April 22, 2007
(Third Sunday of Easter)

I'm a Pickle, He's a Pickle, ...

by The Rev. Carol Sanford, Curate

Acts 9:1-6, (7-20)  •  Psalm 30  •  Revelation 5:11-14  •  John 21:1-19
(From The Lectionary Page)

Alleluia, Christ is risen! The Lord is risen, indeed, Alleluia!
In the name of the One, Holy and Living God. Amen

It’s been a long week. The events in Virginia, on top of other continuing hard news, have left many of us heartsick, weary, and even frightened. We wonder what, if anything, we can do to help, or, sometimes, if there is any hope at all for a peaceful world. And yet, we continue to proclaim our Alleluias. I am here to join you in affirming that Christ is risen, indeed; that there is hope and that there is much that we can do, and that death no longer holds dominion.

Today, I want to talk with you about a simple meal; a meal of bread and fish…and pickles.

The bread and the fish, of course, make up the meal that the risen Christ offers his disciples. As fishermen still do, Peter, Thomas, Nathaniel and the rest set out on the water while it is still dark. And, as fishermen still do, they needed some help in finding fish. They are directed to what turns out to be an extraordinary catch, then come ashore and have something to eat. If you fish yourself, or have ever looked out over the banks of our rivers or lakes on warm summer mornings, you know that fishermen continue to grill their fish over charcoal in the early dawn light.

Our gospel today, of course, is much more than a story about fishermen who get some lucky advice and a morning meal.

Consider this: Darkness is once more over the face of the deep; the disciples cast out for sustenance and none is to be found. And then, now listen carefully, “just after daybreak,” just as the new light is coming forth, they are directed into the way of abundance. They follow the directions, and then, they are fed.

Once more, God’s amazing Grace is revealed in the ordinary stuff of regular lives. On the rocky shore of the Sea of Tiberias, a new creation in a new covenant breaks forth over a small fire and a simple meal. Our cosmic Christ, the one in Revelation to whom “every creature in heaven and on earth and under the earth and in the sea” sings “blessing and honor and glory,” this Christ, sits out on a dawn shore and gets breakfast ready.

We have heard of loaves and fishes before. And we will continue to hear of the bread of life and to receive direction to be fishers of people.

So: bread and fish. Now, what about the pickles?

Pardon me, but we are the pickles. I will explain, but first, a comment about Saul who becomes Paul. Saul, as you know, has bitterly persecuted Christians, and then is encountered by the risen Christ on the road to Damascus. He loses and regains his sight and then, before joining the disciples and beginning to proclaim Jesus in the synagogues, he is baptized. Ananias says that Saul is to be ‘filled with the Holy Spirit,” and we may presume that whether Saul’s baptism involves water or not, it certainly involves the Holy Spirit.

Now here is the pickle part. The Greek word used for baptism is a word that was also used of making pickles. A bit of food is immersed or infused with a solution, is ‘baptized,’ and emerges as something new, a pickle. Our pickles are most often made from cucumbers, and we understand intuitively that no pickle can ever again become a cucumber. In fact, if we tried to de-pickle a pickle, I presume that we would end up with a shrunken, squishy mess, but not a cucumber.

Saul was so changed that he became Paul; a new creation. And there was no turning back.

Neither can we go back. If our hearts and minds and consciences have been altered by God’s Holy Spirit, we can never go back to being unfeeling, happily inactive creatures.

If your heart wept when you heard of the shootings in Virginia, or if you have felt a desire to help somehow when recently publicized ethnic-, religious- and homo-phobic rants have exposed the hatred in our society; if you sorrow over all of the lives lost to war and famine; if you long for the safety of our children at home and in our streets; if you desire to contribute to the beauty of the world; if you have felt any of these things but don’t really want to get involved, oops, too late, you’re a pickle.

If something in you leapt to life when Dean White preached on Easter about moving the ladders that clog up our common life, or if your leg muscles twitch when we are urged to stand up for what we believe in, well, there is no going back.

We can look away, we can try to divert ourselves, but we can never comfortably return to ignorance and inaction, and we deny our baptism and our God and ourselves when we try to do so. And we are in danger of becoming become squishy and shrunken and lifeless. When we tend God’s sheep, we are fed as well.

Okay, one more watery image, this one from Elizabeth Johnson’s book, She Who Is. It’s called the Noah principle, and it goes like this: No more prizes for predicting rain; prizes only for building arks.

