22 April 2007

Breakfast on the Beach: Overcoming Mondays


John 21:1-19 (NRSV)
After these things Jesus showed himself again to the disciples by the Sea of Tiberias; and he showed himself in this way. Gathered there together were Simon Peter, Thomas called the Twin, Nathanael of Cana in Galilee, the sons of Zebedee, and two others of his disciples. Simon Peter said to them, "I am going fishing."
They said to him, "We will go with you." They went out and got into the boat, but that night they caught nothing.
Just after daybreak, Jesus stood on the beach; but the disciples did not know that it was Jesus. Jesus said to them, "Children, you have no fish, have you?"
They answered him, "No."
He said to them, "Cast the net to the right side of the boat, and you will find some." So they cast it, and now they were not able to haul it in because there were so many fish.
That disciple whom Jesus loved said to Peter, "It is the Lord!"
When Simon Peter heard that it was the Lord, he put on some clothes, for he was naked, and jumped into the sea. But the other disciples came in the boat, dragging the net full of fish, for they were not far from the land, only about a hundred yards off. When they had gone ashore, they saw a charcoal fire there, with fish on it, and bread. Jesus said to them, "Bring some of the fish that you have just caught."
So Simon Peter went aboard and hauled the net ashore, full of large fish, a hundred fifty-three of them; and though there were so many, the net was not torn. Jesus said to them, "Come and have breakfast."
Now none of the disciples dared to ask him, "Who are you?" because they knew it was the Lord. Jesus came and took the bread and gave it to them, and did the same with the fish. This was now the third time that Jesus appeared to the disciples after he was raised from the dead.
When they had finished breakfast, Jesus said to Simon Peter, "Simon son of John, do you love me more than these?"
He said to him, "Yes, Lord; you know that I love you."
Jesus said to him, "Feed my lambs."
A second time he said to him, "Simon son of John, do you love me?"
He said to him, "Yes, Lord; you know that I love you."
Jesus said to him, "Tend my sheep."
He said to him the third time, "Simon son of John, do you love me?"
Peter felt hurt because he said to him the third time, "Do you love me?" And he said to him, "Lord, you know everything; you know that I love you."
Jesus said to him, "Feed my sheep. Very truly, I tell you, when you were younger, you used to fasten your own belt and to go wherever you wished. But when you grow old, you will stretch out your hands, and someone else will fasten a belt around you and take you where you do not wish to go." (He said this to indicate the kind of death by which he would glorify God.) After this he said to him, "Follow me."

Where were you on Monday when you heard the news? It’s likely to be one of those moments you won’t forget. Like that day almost six years ago when Suzanne called me on the cellphone and said, “A plane has hit the World Trade Center in New York and they think there’s been a bomb at the Pentagon.” I remember exactly where I was.

This time the kids were out of school. They came with Suzanne and Deborah Lewis, who was still here visiting. We were going to lunch in Onancock after a meeting of the District Committee on Ordained Ministry. And Rachel said, “Did you hear about Virginia Tech?” It was only the beginning.

Before lunch was over we had already called back to the church to start planning for a service here in the sanctuary that night. I didn’t know what else to do. What is the correct thing to do when a young man fighting so many demons takes the lives of 32 of his classmates and professors? What is the right thing to do when your children, who are looking to you to make sense of this crazy world that we live in…when your children are watching the news with you and are asking the same questions that you are…“How? What happened? Why? God?” What do you do as a Christian when there are Mondays like this week when nothing seems to make sense and the message that seemed so good on Sunday morning starts to quiver and to shake?

You go to church. You sing a song in the gathering darkness. You read the Bible. You light some candles. 33 candles. Way too many candles. You pray. And you hold the hands of the people in the pew next to you and remind yourself that Jesus is the Risen Lord on Sunday and Jesus is the Risen Lord on Monday. Jesus is the Risen Lord on Tuesday and on Wednesday and on Thursday and on every Black Friday and every Saturday and on Sunday all over again. Jesus is the Risen Lord.

