The Most Awkward Breakfast in History.

Easter 3, Year C

Acts 9:1-6, (7-20)

Revelation 5:11-14

John 21:1-19

Psalm 30

So there was this one time I did something wrong.  And I knew that my dad knew about it.  I found out he knew on a Friday.  We then went on a previously planned weekend trip, just me and him.  And here’s the thing.  He did not mention the thing I did wrong to me at all until the last hour of the drive home at the end of the weekend.  I had to sit there for two days, knowing that he knew.  And he knew that I knew that he knew.  That entire weekend, I was waiting for the hammer to drop.  It was terrible.  I’m pretty sure the waiting was also intentional on his part.  If I remember correctly, I think the waiting served as my punishment.

Can you remember a time where you had done something wrong, and you knew you were caught?

That gut-tightening feeling when the truth comes to light, and you have to face up to what you did?

And you are waiting for the hard conversation with those whom you may have injured or disappointed?

Does this sound familiar to anyone?

Every time I read this story of Peter and Jesus on the sea shore, I remember the feeling of waiting for the hammer to drop.  For the wrong to be addressed.  I think this is a story of one of the most awkward breakfasts in history.  How often do you get to eat breakfast with the tortured and murdered man you personally betrayed and deserted to suffer his fate alone?  And who has come back to life?

For Peter, there goes any chance of hiding his deed.  There goes any hope of spinning the story he would tell to everyone else that he had done what he could, but it just was not enough to save Jesus.  Peter already had to sit with the other frightened disciples, stewing in the shame of his three-fold denial of Jesus after vowing to never desert him.  None of them were innocent of desertion, but Peter’s denial stands out.  The chief follower of Jesus became the chief deserter.

Peter, at this breakfast, will need to face his past. 

I mentioned on Maundy Thursday—the Thursday before the Easter celebration—the night before Jesus’s arrest and crucifixion, the night he foretells Peter’s desertion and denial—that memory and remembrance has particular meaning in a Christian context.

We—all of us—are held in the memory and care of God.

All of our pains, all of our joys.  All of our wounds, all of our woundings of others.

We follow a God who carries the weight and memory of every pain and trauma and joy and mundane moment of existence.

To God, no one is forgotten.  No injury is overlooked.

At the very least, we count our injuries, too, don’t we?

[Do we count our injuries of others with as much care?]

It would be easy and understandable for Jesus at this point, on the shore of Galilee, to say that the betrayal and denial of Peter is enough to prove Peter is unworthy of the task Jesus would give him.  It would be understandable for Jesus to say the severity of the betrayal of the Son of God Himself is too much to overlook, and that Peter is no longer worthy.  Instead, Peter deserves to be cast away.

When we recoil from our injuries, do we not say something similar?

[Do we not say that those who injure us are now unworthy to be called a friend?]

But this is not the nature of God, or Jesus.

Now, on the other side of the resurrection, Jesus is fulfilling the mission he was given.  Earlier in the same Gospel of John, Jesus tells us that the will of God was that Jesus would not lose any of those he was given, but that he raise them up—that he comes not to condemn but to save.[1]  This applies not only to the disciples, but to the whole world; yet, in Jesus’s appearances after the resurrection, he comes to the disciples to reconstitute the community that he had formed.  He comes back to gather the scattered sheep that God had given him.  He comes back to show the disciples that there is resurrection—the ability to stand with dignity restored—and a loving power beyond desertion, and betrayal, and the worst violence that the world can do.

And so, even though it would have been easy for Jesus to write off Thomas—remember last week? Doubting Thomas?—Jesus comes back to give Thomas exactly what was needed to bring him back into fold—an experience of the risen Christ, in the flesh.  Thomas had to have that experience, because before Jesus and his entourage even arrive in Jerusalem in advance of the crucifixion; it was known that going there would mean death.  And Thomas, in his first recorded sentence in the Gospels, said that they should “go and die with him [Jesus].”[2] Both Thomas and Peter have particular betrayals and desertions recorded in scripture that had to be redeemed. 

And here, in our gospel passage this morning, Jesus is returning to give Peter what he needs—redemption of his past as a denier.

