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.