But I wasn’t sure of all that five minutes before I left for the church on Monday night. Five minutes before I left I wondered if there was anything appropriate to say on a day like that. Then I got a phone call. It was my friend Laurence in Scotland. It was late in the evening there, but they had seen the news and heard the place and he felt he had to call. It was a very brief conversation. Little more than, “We’re thinking of you.” But it was enough. If the bonds that hold us together across the oceans didn’t disappear because a troubled young man took up a gun last Monday, then maybe those words that tell us the bonds of love are not broken even by death were trustworthy and true, too.

Today’s message was supposed to be another Easter message. We are still in the 50 days of Easter – still celebrating and remembering Christ’s victory over death and the grave. And the story we read from the gospel today is one of those post-Resurrection appearances of Jesus. I’m a great believer in the power of the Holy Spirit to speak in many ways, and I wandered over to the text again this week and asked God to speak through this story about a breakfast on the beach. I asked God to speak to a people who knew Mondays like last Monday.

It is the end of the story now. Or maybe it’s the beginning. Jesus has already appeared to the disciples twice since his resurrection – once to the large majority of them as they sat in a locked room in fear – speaking peace and giving them a ministry of forgiveness. Then again he came to the one who had not been there at first. He came back to visit Thomas and we heard that story last week. Jesus tells him, “Blessed are those who don’t see and yet believe.” And in that phrase we all get invited in.

But the disciples are still not launched out into the world. They have gone back to Galilee – back to the place where it all began – back home. As seven of them were gathered there, Peter decides he can’t take the standing around anymore. He doesn’t know what to do, so he goes with what he knows best. Jesus might have promised to make him fish for people, but for now he was going to fish for fish. The other disciples join him and they go out onto the Sea of Tiberias.

All night long they fish and they catch nothing. The sun starts to come up and they are not to far from the shoreline. There on the lakeshore is a man who looks a little familiar. Beside him there is some smoke from a small charcoal fire. The man calls out to them, “Children!” Interesting that he should call them children. They were grown men. Who would be so familiar as to call them children? “You don’t have any fish, do you?”

“No,” they answer back. This guy must have had bad luck on the waters, too.

“Cast your net out on the right side of the boat. That’s where they are.” This was in the days before the Fishfinder 535 with the Big Screen LCD and 320 vertical pixels, so the disciples did what the man said. After all, there was something very familiar about this man and this scene. The result was a net so full that they weren’t even able to haul it in.

“It’s the Lord!” one of them called out. Simon Peter didn’t even wait. He abandoned the net, threw on his clothes and jumped into the water, swimming in ahead of the boat. When he got there, Jesus was waiting by the fire where there was a fish and bread. He asked them to bring more fish from the big catch and then he said, “Let’s eat breakfast.”

Then he took the bread and broke it and gave it to them. “Take, eat.” It was so natural for him to do this. So natural for them to receive it. The disciples didn’t even need to ask who he was. There was no need for words. The food and the sharing was enough.

This week I spent some time talking with Jeanne Torrence Finley who lives in Blacksburg. She is a United Methodist minister and a former campus minister who has been helping to organize the response of churches to the Virginia Tech tragedy. If you listened to National Public Radio news on Tuesday afternoon, you might have heard her because they interviewed her about what the churches were doing. Of course there were services and phone calls to student families who were worried about their children. But what Jeanne talked about was preparing food.

“Students were saying they would like to have food brought to them or to be with people who have non-cafeteria food, food that’s cooked at home…comfort food.”[i] So that’s what they did. They opened the doors and had home-cooked food there. It’s the most natural impulse in the world. When you don’t know what to say at a time of grief, what do you do? You take food to those who are grieving. When you’re a fisherman and you’re not sure what to do with yourself because the savior you followed is no longer there, what do you do? You fish. When you’ve gathered together with the Risen Christ again with fish and bread, what do you do? You eat as you have eaten so many times before.

Maybe that’s why Jesus tells Peter, “Feed my sheep.” Yes, feeding means guiding them, teaching them, caring for them, loving them. But it also means feeding them.