You see, salvation is not simply a matter of saving one’s soul.  The whole self is the concern and theatre of God’s saving work, and the past of the self is included in the scope of God’s saving purpose.[3] 

Our memories and our reactions to our memories make us and shape us.  Our memories—our experiences—shape our understanding of who we are and how we will react to what we see before us.  The shames, the guilts, and the injuries we suffer constrict us.    They make us more reticent to reach out to others—with the exception of when we might seek revenge on those who hurt us, or we inflict pain on others in an effort to drown out our own agony.  Often they compel us to seek shelter in the darkness rather than risk exposure in the light.   We’d rather hide our failures, which may also include attempts to push them out of our own memories.

But the disciples—and we—are confronted by the risen Christ, whose body also bears the wounds of his suffering; and yet he comes to us offering and urging forgiveness and communion.

Christ returns to us as a victim who offers victory through resurrection, not through hiding, silent suffering, or violence.  He continuously shows that there is a power beyond the worst that the world can muster—a power from God grounded in love and healing. 

The healing Jesus offers is free, but it is not cheap.  The price is our willingness to confront the actions and injuries behind our shame and guilt we live in— by either the acts we have done, or the things that have been done to us. 

And in this passage, on the shore of Galilee, Jesus confronts Peter with the memory of his wrongdoing.  An interesting detail that the English translation obscures is that the fire Jesus lights is the same kind of fire around which Peter warmed himself when he denied Christ.  The Greek word for the charcoal fire is anthrakia, and it only appears in the Bible twice:  in the story of Peter’s betrayal, and this moment of his reckoning.  John drives home that this is the moment of reconciling Peter’s denial.  Peter has to bear the full weight of his denial.  He has to experience the hurt of the denial, represented by being asked three times about the true nature of his love.

If Peter is to be called again, if he can again become a true apostle, the “Peter” that he is in the purpose of Jesus rather than the Simon who runs back into the cozy obscurity of an ordinary and hidden life, his desertion and betrayal—his failure—must be truthfully confronted, lived through again and brought to a good end.[4]  Only after this fullness of reconciliation can Peter know himself as truly forgiven; and only then can Jesus fully commission Peter as the new shepherd of the flock.  Only then can Peter find his past transfigured from shame to hope as he witnesses that the power and graceful mercy and love of God can redeem his earlier weaknesses.

If you are still with me at this point, here is why this matters in Christian life.

Even if it is well-intentioned, the famous saying that one should “forgive and forget” is not quite what the Christian faith adheres to.

God carries the memories of the whole universe at all times.

We carry memories too, even as much as we would rather forget or hide some of them.

But they are remembered because our faith rests in God who promises that death and destruction and evil will not finally hold sway.

And we follow a God who invites us to glory with him in the moments when the tragic is redeemed and turned by love into joyful remembrance of God’s healing presence.

Or when a wrong is truthfully faced and reconciliation is offered in exchange for hatred.

We remember because God gave us memory and calls us to be witnesses to the wonders love makes possible.

If the phrase “forgive and forget” has a Christian resonance, it comes not from the notion that wrongdoing is forgotten, as though justice is not important.  It comes from an experience of God that allows us to move beyond a wrongdoing in such a way that death and hatred has no hold on us because we instead cling to love and hope and the power of resurrection—the ability to stand with dignity restored.

Every time Christ appears to the disciples after the resurrection, he heals the memory of the disciple’s betrayal.  The memory of the disciple’s shame and guilt—their memory of the betrayal—is not canceled out or forgotten by Jesus showing up and by his “being okay”--as though the crucixion and death were 'not that bad' since Jesus is back--but because the truth is that God will set all to right in due time.  And our memories of pain, ours and others, are the points of our lives where Christ the Risen Victim invites himself and us to heal memory—to transform our injuries and our failures and our betrayals and our desertions into stories of redemption and grace. 

How might you need to experience Christ’s healing of injury or shame or guilt in your life?

How will you accept his invitation to meet him in that interior space where the heart is open, and no secrets are hid? 

How might a community of believers model that healing and reconciliation in the world around us?

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[1] This promise is mentioned at Jn 6:39, 17:12, and 18:8-9.  While it refers to the disciples in particular, it can be generalized as Jesus’s mission to the whole world; Jesus has been given the mission to overthrow “the ruler of this world” (cf. Jn 12:31 and 16:11) because he was sent not to condemn the world but to save it (cf. Jn. 3:16-17, 8:11, 8:15, 12:47).