Yes, there are hard and sad and frightening events around us, and we are right to observe how very much in our world is not in harmony with God’s way of abundant life. And: as children of God, as children of the light, as followers of the risen Christ, we turn our attention and energy to God’s way.

God breathed over the waters in creation, and brought life safely ashore after the flood, God took the Israelites through the Red Sea, and pulled new life once more from the richness of the watery deep through the labor of the disciples.

Just as we do none of this alone, but with God and each other, so God does God’s work with and through us.

There is a lot of ladder-moving and deep-water fishing and ark-building going on around the cathedral these days. Here are some of the ways that you can help:

These are just a few of the projects and efforts going on now at Grace and Holy Trinity; we offer many opportunities to make a difference in the world. And please, remember that affirming the way of life is sometimes as simple as talking to someone at coffee hour, and that kindness and prayer are activities in which we all can participate.

We cannot predict how our response to God will alter the lives of others.

A small, simple meal of bread and fish, or of coffee and cookies, or of bread and wine…and pickles, and all are fed, and a world is changed.

Let us live out in our lives what we proclaim in our faith.
Alleluia, Christ is risen!

Keeping the Faith in a Broken World

by The Rev. Dr. Michael Johnston, Scholar-in-Residence

I am going to do something this evening I rarely do, which is to skirt somewhat the lessons appointed for the day. I am not a fan of this kind of preaching. In fact, I have always felt that the fixed lectionary cycle we have in the Episcopal Church keeps the preacher honest. You’re not at liberty to stand on your favorite soap box and then go hunting for a text to prop it up. But it’s been an extraordinary week that may require some less than ordinary reflection.

“The grief we feel today, the confusion, the fear, the rage, and our sense of the future betrayed, if not actually lost -- all of these feelings are beyond words. The events of this week have ravaged the articulate. Clergy are supposed to have the words, of course. Society expects it of us; we are the meaning-makers of culture. Or at least we used to be.

“So it is enormously tempting for the priest, like an archaeologist of the spiritual, to rummage around in the shards and bro-ken pieces of the pottery of devastation and try to reconstruct a reasonably whole clay pot. But I can’t seem to find all the pieces I need. Too many are missing; and the ones I can actually hold in my hands don’t seem to fit together right. So I resist the temptation of a comprehensive statement that will pre-tend to make coherent sense of all we’ve experienced this week.”

Those are the words I used to begin my sermon on September 16th, the Fifteenth Sunday after Pentecost, 2001. And now nearly six years later, we have experienced another massive wound inflicted on our national psychic life. There have been others since, of course, including the countless dead on the deserts of Afghanistan and Iraq. But this one seemed to scream at us like 9/11; like Columbine revisited a good five-times over; and with the media –- including NBC News –- telling the story of Mr. Cho in almost tabloid fashion.

And the truth is I still don’t have the words. Except those which all of you have repeated for yourselves over and over again: “Where was God on 9/11?” “Where was God in Blacksburg?”

They’re really old questions, of course. And in the technical language of the theologian, the question is called the Theodicy Problem: “Why does God let bad things happen to good people? “Why is there evil in the world?” “Where was God in Blacksburg?”

The truth is that theologians and parish priests don’t really have good answers for these questions. And it’s also the case, in truth, that the Theodicy Problem poses a really odd question. One might just as well have asked “Where was God on 9/10?” “Or where was God the day before Virginia Tech?” “Where is God in Darfur? Or where is God when millions die of malnutrition? And when children are left orphaned by AIDS?”

I recall from six years ago –- and I still have the article –- that someone wrote to The Living Church and observed as how the four hijacked planes that terrible September morning were remarkably under-booked. So the commentator mused that God was making sure that people missed their flights, or got stuck in traffic, or changed their travel plans.

The problem with that sort of assessment is that it leaves you with an interventionist God who’s enormously ineffective. Rather than creating traffic jams in Boston, for example, why didn’t He just blown out the tires on four selected jets? And when you follow that logic to its conclusion, you also have to wonder, how come God just couldn’t stand between the German professor and the bullet. So you see what kind of tangles you get yourself into when you start answering the question “Where was God?” But let me make this a feeble stab at it.

The image that has come to mind for me this week, over and over again, is actually from those passages of the first chapter of Genesis which recount the creation. This is a little subtle, so hang with me.

Consider, first, for example, Chapter 1:1-3:

“In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.
The earth was without form and void, and darkness
was upon the face of the deep;
and the Spirit of God was upon the face of the deep,
and the Spirit of God was moving over the face of the waters.
And God said, ‘Let there be light, and there was light.”

