Sermon: The First Men's Breakfast

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The First Men's Breakfast

By Charles Rush

April 25, 1999

begin the sermon this week, with two very sober realities in the back of our collective consciences. The first is the report that over the past 4 weeks, authorities have reported that somewhere between 40,000 and 100,000 young men in Kosovo are missing. They may not have been found yet but we know where a whole bunch of them are. They are lying a few inches beneath freshly turned soil in the middle of an overgrown field.

The second sober reality is the whole community in Littleton, grieving the terrible tragedy of 15 teenagers shot to death in their high school. The lost future, the random violence, the sheer arbitrariness, the pain.

I mention them together because it they frame some reference. Take our national attention, the grief that we feel for this town and the families there, multiply it by 2500 and you have the minimal scope of the grief felt by mothers in Kosovo. It will not be easily assuaged.

But, I want to lift up Littleton today for another reason. I happened to be on the phone this week with a friend of mine in North Carolina. This is what he said "You know what strikes me is that these shootings never seem to take place in Newark or Detroit. The reporters seem to go out of their way to point out that these communities are good, lily white, middle class, educated. It's where you move to raise your kids and enjoy the good life. All these reporters are just standing around sort of dumbfounded as to how this could happen here in Pleasantville."

I said "what do you make of that".

"Probably a couple of things", he said. "First, just the simple juxtaposition between people who really have life threatening issues all around them and those who almost seem to create them when they don't exist. Is there something about us that unconsciously craves crisis?"

"Second, I just don't understand the blank look of these reporters that there could be trouble here in Pleasantville. It's almost like they are saying ‘under the conditions of Pleasantville, these things simply can't happen.' It's almost like they think that we can eradicate evil with a spacious enough Mall and the smell of fresh baked cookies. One of the reasons, I'm still a Christian, is that we have a profound appreciation of the fact that human evil is instilled deeply in our souls. Poverty and ignorance might well fan that evil. But we will never eradicate it in the best of circumstances. Even the good citizens of Pleasantville are evil in some dimension of their being."

These reporters have no understanding of sin.

Our text this morning is profound in its observations about sin being at the heart of the human situation. Thus, reconciliation is at the heart of our spiritual situation.

You have to read the gospel of John, especially, like a novel. The author makes his theological points through the use of symbolism in the narrative. Here we can discern a couple of things.

My colleague, Mike Usey, says that this part of the narrative reads like a post-Modern movie. Here you have the disciples, who have lived with Jesus for several years. They have just been through an intense week, in his suffering and death. They have had some kind of profound experience of Jesus post-mortem in the resurrection. After all that, you know, what do the disciples do? "I don't know" says Peter "I think I'll go fishing." It's like the audience after seeing Pulp Fiction. This very intense film, and people just get up. Two minutes later, you hear "anybody for a cappucino?"

We in the church are like this pretty much every week. We go to church, hear a great sermon or a very moving piece of music that lifts us right our of our doldrums. Whether or not the sermon is great, we hear a profound message about the Kingdom of God breaking out all around us. Then we go home, wake up on Monday do the same old drill all over again.

The disciples have been through this intense time. They almost appear to have that vaguely bored, somewhat confused, lights are on but nobody is home gaze that is characteristically 90's.

It is dawn, early dawn. They have been up all night, fishing in the dark. They look out and see a lone guy on the beach around a fire. Now, the last time a fire was present was just before Jesus died. That fire was also burning in the night. Then it was burning at the end of the night, just before the dawn. Around that fire stood a bunch of the disciples and assorted other strangers that had just seen Jesus convicted by Pilate before a great throng.

Around that fire, someone recognized Peter and asked him if he was a disciple of Jesus, who was to die. Peter denied him. Peter denied him again. The third time, around the third hour, the darkest part of the night, Peter cursed Jesus' name and said he never knew him.

Night is a symbol of confusion, lostness, betrayal, in the gospel of John. It is a good symbol. When I was in college, I was home on break. It was about this same hour. I drove the car into the drive and cut the lights. I slowly turned the doorknob to the front door and crept in, sliding off my shoes at the front door. I petted the dog and tip toed into the kitchen to the refrigerator. The coast was clear. The lights flicked on and I jumped. My mother had been standing there all along. She said to me "Son, where have you been?"

I said "Oh, I've just been down at the beach with some friends and my girlfriend just you know hanging out."

She took my face in her hands for just a moment and she said "Son, nothing good goes on at 3 in the morning." She was right.

Here we are at another fire. This is not the fire of the mob. They are all gone. This is not the betrayal and sin that happens in the middle of the night. This is the morning. This is the hope that signals the coming of a new day. This is the hope that tomorrow things will be different sober, humble, honest.

Jesus does a strange thing. He asks them if they have caught any fish and they answer him "No". Then Jesus tells them to cast their nets on the other side. It is an odd request. What does Jesus know about fishing that fishermen don't know? He appears to have some kind of divine knowledge that ordinary humans don't have? That may be one of John's points, but he has another simpler one to make also.

The disciples obey. They don't entirely understand the meaning of this request. It sounds either arbitrary or down right wrong in its approach to the problem of no fish. This side of the boat is only a few feet from that side. What difference could a few feet make? But they do it anyway.

And here is the point. Just after they obey Jesus, someone recognizes him. It is symbolic. I wouldn't want to make a formula out of this observation without a bunch of qualification. But, John's point is that you start doing things and later you begin to understand and discern things. We begin taking the Lord's Supper, before we understand it, and it focuses us to see God's activity in the world. We become the presence of God in the world, through compassion and that opens our eyes to recognize God's action in the world. If that sounds tautological, it is. But, it might be true nevertheless.