[2] John 11:1-16 (particularly v.16).  It is not particularly clear if Thomas means to die with Lazarus or Jesus, but it is clear that following Jesus to Lazarus could mean their deaths as it puts them in proximity to the authorities looking for ways to silence Jesus.

[3] This sentence follows closely Rowan Williams Resurrection: Interpreting the Easter Gospel (Cleveland: Pilgrim Press, 2002), 23.

[4] Borrowing heavily from Williams, 28-29.

Remembering All of It

Maundy Thursday,

St. Matthew’s, Chandler

Exodus 12:1-4, (5-10), 11-14

1 Corinthians 11:23-26

John 13:1-17, 31b-35

Psalm 116:1, 10-17

Remember.

The word, and the concept, of remembering, of memory recalled and made present once again, echoes like heartbeat through the readings tonight.

Remember.

Exodus:  God has acted decisively in our liberation, and we will return to this night every year.

Remember.

The psalmists sings:   

How shall I repay the Lord *
for all the good things he has done for me?

I will lift up the cup of salvation *
and call upon the Name of the Lord.

… I will fulfill my vows to the Most High.

Remember.

Paul to the Corinthians:  The story of this supper was given to me, and now I give it to you.

Remember.

Jesus to the disciples:  “I have set you an example, that you also should do as I have done to you.” 

Remember.

Here we are. 

To hear the stories.

And remember.

Remembrance—how and why we remember—particularly the story of this night in Christ’s life, and the life of the disciples, is inseparably linked to the mystery of Christ’s work of salvation.

And when I say mystery, I do not mean that we are talking about unknowable conjecture and theological meandering; I mean that we are talking about an everlasting truth that eludes comprehension, yet still illuminates the very depths of God’s inexhaustible power and love.  The night brings to us a remembrance of God’s nature, revealed in Jesus.

You see, memory and remembrance has particular meaning in a Christian context.

We—all of us—are held in the memory and care of God.

All of our pains, all of our joys.  All of our wounds, all of our woundings of others.

We are responding to the work of a God who carries the weight and memory of every pain and trauma and joy and mundane moment of existence.

As God says to the prophet Jeremiah “Before I formed you in the womb I knew you, before you were born I set you apart.”[1]  Jesus himself reminded us that the one who grounds all of existence is also the one who has also counted every hair of our head.

And as the psalmist sings of God:

Lord, you have searched me out and known me; *

you know my sitting down and my rising up;

you discern my thoughts from afar.

You trace my journeys and my resting-places *

and are acquainted with all my ways.

Indeed, there is not a word on my lips, *

but you, O Lord, know it altogether.[2]

To God, no one is forgotten.  No injury is overlooked.

God knows the messiness of our lives and the difficulties of human existence.  He remembers that we are dust, given to decay and sickness and death. 

But our Lord did not die of disease or old age.  He died on the cross through a deliberate set of political considerations and schemes and betrayals.  As such, it is worthwhile to consider over these three holy days what Christ action saves us from and brings us toward.  

And given the nature of Christ’s death, it is worth considering especially the violence which we are so good at visiting upon each other, not to mention the apathy we are disposed to show in the face of overwhelming human suffering.  There are so many ways in which humankind so often goes beyond not showing love to our neighbors, or even as regarding others as of little consequence, but instead we tend more often toward mutual rejection of each other.  

Hate so often goes both ways in our broken relationships, both individually and corporately, with us feeding off of the violence of each other in a twisted inversion of the Golden Rule. Instead of heeding the word to “Do unto others as you would have them do to you,” we live in a world that teaches “do to others as they do to you, because it is only fair.”  

Violence spirals in vicious circle as victim and oppressor visit yet even more violence upon each other.  In such an inversion of the Golden Rule, the moral bar is continuous set lower and lower.  We may say “We have gotten our hands dirty, but at least we are not as bad as our enemy.”  We may hope that fact alone absolves us from the responsibility we actually have to treat others as we hope to be treated.  We dismiss the hope that we are capable of such a loving regard of our enemies as impractical.  We prefer our cold calculations of cost and benefit, power and security, on the level of our private relationships, and in our national lives.  

We are all victims and oppressors.  
We are wounded, we fight back. 
We call it a law of nature.

Our human history is one of violence. We are all of us, in some measure, shut off from one another: Our own options for cruelty, violence, and apathy fade into...

