I'm scared....

John 14: 23-29

In my previous life, I traveled a ton for work.  And if you spend any amount of time traveling by air, you know you get the opportunity to see and experience some unique stuff.  Medical research sounds vast, but you find that everyone runs in the same circles and you always wind up running into the same people.  And like birds of a feather who flock together, human nature leads us to a state of commiseration where we share stories of travel nightmares in an almost competitive nature.  There were stories of missed runways and wrong airports, failed engines and horrid seatmates…but the one story that trumped them all….

After a flight from Atlanta to Los Angeles landed, there was a 50 minute layover before the plane departed again, on to Hawaii.  For those going on with the plane, the pilot announced that they were welcome to deplane and stretch their legs, etc., before the already lengthy flight finished.  Everyone took advantage of this break, with the exception of a blind man and his service dog.  The pilot noticed him as he walked by and offered to help the man, but the man declined, but said “my dog could use a break”.  So picture this:  passengers crowded around the entrance of the jet bridge, and off walks the pilot, dark sunglasses on, seeing eye dog right beside him. 

Feat took control!  With screams and cries people scattered, flooding the customer service desks of other airlines desperate to change flights; one woman even fainted in the middle of the aisle. 

Fear is a natural human response…it’s a part of our everyday lives.  Perhaps more so for some than others, but we all deal with it at some point.

Political corruption, discord and strong arming; peace be with you. 

Hatred, prejudice, racial profiling; peace be with you.

Prolife vs prochoice, men vs women, young vs old; peace be with you.

Rich vs poor, republican vs democrat, us vs them; peace be with you.

Rape, assault, abuse of power; peace be with you.

Global warming, tornadoes, floods; peace be with you.

War, suicide bombings, nuclear threat; peace be with you.

School shootings, murder, state sponsored executions; peace be with you.

Hunger, homelessness, unacceptable living conditions; peace be with you.

Measles, cancer, HIV; peace be with you. 

These are some of the many, many things that spark fear deep within us.  These are things that cause that fear to grip our hearts, to creep into the very fibers of our being.  These are things that cause fear to control us.  Where there is fear, there is no peace.  Fear brings anxiety, worry, apprehension, dread, restlessness, panic, tension…all of which are the antithesis of peace.

In the lesson in John’s Gospel this morning, Jesus tells His disciples:  Peace I leave you, my peace I give you.”.  To understand why Jesus might say this to His disciples, we need to look at the 14^th chapter of John in its whole.  The chapter begins with Jesus’ words, “Do not let your hearts be troubled.”  John starts this chapter with Christ’s words of comfort, and we pick up today with a second set of words of comfort.  Jesus and his disciples are gathered around the table.  He has washed their feet.  He has taken the bread, he has given thanks for it, he has broken it, and he has given it to them.  Likewise, he has taken the cup, he has given thanks for it, and he has given it to them, both with instruction to continue this in remembrance of him.  Something was different with this routine, yearly observance.  There was a vein of tension and fear in the air.  You can almost feel the suspicion of the disciples; what is he doing, they ask.  He tells them he is going away.  The fear and suspicion turns to shock, and disbelief; the fear remains, and begins to grow.  “I am leaving”, he tells them, “I am leaving to make a new home for you, and I will come back for you and will get you, and you will be with me again”. 

I wonder, then, how long the silence held.  How do you respond to that?  A million thoughts and questions flood your thought space…then someone speaks up, asking probably the biggest question on everyone’s mind: when you come back, how will you know us and how will we know you?

So Jesus tells them how.  I will come back and know those who are mine by those who love me, and I know you love me when you keep my word, and those who love me and keep my word will be loved also by my Father (God the Father), and we will make our home with them. 

That’s a little bit scary.  That’s actually a whole lot scary.  That’s terrifying. 

Raise your hand if you know without a shadow of a doubt you’ve kept Jesus’ word, without fail….  (no one should raise their hand).

Yeah…me either.  But these words of Christ here are kind of ambiguous if you think about them.  So we have to Love God, keep the word of Christ…but how do we do that?  How do we keep the word of Jesus?  How do we show love to God?  How do we show God the Father and God the Son that we are the people…the people who seek to have a home with them?  These are, I’m sure, the same questions thought swirling around the room that dry, dusty night. 

What are the teachings of Christ?  What is the word we are supposed to keep?  If you take all the teachings of Christ, the metanarrative is easy to see:  the teaching of Jesus is love.  It’s love over, and over again.  It’s love on top of love.  It’s a heaping measure of love, shaken and pressed down.  It’s love God, love your neighbor, and love yourself.  Love the earth, love the animals, love all of creation.  Love again, and again, and again. 

