Third Sunday of Easter, Year C

Readings are here!

            As many of you know, part of the way our congregation has two priests is that I am, and we are, the beneficiaries of a grant from the Lilly Foundation that supports the work of newly ordained priests and ministers. As a part of this grant, I meet weekly with a peer group to talk about our work, to learn from each other. Sometimes we read books together too. This week for my Lilly Fellows group we had to read a book called Move. It is a book written by the ministers of a large evangelical church in Chicago. Even though these large Mega-churches seem very different from what we do here on a Sunday Morning, there were still some interesting lessons to take away from the book. It is called “Move” because it is about spiritual growth and movement. The book grew out of a survey they conducted at their church. It was a survey that had results that really startled them: it told them even though they had huge attendance numbers, and very involved people, involved in ministries and mission, they weren’t helping people move very much. What do they mean by move? They mean move in their spiritual life. They mean not helping members of their parish go from wandering in the door as new comers kind of curious about church, and God and Jesus to being at a more advanced spiritual level where their lives are centered on Christ. At first it might seem like you could blame this lack of helping the congregation achieve a closer, more spiritually advanced understanding on Christ on the fact that it is a mega church, but I think this would be unfair. Surveys in main-line protestant churches have shown this stalled spiritual development is a pervasive issue. And I am sure that we here at St. Ann & the Holy Trinity are not immune to this. I am sure that many of us feel a little stalled in our spiritual development, and are searching for ways to feel closer to God, and to understand better God’s role in our lives. The collect, the prayer at the beginning of our service sets up the themes presented in out readings today, and during that prayer we ask God to open the eyes of our faith. So this morning I would like to think about the ways in which we move in our spiritual development, and how we might open our eyes to God’s role in our lives.

            The first thing that I think is important to consider is that our faith is indeed there, is indeed here, and our collect simply reminds us to open our eyes to see what is already there. The emphasis on eyes surely comes from our reading from the Acts of the Apostles, where Paul is temporarily blinded. There is something we need to understand about his blindness. He isn’t blind while he was persecuting the church. His eyes were wide open then. He was breathing threats and murder. But he is blind in this in-between time. This time during which Paul transitions from persecuting the early church to being an apostle to the Gentiles is the first time that his spiritual life is stalled. Paul was a zealot, someone who goes above and beyond, he was fanatical. In his early life as a persecutor of the church, he wanted to be the fiercest persecutor. And then Jesus speaks to him. In those days following the so-called “Damascus event” Paul is for the first time sort of unsure about what to do-unsure of what it means to be a person who believes in God. I suspect many of us have had that experience. That is, reaching a point where we are no longer sure God is who we thought God is. Sometimes it is prompted by a terrible event, a sudden death of a loved one. Other times, people may become disillusioned by religious institutions and their faith is disillusioned along side that. And still for others they may find that they have just gradually felt distant from God. So, as we read and hear this passage, we can look for how Paul moves from the insecurity of not knowing who God is in his life anymore to being able to go out and proclaim the Gospel.

            It is important to note that Paul wouldn’t have called this movement a conversion experience. In his understanding, he was always faithful to God, but in this moment he came to understand that God was not just the creator, but that there were two other parts of God too, the Son, Jesus, and the Holy Spirit. Paul’s faith, like our faith, is there, but it did need to be redirected. His eyes were closed in the in between time, because when they were reopened he knew the new truth of his life, the truth that is made known in the breaking of the bread, and the truth of Jesus’ life, death and resurrection.

            Even though it is important to emphasize Paul’s continuing faith—I think there is something both menacing to the tone of this passage, and generally intimidating about this story. I have heard quite a few of you in this congregation remark that you haven’t had a Damascus experience—which tends to be short hand for not having a major life changing religious experience. But when I look closely at the passage, when we examine what exactly happens I don’t think it is really all that unfamiliar to us all. What Jesus does in this passage is he speaks to Paul—but more than speaks, he seems to provoke a feeling in Paul that his zealotry was misplaced. The transformative moment for Paul isn’t so much the speech of Jesus that changes his feeling, after all when Jesus is done speaking Paul is blinded, and cannot see. It isn’t one moment, but something is stated in Paul on the ground. It takes a few days to work out, and a visit from a local man to lay his hands on Paul, but during this process, this feeling that Jesus starts in Paul provokes a reaction—and that reaction, that going out into the world more firm in his faith, more clear about who God is—that is the real thing that happens at Damascus. So maybe some of have not had a life-changing religious event, but I suspect we have all had a Damascus process: a moment where some feeling is provoked, followed by a period of being unsure about what that feeling meant, and finally responding to that provocation. Doing, and acting.

            I see this in today’s Gospel reading too.  There is the intimacy of that breakfast scene, followed by Jesus’ asking Peter three times, do you love me? In this time after Jesus’ death and resurrection, he is figuring out how to be with his disciples, and they too are learning about what this resurrection life is like. So far the disciples do not really seem sure about what to do. They seem a little adrift, and perhaps because of this they seem to be going back to their roots—the go back to fishing. Remember the stories about how Jesus first encounters his disciples as they are fishing and tells them to follow him and become fishers of men? This passage in John’s gospel seems like a strange echo to that. Somehow the appearance of both fish and then Jesus’ mention of sheep and lambs strikes me as a way of Jesus provoking a feeling in the disciples that they need to move on to the next stage—away from the fish—towards the sheep. And there is also no doubt that this passage seems to almost re-instate peter after he denied knowing Jesus three times on Good Friday, we hear him today confess to loving Jesus three times. When we look at the response of the disciples to Jesus in this passage we have them following his fishing instructions, then we have Peter getting dressed and jumping in the water, and finally Peter responds that he loves Jesus. These three responses show the spiritual growth of the disciples. First they just do as they are commanded: they cast the nets on the side of the boat Jesus tells them too. Then they sort of act with out fully thinking through the consequences: Peter just jumps in the water, not really for any good reason, or to any real effect. And finally they act and speak with love, Peter repeats that he loves Jesus. 

            These passages in scripture today show us one of the ways we experience God and the ways that we might spiritually grow in our response to God. They show us that there is not often a voice that speaks to us, nor is their often a major life changing moment, but there are smaller instances—smaller feelings, often an internal call reminding us of something greater, getting us to act with more compassion, providing us an opportunity to be of service to someone in need, or a gradual realization of a stranger’s humanity—these small feelings provoke a response of love, and are ways we can and do understand God to be present with us along the way. Since I began this sermon talking about spiritual movement, I want to end by saying that I think we can look for our lives to be more Christ centered in our actions, in our responses to the small provocations God makes in our lives toward greater good, and greater love.