Easter 3 C May 5, 2019
Luther Memorial Church Seattle, WA
The Rev. Julie Hutson
Acts 9: 1-20 + Psalm 30 + Revelation 5: 11-14 + John 21: 1-19
Alleluia! Christ is risen! Christ is risen, indeed! Alleluia!
Southern women have the best disaster response plan in a crisis of any kind. It doesn’t matter if you have lost your job or someone has died or been born or you’re sick or you’re moving. Southern women have the best response plan in a crisis. They bring food.
Casseroles or pies or cakes….a Southern woman will show up at your front door with food to get your body through whatever your spirit must endure. It’s really the best response plan in a crisis.
But we all respond differently to times of crisis, times when the world or our lives as we know them are just turned upside down. Some of us bake and some of us eat and some of us clean (that would be me) and some of us withdraw and some of us dig our heels in and some of us make really unhealthy choices. Because life can just be hard sometimes.
And it’s not just our individual lives that can be in a state of turmoil or chaos. Families experience seasons when they are troubled. Neighborhoods experience states of apprehension. Workplaces can be places of stress. Nations can experience times of great division. And I know this is shocking….but even congregations can find themselves in seasons of disquiet and unease. And every one of those systems has a way they deal with such conflict and chaos.
In the reading from John’s gospel today, Simon Peter had a way he handled the stress of the death and resurrection of Jesus. He goes fishing. “I’m going out to fish,” Peter says and the rest of the disciples respond: “We’ll join you.” You’re not leaving us here at the lakeside with nothing else to do but try to figure out what in the world is happening with all of this resurrection stuff. You’re going fishing? We’re coming along.
The first reading from Acts, offers us another story of a chaos filled time in the life of the early church. (Birdwalk: In the Easter season, the readings from the Older Testament are replaced with readings from the book of Acts, which is the story of the early church.)
This is the story of the conversion of Saul. I was telling this story to someone the other day, who had not grown up hearing it, so they didn’t have all of the interpretive filters in place. I wonder if we can let the scales fall from our own eyes and listen to the story in a new way?
Saul is one really bad dude. He’s breathing murderous threats against the early followers of Jesus. Not only that, he has the backing of the religious authorities, saying that he could in fact arrest and detain and separate from their families both men and women who followed Jesus. No one was safe.
While traveling on the road toward Damascus, a bright light flashes and an unseen voice demands to know why Saul is persecuting him. It’s the voice of Jesus, not attached to any bodily form. And Saul is blinded by the voice and the accusation against him, so he goes on to Damascus where he sits in his blindness and eats and drinks nothing.
Meanwhile, a follower of Jesus, a disciple named Ananias is called by Christ in a vision to go and pray with Saul, to lay hands on him. Understandably, Ananias isn’t very excited about this idea, reminding Jesus that Saul has persecuted and harmed and killed his followers.
There’s a lot of chaos in this story of Saul and it doesn’t all involve him. Ananias must have wondered why in the world Jesus would interrupt his life and command him to go to Saul.
This is about the point in each of these stories…the disciples in their confusion about the resurrected Jesus…Saul struck blind suddenly….and Ananias sent to do a new job that no one in their right mind would want to do…this is the point, that if they lived in Alabama or Mississippi or Texas or Georgia a woman would show up with a casserole.
But here’s the thing about those Southern women and their literal comfort food. That pie or cake or casserole is just how they get their foot in the door. Because they’re going to follow up in two ways: First they are going to pray for you. And when they say they’ll pray for you, they mean they will pray for you. And second, they are going to follow up to make sure that you aren’t just letting whatever you are dealing with win without a fight. There’s nothing like a Southern woman to remind you that, being made in the very image of God, you actually do have what it takes to survive or overcome or move past or get through whatever it is that makes you think you don’t.
In both of these stories this morning, the communities and the people in crisis are offered a way forward.
After Ananias protests that he doesn’t really want to go deal with the murder breathing Saul, Christ says: “Go anyway.” Sometimes these are just the words we need to hear. Do it anyway. Go anyway. We know what to do, we know what is right, it’s not what we want to do, but we need to go anyway. And Ananias is not only received by Saul, but he baptizes him.
Saul receives Ananias as the messenger from Jesus and after being baptized, he eats and drinks to fortify his body for what is ahead, which is no longer killing or arresting or persecuting the followers of Jesus. Instead, it is proclaiming in the synagogues, in the very places where he’d been given permission to arrest the Jesus followers….it is proclaiming there, that Jesus was the Only Begotten of God….the Messiah….the one for whom they’d waited. Saul basically had to say “Hey, I was wrong. This IS the one for whom we’ve waited.” And of course, with his change of heart came a change of name and Saul became Paul.
When the disciples are fishing, Jesus is revealed to them in a lesson about not always doing things the same way they’ve done them in the past. Put your nets on the other side. The side where you usually catch nothing. And they caught more than they could bring up. And then, Jesus fixes breakfast for them: bread and fish prepared right there on the beach. You can imagine that they felt both joy and uncertainty. After all, their ability to understand what was happening wasn’t something they could count on. They didn’t know for certain who he was.
And then Jesus asks Simon Peter some heartbreaking questions. Three times Jesus asks, “Do you love me”. In most translations we hear Peter’s answer as “Yes, Lord, you know that I love you.” But there’s an important distinction. The language of Jesus and Peter has many words for love, unlike ours. Jesus asks “Do you agape me?”….do you love me deeply. And Peter responds “You know I phileo you.” You know I love you like a friend.
Wow. But Jesus doesn’t get caught up in Peter’s distinctions. Jesus just reminds Peter that his task as a disciple is to take care of those in community with him. The others who might also be confused about the chaos surrounding this whole death and resurrection thing. Feed my lambs. Tend my sheep. Feed my sheep.
Did you catch that food is involved in both of these stories? The food that Saul eats to strengthen himself for the work of going out in the world as an entirely different person. The food that enables him to stand firmly and declare Jesus as Messiah.
And breakfast on the beach with Jesus. Jesus knew that his disciples were trying hard to adjust to the new normal. So much so, that they just wanted to do what they always did, which was to go fishing. But Jesus says, “Here. Here’s how you’ll catch fish. Now have some breakfast, because you’re going something to eat in order to go out and feed and tend others.”
Life is full of unexpected difficulties. Sickness. Disappointment. Betrayal. Abandonment. Loss. It’s filled with times when we want to go and do the things we think we know how to do best: go fishing. Or whatever your version of that is.
So, beloved children of God, faithful followers of Jesus, take care of one another. Feed and tend the brokenhearted. Lift up the fallen. Make space for the mutual burdens we bear together. Because God is with us. Like a southern woman standing on the porch with a chicken and mushroom soup casserole, we can count on God to show up with what we need….it might be that we have to be the bearer of those mercies. And, as the Psalmist sings out, keep these words in your hearts: There may be tears during the night, but joy comes in the morning.
Thanks be to God, and let the church say…Amen.