Let's come back to the central point. Jesus appears to have had one central mission on his mind in making this appearance to the disciples. 3 times he forgives Peter, matching the 3 times that Peter denied him. Somewhere between number 2 and number 3, it must have dawned on Peter what was happening to him.

Think about that for just a moment in all of its humanity. How often this happens. A loved one dies, let's say that it is a parent or a child. Think about these parents for a moment, whose kids led that rampage out in Littleton, killing all of their classmates before turning the gun on themselves. We can fairly well presume that there must have been a good deal of distance and alienation between the parents and the boys in the weeks and months preceeding this horrible end. And then this end. What an awful way to end a relationship, full of guilt and shame and disappointment. I bet that those parents would trade all their worldly possessions to be able to be reconciled with their sons, to forgive and be forgiven, to work through some of that alienation to the point where they could live with themselves again.

As a minister, I do a lot of funerals. I've stood in quite a few grave yards waiting for a burial to begin. Invariably while I wait, there is someone in the distance at a grave talking. Surely, a lot of those conversations are plaintive "I sure miss you today". But I'm also sure that some of them are people saying to the dead what they could not say to the living. They are asking for forgiveness. They are forgiving stuff that they did not get around to, or stuff that they could not get around to. Sometimes they have been carrying this load with them for quite a long while and they need to let it go, so that they can move on.

Peter saw the Lord and we are told that he jumped overboard and swam to the shore. And we would too, much of the time. If we could just finish up some important stuff that we left unfinished. If we could just be reconciled that would be enough. That would be all that we really need.

Jesus comes back and what is it that he does. He forgives. He reconciles. He empowers the disciples to carry on without him. This is pretty important. This is the central message of what the Christ came to tell us about.

It is an important word for us to hear as a congregation just now since we are actively thinking through the question of what kind of church we want to become for gay men and lesbians.

In the last few weeks, listening to people dialogue on this subject, I've been struck by how difficult it is for us to think morally. We actually work our lives out so that we have to do very little moral thinking. We get our lives into settled patterns that follow predictable paths. We know where everything is, we know where we are headed, so there is not much to consider on a moral level.

Moral questions are always posed in the midst of uncertainty. When you absolutely know what is right and wrong, you just do it without thinking. That is simply what Aristotle used to call praxis. In the words of the Nike commercial ‘Just do it.'

Moral questions are posed when we don't know what is right or wrong. Having to think on that level fills us with emotion and anxiety. Suppose I asked you right now what we should do in Kosovo and also asked you to articulate the moral principle that your position entails? Suppose I gave you only 2 minutes to formulate your answer? Suppose I asked you to stand in front of the congregation and explain your position in less than 3 minutes so that it had to be simple and straightforward? Most of us would be filled with terror.

It is not simply the time factor. It is not simply the public speaking. It is having to make up our minds in the midst of uncertainty, knowing that we are not all that informed, having to expose ourselves to our peers. I used to do this as an exercise at Rutgers. Half of my students would say just "I don't know" for which they got an F. Then you had some people who could give great arguments but you felt like they could be arguing about anything, and yes, almost all of them ended up in law school.

It is hard for us to make up our mind, when we cannot be fully sure of what we are doing. It is hard for us to make a commitment when all of the facts are not in. That is why we get so emotional, so full of anxiety.

That is why moral questions are inherently divisive. We can't agree in the context of ambiguity. People passionately disagreed about what we should have done in the Vietnam war. At the time, it was not so easy to know. Look back, you wonder why it seemed so intense at the time.

People passionately disagreed about Civil Rights, about integration and whether it would work. You look back now on this subject there is pretty much unanimous consensus that Civil Rights are good and integration is an important social goal but 35 years ago, it wasn't all that clear.

People in the church passionately disagreed about divorce 30 years ago. Especially if your Minister was divorced. Nowadays, there is no moral stigma to it at all. Sadness, yes, but no stigma of shame.

People in the church passionately disagreed about women in ministry. We had churches that were going to leave the denomination if women were ordained. Nowadays, it is not an issue much at all on a moral level. In fact, the majority of people going to many seminaries these days are women. They just never get voted to be Senior Minister, a incongruity that is likely to get more pronounced.

People still passionately disagree over abortion. Leave aside the social question of whether it should be legal, all you have to do is pose a concrete question, and you can get quite an argument. "Michele is 25, she and Robert have been hooked up for 7 months, etc., etc., etc.,

And in every one of these cases, there came a moment in the moral discussions where people felt so passionately about the issue that they threatened to leave the church, and some of them actually did.

And in every one of these cases, there also came a time in the church- and here I speak of the denominations as a whole- where people realized that they needed to be reconciled. They realized that this one issue was not the sum total of what defined their relationship to the church. They realized that the people that disagreed with them were not the enemy. Boneheads perhaps. But they were also nice people and good Congregationalists after all. So we had services of healing because at the end of the day, we all realized that what draws us together, what keeps us together, is not that we all agree on every moral issue. No this is where we have been set to serve, our community is where we get our support and support others, it is where we worship and share our lives together. In the end, it is more important that we are reconciled than it is that we are right.

And we come back to that point periodically because that was what Jesus was principally about. Jesus had moral convictions. Jesus lived out of his commitments. But the primary thing he was about was being reconciled to people who had betrayed him, who had hurt him, who had disappointed him. And we know that is what we should be about too.

So as we enter the next few weeks of discussion and decision, I hope we can keep this before us. I hope we can live our convictions with integrity and that we can also demonstrate respect for those who differ with us. I hope that we can have as a goal that we can be reconciled with each other, come what may. We are that important to each other.

Amen.