"...a background of raging endemic violence.  We are born into a world where there are already histories of oppression and victimizations: our moral and spiritual growth does not occur in a vacuum.  And so, before we are even conscious of it, the systems of oppressor-victims relations absorb us.  This state of being is the ‘already” and “always” which theology refers to (sometimes unhelpfully) as original sin—this sense of a primordial inheritance of violence, of being born into systems of enforced hierarchy and violence that undergird all human relation before we are capable of understanding or choice." (Rowan Williams, Resurrection: Interpreting the Easter Gospel.)

This violence which constricts our openness to communion or to relationship.  In our world, memory is weaponized, and becomes our source for the stories of our various separations.  

“We are always innocent.”  

“They have always been at war.” 

“He can never be trusted.” 

“She will never trust again.”

This is our world, which Jesus entered as a peasant of an oppressed minority under violent and brutal imperial occupation. He quickly got the attention of this all-too-human system. And on this very night, he will be led away to a sham trial and the beginning of his suffering.  He will give himself freely to his fate, waiting in the Garden of Gethsemane for his arrest.  He will go to his death, the victim of a tug-of-war between religious leaders who see him as a blasphemer who must be killed before he brings revolution and Roman wrath upon them, and an occupying governor who would rather not deal with this issue at all.

But he does not simply die as a sacrifice to the bloody human system.  He will conquer the cross through the resurrection, and in so doing, Christ passes judgment on the ways of our world. 

Apologies if it seems like I am skipping ahead, but here is why it matters:  On this night, in which Jesus washes the disciple’s feet and institutes the sacrament of his body and blood, he was dealing with disciples still bound in the ways of this violent passing world.  He washes the feet of his own betrayer, knowing precisely what was going to happen.  He recognizes the false bravado of Peter, who vows to be faithful no matter what.  Jesus this night knows he will be rejected by the very ones he serves and considers his closest disciples. 

But still Jesus gives.  He gives his service.  He gives his life.  He gives his flesh and blood as food and drink.  And when Jesus will visit the disciples after the resurrection, he will do so in a body bearing the wounds he suffered—yet he will come breathing forgiveness and communion.

Every time we celebrate the Eucharist, we recall the events of this night, of this institution of the Eucharist.  And in the shadows of this celebration is also the remembrance that Christ was betrayed by those who were with him at the table.  The Christ who comes to us in broken body and shed blood confronts us with the memory of our propensity to offer up others as a sacrifice to our own needs for power and control and safety.  And yet, Christ returns to us as a victim who offers victory through resurrection, not violence.  He continuously shows that there is a power beyond the worst violence that the world can muster, a power from God grounded in love, communion, and healing. 

When Christ appears to the disciples after the resurrection, he heals the memory of the disciple’s betrayal.  The memory of the disciple’s shame and guilt—their memory of the betrayal—is not canceled out by Jesus showing up and by his “being okay,” but because the truth is that God will set all to right in due time.  And our memories of pain, ours and others, are the points of our lives where Christ the Victim invites himself in to heal memory—to transform our failures and our betrayals and our desertions into stories of redemption and grace.  Pay close attention to the stories we read as a Church together in the weeks after this coming Sunday and you will hear of the healing of memory and the redemption of betrayal.

Just like that night, in which Jesus served his own betrayers and deserters,

and yet will forgive and reunite them,

we come to this rail, and this altar to remember something precious.

Tonight we remember that the story we tell ourselves

about how the human use of power is naturally lorded over others

is overturned by the very one who created the world. 

Those who follow the Lord of all creation are not called to rule, but to serve.

And so let us do as Jesus showed us, and upend our own notions of power by becoming servants to others

and momentarily obliterate the hierarchies we live in.

let us be vulnerable enough to risk putting ourselves in another’s hands

let us give up the lie that we have no need of one another,

and in so doing glimpse the world God calls us to. 

Tonight, we remember that those who did not measure up because of their desertion and betrayal, found solace and strength first in Christ’s presence with them on this night, then in his returning, and then in his promise to be with them to the end of the ages.

Then, as now, those who follow the Lord are invited to bring our betrayals, our guilts, our pains, and joys, and our memories, and find our restoration through Christ’s presence in His body and blood.

Let us come to the table and find ourselves re-knit into communion with each other,

and with God through Jesus’ Body and Blood.

Let us find ourselves re-membered as one belonging to Christ in his body. 

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[1] Jer 1:5.

[2] Ps 139:1-3.