Sermons from the Pulpit

Preached to the Congregational Church in Exeter, U. C. C., on the third Sunday of Easter, April 29, 2001, by Michael L. C. Henderson, pastor.

Psalm 30; John 21:1-19; Acts 9:1-20

You will be told what you are to do.
   -Acts 9:6

     Well, the subjects for the day are Peter , alias Simon, and Paul, alias Saul, the two brightest stars in the Christian sky, who after Easter took charge of the Jesus movement and, for better or for worse, molded both the mind and the body of our faith forever according to their visions of what it ought to become.

     And what are you and I to make of them at this remove? Peter, considered to have been the first Pope, the first occupant of the Throne of St. Peter, and the gatekeeper of Heaven, is to us Protestants therefore the personification of that Roman authority, run amok, which we have been stoutly protesting and resisting these five hundred years now. And Paul is of course the feisty overachieving woman-hating scold who cut us loose from our Jewish moorings and almost made the actual life of Jesus irrelevant to us. An argument could be made and has been made that the best thing Christians could possibly do is to forget the pair of them and somehow go back and excavate the "real" Jesus from under the mythologies that they and their minions laid on him, and follow that Jesus, not either of theirs.

     But of course we haven't done that and we never will, and the reason why is these two Scriptures that we just read. It says right here in these readings that it was Jesus himself, the resurrected Jesus, who came deliberately, dramatically, miraculously to Peter and to Paul and spoke with each of them, one to one, face to face, and appointed them to do what they did.

     So Peter and Paul became big fish in what was then a very little pond, and after they were dead and gone, the little pond grew very big, but their stature in it didn't shrink; they became Christianity's superheroes, towering figures in a stained-glass window. That always happens to people who have a hand in shaping history. Jesus, Peter, Paul, Joan of Arc, Washington, Lincoln, King - in posterity's eyes all these people become what they never were.

     "Simon son of John, do you love me more than these?" "Yes, Lord, you know that I love you." "Then feed my sheep; tend my lambs." Believe it or not, that line is the reason why popes and cardinals and bishops to this day carry a shepherd's staff when they dress up. Three times Jesus and Peter do that little dance together, then Jesus tells him, "They will kill you for following me, but follow me anyway." We have a choice about what we make of this. We can carry on the endless debate about what this passage and others mean regarding Peter's rank and importance in the church, or we can listen and learn from it what happens when the resurrection of Christ really hits home in the soul of a sinful, troubled, haunted, frightened person. This is after all the same Peter who not long before was the very first and loudest of the disciples to deny that he had ever had anything to do with Jesus.

     Likewise Saul, the breather of threats and murder against all the Jesus people, was actively engaged in hunting them down when Jesus struck him like lightning and blew him off the road. An intolerant zealot! A man who really enjoyed having enemies. What shall we make of what happened to him on the Damascus road? Shall we take it as validation of the things he stood for, the break with Judaism, the doctrine of justification by faith alone, the theology of the Cross? Or shall we listen and learn from it what happens when the resurrection of Christ really hits home in the soul of a wilful, prideful, uncharitable person?

     We are not looking at these stories today because we need to know how important Peter and Paul were or are. We are looking at them because this is two weeks after Easter, and what we are all wondering, whether we admit it or not, is: What difference does it make?

     Easter always means a full church and a big offering, and so many lilies that their perfume makes you giddy, and triumphant trumpets and happy hymns and little girls in beautiful dresses and a chance to celebrate the warming and greening of the earth. Isn't that enough? Maybe it is. I'd vote to continue having Easter for those things alone.

     There's more, though. There's also a theological meaning. Easter promises that death will not have the last word; the death which we all dread and resist will ultimately be swallowed up in victory. And so we could also celebrate that, and sing about it, and let it go at that. That might be enough.

     But these two stories about Peter and Paul, or Simon and Saul, go beyond even that. They make the theological into the personal and the actual. Something happened to Peter and to Paul. Something, or someone, took hold of them, took possession of them, and never let them go for the rest of their lives. And that is what interests me, because it has implications for me, and for you.

     We are of all people most to be pitied if we take the Resurrection to be no more than a doctrine, an abstraction, a proposition. We are poorer than poor if we think of the Resurrection as a wonderful thing that happened to somebody else, or even as a wonderful thing that will happen to us some other time.

     The testimony of these tales is that the Resurrection messes with sinful, troubled, haunted, frightened, wilful, prideful, uncharitable people - people like you and me! - and does it today. It cannot be kept at some safe distance from us in space or time or in the type of people whom it targets.

     You may have trouble believing this could apply to you. Well, so did Simon. Easter was over and he couldn't think of anything better to do than to go fishing. Go back to the same old same old as if Jesus had never happened. And Saul obviously thought Easter was a huge fraud and a lie. But the living Jesus caught up with both of them, and what makes us think Christ is not catching up with us?

     One hundred fifty-three large fish were in that net that Peter cast after a night of casting and catching nothing. One hundred fifty three surprising and surprised fish, and yet the net was not torn. The Biblical scholars have puzzled for two thousand years about the mystical significance of the number one hundred fifty-three, as if it were code and the decoding of it would open the doors of the Kingdom.

     There is no secret code to the Bible, and if you set about decoding it all you will produce is a hundred and fifty-three red herrings. But those fish that they caught that day were not herrings of any color. What were those fish and the net they were caught in that was not torn? You've learned something about how the Bible expresses things; what are they? The net is the faith, of course, the faith of the church. And the fish? We are the fish, the fish which Peter could catch after all, not because he was a superhero but because he himself had been caught.

     So we make a mistake if we think we can put the Easter things tidily away and move on to the next thing. It's not for us to say what the Resurrection does or does not mean to us. We will be told, in one way or another, what it means to us and what we are to do about it. And unpalatable as that may be to our contemporary tastes, it is very good news.

     Lord, you have turned my mourning into dancing; you have taken off my sackcloth and clothed me with joy, so that my soul may praise you and not be silent. O Lord my God, I will give thanks to you forever. Amen.