The Other Side of the Boat

 John 21:1-19  Easter 3  April 23, 2023

 
I knew someone who was working in customer service

in the same job I was working at for a few years after college

at a large beauty supply business.

She seemed happy enough at the job.

But she always dreamed of opening her own hair dressing salon.

So she borrowed some money and she opened

up the salon. She was very hopeful,

but there were some problems early on.

Stuff that the business couldn’t recover from.

 

After one year, she had to abandon the business

and she came back to work at the beauty supply place

in another department. It was actually a good job.

A better job than she had before she left.

But she was depressed. She hated it the second time.

 

She had a taste of her dream, then she had to go

back to life as it was before.

Even though the job itself wasn’t a failure,

and she would have been happy to have had it before,

now, going back to her old life, it felt like a failure.

Like my husband always says,

“You can’t reheat the soufflé”

 

I’m guessing this is what Peter was feeling

when he and the others decided to go fishing that day.

 

Even though he and the rest of them had seen Christ risen,

it seems like they didn’t truly grasp the reality of it.

He didn’t seem to be around them like he was.

How would they go on without his leadership?

The whole thing which seemed so promising and exciting

was ended and they thought they had to go back to their previous lives.

 

So, even in the face of the miracle of resurrection,

Peter returns to the comfort of what he knew before.

Before he was called to be a disciple of Jesus. 

He goes back to the safety of his fishing boat.

The Great Catch
John August Swanson

And even if he was okay with it before,

it probably seemed like failure.

 

Like so many times in the scriptures,

Peter’s actions are a metaphor for the church. 

The body of believers gathered in Christ’s name.

Not necessarily one congregation or

denomination,

but the church universal.

 

God has given us the gift of resurrection.

The gift of forgiveness and new life.

But time and time again, we choose to go back to our old life.

We seem to boomerang back to the safe and secure

instead of the call of the gospel.

 

Ed Friedman is a well-known writer who taught

about congregational habits and life.

He called our world today a “Seatbelt Society”

He said that we are addicted to caution and safety.

And churches are part of that.

We believe the thing that will save us is more safety

having more data, that we will rescue the world by

refining our technique and processes having an air-tight plan

and doing what we’ve always done before.

We just keep doing the safe thing.

We keep going back to what we know. 

 

We see this in a lot of churches, don't we?

An obsession with security and doing everything

the way we’ve always done it because it worked once upon a time.

“Because we’ve always done it that way.”

“Because we’ve always done it that way.”

We hear this call much more clearly and

loudly than we do the call of the gospel.

It’s a human tendency that congregations fall into, that pastors fall into,

that bishops fall into, I fall into. I think we all do to some extent.

 

Although Ed Friedman died almost 20 years ago,

he said that this was what was doing the most damage

in congregations of all kinds. He was a rabbi and he saw it there too.

Too much reliance on past things, on sure things, on safety and security.

 

But he said what churches need more of is to

to let go of the old, to be able to change our way of thinking.

We don’t need more security,

what he thought we really needed was a sense of adventure.

 

What we really need to do

is to believe in, and rely on,

resurrection and forgiveness of God.

Not to just give it lip service,

but to actually believe in it and act on it.

To believe that no matter how much

we might fail miserably, or how off the rails

things might go, there is forgiveness.

There is new life after death.

 

So, Peter and the disciples have seen

Jesus risen from the dead, just like he promised them.

They’ve seen God have victory over death.

They have seen the possibility of new life with their own eyes.

 

But he and the other disciples all go back to

their previous ways and what they

knew had worked before: Fishing.

But it really isn’t working.

They catch nothing.

 

But in comes Jesus,

he has risen from the dead and he’s not

just going to let them go back to the same old

things again.

 

He says to them, “Children, you have no fish do you?”

It’s not working out is it?

And they say to him, “No.”

And he tells them: do something different.

Just a little different at least to get them started.

Put that net to the right side of the boat instead.

