context of John’s gospel because in Chapter 20 – one chapter before today’s lesson, Jesus has just revealed himself to the skeptical Thomas and the other disciples as the risen Lord. We heard that story last Sunday. In it, Thomas is awe-struck and falls to his knees proclaiming Jesus as his Lord and God. Then in the story we hear this week from Chapter 21, the disciples, including Thomas, once again initially fail to recognize Jesus. As with much of biblical literature, the coherence of the narrative and the inner life of the characters are not the first priority of the author – the story is about something else. At the end of it, Jesus casts Peter in the role of leadership. He is to be the one who feeds and walks alongside them providing sustenance, community and guidance. As with last week’s gospel lesson, this is a story about what and how the church is to be.
We are what the church has become. We look back a century or even a half century ago and see the church functioning as an institution, interacting with other institutions. The church was a presence in civic life. It was a norm in personal and family life. Throughout my school years the number of my peers whose families did not at least claim affiliation with a particular church was very small. The number whose families did not attend regularly was not much greater. Now it’s very much the opposite. And the church is more frequently ignored or actively excluded from civic life out of fear of appearing to favor one variety of religious belief over another or concern that religious partisans will attempt to impose their particular beliefs on others in the form of law. The dark side of the church’s institutional weight has been exposed more recently – the effort to hide the abuse of children in the Roman Catholic Church or the willingness of some in the Anglican Communion to exclude its gay and lesbian members from full participation in the sacraments in order to placate those who would fragment it out of anger over their full inclusion in the community of the baptized.
As the church we do not have the civic and institutional heft we once did. Plenty of people claim to “be spiritual,” but the mention of Christianity frequently produces a roll of the eyes or a response made in a resigned tone of voice, as if we have little or nothing to offer to someone seeking life in the spirit and in community.
But the articles I mentioned earlier both suggest that that assumption is inaccurate. The church does have something very important to contribute to the common life of the community outside these walls. What we have to offer is particularly important in a time in which the expectations of future generations for a standard of living that exceeds that of their parents may never be satisfied. It is particularly important in a world where work is no longer about creating something useful or valuable but has become something more like putting your hand in the next person’s pocket and taking what you find. It is particularly important in a world in which ideas, behavior, politics and economy are increasingly driven by the furtherance of individual interest and satisfaction of individual desire rather than what builds and preserves the rhythm and fabric of a community’s common life and connects humanity with the natural world.
I think you can find all of these ideas in today’s gospel lesson. The disciples encounter Jesus in the early morning on the beach. They’ve worked all night at fishing and have nothing to show for it. He suggests that they try one more time, and their labor is productive. They have a connection with what they do. The interaction of their labor with the natural world is obvious. They sell their fish to the people who will consume it. And they eat what they catch. They’re not selling financial instruments that reward the seller with mind-bending amounts of money in the short term, arouse in the buyer the same hope of mind-bending profits when he flips them and then cause entire national economies to collapse when those two have their money safely deposited offshore. As the church, we live life by what has been characterized as a noble rhythm: the change of seasons and in the church year that is built around the story of Jesus’ life and the traditions that his followers have gathered over time. Those traditions challenge us to find our place in a story that is not entirely of our own making. It links us across space and time to those who have gone before us and those who will come after us. We also fit ourselves into the ethical constraints that story asks of us and apply them to our daily living.
In today’s gospel story Jesus invites the disciples to come together to cook and share a meal. It is one of the most basic forms of human community. We enact it in ritual form every Sunday and in real life after we conclude our worship. Calling coffee hour the 8th sacrament is more than just a joke. It points to our human inclination to eat in the enjoyable and enlightening company of others. But in families and households in our culture, the preparation and sharing of meals has become enough of a rarity that experts like family therapists and nutritionists have to tell us how important it is. As a culture our consumption and acquisition of food and of everything else, for that matter, has lost its rhythm and purpose. Consumption has come to be about satisfying our momentary desires and our demand to have more for the purpose of having more. The ideals and aspirations of our culture have come to be about gathering the resources to support this satisfaction of endless desire. That transforms the meaning of work from effort that produces something useful and valuable into whatever produces the most gain for the worker. By this standard, if you’re not earning a fortune by any means necessary, you have some explaining to do. When the system that had evolved for doing that took a hit in the fall of 2008, and the realization dawned that it was all a game that we had been drawn into, the prevailing emotion was fear – fear of not having enough. What the church can do is help people recalibrate what enough means. Every Sunday we gather together for the Eucharist – the giving of thanks and the sharing of a meal. We express ritually the belief that in Christ there can be enough for all. We offer that expression in a community that acknowledges shared limits on the way we live out our own desires and our responsibility to provide for the needs of others. By changing our own attitudes about what is enough – for others and for ourselves, we offer the world the means to exchange the resentment over a declining standard of living to a thoughtful and appreciative consideration of what we really need to live life well: to care for the earth and its creatures, to do our work with honor, commitment and a sense of productivity, and to create a world in which justice and peace guide our decisions and actions.