Jeanne Finley also told me that when her church, Blacksburg UMC, got together for a second time on Wednesday night. After the meal, they went into the sanctuary and they sang. They sang, “Be Still, My Soul, the Lord is on your side.” They sang, “This is My Song, a song for every nation.” They sang, “Here I am, Lord…I will hold your people in my heart.” And because the killer had just been identified that day, they also sang a Korean song from the hymnal because they knew how the Korean-American community would be feeling and they wanted to affirm that though evil may have been done by someone with a Korean name, God still speaks Korean, too. Jeanne said, “Students liked the service because it connected them to other faith communities in other places and times saying there is a life beyond this one.”

So that’s what we’re doing today. We’re doing the things that we know how to do. We’re reading scripture and praying and singing and keeping the door open because it is what Jesus told us to do. We are gathering together as a Christian family because it is what Jesus told us to do. We are lifting up the names of those who have died because the scriptures tell us that “precious in the sight of the Lord is the death of God’s faithful ones” [Ps 116:15]. And we are praying for Cho Seung-Hui and his family, not because we are heartless or because we are neglectful of what he has done, but because it is what Jesus tells us to do.

I talked to a UVA student this week about what was happening on campus there and he said, “This week has given us Christians a chance to step up and show who we are.” The thing he pointed to that made Christians stand out, he said, was that we not only prayed for the victims but we also prayed for the perpetrators. Because this is what God does. God’s greatest threat to those who would separate themselves from the love of God is not that they will be excluded but included. God is continually bringing broken pieces together and making them whole. God is continually seeking out lost coins, lost sheep and lost children and celebrating their return. And God is continually reminding us that nothing can separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus.

There is a word of witness to be spoken today to Seung-Hui Cho’s family. They are living in hiding in fear and shame. You could hear their anguish in the statement released by the family on Friday. “We are humbled by this darkness. We feel hopeless, helpless and lost.”[ii] Their grief is our grief. I’m reminded of how the Amish community responded to the family of the man who killed so many of their school children in Pennsylvania last fall. They took food and offered forgiveness because they knew that family grieved as well. I pray that Cho Seung-Hui’s family can go back home to Centreville and that people will take them food and sit with them and forgiveness can happen.

Finally, I want to say a word about hope. Because that is also what we are commanded to do by the scriptures. In the face of darkness, we are to light a candle because we know that the darkness cannot overcome the light ultimately. There was hope in the Hokie cheer and the strains of “Amazing Grace” rolling across the Drillfield at the candlelight vigil last Tuesday night. There was hope in the maroon and orange shirts and ribbons we saw on Friday. There was hope at the baseball game at Tech on Friday evening when the University of Miami team brought a check from their school for $10,000 to be used for a memorial fund.

But there was also hope in those classrooms on Monday. We heard the story of Liviu Librescu, a professor of aerodynamics at Tech. He was born in Romania in 1930 and as a Jew he faced the insanity of the Nazi Holocaust during World War II. His father was deported and he and his family were sent to a labor camp in an occupied area of the Soviet Union. He survived the war and the communist government that followed it and finally ended up in Israel. In 1985 he came to teach at Virginia Tech and became a very well-respected teacher.

On Monday he was teaching a class as usual in Norris Hall when the sound of gunfire broke out down the hall. He went to the door and held it shut as Cho tried to break in from the other side. He told the students to go out the windows and they did. He was shot five times and died in the classroom but he probably saved many lives. Monday was Holocaust Remembrance Day, but his students will always remember it as Liviu Librescu Day. One of his students, Caroline Merry, said, “He’s a part of my life now and forever. I’m changed. I’m not the person I was before Monday.”[iii]

There’s a lot of truth to that. We’re not the people we were before Monday. But it’s not because we’ve learned that there is evil in the world. We’ve always known that. The death of 33 people happens each day in places like Baghdad and Darfur. But it shouldn’t be surprising that evil lurks even here in Virginia.

No, what has changed is that we are little more aware of our vulnerability, a little more aware of our need for a God who is strong enough to take on death and suffering and bring a resurrection victory, a little more reliant on hope, self-sacrifice, and the deep goodness at the heart of the universe. So we’ll do the things we know to do and pray that we don’t have Mondays like the one we’ve had this week. We’ll sing together and eat together. And we’ll scan the beach when it seems the waters have nothing for us for the face of a savior who has many more fish for us to catch and many more blessings for us to receive. Thanks be to God.
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