2019.4.21
“Coming Back to Life”
Monthly
worship theme: Restoration
Readings:
Blessing
for a Broken Vessel by Jan Richardson
Growing
Apples by Nancy Miller Gomez
John
21:1-19
I know, Easter, we’re supposed to be
talking about Jesus and Jesus’ resurrection.
But today I really want to talk about Peter. And Peter’s restoration. And what it tells us about hope, and love, and who we
can be to one another.
This bit of scriptural story we just
heard comes from the Gospel of John, and is the third appearance of Jesus after
his resurrection. And here is when Peter
is basically given the mantle of leadership for the community that had formed
around Jesus and his teachings – what would eventually become the church. Peter, Saint Peter, who is known as “the rock”
of the church, the first Bishop of the Christian Church.
But let’s rewind a bit. Is this the same Peter who was with Jesus in
the Garden of Gethsemane just a couple of days earlier? Yes.
The very same one.
The one who could not stay awake, even
though Jesus had asked him to keep watch while he prayed in the garden.
The very same Peter who was so sure that
he would not desert Jesus, even when things got really tough. And yet, his courage failed him. When the authorities came to take Jesus away,
he ran like the others, and three times he denied even knowing Jesus. On the night Jesus was taken away, Peter didn’t
even fess up to knowing Jesus, let alone being one of his followers.
Aren’t we all like Peter, sometimes? I mean the Peter who forgot his promises and lost
his nerve in the Garden.
Over and over, we profess to believe one
thing, and then fail to act on that belief.
Example: I
believe in climate change, I think it is a crisis. I affirm human interdependence with the earth. And I drove a car here today.
Example: I believe in the inherent worth and dignity
of every person. And I have been witness
to harassment of persons because of who they are, and failed to interrupt
it.
Aren’t we all like Peter, sometimes?
Scared, and acting out of fear rather
than love.
How often do I let fear get in the way of loving people? Fear of being vulnerable, fear of rejection,
fear of messing up, fear of losing the person I love.
Aren’t we all like Peter,
sometimes? Don’t we worry, deep down,
that if the day comes that the authorities come knocking to take away our
friend, that we won’t have the courage to stick with them, to go with them?
Will we be able to stand with immigrants who are being
detained and deported? Will we be able
to physically put ourselves on the line for our transgender siblings? When black churches are burning, when the
Highlander Center, a place of empowerment and refuge for liberation struggles is
burned by white supremacists—do we have the courage to stick with them?
And aren’t we all like Peter, sometimes,
when we don’t measure up to expectations, when we lose something precious to us
and we wonder if we could have done something different. Think about Peter after Jesus death. Forlorn and drifting, not even able to catch
any fish, and he was a fisherman!
àTime of grief and failure
And yet, here he is after Jesus death,
the guy who messed up so many times, being given the role of shepherd to the
followers. In this resurrection
appearance, three things happen:
Peter is able to the thing he thought he
couldn’t do any more—he is able to catch fish again.
Peter is fed. “Come and have breakfast” says Jesus.
And Peter is reminded of who he loves. Jesus and Peter have this very interesting
dialogue—Do you love me? Do you love
me? Do you love me? Jesus asks Peter three times. And in this way, remembering who and what he
loves, Peter is restored to a new life.
I want to tell you about another man who
was restored, another old story, though not quite as old, this time from the
history of Universalism in the United States.
Like the biblical stories, this story has probably gotten changed and
simplified as it gets told over and over.
This is the story of John Murray, recognized as the founder of
Universalism in America.
John Murray was a British man who lived
in the 1700s, educated, fairly well-to-do, and a fire-and-brimstone sort of preacher
who followed Calvinistic ideas about hell and damnation. But over time John Murray’s thinking about the
idea of hell changed and theologically he became a Universalist. Someone who believed in Universal salvation,
who didn’t think that God could ever damn people to an eternity in hell. Someone who questioned the very existence of
hell—except for the ones we create here on this earth.