That’s all?  That’s easy!  We’ve totally got this…or at least I do!  No worries, here.

I don’t have to love the people who don’t look like me, right?  But, their skin is a different color.  They married outside of their race, and I’m pretty sure the Bible warns us against that….

Oh…I have to love them too?  I can love them but be disgusted by them right?  What’s that…I can’t?  Really?

What about these immigrants?  Coming into my country, getting on welfare I pay for, and they won’t even learn my language!

Jesus didn’t mean them.  I loved them just fine before they came to this land…my land….

But they take our jobs, and they get everything free!  But….

(Frustration)

What about that woman who’s had 3 abortions, the couple down the street who are in an “unconventional” relationship that looks different than mine, the stinky homeless man always begging for money, people in the military, human traffickers, Muslims, millennials, hippies….

I CAN’T LOVE EVERYONE!!!!!!!!  I CAN’T DO THIS!!!!!!!!!!!

“I am sending you a helper”, Jesus tells them.  I am leaving you, but I am not leaving you alone.  And here we see the third part of the Holy Trinity, God the Holy Spirit.  This is one of those few times Jesus actually speaks of the three parts of God and their relationship to each other.

The Advocate, the Helper, the Guide…the Holy Spirit, whom the Father will send in My name; the Spirit will teach you everything you need to know, and will remind you of my words.  When we get a little too full of ourselves, it’s the Spirit that reminds us that we are to empty ourselves.  When we put ourselves first, our needs, our wants, our desires, it’s the Spirit that reminds us that those who are last will be first.  When our culture, our society, and our opinions and views, regardless  of how well or poorly formed begin to drift into our ability to love, it’s this same Spirit that reminds us to love, helps us to love, gives us the courage to love and guides us to service in love.  IF…if we listen.

We must.  Accepting Christ and the gift of salvation, while crucial, is only the beginning.  Our journey doesn’t end when we affirm our faith and become followers of Christ; it’s only the beginning.  Jesus tells his disciples here that my Father and I will know you by your keeping of my word.  Not by our baptism, not by our conversion…by our discipleship.  By our living a life that emulates Christ, and his generosity and self-sacrificing love.

That doesn’t bring me peace.  That troubles my heart.  Heaps and heaps of trouble, fear, doubt, questioning, and certainty that I’ve completely missed the mark altogether…because the Spirit pokes and prods me often, reminding me of all the opportunities I had to give love and either didn’t, or demonstrated the opposite of love.  All the harm I have done, all the selfish humanness I hold on to. 

And while the Spirit does point these things out, the Spirit does something else…reminds me of the grace that surrounds me.  The grace that covers a multitude of sins, of mess ups, of errors committed by accident or with calculation…grace that carries me, and carries you, and carries us all….

That, brings me peace.  That, settles the troubles in my heart.  That abates my deepest fears and calms my inadequacy.  And we are given this Grace by one who gives freely, openly, without conditions or limits or any of the ways you and I of this world might give. 

And for that, thanks be to God.

Shepherding Fish

Metaphors are something I never really caught the grasp of, so I tend to avoid them as to not make myself look any worse than I already do.  This is not new.  Every time I try to use a metaphor, I wind up combining two or more and come up with these often illogical, sometimes humorous, mixed metaphors, like:

“Sweeping the rug under the carpet.”

“Burning the midnight oil at both ends.”

“It was so cold last night I had to throw another blanket on the fire.”

“It’s time to step up to the plate and cut the mustard.”

“Robbing Peter to pay the piper.”

“Up a tree without a paddle.”

“Skating on hot water.”

“Keep your ear to the grindstone.”

“Sometimes you’ve gotta stick your neck out on a limb.”

“Some people sail through life on a bed of roses like a knife slicing through butter.”

And now you see why I stay away from metaphors.  But today’s lesson from John seems to be one of these mixed metaphors, moving from fishing into shepherding; so are we shepherding fish, or are we catching lambs?

This 21^st chapter of John seems to almost be an epilogue, or an afterthought.  We wrapped up the 20^thchapter last week with John almost closing, telling us that there are other signs that were not written in this book, but these are written so that you may believe.  

Today we find seven of the disciples on the water…they spent all night fishing.  They would cast the nets out, and pull it back empty.  Throw after throw without results.  By now, daybreak, they were exhausted and frustrated. 

Through the mist, they heard a voice.  They couldn’t make out who it was, but they heard the words “Have you anything to eat?  Cast your net on the right side of the boat, and you will find some.  If I can say anything about fishermen, it’s that while they know what works for them, they’re always willing to try something new.  My Granddaddy was an avid fisherman and every week he had some new bait, or had heard of a new trick….  So if these fishermen were anything like him, they were surely open to trying casting from the right side of the boat.  They hadn’t caught any fish up to this point so what did they have to lose?

