Sermon: The Ministry of Reconciliation

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The Ministry of Reconciliation – 3rd Sunday of Easter

By Charles Rush

April 29, 2001

r text this morning starts with a strange line. Peter says, “I think I'll go fishing”. I think this text begins in fear. In chapter 20, we are told that the disciples met in fear “behind closed doors”. I suspect that Peter is returning to something safe after going through a traumatic experience that shook him quite a bit. It sounds like a man's way of handling trauma or tragedy doesn't it, just to go back to the routine without any thought or comment.

I suspect that Peter is a little like the horses I rode as a child. I was a poor equestrian but I tried to bluff the horses nevertheless. I would stand as tall as I could and try to look like Clint Eastwood. I would try to walk like John Wayne. I had a big show mounting the horse. But I never fooled the horse. The horse always knew that Pee Wee Herman had hopped on for a little trot. Inevitably, after a couple of uneasy miles, I would do something stupid like pull the horse to the left and the right at the same time. The horse would get spooked, rear up, throw me into the middle of a cornfield, and take off running into the horizon. Inevitably the horse would run back to his stall. In fear, he would always run back to the same safe place. I bet Peter was running back to a safe routine because humans do that in reaction to trauma and grief.

Martha Lewis lost her husband on September 24th. Martha lived in Breckenridge County in Kentucky. Her husband was a tobacco farmer. He had been doing some ordinary chores around the farm. Using an old tractor, he flipped it over on himself and died before anyone found him. After the funeral, Martha went through her normal routine on the farm, doing her chores at the appointed time. She never missed a beat. At first, it seemed like she was an incredibly strong woman, which she was. But after a few months went by, her neighbors called the preacher and asked him to stop by to check on her. This routine just didn't seem quite right. The preacher asked her point blank why she didn't take some time for herself, maybe go visit one of her sisters and have a little vacation. Martha, how come you are working so much, so steady? She said ‘As far as I'm concerned, time just sorta stopped on September 24th. Everything since seems like one long day that never ended.'

Being abandoned produces a fear in us so deep, so primordial, we do things we didn't know we could do, stuff that has its roots all the way back in infancy. It is a visceral reaction. We build our life around people. They are our piers in the midst of a changing tide. They are our joy too. They hold us in the night, make us laugh. They make us want to be better people. And when they die our whole reason for living dies too. Most of the time, we don't even realize it until they die that most of our meaning and purpose is gone. We literally do not know what to do. It is a season of numbness. So we go through the routine until our heart can catch up with our head. Peter goes back to something he knows. Peter decides to go fishing.

It is just before the dawn. It is the end of a very long night. They have been fishing in the dark. Time goes slower in the dark. There is a lot of time just for your thoughts. 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. One of my teenage sons wanted to go camping on the Appalachian trail, so we went. He didn't want to camp in the shelters that are provided on the trail, so we slogged on until we came to a nice stand of fir trees and put up our tent. Somewhere in the middle of the night, it began to rain, then it turned into a solid sheet of water, and a river opened up just beneath our tent.

At just the time, we decided that the least worst thing to do might be to hike out, the flashlight went dead. Right about then, I began to picture the headlines in the Star Ledger the next day. “Minister freezes to death in Wilderness: Case of Boneheadedness” and the sub-headline. “Allowed his teenager to lead- big mistake.”

It was so dark that we were merely trying to find where the trees weren't in the woods. Fortunately, we were only a couple hundred yards from a state lake. Even there, it took us a long time to tell where the road was from the parking lot and a couple times we walked off the macadam. Cold, drenched, tired. The whole time, I just kept picturing us in front of a fire.

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 a fire of comfort. 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 in the spiritual life, 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. Do it and see.

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. As one of my brother-in-laws says, “I may be dumb, but I'm not stupid.” Light goes on.

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 the parents of the boys that killed so many of their classmates at Colombine High School in Littleton, Colorado, a couple years ago, 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 preceding 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. No one wants to end on such an awful not.

As a minister, I've done a lot of funerals. I've stood in quite a few grave yards waiting for the family to gather, waiting for the 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.

I imagine Peter had a heavy load about Jesus, a heavy load about his betrayal at the time of his death. 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. If we could have one more clean, honest moment, 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.

Jesus explicitly mentions this in John 20:23. “If you forgive the sins of any, they are forgiven; if you retain the sins of any, they are retained.” This is what he said when he breathed on the disciples that they would receive the Holy Spirit. The line contains a subtle touch of irony. We humans don't need any help retaining the sins of others. We are exceedingly gifted at keeping score and avenging wrongs to us. Left to ourselves, our clans are capable of keeping a feud alive for centuries with terrific damage and suffering done in every generation. Human history is littered with the detritus of arbitrary violence meted out in the name of retribution.

It highlights in a poignant way, the freshness of forgiveness and reconciliation. We have been looking for a way to break the cycle. Here it is. And our text suggests that if you begin the profound work of reconciliation, you just might recognize the Christ in your midst.

The delightful film Billy Eliot takes place in Northern England in the 80's. Billy is 11 years old. He lives with his father and older brother, both of whom work in the coal mines, both of whom are out on strike. His elderly grandmother lives with them too and she has early dementia and is a little eccentric. Billy's mother is dead and there is a big hole at the center of the family.

Every day Billy's father gives him 50 pence for boxing lessons. Only Billy hates boxing. But the gym where he boxes also has a ballet class in another part of the building. Each day he watches the ballet class practice and one day he joins the class- all girls in tutu's. He works hard and very shortly discovers that he has dancing deep in his bones. He is very good.

But it is such a sissy sport, he has to hide it from his father, his brother… everyone in his world in fact. When his father discovers he has been spending the money he's been giving Billy, hard money to come by for a coal miner out on strike, not on boxing but on ballet dancing for the last couple months, he storms down to the class and yanks Billy out of class to his utter embarrassment and humiliation. His 18 year old brother threatens to beat him up back home.

But he has great potential to ance and the teacher in the class wants him to try out for the Royal Ballet Dance School in London. At one point, he has to decide to defy his father and brother, all the social mores of his coal mining town and dance or just drop the whole thing. He doesn't know what to do. He genuinely does not want pople to think he is a sissy or a priss in any way.

He takes out a letter that he has read so many times, he has it memorized. It was from his mother. She wrote it before she died for him to read when he was older. But he found it, and opened it as a boy. This is what it said:

“Dear Billy, I know I must seem like a distant memory to you know which is probably a good thing. It will have been a long time. I will have missed you grow, missed seeing you crying, shouting. I will have missed telling you off. But please know that I was always there with you through everything. I will always be. And that I am proud to have known you. I am proud that you are mine. Always be yourself. I love you forever. Mom”

That night he wakes up in the middle of the night and goes to the fridge to get some milk. His mother appears. She only says, “Don't drink out of the bottle”… He just looks up to acknowledge her. That is it.

His life doesn't have all it's problems solved. He doesn't have the fog of ambiguity completely lift. He is still a kid struggling to figure out his life. But he knows how to live and he knows what to do.

That is what the gift of the Holy Spirit looks like. It is a profound power of healing because it is authentic. We can realize our potential living out our real center rooted in God. It is acceptance, encouragement. Blessed is the person who can live not out of their fear, not out of their guilt, not out of their anger… but out of their dreams. Good things happen.

Amen.