“It’s
All About Love”
John 21:1-19
First Presbyterian
A few weeks ago a colleague of
mine used a passage from Philippians as the scripture for the day in his
congregation, a passage in which
This
The first thing he showed the
children was a keepsake from his wedding. And
then he put it in the garbage can. Next,
he took a souvenir from the very first baseball game he attended in
By this time, he said, the
children had begun slowly to back away from him, looking at him as though he was
a little crazy. He finished the time
with the children, prayed, and sent them back to their parents.
He went on with the service and was feeling good about how the time with
the children had gone and believed he also had made his point with the “bigger
kids” in the pews. Until he got
home.
“Well, did you get all of
your stuff out of the trash can after worship?” his wife asked him.
“Of course,” he answered, looking at her as if she had
completely lost it.
“Oh, so it was just an
‘object lesson’ for the kids, and not something you really believe?” she
said as she continued to put away the groceries.(1)
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That is the rub, is it not?
We like the idea of the gospel, proclaim its promise, even are
moved by it at times. But we do not
fully embrace it because we fear the stark and sweeping danger it poses to our
carefully ordered and socially expected lives.
The gospel is a fire and we are afraid of the burning.
It is hard for us to trust that God is love and that the fire of that
love refines and refashions our humanity, and does not destroy it.
The fire can burn wild, though, and that is what scares us because, in
the presence of love’s fire, every lesser thing in its path melts away.
If our lives are built on lesser things, the crucible of reconstruction
may be painful. But it is the only
way I know that we are able to live into the freedom and joy that are the dream
of God for us.
So much opens up to us when we
do not force a literal interpretation on the Bible’s stories.
This especially is true of John’s gospel for he was neither a historian
nor a biographer, but a theologian, and a mystical theologian at that.
He was concerned with the inner experience of God and faith and love in
our lives. Not understanding John is
the reason he has been so grievously misunderstood across the years.
It is why a sentence such as Jesus saying, “I am the way, the truth
and the life; no one comes to the Father but by me” has been so heinously
misinterpreted as a declaration of Christian superiority and exclusivity.
One of the several causes of the decline in the churches over the last
couple of decades is its continuing preoccupation with doctrines and dogmas,
with right belief and what we call “orthodoxy.”
When one desires to become a member of a church, typically the membership
questions inquire into one’s beliefs about God, not one’s experiences
of God. Both are important, of
course, but the church has been out of balance for too long in favor of the
former. People want to, I want to,
do more than believe in God. We want
to experience God.
The church too often has taken
John’s stories and used them doctrinally when John, the mystical theologian,
meant them for the increase of love in the world.
In our story today of Jesus making breakfast on the beach for his
disciples, it is not a matter of feeding their stomachs that John is addressing,
but their souls. The sea, the water,
is, in mystical writing, always a symbol of the human soul.
The fish are symbols of spiritual food.
In John’s story, the risen Christ appears in the disciples’ lives to
lead them to the spiritual discoveries they needed, represented by the fish and
bread, in order to move beyond the despair and disillusionment of their lives
caused by the crucifixion of Jesus in whom they had put so much hope and trust.
John’s story has Jesus
lighting a charcoal fire in which to cook the fish, but John means for us to
understand it is a spiritual fire he is kindling in the disciples.
It is the fire of divine love that Jesus wants to ignite within them so
as to transform the way they see the world and live in it.
More than that, it is only by participating in the divine love that Jesus
represents in the story that Peter and the disciples and any of us can grow
toward our true and full humanity.
So three times Jesus asks Peter
if he, Peter, loves him, if Peter loves who and what Jesus embodies and stands
for? “Peter, do you want the
fire of divine love to burn within you? Do
you want to be filled with God? Do
you want to be freed to live passionately and poetically and prophetically in
this world without being conformed to it or done in by it?”
Three times Peter answers yes and each time Jesus invites Peter into
the work of love: comforting anxious hearts, holding trembling hands, binding up
broken spirits. “Feed my lambs, tend my sheep, feed my
sheep”…for they are hungry, hungry for God, hungry for love, hungry for
life, for light, for luck, for justice and mercy and peace.
Then comes what is surely one of the most truly surprising sentences in the Bible. It is when Jesus says to Peter, “When you were young you dressed yourself and went wherever you wished, but as you grow older you’ll have to stretch out your hands while someone else dresses you and takes you where you do not wish to go.” (Here, I stretch out my arms in the shape of the cross, implying crucifixion.) Do you see what Jesus is saying to Peter, to us? It is the strange reversal of that conventional wisdom that says, “When you are young someone else will dress you and take you where you did not wish to go, but when you grow older you can go wherever you want to go and do whatever you want to do?” But that is not the logic of the gospel. It is not how the fire of God’s love burns.
To grow in the Spirit of Christ
Jesus means to be led for the sake of the world to the place where Jesus himself
was led. To the cross.
To the path of downward mobility in a world that pronounces anyone who is
not on the upward path passé, irrelevant, and pathetic.
This message will not play in many churches these days but I say it to
you gladly, because the downward road of God is the road on which we shall find
God.
Stephen Phelps of the
But, there is another way.
A way whose path is never barred. It
is the path of going lower, a path we do not think of traveling until the fire
of divine love is kindled in us. On
this path there is no end but God, for no matter how low another person is or
has fallen, we can choose to go a step lower, to serve him or her there.
How is this so?
As long as we try to climb higher and higher in our lives, we are seeking
to make more of ourselves. But, when
we allow ourselves to be carried by God’s Spirit downward into
places and situations and lives where we never thought we would go, we
cease trying to make more of ourselves and find ourselves instead being made:
being made more fully human, being made more wholly divine after the manner of
the One who on Calvary went as low as he could go.(2)
It is, life is, as Jesus
suggested in this thrice-asked question to Peter, all about love.
Learning to love, and nothing else, is finally and fully the purpose of
this church.
Amen.
(1) “Occasional Sightings of the Gospel,” an internet blog of Thom M. Shuman
(2) Stephen H. Phelps in his sermon “The Sent-Down Man” preached here March 7, 2007
© Copyright First Presbyterian Church 2007