So they cast their nets on the right side and caught more fish than their boats could manage.  I imagine they looked up to the shore again and immediately recognized who called out to them:  it was Jesus. 

We aren’t sure of the time frame (how much time has passed since they last saw Jesus), but by the clues most scholars agree that quite some time has passed.  Enough time that the Disciples, probably not understanding what to do, went back to what they knew.  We find Peter, James, and John, along with a few others, fishing.  My guess is it was was easy to be engaged in this radical new ministry while Jesus was with them, leading them; in his absence, it seems to not be so easy. 

We see that Peter, upon recognizing who was standing there, grabs his clothes and makes his way through the water toward the shore, leaving the others to wrestle with the enormous catch in the nets.  When they all made it to the shore, there was a fire built; Jesus was cooking fish, and bread.  He was making breakfast for the disciples. 

I wonder, at this point (the third time Jesus had appeared to them after his crucifixion), does Peter still carry with him the guilt of denying Christ three times?  I wonder this because of what comes next:  Jesus asks Peter “Do you love me more than these”, Peter says yes, and Jesus responds “Feed my Lambs”.  Jesus doesn’t stop at one exchange with Peter, but continues with two more, for a total of three:  Jesus asks Peter again “Do you love me”, to which Peter answers “Yes”, and Jesus responds, “Tend my sheep”, then a third “Do you love me” with Peter responding “You know everything, and you know I love you”, and Jesus countering with “Feed my sheep”.  I have to wonder if maybe these weren’t the three atonements Peter was in need of to move forward.  I’ve been stuck in guilt, unable to move on.

There are many beautiful moments in this passage, navigating these almost mixed metaphors at times.  I want us to focus, for a bit, the who, the where, and the what.

The who:  Throughout the ministry of Jesus, it is no mistake that He never went out of his way to choose people to partner with him in ministry that were educated, or polished, or necessarily presentable.  Peter, James, and John, in particular, were fishermen.  The work of the fishing vocation is hard, requires no prerequisite education, the hours are long, you stink, and from what I’ve seen on the Discovery Channel, you’re pretty rough around the edges and have a foul mouth.  In Jesus’ day, fishermen were way down on the social totem pole.  Yet, here we see Jesus calling these uneducated, unequipped, willing ordinary men to extraordinary things.  In this passage, we see fishing paralleled with shepherding, another vocation that ranks with the lowest of the low.  

The where:  In the beginning of his ministry, and even in today’s text, we see Jesus going to where these ordinary men were, meeting them where they are.  He came to the shore, where they were fishing; not only did he come to meet them on the shore, we need to see that he met them in their tiredness, their frustration, their confusion, their desperation, their anger…he saw them, where they were, and he came to them.  He didn’t wait until it was more convenient, or easier; he met them right where they were.

We’ve seen many times in the Gospels where Jesus picks someone out and meets them where they are, then offers “something”:  healing, counsel, an invitation.  The first time Jesus meets Peter, he offers him an invitation to become a fisher of men.  Today, the exchange isn’t much different.  He asks Peter to feed his lambs, to tend to his sheep.  He is asking Peter to shepherd his flock. 

When Jesus told Peter at the beginning of their ministry together to fish in the deeper water, Jesus was giving the same instruction to us; the same applies here…we as Christians, we as the church, are tasked with tending to the sheep.  And for the most part, we do a good job.  We take notice when someone isn’t here, we know when someone is sick, or in need.  So, do we tend to the sheep in the world as well as we tend to the sheep in here? 

Tending the sheep, feeding the lambs, and shepherding the flock is substantially different than catching fish.  You have to make sure they’re fed, and make sure they don’t wander off, and go hunting for them when they do wander off, and protect them from harm….  Growing up we had horses and this sounds a lot like horses (or even cows).  It was a regular occurrence at our house to get woke up at 4 am to chase the horses back in the field in our pajamas. 

The lambs Jesus is speaking of here is us.  All of us, everywhere.  Every person you meet…are sheep.  And we have been asked by the Great Shepherd, to care for His flock.  We, who aren’t trained, and don’t necessarily know how, we, whose lives are a big mess and are barely to care for ourselves at times, we are who Jesus has come to with this request to care for his flock. 

Shepherding and fishing may seem like mixed metaphors, but they provide a healthy challenge for the church, because this is what the church is all about.  Let’s covenant together, today, to fish for sheep, and shepherd the fish.