Another way to translate the Hebrew is, “And God said, ‘Let light be.’”

There is a kind of formulaic repetition in the Hebrew poetry. For example, in verse 6, God says, “Let there be a firmament in the midst of the water…”. Which can also be translated as “let the firmament be.”  And over and over again the formula is repeated:

• Let the waters gathered under the heavens together be;
• Let the dry land be;
• And the birds that fly above the earth…let them be;
• And every kind of living creature from the earth, let them be;

I would argue, then –- as does my friend Sam Portaro in his new book on Christian Discernment, from which some of these ideas come –- that there is a kind of essential “letting be” in the act of Creation which comes from God’s choice to create without restraint. Or to put another spin on this, and paraphrasing scripture, “Before I was born in the womb, God said, ‘Let Michael be.’”

Thus, at the very outset, God established the terms of his relationship with the created order: God was free to create (She did not do so grudgingly) and all that God creates, invites into being and allows to grow, is likewise free. Another, more familiar way to put what I’ve just said, is that humanity is created with “free will” –- a term much bandied about but often with much meaning. In any case, that mutual freedom between God and Creation is the absolutely essential component of any relationship of love –- both divine and human.

So where are we? Well, I think, where we are is that we’re left with a God who is first of all neither a manipulator nor a micromanager of Creation. He does not leap tall building at a single bound. He does not stop speeding bullets with his bare hands. She does not interrupt the laws of nature.

God does, however, call us to create meaning out of tragedy by coming together as a community of love and care. He stands ready to return his freely given creative love by creating a community that suffers with one another. In some way, that is exactly the meaning of the Cross. Ours is a God who chooses to share our pain.

He lies with those who lie in hospital even as we speak. She stands with those of us who stand in fear of loss. He stands with those of us who mourn. He is with us in our wounds and in our dying. And that is where God was last Monday, suffering with those who suffered, dying with those who died. I would even go so far as to say that last Monday, God stood with Mr. Cho –- in his loneliness and isolation, in his grief and sorrow, and even in his homicidal rage and madness.

As I think of it, there is actually something of the sort going on in to-night’s gospel. It was a hard week for all those disciples of Jesus. There has been the Passion and the Death, and some not altogether credible witnesses who suggested that their Lord might still be alive. But who knows? The women in Mark ran away from the tomb without comment, “…for trembling and astonishment had come upon them; and they said nothing to anyone, for they were afraid.” In Luke, the reports from those at the empty tomb were dismissed as an idle tale, “…and they did not believe them.”

So perhaps it is not surprising that Peter’s inclination is to go back to business as usual. The whole discipleship project seems to have ended on a road which led to the cemetery of hope, a road leading back to history as usual. That, of course, seems to be our experience as well. All roads lead to Blacksburg, or to an AIDS clinic, or to a homeless man living un-der the rafters of our own diocesan center, just steps away from where we sit tonight. It is all business as usual. So Peter, I suspect wearily, says “I’m going fishing.” And a few others choose to tag along. But then, of course, is the sighting and the miraculous draft of fish.

But it further occurs to me that where our lives connect to that of Peter is really later in the story, in the three-fold exchange between Simon bar Jonah and his now realized, Risen Lord: “Simon son of John, do you love me more than these?” To which Peter replies, “Yes, Lord; you know that I love you.” And to which Jesus responds, “Feed my sheep.”

As is the nature of story-telling, the exchange occurs twice more. And by the third asking, Peter is just a little testy:

“Peter felt hurt because he said to him the third time, “Do you love me?” And he said to him, “Lord, you know everything; you know that I love you. To which Jesus says again, “Feed my sheep. Verily truly, I tell you, when you were younger, you used to fasten your own belt and to go wherever you wished. But when you grow old, you will stretch out your hands, and someone else will fasten a belt around you and take you where you do not wish to go. Follow me.”

Follow me into that place where tragedy is redeemed by meaning. Follow me into that community of compassion, care and love.

Katy Couric ended her segment of the CBS Evening News on Friday with images collected from around the nation in response to Blacksburg: students, classmates, professors, parents, ministers, priests, and strangers –- all deeply in prayer.

Prayer, of course, puts us in touch with God, whose Son’s Resurrection is our ultimate consolation against the assaults of meaningless. But prayer also puts us in touch with one another. We are called out of isolation into community. And that is not business as usual. Where God is, is in those moments when we are able to look each other square in the eye and say “I love you.” And most of the time, that’s not business as usual.