Acts 9:1-20
Psalm 30
Revelation 5:6-14
John 21:1-19
©John Rolley
+May my words be in the name of the Loving Creator, Compassionate Christ & Healing Spirit, Amen.
A poem by Davin Tensen[1] starts thus:
I used to cry out to you
For you
With fervour and volume
Not ceasing to bid
For divine intervention
Asking you to come
Like a rider of clouds
Like Deus Ex Machina
Like a warrior king
I’d petition you
To deliver me
And save me
From my suffering
From my lack
From my angst
And you did
You did
Till you didn’t
These words, I’m sure resonate within each of us. The days, weeks, months or even years spent pleading and begging for God to change, heal or restore us. Sometimes there were signs of God’s interventions, yet other times, not.
So often we hear the repeated complaint, “If there is a God, why is there so much suffering?” Or, as I heard one atheist say, I’m sure being a tad provocative in the context of a television interview with an Anglican Archbishop, “I didn’t get the bike I wanted when I was ten, so I haven’t bothered with God ever since!”
Both of these questions miss the point in different ways. Both suffer from a lack of regard for the complexities of the human condition. A condition where the depths of our living and loving are too frequently marked by pain, by missed opportunity, by fractures in love, in eros, in relating. Yet each of these pains and fractures, these missing moments, equally bound up with the triumphs and exhilarations, exist – flowing with and against each other AND with and against those dynamics within the others with whom we share life and love.
The human person, driven by the ego’s urge to survive and equally deflect as much of the personal responsibility for the pain, fractures and missing moments as possible, clings to the simplistic vision of ‘me’ over and against ‘other’. “Why me?” “This always happens to me?” “Here I go again!”
David Tensen continues…
It’s like you stopped
Stopped allowing
Me to see you that way
Far away
Worlds away
So you delivered me
You saved me
You saved me from the lie
That you were distant
That you could leave me
Forsake me
Go against your word
Your nature
And be anywhere other
Than with me
Be anyone other
Than Immanuel
So, each of the readings set for today, echo these themes. Acts, the Psalm and John: They tell of brokenness – broken relationships, shattered illusions, deep pain and confusion. They speak of helplessness and the uncertainty of desolation: The desolation of experiencing the hells of human creation; the desolation of being thrown down in the light of the presence of contradictory love; and the desolation of being found in the presence of forgiving and restoring love!
It is important to note, both within the poem by David Tensen that unfolds in this sermon, and the people within the readings, the loving touch of the Divine presence isn’t an event – it is a process. Love as an ever-present co-creating force for restoration.
For Saul the confrontation of his worldview of rightness and purity, the need to purge heresy from the house of Israel, his zeal for God, his love of God’s law – all led him down a certain road, so to speak, and right into the hands of the One who came to restore – the dying and Risen One. The Immanuel! I’m sure Saul prayed fervently and authentically – as we all do when we are facing the dissolution of our worldviews. Yet, the Beloved moved in through the cracks of his world’s constructing and stood with Saul as the walls imploded.
The Psalmist, capturing some of the most iconic and beautiful words of the human journey in the Psalms, gives a broad view of this very process (v. 6):
As for me, I said in my prosperity:
‘I shall never be moved.’
The next verse continues
By your favour, O Lord
You had established me as a strong mountain;
You hid your face;
I was dismayed.
The breaking of our expectations of who God is and how God works, our demands for and of ourselves, the ways we project those expectations and demands onto others – the shattering can be so thorough, at times, it sits us in our dust and ashes.
Yet, the Psalmist states resoundingly:
You have turned my mourning into dancing;
You have taken off my sackcloth
And clothed me with joy.
In these moments, there is nothing to do or say, rather it calls us to be present to the essential blessed gift given by God and shared by all – our humanity! It is our humanity that God LOVES with a deep and abiding passion. It drove the God who creates to become the God who lives in and among God’s people!
David Tensen continues
So, I quit working
Quit striving
Allowing myself to rest
I took a break
From the burnt offerings
Burning myself
Beating myself
And started loving myself
Like you do
I started learning
What it meant to be me
With you by my side
And it was great
Really great
Till it wasn’t
And I needed saving again
So, we turn to Simon Peter! The rugged beautifully flawed human face of the apostles. This passage in John is an oddity in that many scholars believe it was added to the John’s Gospel. However, many also agree that it has served as an important gift to the Church. We see Simon, his pronouncement of ‘…going fishing!’ (I’m sure many a partner has heard the (often) man in their life saying the same thing!) Yet, we don’t have a motive – and it probably doesn’t matter. I can only imagine what would have been in the very human Peter’s mind. How do you cope with three years of intensive engagement with Jesus, only to see him violently and brutally taken, the grief and anguish, the frailty of fear giving way to denial, the guilt, the reports of Jesus having risen – even encounters with the Risen One. There is so much happening on a human level that fishing seems a reasonable suggestion!
Yet, the writer of John had a very specific reason for bringing, for one last time, two people, Jesus and Simon, back together.
The scene is filled with gentleness and love. “Children, you have no fish, have you?” Peter and the six others would have been exhausted – Peter was naked.
Into this scene, Jesus injects an abundance that confronts their emptiness, clothes them with his affirming presence and provides for their earthly needs. The Risen One is still the Immanuel!
Peter then encounters Jesus!
Isn’t it amazing sometimes, how forgiveness, love and restoration can break us open more than aggression, judgement and condemnation? But there it was. “…do you love me?”
Some speculate that the writer of John had Jesus say this three times to counter the three denials of Peter. Rather, I suspect, it was one of those crucial human ‘teaching’ moments where, having lived through the dissolution of his world and the struggle to try to make sense of it all, Peter experiences Jesus gently journeying through his wreckage to bring him to a new understanding of what it meant to “Follow me”. Jesus was showing him a glimpse the Reign of God which is known in love – the agape of God. Peter couldn’t yet move past the simplicity of an earthly fondness one has for a friend. Jesus knew this! And in a moment where he affirms that Peter’s understanding is ‘enough’ for now, uses Peter’s word for love, ‘phileo’. For Peter, as for us all in the ‘here and not yet’ of Reign of God’s love, the completion of that journey was not for that moment – but to be lived out in the process of the beautiful complex richness of our living and loving! The Immanuel isn’t an event but a constant presence!
David Tensen concludes:
You see
To know you are with me
Is a truth
And a joy
But a by-my-side
Best-friend-saviour
Way of knowing you
Still has me separate
Separate from union
Separate from oneness
Separate from discovering
My place in the divine dance
Which is where
You brought me
Eternally
Which is crazy
Which changes everything
But I’m learning
That the truth of my being
My very being
Is you
You
+In the name of God,
Loving Creator,
Compassionate Christ, and
Healing Spirit. Amen.
[1] The Saving I Need by David Tensen, 2021, So I Wrote You a Poem: Poems of empathy on life, loss and faith. Abbotsford, BC: St Macrina Press, 66-69.