Bridging the Gap

Have you ever spent time in place where life looks and feels so different, that it is almost impossible to remember what your home is like when you are there? Then, when you come back home, it’s almost impossible to remember the other place? For me, the eleven years that I lived in Europe quickly faded to flat picture-postcards as soon as I came back to America. And now, when I go back to Europe for a vacation, that world pops back into reality, as if by magic. While I’m there, it’s my life in America that automatically seeps into shades of misty gray. It’s as if both places can’t exist at the same time. It’s as if I’m a different person in each place. My mind is somehow unable to hold together such different worlds, with their different languages, customs--even sounds and smells. 

I believe that’s how Simon Peter and the disciples must have felt right after Jesus’ crucifixion—as if their lives with Jesus had never existed, as if they were back where they started, cut off from God, cut off from their calling as disciples, as if both realities couldn’t exist at the same time. In our Gospel reading, the disciples have moved suddenly from their world with Jesus back into the world of their former lives—they have gone fishing in Galilee. Their memories of their time with Jesus probably seem unreal. After all, their messiah has been crucified, defeated by the Roman powers. The systems of meaning that they built while listening to Jesus’ teaching have suddenly come toppling down under the shadow of the cross. Even the glimpses of resurrection have been vague and shadowy: A wild story from Mary Magdalene about a gardener? Strange appearances in the upper room?  Were these things that they could hang on to?

To top it off, Simon Peter not only drifts aimlessly on the waters where he once found purpose and livelihood; he is especially ravaged by shame. Whenever he thinks of Jesus--his friend, his Lord--he must also remember his own betrayal of Jesus. How the red heat of shame, of his own failure and worthlessness, must burn within him! We all know the feeling, the way our minds replay our failures again and again. Over and over in his mind, he hears the crowing of the rooster. He smells the acrid charcoal fire in the courtyard where fear led him to deny being a follower of Jesus-- not once, but three times.

Now, in today’s Gospel, Peter comes face to face with that dreaded charcoal fire once again. Out of the shame-filled shadows of “before,” arise both Jesus and the smoke of a campfire. Yet, who is Peter now? He’s no longer “Simon Peter,” the Rock on whom Jesus will build his church. Jesus calls him, “Simon son of John.” Once again, he’s the unknown, insignificant fisherman whom Jesus met at the beginning of his ministry. Jesus may be raised from the dead, but Simon Peter still wanders in that empty space in between our everyday world and our “world with God,” a space filled with regrets and failures.

But look at what Jesus does: He doesn’t leave Simon in shame and failure. He invites Simon to join him in his reality—in his new Easter reality. Resurrection isn’t only a raising of Jesus’ past identity. It’s also a raising of the past identities of those who have been with him.[1] The Good News for us--we who live lives of trying and failing and trying again--is that Jesus, the victim who loves instead of condemning, raises us up with him. He invites us into a new world of meaning and forgiveness. Being raised with him, being brought into his new reality, we are no longer forced to choose between distant and opposite shores.

       OK, so how exactly does this work? The first step is to recognize Jesus. How do the disciples recognize him?  In God’s miraculous abundance. There’s suddenly a huge catch of fish, yet their nets don’t break under the load. We, too, are invited to grasp the abundance of the risen Christ in fleeting yet powerful, singular moments: in a satisfying abundance of love that washes over us-- hugs and kisses, cards full of well-wishes, the company of friends. Or we grasp God’s presence in a sudden abundance of grace that carries us through a trial—forgiveness that we don’t deserve, meals brought to us when we are sick, debts forgiven. We even grasp it in the breath-taking abundance of beauty in nature—a sunset, a field of spring flowers, a soaring mountain view. God is always present in glorious abundance. “God’s love” in general is hard to grasp, but we can’t deny the momentary weight of it in our hands, like a net full of fish.

Secondly, like Simon Peter, we need to jump in and swim to Jesus. Commentators scratch their heads in this passage over Simon Peter being naked and then getting dressed to jump into the sea. But the Greek phrase used here for “putting on clothes” can mean that Simon Peter just belted up his fisherman’s smock so that it wouldn’t impede his swimming as he rushed to get to Jesus.[2] What we can gather from this strange verse is that Simon Peter jumps headlong into the gap between himself and Jesus. He leaves the nets full of fish; he leaves the boats—all he wants is to get back to Jesus’ world. When we see the risen Christ, we too are compelled to tie up whatever gets in our way, and leap. Yes, I’m afraid that there is always going to be leaping involved. And unfortunately, we aren’t usually able to push some kind of magic pause button while we ponder the risks.