Do something different.

 

And then there was fish.

And this is just the first step in

the new life that Jesus is calling them to.

 

We here at Christ Lutheran are dabbling

in the other side of the boat lately.

It takes our own courage and willingness to do it,

but mostly it takes faith.

Faith in resurrection. Faith in forgiveness.

Faith in new life.

 

Life is better on the “other side” of the boat.

The side we haven’t always tried before.

Things will not always be perfect.

Sometimes we will fail miserably.

But there is where we truly know the resurrection.

This is where we don’t rely on the same routine.

This is where Jesus leads our lives.

 

Let’s not go back to our old life again.

let’s take a risk and follow the risen Christ.

 

Forgiveness is our Business

John 20: 19-31 
Easter 2 
April 16, 2023

By Faith Not Sight
Alix Beaujour

 

The Resurrected Christ pays a visit to the disciples this week.

They are hiding together behind a locked door in fear.

And Jesus enters their locked room.

 

We read this gospel lesson every year on

the second Sunday of Easter and most of the time

we focus our time on Thomas and his doubt.

Now, I happen to like Thomas.

He left that locked room when no one else would.

He went out to get everyone coffee or lunch

or to try and find Jesus or whatever he was doing.

He was the brave one in the group.

He just happened to miss all the action.

And for the record, I don’t have a problem with his doubt at all.

I think doubt is perfectly normal in the course of our faith life.

But we can talk about him another year.

Because we do talk about him most every year.

And in all the hubbub about Thomas, we often of miss

a very important thing here:

The resurrected Jesus came to the

disciples and gave them a mission.

He says it plainly to the disciples,

“Peace be with you, As the Father has sent me, so I send you.”

 

Jesus has returned to give

the disciples peace in their fear,

to give them the presence of the Holy Spirit

And at this point in the narrative,

he also gives them a clear mission:

 

If you forgive the sins of any,

their sins have been forgiven them;

if you retain the sins of any, they have been retained.

 

For a long time many in the church have believed-

or acted at least – that Jesus sends

our churches out primarily for two things:

For recruitment – so we can

increase the number of Christians in the world

And/or to tell people about

the rules and about morality –

and to scold people for getting it wrong.

 

Those are noble causes.

But neither of them are

what Jesus sends the disciples to do.

here at this very important moment after his resurrection.

He doesn’t say to the disciples,

“make sure you get a lot of new members,

OR make sure you teach

everyone what the rules are.”

 

Jesus sends the disciples out into

the world with one main purpose:

That is forgiveness.

“as the Father has sent Me, I also send you." He says,

"Receive the Holy Spirit.  If you forgive the sins of any,

their sins have been forgiven them;

if you retain the sins of any, they have been retained."

Forgiveness. This is what Jesus

sends the disciples out to do.

To forgive one another and to let others

know about God’s forgiveness.

This is Jesus’s gift to his disciples

and this is the disciples gift to the world.

And this is what we uniquely have to offer.

 

There is an Episcopal priest named Robert Capon

who writes wonderful thing

mostly about Jesus’ parables. He writes:

The world is in the morality and

rules business and they succeed at that.

What the world cannot get right,

however, is the forgiveness business –

and that, of course, is the church's real job.

She is in the world to deal with the Sin

which the world can't turn off or escape from.

She is not in the business of telling the world what's

right and wrong so that it can do good and avoid evil.

She is in the business of offering— to a world

which knows all about that tiresome subject –

forgiveness for its chronic unwillingness to take its own advice.

 

But the minute she even hints that morals, and not forgiveness,

is the name of her game, she instantly corrupts

the Gospel and runs headlong into blatant nonsense.

The church becomes, not Ms. Forgiven Sinner, but Ms. Right.

Christianity becomes the good guys in here 

versus the bad guys out there. Which, of course, is pure tripe.

The church is nothing but the world under the sign of baptism.

