kumbaya, love, and skittles?

 

SERMON PREACHED AT St MARY’S, OAMARU Nth

THIRD SUNDAY of EASTER (May1st ) 2022

 

READINGS:

 Acts 9: 1-20

Psalm 30

Revelation 5: 11-14

John 21: 1-19

 

There’s an awful lot of reconciliation going on in this Johannine account of a resurrection appearance of Jesus. As Dr Gerry Morris pointed out on our online Gospel Conversation, John provides a whole lot of flags to suggest that reconciliation is a really important part of following the newly risen Christ. The Peter who warmed his hands by a charcoal (Gk: anthrax) fire as he was deserting the one he pledged to follow endlessly, now encounters the Risen Lord beside another charcoal fire at a beach barbecue breakfast. Jesus, the one who was deserted, provides kai [meal/food] for Peter the deserter. This is an unimaginable act of table-fellowship, of manaakitanga [hospitality], above all, of grace. To add to the grace-imagery we might note that Jesus has, seemingly with some rather over the top miraculous intervention, provided an overkill of grace – 153 fish, presumably not anchovies, and it seems some sort of supply of bread to wrap it in. That is a fair-sized breakfast feast.

Reconciliation. I speak as one who has generally not harboured grudges, but there’s not an awful lot that is meritorious in that. I have a memory like a sieve for many matters and tend to forget whatever I might have nursed as a grievance. But amnesia is not merit, and I now I have tucked away one or two serious grudges over the years – the host who turfed me out of his house one day, forcing me to drive, tired, nearly a thousand kilometres through the night to get my family home. The colleague who won my trust, gleaned some of my most private feelings, and then turned out to be the leader of a pack baying for my metaphorical blood and literal dismissal. The very fact I have recounted these unrelated tales is proof enough that yours truly is far from gaining any merit on the reconciliation journey.

And partly that’s okay. Peter after all denied Jesus three times – I’m sure it’s no coincidence that Jesus asks him to declare his love three times before commissioning him to a somewhat grisly mission, commissions him, as John notes, to living and dying as a Jesus-follower. Divine forgiveness, Jesus had long since told his followers, reaches to seventy times seven – which means “infinity times infinity,” not 490, incidentally – and there are broad hints that such grace is attainable only by the invasion of the one we call Spirit. The one whose "task" is making Jesus present to and within us, making all that we need to know of God present to us and for us. Peter goes on to get it reasonably right from here on, though we get glimpses of his relationship with Prickly Paul that suggest all was not always kumbaya, love, and skittles.

And it’s not for us, either. Firstly, no one is suggesting some sort of cheap grace here. Jesus doesn’t wave an airy hand to Peter and say “Yeah, look, no worries mate.” The awkward exchange forces Peter to reassess himself, and I suspect he was uncharacteristically introspective as he chomped on his fishy barbecue in the hours that followed. No one expects a Ukrainian mother to wave a disinterested hand to a Russian who has bombed or raped her family. No one expects a victim of domestic violence to cheerfully pronounce that her – or his – story doesn’t matter. It does.

We are challenged to hope and heal. As it happens I am a believer in universal salvation – I don’t believe anyone can resist in the end the painful but persuasive redeeming love of God. Though now we see love and sin alike only through darkened glass, but there must come a time – if there is a God – when the scales fall from our eyes and we see how great our need of God is, and how inadequate we are in grasping that love without the love-help of the Risen Lord. 

And then at last we might stutter with Peter, “you know I love you – and how badly I blew it.” I don’t believe in an eternal hell – or hell at all. But I believe in purgatory – that long searching look by which we are exposed to Christlight and persuaded to surrender our darkness. Even a Putin – though neither I nor the gospel deny that’s a tough call.

But I partly digress. And in any case I want to end not with Jesus, as Esther Clarke-Prebble put it on the Gospel Conversation, doing the housework, or as I prefer because I’m a bloke, barbecuing on the beach.

I want to end with that inspirational vision of another John, as he speaks of the Risen Christ, portrayed as a Lamb who conquered all suffering, the Risen Christ reading from what we might call the Book of Eternal Life: “praise, honour, glory and strength forever and ever to the one who sits on the throne and to the Lamb.”

As we learn to chant those words in the depths of our hearts (and it’s a life time of learning) however great our wobbles and however dark our inner recesses, it seems at least to this flawed pilgrim that we can join Peter in his reconciliation with the one he deserted. Aided by God’s Spirit  join Peter and stumble along, as Jesus beckons “follow me,” stumble and dance along filled with Resurrection Joy.