But pretty soon after this conversion, both
his wife and one-year-old son got sick and died. Several of his siblings also died. He lost his job and went into debt, and was
put into prison because he couldn’t pay his bills. He was depressed, and lost.
Eventually, he decides to sail to the North
American colonies. This is 1770. We weren’t even the United States yet. He was supposed to go to New York, but a
storm came up and the ship got grounded in New Jersey. John and a few others went ashore to get food
and supplies.
As he was walking ashore, John saw a
farmhouse with a small chapel or church beside it. It belonged to Thomas
Potter. Thomas Potter greeted John, gave him food for everyone on the ship, and
invited John to come back and have dinner with him that night.
When John came back, Thomas Potter
showed him the chapel. Thomas Potter said that he believed in a loving God who
wanted to accept all people into heaven. John said that he believed the same
thing. Thomas Potter told John that he had built the chapel and was waiting for
God to send him a minister. “You, John, are that minister. I have waited for
you a long time”.
John did not want to hear this. He was
not a preacher anymore and he was determined to never preach again. Yet, Thomas
Potter seemed confident that John was the Universalist preacher he waited for
and he asked John to preach on Sunday. “I can’t preach on Sunday,” said John,
“because as soon as the wind changes, my boat will set sail and I must be on
it.”
“If the boat has not sailed by Sunday, will
you preach?” asked Thomas Potter.
“If I am still here on Sunday, I will
preach,” said John Murray.
And it turns out that John Murray did
preach on Sunday morning, September 30, 1770, in the chapel Thomas Potter built
many years before.
John Murray went on to be the minister
of the first Universalist congregation in the United States.
Today we carry his legacy, and the
legacy of so many others, who believed that the message of Jesus was that No
One is outside the Circle of God’s Love.
Like Peter, John Murray had failed. He was adrift, and disconnected from his
calling.
And like Peter, he was restored to a new
life through an encounter with a person, Thomas Potter, who helped him do the
thing he thought he couldn’t do any more, who literally fed him, and who
reminded him who and what he loved.
Anyone who has restored an old house or
an old car knows that restoration does not mean going back to exactly the way
it was before. Restoration is not the
same thing as preservation. Restoration
is a kind of resurrection. It is both a
return and a transformation at the same time.
It is a return to the core of who you are, to the essence of Love and the
energy of Life that is within you. And
it is waking up to a new life, a shared life that depends on others. Restoration does not happen alone, but in
relationship with those who love us and who remind us who we love.
As the poet Jan Richardson writes,
You hold the memory
of what it was
to be whole.
It lives deep
in your bones.
It abides
in your heart
of what it was
to be whole.
It lives deep
in your bones.
It abides
in your heart
It is Love that restores those broken
places, puts it all back together into something new and beautiful. Peter experiences this, and John Murray experiences
this.
In our theological tradition, this is
the core message of Christianity. Jesus
didn’t substitute himself for us, in some economic way paying the price for us,
dying for all of our sins. Jesus didn’t
defeat death through a supernatural bodily resurrection. Instead, our Unitarian and Universalist tradition
says: Jesus taught a way to live. A way
that is focused on what is liberating and life-giving, a way that restores us
to ourselves, even when that is dangerous and goes against the powerful.
It is a way that is hard, that requires
much of us, but that is nonetheless simple:
feed one another, tend and care for one another. Remember who and what you love, even if it is
taken away from you. Perhaps especially
when it is taken away from you. This
kind of Love, agape Love, does not require that we like one another, but to
remember that we are all both broken and whole, and that we are all absolutely
dependent on one another and the earth for life.
That is the message that we remember today
and we symbolically enact it through the ancient ritual of communion. The words I’ll be using for today’s communion
are taken from ritual words used in our Unitarian and Universalist traditions.
Like so many prophets before and after
him, Jesus acted as if the world is
ordered by Love and not by human greed and hatred. This acting as if all people mattered, changed the world. And so in communion, we also act as if that is our reality, a reality of
Love where all are fed, all are restored to abundant Life.
