April 25, 2004 - Third Sunday of Easter
John 21: 1-19
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Psalm 30
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Acts 9: 1-6
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"Same...But Different"

I just returned this week from a retreat gathering of Congregationalist ministers, down at the very beautiful property of St. Mary of the Lake in Mundelein, Illinois.  There I met a colleague who grew up in New England, around Boston and around many theologically liberal churches, became a conservative Baptist among those more liberal New Englanders and ended up in a Congregationalist church in the Midwest.  

I was raised in Texas, in the stronghold of conservative Southern Baptist churches, but became a Unitarian, and, likewise, ended up in a Congregationalist church in the Midwest.

He and I laughed.  He should have been the Unitarian and I should have been the Baptist, but we both ended up Congregationalists. Which just goes to show how varied are callings, callings not just to ministry, but to the religious life and to the Christian Way.

While this fellow and I have come down different paths to the same broad Congregationalist tradition, so did Jesus appear so differently to Paul in the story from Acts and to the disciples in the final chapter of the gospel of John.  And yet, both stories have a similar theme of encountering divinity in the everyday roads of life, whether on a trip to Damascus or after a long and difficult night of fishing. 

The story of Paul on the road to Damascus is probably the quintessential conversion story.  Saul/ Paul's encounter with Jesus on the road is so definite, so clear, so sure.  Before his conversion, Saul actively and violently opposed what was then called the “Way” – more so than many Jewish leaders. 

He is on the way to Damascus to persecute Jewish followers of the Way when there is a blinding light and a voice – “Saul, why do you persecute me?”  Jesus identifies himself and tells Saul to continue into the city.  Saul loses his sight for three days before the “scales fall from his eyes” and he arises to be baptized, proclaiming Jesus as the Son of God.

This story is one of the most familiar in the whole Christian testament.  The very phrase “Road to Damascus Experience” has currency in our language, even separated from its Christian context. This story is so well known that it presents a problem—it suggests or at least has been understood by some to describe what is a normative experience of conversion to the Christian faith. 

People come to faith in many ways.  While some people do experience dramatic turns in life which can be described as Damascus experiences, most of us do not.  Paul did.  It would take, perhaps, such an event as blinding light and a voice from the heavens to get Paul’s attention and convert him, for he was such a zealot.

And for many of us here who, unlike myself, grew up in the faith, perhaps you have never had a conversion experience as such.  You were born into the church (either this one or another one), educated and raised in the church, and can’t recall a time when you shifted from one set of beliefs to the other.  We will not all be stopped in the road by a brilliant light.  We will not all hear a voice calling us by name out of that light, nor have a vision in which the Lord instructs us to go to a specific locality.  But we can be transformed, even in the community where we’ve grown up, we can be deepened into the Christian Way, and this is what I think the story from the Gospel of John is about.

While the light-blinded Paul, in the story from John, here at the seaside it was dark, at that twilight time between night and dawn, as if in a dreamscape

The disciples have been fishing all night long, with no luck.  They caught nothing. We can imagine their frustration and their growing hunger – probably a familiar situation given their hand-to-mouth existence.  Just as day was breaking, just at dawn, a man asks if they have caught many fish.  The disciples don’t recognize the man as Jesus as they tell him they haven’t caught many fish.  Jesus tells them to fish in a new place, on the other side of the boat.   Then do so and cast their net and they catch so many they couldn’t haul all of them in.  It is then that Jesus is recognized.  They all get on land.  There is a charcoal fire.  “Come and have breakfast,” Jesus says as he might motion them to the warmth of the fire.  Jesus took the bread and gave it to them, providing eucharistic overtones to this seaside meal. 

The disciples are slow in recognizing Jesus.  This is a common occurrence in these post-resurrection appearances.  In earlier post-resurrection appearances in John, to Mary Magdalene and to Thomas, the disciples were likewise slow in recognizing their master. 

So it seems that the disciples have difficulty recognizing Jesus after he is resurrected.  He is there, but there is something in his appearance, perhaps, that veils his identity.  Perhaps Jesus' resurrected body is in some way different from his pre-resurrection body.  And if the disciples couldn’t visually recognize Jesus, why couldn't they recognize his voice?  At the same time, it seems that Jesus’ body bears some semblance to his state before the resurrection.  In an earlier story, he walked through solid matter – through locked doors – while here he handles bread and fish with ease.