Third, Peter and the disciples eat with this Jesus who appears to them. They allow him to feed them breakfast, just as he fed them before his death, all those many times. The meal on the beach represents the Eucharist, of course, the same meal that Jesus prepares for us today. Each time we share in the Eucharist, we, like Simon Peter, dare to put one foot into the flat, shadowy world of shame and inadequacy, for we partake of the body and blood of the God we condemned. Yet at the same time, we are restored by the forgiveness of the One whom we have condemned. The Easter community is both guilty and restored as it gathers in the name of the one who is both crucified and raised. The Eucharist is an activity that opens up the space between our world and the Easter world. It holds them both together. As we share the bread and the cup, we enter a place in which that strange disjunction between two worlds is bridged, a place in which the old comes together with the new, in which the world that killed Jesus meets the world filled with Jesus.

Finally, once we have been fed, Jesus asks us, as he asks Simon Peter, to feed his sheep, to tend the people of God. They are not our sheep to do with as we would like; they are not somebody else’s sheep for us to ignore, but they are God’s sheep. Our purpose, our meaning in this post-Easter world, is to care for them. Our new identity is to follow Jesus—to follow him in love and friendship for others, no matter where it leads. Scholars wonder why John alternates two words for “love” in this text. Jesus asks if Peter loves him using the Greek word “agape,” self-giving love, the love that Jesus showed us on the Cross. Peter, though, answers that he loves Jesus with “phileo,” the love of deep friendship. Finally, Jesus comes to meet Peter where he is, asking him if he has friendship for him. For me, this puzzle shows us the importance that God places on friendship, on relationship. Jesus asks us not just to love with a vague, abstract devotion. Jesus asks us to actively love him and others: To reach out with the love we show for our friends. As psychologist Brené Brown puts it, in recovering from the shame of failure, “we [must] move what we’re learning from our heads to our hearts through our hands.”[3]

• Recognize and live into abundance
• Take risky leaps
• Be fed by the mystery of the Eucharist
• Prioritize relationships

 In so doing, our ordinary lives are made holy. We are made whole to follow Christ wherever he may lead us. Europe will exist across the Atlantic, whether I am feeling disconnected from it or whether it has been momentarily made present by a phone call from an old friend. In the same way, our new life and wholeness in Christ exist beneath our doubts and lapses, reemerging as we feed and are fed.

 

 

---

[1]Rowan Williams, Resurrection (Cleveland: Pilgrim Press, 2002), 35.

[2] Raymond Brown, The  Gospel According to John, XIII-XXI, (The Anchor Yale Bible; New Haven: Yale University Press, 1970), 1072.

[3] Brené Brown, Rising Strong: How the Ability to Reset Transforms the Way We Live, Love, Parent, and Lead (New York: Random House, 2015), 7.

Alleluia! God has Power over the Switch

 

Once upon a time during Holy Week, I was hunched over my computer after a service. I was concentrating on very important church work, like scheduling meetings and reading emails. All of a sudden, a bunch of young kids rushed by the office, all talking at once. “Rev. Anne, Rev. Anne,” they cried, “the ‘Alleluia Box’ blew up in the church and all of the Alleluia’s are gone!”

 

          “What?” I exclaimed, with a bit of impatience, looking at my watch. I knew that I was in control of that Alleluia box game; I was the one who locked up the word “alleluia” on Ash Wednesday. I was the one who would free it on Easter. It’s a fun game, but I knew that the box wouldn’t really blow up. Kids’ imaginations!  But the children were all in an uproar, so excited, all talking at once.

 

“It’s true, we saw it, we saw it!” they cried, when I didn’t react. “It’s just like you told us,” offered one boy, in the patient way you have to talk to clueless grownups. “You said that on Easter the box would open and that all the alleluias would come out. Well, they must have come out early and flown away, because they’re all gone!”

 

          “OK,” I said, trying to humor the kids. “You’d better go find your parents. They’re probably looking for you. I’ll check on it later. You see, it’s still Holy Week,” I explained. “Jesus isn’t alive again yet. So the alleluias must still be in the box. It’s OK.” The children trooped away dutifully, with only a faint trace of disappointment on their still glowing faces. They knew what they had seen—and they remembered the Easter story from Godly Play. Still, only when I finished my “important” work did I head into the church to see what was going on.

