Preached Sunday, April 14, 2013, Knowles Chapel, Rollins College
Sermon,
Third Sunday of Easter (Year C)
Acts
9:1-20
Psalm
30
Revelation
5:11-14
John
21:1-19
“And
Jesus said to him, ‘Follow me.’” [+]
Interesting
Lectionary
Today’s lessons feature some well-known
stories from the Christian tradition. There is the famous Damascus Road story
about St. Paul. It is a rich story from which expressions such as “scales
falling from their eyes” and “a Damascus Road experience” originate. Then there
is a post-resurrection account in the Gospel of John featuring Jesus and his
disciples at the seashore. His disciples have fled Jerusalem where their leader
has just been ignominiously put to death and inexplicably returned to fishing
as if nothing has happened. Perhaps they are trying to forget the horrific
recent events with Jesus.
As a side note, I always find it interesting
when people argue that women should not be ordained because Jesus didn’t choose
any women as disciples – a debatable contention at best. Inevitably, the
proponents of such arguments rarely continue on to the obvious conclusion of
their logic – if we should only ordain those Jesus actually called, clearly the
only ones called to the priesthood are these Jewish fishermen.
In today’s Gospel, note the irony of the
risen Christ teaching veteran fishermen how to catch more fish then serving
them the 1st CE equivalent of tuna fish sandwiches on the beach for
breakfast. It’s only then that he tells them why he’s really there.
What interesting readings.
Luke
the Harmonizer
Let’s begin with Acts. The Damascus Road story
is told by the same Luke who also wrote the Gospel bearing his name. While
tradition has it that Luke was a physician and travelled with Paul, these appear
to be conflations of several acontextual and oblique references in Paul’s
epistles. In fact, there is little solid evidence that Luke ever actually knew Paul
or that either he or Paul ever actually knew Jesus.
But Luke’s job in writing the Acts of the
Apostle is much tougher than being a mere historian and what he provides us is
ultimately not history. Much like the post-exile priestly writers of the Hebrew
Scriptures in the 5th BCE, Luke was seeking to provide a comprehensive
narrative for the infant Jesus movement, a movement that would not fully become
what we know today as Christianity for at least another couple of centuries. This
was no small task since in fact while Luke refers to the Way of Jesus in today’s excerpt from Acts, there were many different ways of Jesus in the
early 2d CE when he is writing and they often see each other as rivals if not
enemies. Consider the implications of calling someone an anti-christ, a
designation that can only arise if one sees oneself as the self-appointed guardian
of the one true understanding of Jesus as the Christ and the way of life that
requires. It’s Luke’s unenviable job to
try to harmonize those competing factions into one story.
Luke provides an account of Paul experiencing
an ethereal Christ who speaks to him from a blinding light in the sky on his way
to persecute the Jesus followers in Syria. This is often called a conversion
experience. The common understanding of a conversion experience today is that
it somehow changes one from who they were to who they are now. It is an understanding
that is highly cognitive – one changes from one belief system to another. It is
also highly existential. In one blinding flash, Saul the Jew becomes Paul the
Apostle. And it often requires literally being knocked off one’s feet in order
to happen or perhaps the horse that does not actually appear in the story
itself until it is provided by a painting by Caravaggio in the 17th
CE.
A
Calling, not a Conversion
In fact, it is when we look carefully at what
Paul himself has to say about this experience in his epistles that we realize how
rich the literary imagination of Luke really was. While Luke’s account provides
us with an archetype for sudden, radical conversions and the prototype for the evangelical
altar call with its public conversion experiences, Paul never talks about the
Damascus Road at all. In fact the language of Paul’s own writings suggests that
what is happening with him is much more subtle.
You see, Paul is not being converted here.
Indeed, there is never any suggestion that he ever saw himself as anything other
than a good Jew, albeit a Jew who had found the long awaited Messiah. Rather
what we hear in both Paul’s own descriptions and just below the surface of the
dramatic events of Luke’s account is something much more nuanced and ultimately
much more powerful. What you hear is a calling.
The Latin word vocatus from which the English words vocation and voice originate
means to call. Contrary to the
assertions of American individualism, it really does take a village for any
calling to be lived out. Traditional Christian understandings of vocation require
a G-d who calls, the human being who hears the calling, a community who helps
discern and validate the calling, the willingness of the one called to live
into their calling and ultimately a locus, a place for the calling to be lived
out. Anyone who has been through the vocational process to ministry recognizes
this pattern. But Martin Luther is quick to remind us that the farmer shoveling
manure in the barn – or the student shoveling a similar commodity at 2 AM the
night before the big essay is due - is just as faithful to his calling as this
preacher standing behind the pulpit.
One of the great beauties of the Episcopal
Book of Common Prayer is its recognition of the roles of all the parties required
to live into our own callings as followers of Jesus. In our Baptismal Covenant,
we are asked a series of questions about our commitment to this Way of Jesus as
we know it today:
·
Will we continue in
the apostles’ teaching, fellowship and breaking of bread?
·
Will we resist evil?
·
Will we proclaim by both
word and example the good news of G-d in the Way of Jesus? Will love our
neighbors as ourselves (ALL of them without exception) and manifest that love
by working for justice and peace?
To every question we answer “I will with G-d’s
help.” We do so as a community and every baptism we remind ourselves of what
our calling as a Christian community is. And we remind ourselves that none of
us can do this alone – we need each other, and we need G-d’s help in all of our
endeavors.