So Jesus was in some ways the same and in other ways different.  Sometimes he is not recognized until he participates in an act with the disciples, as in the story from Luke when they recognize him when they break bread with him, or in the earlier story in John when Thomas must touch the crucifixion wounds on his body.  In this post-resurrection state, he is the same and yet he is different, for he has had an encounter – we could say the ultimate encounter – with the Divine, as he had conquered death. 

For the disciples themselves, after encountering Jesus after the resurrection, they are left different and yet in some ways the same.  They are still who they are, though they also have been transformed by Christ’s presence. They are still who they are, though they have been shown a more expansive, more inclusive, more loving way to live.

There come moments in our lives when something happens and our life shifts, perhaps a little, perhaps a lot.  A moment when life is in some ways the same and in some ways different. 

My oldest son is preparing to graduate from college on May 8.  Already he and our family are feeling the shifts that come from that experience.  In a few weeks he will no longer be a student, but be “on his own,” and in some ways fully grown.  He is in some ways the same person, but he is also different.  Our relationship is in some ways the same relationship, that of father and son, and yet different, as my role as provider and caretaker is slowly diminishing.  It was the same on the day that we brought him home from the hospital, and a few years later we repeated the experience with the arrival of his little brother, in that the addition of another life to our home made such a radical shift in things.  We were the same people, we had the same house, we had the same jobs, and yet life was so different.

Some things stay the same, others are different.  Illness can cause the shift, certainly the death of a loved one.  New jobs, new localities, the loss of relationship—certainly divorce is one of the most challenging events that some of us have experienced, as we continue to live our lives with some constancy amid dramatically different realities.  In these events and in so many others – things change, but stay the same.

With the death and resurrection of Jesus, so much changed.  The Jesus that was before the crucifixion was a beloved teacher, rabbi, friend, prophet—beloved to his followers, but hated by the powers and principalities.  The Jesus that was before the crucifixion preached an elevated ethic—take care of the poor and marginalized, love God and your neighbor as yourself.

But things changed.  He was crucified by a collusion of religion and government and yet he overcame death. 

Some things stayed the same.  The crucifixion did not erase what he had previously taught, but it added a new dimension to it.  The pre-resurrection Jesus still stands and yet the post-resurrection Jesus – the Jesus that is not always immediately recognizable – stands as a sign that there is something in life that has eternal value, that he and that we participate in that life, that death no longer is an enemy though it certainly continues as a reality, but that there is something in the resurrection experience that points to God’s participation in creation. The vast quantity of fish in the disciples’ net and the gracious meal of bread and fish suggest that God’s gift is available in the risen Jesus just the same as it was in the incarnate Jesus.

The whole idea of a resurrected Jesus didn’t make sense to me as I grew up outside the church.  Perhaps even if I had grown up in the church, I would have felt the same.  That this man could be God made even less sense. How all of religious wisdom could be wrapped up in this one man of history seemed silly.  That I was headed toward being a religious liberal even in the buckle of the Bible belt, in that world of Southern Baptist churches on every corner, seemed quite clear.

I didn’t understand the idea that Jesus is God, but I did want to know God. I prayed.  I sought religious wisdom, not just from Christianity, but from many of the world’s great religions and from a few of the not-so-great.  And this was valuable.  I learned a lot.

But the harder I tried to access God through universal means the more difficult it became.  This God was distant, impersonal.  And slowly I kept looking over my shoulder at that Prophet from Nazareth.  There was something there in his teachings, in his ministry, in his concern for the sick and poor and marginalized, there was something that drew me in. And as I traversed life – as I encountered the thorns and thistles of life, as I suffered, I began to see that a genuine God must be a suffering God, a God who knows suffering and can thus offer transformation from suffering to abundant life.

And my ministry, in many ways the same as it had been before, is in other ways dramatically different, since I now have a story in which we all share, a theology – as broad as it is given our various understandings, a history which stretches back to the founding of religious liberty on this continent, and most assuredly a God whom we trust with our hearts and our minds.  This has enriched ministry for me so profoundly.

