Today’s gospel lesson is hands down my
favorite
resurrection
appearance in the Bible.
Partly, it’s the context.
John has the appearance to Mary
Magdalene,
then
to all the disciples,
then
to doubting Thomas.
And there it stops with Thomas’
conversion.
We have the thrilling conclusion – a
conversion from doubt to belief.
John explains the purpose of the book
and says “the end.”
The curtain comes down. The credits are
rolling.
Then John runs back on stage and says
“Wait!
Wait! There’s something else!”
Then we have this story added on like
an afterthought.
Here’s what’s going on:
In John, we don’t see much of the human
side of Jesus.
Someone said, in John’s gospel, Jesus’
feet never quite
touch
the ground.
The religion in John is about believing
your way into a mystical union
--believing in
something too mysterious to express.
Only near the end, in Jesus’ farewell
discourse, does love come up.
And the love Jesus commands is “agape”
– a spiritual love
that
is absolutely unconditional
-- which I would be entirely for
– if only I were capable of it.
My capacity for love is more humanly
flawed.
People have to be pretty lovable for me
to even put up with them.
In a word, it’s a pretty lofty religion
we got going in John.
If you want spiritual, this is
spirituality on steroids.
John’s community practiced that mystical
brand of Christianity
in
Ephesus for several decades.
But reality kept tripping up their
spirituality.
They had problems aplenty – mostly
internal strife.
They fought like cats and dogs while
preaching agape,
unconditional
love all the while.
So how do we make sense of a faith
when
the people practicing it persist in being
all too human?
As John’s community struggled with their failures
in the art of
spiritual love,
they
remembered one of the old stories.
They remembered another appearance of
the Risen Lord
that
hadn’t seemed important before – because it didn’t fit.
But now, it became so important,
they
added a chapter to their gospel.
They added this story.
In the previous Resurrection
Appearances,
Jesus
was even more elevated and spiritual
than
he had been before Good Friday.
He walked through walls.
He invoked the Holy Spirit on the
disciples.
He told Thomas his belief might be good
enough
but it was still
second rate.
He was loftier than ever – and he was
always pretty lofty.
But this last appearance is different.
Jesus is different.
He shows up unassumingly on the beach.
From his manner of speech and actions,
he seems like a
grizzled old fisherman.
I suspect that’s why they don’t’
recognize him.
He offers fishing advice as fisherman
do.
The disciples finally recognizes him
and rushed to shore
to worship their
Lord.
But instead of doing something
spiritual,
Jesus
has built a charcoal fire.
Instead of saying something profound
about
“I live in God so if you live in me you will live in God
and
God will live in you and will all be one as the Father
and
I are one” or some such thing, he says,
“Let’s
cook up some of those fish and have breakfast.”
This is a very human Jesus – a Christ
of the ordinary.
This disconcertingly normal appearance
of Jesus cooking breakfast
over
a charcoal fire as poor people do all over this earth
is
where we get our Anglican sense of “the sacred ordinary.”
In his classic essay, The Anglican Way,
Dean James Fenhagen
described
our pedestrian spirituality as “holy worldliness”
and
“worldly holiness.”
The father of Humanistic Psychology,
Abraham Maslow, said:
“The
sacred is in the ordinary . . . . It is to be found
in
one’s daily life, in one’s neighbors, one’s friends and family,
in
one’s own backyard.”
Much of what goes by the name
“spirituality” these days
is
not like that at all.
It is pretentious.
The “spiritual” people are better than
the ordinary clods,
way
better than the ordinary religious clods in churches.
Much of what goes by the name of
“spirituality” these days
is
escapist.
Do a special technique taught by an
exotic person with an accent
and
imagine you are in some pristine place of peace and solace.
It will take your mind off the
messiness of reality.
You won’t have to think about
unpleasant things
like
hunger in Haiti, gang violence in America,
or
the loneliness of elderly people in Las Vegas.
But Anglican spirituality is the
spirituality of today’s lesson.
It is pedestrian spirituality.
It cooks breakfast.
It even washes the dishes.
One of the great classics in Christian
spirituality
is
The Practice of the Presence of God
by
Brother Lawrence, a Carmelite monk
whose
monastery job was cook, waiter, and bus boy.
He practiced the presence of God while
keeping house.
This pedestrian spirituality of ours
does not make us better
than
anyone else.
It is too ordinary.
It calls for an ordinary way of life –
nothing to brag about.
It is a religion lived out in ordinary
relationships
like
the relationship between Jesus and Peter.
After breakfast, Jesus took Peter
aside.
They needed a little reconciling after
Peter had denied Jesus
three
times in Caiaphas’s courtyard.
So Jesus said,
“Simon,
son of John, do you love me more than these?”
But the word he used for love was agape.
It meant, “Simon do you have the most unconditional,
highly spiritual love
for me of any of the disciples?”
But Peter when replied, “Lord you know
that I love you.”
He used the word phileo. It was an
ordinary word, not so spiritual.
“I love you as a friend.”
Jesus said, “Ok, then feed my lambs.”
Then Jesus gave Peter another chance.
He asked again, “Simon do you agape
me?”
But again Peter failed to rise to the
spiritual challenge.
He said, “Lord you know that I phileo
you.”
So Jesus said, “Alright, tend my
sheep.”
The third time, Jesus changed the
question.
He met Peter on his own human level.
“Simon,
do you phileo me?”
All he asked now was a human love,
a
human friendship, the kind of thing
an
ordinary bloke like Peter or I
might
be able to achieve.
And Peter said, “Yes, Lord, you know I phileo
you.
I love you as a common man loves his
friend.
I am not an enlightened saint but I can
do that.”
Jesus said, “Feed my sheep.”
The good news is that an ordinary,
fallible human love
is
all we have to do.
The bad news is the sheep and lambs
part.
An ordinary human love won’t elevate us
to a higher plane
than ordinary people.
Quite the opposite:
it will get us mixed
up with all those other ordinary people
in
the world who need us as sheep need shepherds.
Someone said,
“The problem with
inviting Jesus into your life
is
that he brings his friends.”
And so it is.
Loving Jesus in our little human way
doesn’t
make us the least bit special
but it will entangle our lives with an
odd lot of other folks.
Jesus will get us mixed up with all the
wrong kind
of
people.
Worse yet, we may even wind
up caring about th