 

On this second Sunday of Easter, we and the disciples

are sent to the world to tell it of God’s forgiveness.

We are sent to act out own forgiveness of others.

We are sent to forgive.

And why?  Because we believe in the Resurrection.

Not just in the stark fact that Jesus was raised from the dead.

But we believe that the Resurrection of Jesus 

was just one big example of the new life that God offers the whole world.

 

The Resurrection tells us that God is not spending time

writing down when we’ve been naughty and when

we’ve been nice.

God is not saving up and will make us pay for them one day—

The Resurrection says that if God could forgive

the crucifixion, God can forgive anything.

 

We believe in the Resurrection which tells us

that God won’t check the list twice or once,

God has thrown out the list all together.

Resurrection tells us that no matter what has taken place,

God can and will create New Life.

God will forgive the old and make the new.

No matter how bad it has gotten, God will redeem the world.

 

And that is Forgiveness.  That is what the church is sent out for.

Because we believe that Christ is risen,

we believe that redemption is possible in all situations.

For decades, people suffered under the

horrible racist oppression of Apartheid in South Africa. 

The white government sanctioned stiff segregation, kidnappings,

killing and torture for anyone who rebelled against it.

 

After being released after 30 years in prison, once in power,

Nelson Mandela did not call for retaliation and 

uprising against the white government oppressors.

Although no one could have blamed him.

He didn’t even call for a Nuremburg type trial

like after WW 2 that ended in hangings –

although they may have deserved it.

With Bishop Desmond Tutu’s help,

he called for the Truth and Reconciliation Commission.

 

In this commission,

people would admit to being a party to the oppression,

then they would listen to the stories of the

horror told by the victims. In turn, they would be forgiven.

 

This commission did its work for two years.

It hasn’t been perfect in South Africa,

after decades of oppression, there is still

rampant inequality, poverty, and as a result, crime,

but there has been a noticeable absence of

bloody, civil wars which have arisen in other places in Africa.

There has not been an attempt

at ethnic cleansing which certainly could have happened.

And  there is a presence of justice.

Black people and white people are working together.

There is hope for that nation.

 

Bishop Desmond Tutu, the Episcopal

 archbishop who lead the commission:

“Forgiveness is an act of much hope and not despair.

It is to hope in the essential goodness of people

and to have faith in their potential to change.

It is to bet on that possibility.

Forgiveness, is not opposed to justice,
especially if it is not punitive justice, but restorative justice,
justice that does not seek primarily to punish the perpetrator, to hit out,
but looks to heal a breach, to restore a social equilibrium
that the atrocity or misdeed has disturbed.

Ultimately there is no future without forgiveness."

Jesus has come into the room. The pain is still visible,

the crucifixion has not been forgotten and swept under the table.

The wounds are still there for Thomas to see and put his fingers in. 

But Christ still comes with a word of forgiveness.

“Receive the Holy Spirit. 

If you forgive the sins of any, they are forgiven them;

if you retain the sins of any, they are retained.”

The ELCA’s  former presiding Bishop, Mark Hanson asked:

“Do you think by that Jesus could possibly mean

that if I fail to tell my neighbor, my colleague at work,

my son or my daughter,

the Good News that God in Christ forgives you,

then their sins now belong to me?”

It’s an interesting way to look at what Jesus said.

 

Forgiveness is what we are sent out to share with the world.

God’s forgiveness and our own forgiveness.

Forgiveness is new beginnings. Forgiveness is hope for the future. 

Forgiveness means that the past won’t hold us back.
Forgiveness means relationships can start again.
Forgiveness means that life can start again.
Forgiveness is hope for all of God’s people.

When we share forgiveness with a friend or a relative

or with a stranger, or an enemy,

or with those who have done us harm –

it is the Resurrection of Christ made real to the world.

It is the hope and promise of New Life.

 

Resurrection is God’s gift to us.

Resurrection is forgiveness.

Forgiveness is our business