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| "Campfire" by Elena Penkova, distributed under a CC BY-NC license. |
Third Sunday of Easter - May 1, 2022
Readings: Acts 9:1-6, (7-20); Revelation 5:11-14; John 21:1-19; Psalm 30
Preached at The Episcopal Church of All Saints, Indianapolis
I believe in the forgiveness of sins.
In the name of God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Amen.
I wonder if Peter was happy to see Jesus after the resurrection. Not in the sense that he would’ve preferred Jesus had just stayed in the tomb - of course not - but you know the feeling, the knot in your stomach, when you come face to face for the first time with someone you’ve failed or wronged in some way - maybe been found out for talking behind someone’s back, or caught in a lie, or you didn’t do the thing you said you would - that feeling.
That feeling. How Peter must have been feeling that.
At least when Jesus was dead, Peter knew what to do with himself, more or less.
As awful as Jesus’s death on the cross and the events leading up to it were, once it was all over, Peter and the other disciples, Mary Magdalene, Mary the Blessed Mother, Joseph of Arimathea, started to do the things their culture assigned them to do. Until suddenly they couldn’t, because a miracle had happened. Jesus wasn’t dead, and there was nothing in their life experience, no Jewish or Roman customs they could draw on to tell them what to do.
There was no first century Emily Post to give Peter words for the occasion when the friend he thought was dead showed up alive in a locked room, displayed his wounds, and breathed the spirit into him.
Especially when not so many days prior, he had failed Jesus so completely: asleep while Jesus sweat blood praying in the garden, denying knowledge of him while he stood trial.
How could he even look Jesus in the eye? How could a coward such as Peter possibly still be the rock on which the church would be built?
So Peter, ashamed, went back to doing what he knew how to do, all that time ago on the shores of Galilee, before Jesus recruited him to fish for people. He went fishing, for fish.
And even that he couldn’t do right, spending all night in a boat with six others without a single fish to show for it.
And that’s when Jesus shows up to make them breakfast. The other resurrection encounters recorded in John have a dreamlike, almost ghostly, quality. But this one feels very rooted in this world, evoking for me memories of backpacking trips and Boy Scout camp. Sitting around a charcoal fire on the lakeshore, Jesus serves them a meal of fish and bread, the same menu as the feeding of the 5,000, except today there are only eight of them.
John doesn’t record what they talked about, but he scarcely needs to. There’s something about breaking bread together. There’s something about gathering around a campfire. It’s a natural, human-scaled, setting for reconciliation.
The exchange that follows breakfast - the healing of the breach between Peter and Jesus, where Jesus gives Peter the chance to replace his nighttime denials with a declaration of love and loyalty in triplicate at daybreak, demonstrates that the import of the miracle of Easter goes far beyond the restoration of breath to a corpse. We celebrate this great season for fifty days no only because Jesus gets to live, but because we get to live, too.
What happens in this moment, the repetition of, “Lord, you know I love you,” and, “Feed my sheep,” is not an erasure of Peter’s failings. Those are and will forever be part of Peter’s story. God tried erasure once, in the great flood in Genesis, and then swore never to do it again.
Rather, just as Christ’s resurrection body bears the scars of the cross, as evidence of the power of life to overcome even the most grievous of wounds: through the forgiveness of Christ Peter’s failures flower into the foundation of this church and every other church that ever has been or ever will be built. Forgiveness in Christ is no mere sentiment, no, “Apology accepted,” but a force of divine nature.
Forgiveness in Christ transforms Peter’s
Cowardice into courage,
Embarrassment into encouragement,
Pain into peace,
forgiveness in Christ turns his
Heartache into healing,
and changes him from
Anxious into apostle, from
Sinner into shepherd;
brings him into the fullness of who he is, Peter, Cephas, the rock upon whom Christ has indeed built his church.
Christ’s forgiveness is not an undoing of sin but a refashioning of the sinner into who we were created to be at the beginning: beloved creatures made in the image of our creator.
And if the forgiveness of Christ can restore Peter from betrayal into full stature as a beloved child of God; if the forgiveness of Christ can bring Paul to his knees on the road to Damascus, and turn him from the persecution of the church to proclaiming that “faith, hope, and love abide” - what will his forgiveness do for you, for me, if we dare to let it into the tender places in our hearts where we carry our shame for our sins against God and our neighbor? If Christ has in some way become a stranger to us, we are no stranger to him; he waits only to hear, “Lord, you know I love you.”
Dawn broke one morning on the shore of the Sea of Galilee. Jesus said to Peter and the others, “Come, have breakfast.” And in the repair of the breach between redeemer and redeemed, sin and shame were robbed of their power.
Likewise in Easter, the culmination of the story of our salvation in the life, death, and resurrection of our Lord Jesus Christ, we who gather here this morning to be shaped in our faith in “the communion of saints, the forgiveness of sins, the resurrection of the body, and the life everlasting,” affirm “this…true saying, worthy of all [people] to be received, that Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners.” (1 Tim 1:15, 1979 BCP para.) To save us.
In our incarnate and risen Lord, “the dawn from on high [has broken] upon us, to shine on [us] who dwell in darkness and the shadow of death, and to guide our feet into the way of peace.” (Song of Zechariah, 1979 BCP, para.)
In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.