It’s
Great to be a Sheep?
That’s where the Gospel reading comes in
today. After all the rather bizarre events of Jesus directing naked fishermen from
the distance of a football field across the Sea of Galilee telling them where
to fish and the ensuing al fresco breakfast on the scenic shores of that large
freshwater lake, the risen Christ gets down to business, quizzing his disciples about what it means to be a true
follower of Jesus. His questions are pointed: “Do you really love me?” And,
after the expectable answer, “Lord, of course I do,” there is an unexpected
rejoinder: “Then feed my sheep.” The risen Christ is rather blunt here,
essentially telling his disciples “You say you love me? Well, prove it.” And he
concludes his lesson with this exhortation: “Follow me.”
The use of sheep imagery in the Hebrew
Scriptures and New Testament is hardly unexpectable. Anyone who has been to the
middle east knows that the sheep and the goats that often serve as immediate audio-visual
aids for Jesus’ parables are even today one of the mainstays of the region’s
economy. While we tend to romanticize the sheep for whom Jesus is seen as the
Good Shepherd, in fact anyone who has been around these animals for any length
of time know two things about them. First, they aren’t real bright and often
get lost from the flock. Our bishops to this day carry shepherd’s crooks as
their symbols of pastoral authority. Real shepherds use them to literally
collar lost sheep by the neck and pull them out of harm’s way. Moreover, anyone
who has ever gotten a wool sweater wet knows the other less savory aspect of
sheep. Wool acts like a magnet which attracts every stray particle of grime and
manure in a 100 mile radius and once wet it truly becomes a veritable olfactory
banquet!
It’s enough to give one pause from ever seeing
oneself as a sheep again, animals that are largely stupid and stinky. But like
any given human being, there is more to being a sheep than simply their worst
characteristics. They are also vulnerable and needy, much like human animals. And
they are all worthy of Jesus’ attention, much like human animals. As John’s
Gospel points out, Jesus’ sheep are in constant need of being fed, both
spiritually as well as physically. And Jesus is pretty clear how that happens: If you love me, you feed my sheep. All of
them. This is how we live into Jesus’ very direct calling: “Follow me.”
The
Marks of the Way of Jesus
If we are to take Jesus at his word here, it
is the willingness to care for and assist others that marks one as a follower
of Jesus. Such compassionate behavior
ought to be seen as honorable by the world around Jesus’ followers. But it was
not admired in the Roman Empire. And it is not valued in the corporate empire
of global consumerism today.
The Roman Empire maintained itself through an
extractive economy which literally ground the poor into the dust and a highly
bureaucratized social structure in which everyone had their place and one would
do well to remain within their assigned role if they wished to avoid
punishment. The massive structure of the Roman Coliseum symbolically spoke to
the denizens of the empire: We are in
control here. Do as you are told. Do not resist us or we will crush you.
So what happens when a movement which opposes
the exploitation of human beings for imperial purposes confronts that empire through
their very way of living? What happens to the prophet who proclaims that G-d
loves the poor and not the empire whose worship of the idols of wealth and
power makes them poor? What happens when the Kingdom of Caesar collides with the
Kingdom of G-d Jesus sought to embody whose values implicitly draw into
question the values of empire? What happens? Jesus is pretty clear here: “[S]omeone will fasten a belt around you and
take you where you do not wish to go.” That place one does not wish to go?
The place of crucifixion. And the risen Christ knows this only too well from
experience.
Being a follower of Jesus has always borne
the risk of crucifixion. We live in an empire in which the calling to be
largely unthinking consumers has largely replaced the duties of being citizens,
members of communities or even being in relationship with one another, much
less critically conscious and compassionate human beings. The gospel of corporate
consumerism – if one can actually call it good news - is proclaimed daily from our
airwaves – “Just do it!...Have it your
way…Obey your thirst…..Talk all the time…Never stop playing…” And now even
our children preach to us: “More is
better. We want more!” In short, it’s all about you - so long as you buy
our stuff.
So what happens when today’s followers of
Jesus seek to live into their calling to feed the many needy sheep of our
world, to think of their neighbors and the need for loving relationship, to
care not only for the immediate needs of those who are vulnerable but to question
ways of being a society that engender and perpetuate that vulnerability? What
happens when the calling to consider others and to be willing to care for their
needs – spiritual, relational and material – collides with a gospel of
consumerism and its atomizing constructions of the individual? What happens? One
has to wonder how many creative ways a modern empire with an unprecedented
technological arsenal at its disposal might consider in crucifying the follower
of Jesus who draws the values of the empire into question.
Jesus still calls his followers to follow
him. But answering that calling never comes cheap. So where in your own lives do
you respond to Jesus’ call, “Yes, Lord you know I love you?” Which sheep do you
feed? And where does the empire win? AMEN.
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
The
Rev. Harry Scott Coverston, J.D., Ph.D.
Member, Florida Bar (inactive status)
Priest, Episcopal Church (Dio. of El Camino Real,
CA)
Instructor: Humanities, Religion, Philosophy
of Law
University of Central Florida, Orlando
If the
unexamined life is not worth living, surely an unexamined belief system, be it
religious or political, is not worth holding.
Most
things of value do not lend themselves to production in sound bytes.
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
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