 

          My tale is similar to Luke’s account of the resurrection in today’s Gospel. A group of women arrive in the fragile light of dawn to prepare Jesus’ body for burial. They’re terrified to find an empty tomb, rather than a lifeless body. They’re told by angelic witnesses that Christ is risen, and all of a sudden, they remember what Jesus had taught them. They remember the promises that he made to them.  They run back to the rest of the disciples, full of wonder and excitement. Yet their testimony is dismissed as a gullible flight of fancy. After all, in the first century, women had about as much credibility as young children do today.

          Just like Jesus’ disciples, we have heard his promises, too. We read what the earthly Jesus said and did in Scripture; we hear his story in Godly Play; we recite it every week in the Creed. We know how the Easter story goes: Christ is risen. God is victorious. Death is vanquished. Sin is forgiven. From that first Easter on, we live in a new creation. We are a new creation. We Christians say that we believe this story. Or at least we try to believe it.  But then we mostly go on about our lives as if none of it were true. We spend our days working and running from moment to moment, hardly stopping to catch a breath. We spend our nights worrying about failure, about war, about sickness and death. We live as if gathering enough security or buying enough things will make everything all right.

Even at Easter, we get caught up in brunch menus and reservations, in decorating and cleaning up the church, in getting the kids or grandkids looking cute for the photo ops. “Christ is risen!” we proclaim, yet it often feels like a game that we are playing, a game like locking up and freeing the alleluias. Those of us here today, at least, are pretty good at showing up at the tomb, like the women. Yet, even though we know what Jesus has told us, we come expecting not life, but death. We don’t really expect an explosion of life on Easter, do we? We don’t expect to see Christ. We don’t expect the world to change overnight. I mean, how can we?! Just look at the news headlines!

I read a quote this week that shook me out of my own death-seeking slump. It’s by Cole Arthur Riley, author of the new bestseller, This Here Flesh.  She posted on Instagram that “Turning on the light doesn’t make the monsters disappear from under our beds, but it reminds us who has power over the switch.” Turning on the light reminds us who has power over the switch.

Don and I have a running battle over who has power over the light switch in our kitchen in the morning. I’m for sudden shock and awe, blasting the room with morning. Don prefers a gradual glow, adding light a bit at a time. In any case, whether the lights come on suddenly or slowly, we all know that uncomfortable, blinky feeling. When you get up everything is still kind of dark and fuzzy, right? You’re still half asleep, and you don’t have your glasses on yet. And then, whoosh, the light comes on! Suddenly, you squint and blink, and you can’t quite see everything right. You’re blinded by that light. Then, as we start our day, our eyes eventually get used to the light. We don’t notice it anymore. We just pay attention to the world that the light shows us. We make our coffee and start reading the paper. We’ve forgotten about the light. But without it, everything would still be dim shadows.

 For theologian Rowan Williams, the resurrection is like a new light going on in the morning. The Risen Christ is a way of seeing the world around us. For the disciples at the empty tomb, it was as if someone had just flipped on a bright light. Jesus was that light. They saw him everywhere. It was a disorienting experience, a frightening one. They were painfully aware of his strange new form and presence. But soon, people stopped noticing the newness. They stopped squinting. The light stopped being something that drew our attention. Instead, Christ became something that we see by. At Easter, the Risen Christ becomes “the channel by which God goes on speaking to the world, the way in which God is with us, committed to us whatever we do.”[1] Easter reminds us that God, not evil and death, has power over the switch.

I’m hoping now that the children can help us death-seeking grown-ups remember Jesus’ promise that God controls the switch of new life. Children, come on up here, and let’s blow up this “Alleluia Box!” [The children come forward and hold open a big silk scarf like a parachute. I open the Alleluia Box and pour all of the locked-up Alleluia papers in the middle. Everyone shouts, “Alleluia, Christ is Risen! The Lord is Risen Indeed!” And we send the papers flying up into the air.]

          May we all remember that Easter didn’t happen one time over two thousand years ago. It didn’t happen just last year, or just today. Easter is every Sunday. It is new life in the Body of Christ. Easter is here among us, the light by which we see. The light in which we live. Alleluia!

---

[1] Rowan Williams, “Ascension Day,” in A Ray of Darkness (Cambridge, MA: Cowley Publications, 1995), 68-71.