Perhaps another way of describing it is that I went to the other side of the boat to fish and that is where I found abundance.  When I entered into the Christian story more fully, life was more abundant.  After a lifetime of searching on the perimeter of the story of Christ, I entered in.  And that Jesus was there, as a presence, welcoming me.  My God of universal concerns, this God of many names as I would say, was now made specific in this encounter with the Christ. 

I still struggle with what the resurrection means, if truth be told.  I still don’t think that Christians have a trademark on truth.  I still think God can be known in many ways and in different religions  I still think that fundamentalism and non-scholastic approaches to Scripture are sure roads to spiritual poverty.  And yet I understand now, that the resurrection of Jesus is a symbol pointing to a reality about God, how we live eternally, now and after the experience of death; that Life has an eternal quality, eternality within our temporality, and that Christ Jesus makes this known, in a specific way, in our lives.

These stories of post-Resurrection appearances, on the Road to Damascus and by the seaside with the disciples are not merely historical narratives about events a long time ago.  They are faith stories that point to our contemporary experience of how we might encounter God; of how Jesus makes himself known to us.  If not a blinding experience on the road of life, perhaps a simple stranger who invites us to breakfast, after a long night of unsuccessful fishing, when we have an ache in our belly and also an ache in our soul, and this Divine Stranger satisfies both.

These are not merely historical narratives and we actually know little of the historical Jesus. There is much talk these days about the Jesus Seminar, a seminar of scholars who are searching for the historical Jesus.  There is some good material coming out of that seminar that is interesting, yet I am less and less interested in the search for the historical Jesus, for we will never really find him.  We know so little historically about him.  The Jesus presented to us in Scripture is the Jesus of faith, which is grounded in an historical experience, but not limited to that historical experience.

This quest for the historicity of Jesus is not new.  Early in the 20^th century Albert Schweitzer also searched the historical record to get a fuller picture of who Jesus was.  In 1911 Schweitzer published his book “Quest of the Historical Jesus” and his final paragraph sums up for me what I am trying to say, and what I think was the experience of the disciples as the dawn broke lo those many years ago as they sat with Jesus and ate fish and bread for breakfast. Schweitzer says that ultimately the historical Jesus is lost to us and yet Jesus appears to us in many and more profound ways.

“He comes to us as One unknown, without a name, as of old, by the lakeside.  He came to those who knew Him not.  He speaks to us the same word ‘Follow thou me!’ and sets us to the tasks which He has to fulfill for our time.  He commands.  And to those who obey Him, whether they be wise or simple, He will reveal Himself in the toils, the conflicts, the sufferings which they shall pass through in His fellowship.  And as an ineffable mystery, they shall learn in their own experience who He is.”

This was the final paragraph of Schweitzer’s book, as today’s lesson from John was the final chapter of that book.  And so Jesus walks off the pages of these stories into our lives. 

Who he is, in this season of Easter, is one who enters our lives, often in surprising ways, to offer transformation, to offer new perspectives, different perspectives, in the same life.  While personal transformation is a gift of the Christian life, that is not all nor it is enough.

In John’s text, once Jesus feeds the fisherman, Jesus asks Peter three times, “Do you love me?”  Each time Peter affirms his affection.  To each of Peter’s affirmations, Jesus responds, “Feed my lambs, tend my sheep, feed my sheep.”

This suggests that while personal, private experiences with the divine are to be expected, while spiritual transformations are a gift of walking with Christ, that true transformation, this difference amid the sameness of our lives, has a community aspect.

Do you love me?  Then feed my lambs.  Do you love me?  Then tend my sheep.  Do you love me? then feed my sheep.  This suggests that our religiosity is not merely private, but communal.  This suggests how we should relate to each other, by taking care of each other.  This suggests how we might relate to the world beyond these walls, by tending and feeding and caring for those in our wider community.  As Jesus has loved us, so must we love the world.

Then Jesus says, simply, “Follow me.”  This simple command, follow me, is reflective of Paul’s description of us as “the Way.”  This suggests that we do not walk the path alone, that we are following one who is still with us. He feeds us.  And then asks that we feed each other.