Sermons

+In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

There are weeks when the lectionary delivers such a wealth of material that it’s hard to determine what to preach about. This is one of those weeks; we heard from Acts the moving story of Saul’s conversion on the road to Damascus, we saw in Revelation a glorious vision of the heavenly court, and in the Gospel we were drawn in to the almost painful dialogue between Peter and the risen Christ, wherein the one who denied our Lord thrice on the night he was handed over to death now thrice commits himself to loving him. That said, I want to start by looking at a peculiar detail in the Gospel.

“So Simon Peter went aboard and hauled the net ashore, full of large fish, a hundred fifty-three of them; and though there were so many, the net was not torn.” John records these events with a great deal more detail than he’s often given credit for by modern biblical scholars, who tend to be biased in favor of the other three gospels (the so-called “synoptic gospels”: Matthew, Mark, and Luke). In reality, John’s Gospel may include more little, specific historical tidbits than do the other Gospels, a testament to the Gospel’s historical accuracy, and what’s more, all the detail in John tends to point not only to the historical facts of the life of Jesus, but also to theological truths which that life revealed.

So, that being said, what’s the deal with this detail John recounts in today’s Gospel- namely that the catch of fish was precisely one hundred fifty three. There have been scholars who have held that the number of fish the disciples caught that morning was merely an accident, a trivial detail which John decided to record. This, however, does not seem to be likely to me, since we’re dealing here with scripture rather than the log book of a fishing guild or something like that.

Other thinkers, both ancient and modern, have come up with rather strange theories about why 153 is significant to John’s telling of this story. Some have argued that the Tetragrammaton, the four letters (yud, heh, vav, and heh) which constitute God’s Hebrew name, appears exactly 153 times in the Book of Genesis. One wonders, if this were true what would be the theological point of alluding to it in the Gospel. It’s hard to say.

Others have used complex systems which assign numerical values to Greek letters to somehow connect the catch of fish with a biblical or historical figure, notably Mary Magdalene, but this too seems far-fetched.

It seems to me the most likely explanation was that of Saint Jerome, who noted that in some ancient fish books, including the Halieutica of the Greek poet Oppian, there were exactly 153 types of fish described. While we know now that there are many more species, the ancient Greeks would have believed these ancient books to be exhaustive; so for the ancient fisherman, it would have been common knowledge that there were exactly 153 different species of fish in the world.

Now, at the end of Jesus’ meeting with his disciples on the bank, after he had eaten with them and had his discourse with Peter, Jesus gave a simple commandment which he had given them before: “follow me.” I imagine Peter would have immediately remembered his first meeting with Jesus. He had been fishing on the Sea of Galilee then as well, and Jesus gave him the same commandment, but that time had followed it with an explanation of what it meant: “Follow me and I will make you become fishers of men.” In that instant, I suspect, the meaning of the miraculous catch would have struck Peter. The risen Christ had reminded him of his mandate and had made that mandate universal. Go catch people, all people, from every race and nation and class and station. Just as every sort of fish was in the net which did not tear, so shall the church bring in every sort of person, not crumbling from the weight but holding fast upon the foundation of Christ himself.

This is the truth which Saul who was to be Paul was ultimately to realize, his realization changing the course of human history. He himself was perhaps not the best sort of fish, more of a bottom feeder during his campaign of terror against the church, yet he too was pulled from the waters of sin and death into the boat and onto the shore. It was he who recognized the need to cast the net broadly, to bring the gentiles into the church, knowing that the net wouldn’t tear, the church wouldn’t crumble.

So too, must we, the modern disciples, cast the nets broadly with faith that the risen Lord will provide a catch as diverse, as complete, as the one hundred and fifty three fish. Christ is providing his catch today. There is not an inch of creation, there is not a single human soul, which god fails to declare his very own possession; and it is ours to make that known.

That glorious vision which John had of the heavenly court is not only a reality which God shall effect at the last. It is also a vision for what the church can be in this world as our prayers and praises join those of the angels and as we, with God’s help, bring more voices into the chorus. Even now, we join the “myriads and myriads and thousands of thousands singing with full voice” to the lamb upon his throne. We shall one day hear and join in on the song of “every creature in heaven and on earth and under the earth and in the sea, and all that is in them.”

But we can do more than just wait for it. We must also work for it. We must also go fishing and we must not be fearful of what we drag in, for we know that God means to bring all people into his church and we know that the net will never tear.

+In the name of God: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Amen.

+In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

So, who else watched Conclave this week? I admit I did, despite it seeming a bit ghoulish, but I’ll chalk it up to the fact that I figured it would be top of mind among both the talking-heads and ordinary folks in the coming days, and I wanted to be able to follow “the discourse.” My thumbnail review of the film: eh… it was alright. Some have praised it as amazing as art and social commentary, others have slammed it as an anti-Catholic or even anti-Christian hit piece. I don’t thing either extreme is right. It was just okay.

I will say, and without getting into spoilers, I’m not sure if the main character had much of an arc; whether or not he developed. This question is apposite today, because he seemed to be defined from the beginning as inhabiting this uncomfortable ground between faith and doubt. This is a reality most of us experience at some point or another in life, and it’s not to be reckoned a fatal moral flaw. That said, I’m always a bit suspicious with art and literature which begins by positing the practical epistemic and theological value of doubt (which is real) but then doesn’t take it any further, which doesn’t seem to lead to any resolution other than maintaining doubt as a virtue in itself rather than the path to a greater faith. I’ve not read the novel on which the film is based, but I have read some articles and interviews which suggest that the book might imply that the Holy Spirit has a role in the way the plot unfolds, as opposed to its film adaptation, every point of which can be empirically justified, even when it’s sometime a stretch. Anyway, that’s my one rather big criticism of the film, though it’s entirely possible I’m not giving it enough credit and am simply falling victim to my own need for clarity and certainty in a knee-jerk fashion. So, as they say “YMMV” (your mileage may vary).

I bring all this up because this week we get our annual reminder of poor “Doubting Thomas.” In previous sermons on this text I said that we miss the point of the story if we turn Thomas into a charicature – the icon of incredulity – whether we lambaste his doubting ways or affirm them as the saint par excellence of modernity and scientism. His life as a whole and his response to this Risen Lord in particular is more rich and nuanced than that straw Thomas. Unlike the protagonist of that movie, Thomas has a character arc, in which his doubt is transformed into greater faith.

So I want to focus not on the doubt itself, but what grew out of it- a stronger belief and a commitment to living out that belief as an apostle after the Resurrection. The more I consider doubt as a part of the believer’s life, the less ready I am to to say anything definitive about it. Some would reckon doubt of any sort a serious moral failing. Unequivocally denouncing all who would question their beliefs can lead to a shallow sort of faith or, even worse, to the kind of unquestioning obedience to a set of beliefs and actions which strikes me as an element of cults rather than true religion.

On the other hand, there are those who would elevate doubt itself to a kind of article of faith, as ironic as that may sound. Such an approach might hold that one must question everything to come to any kind of certainty about anything. Now, I love wrestling with hard questions, and I think new insights often depend on our being open to admitting we were mistaken about something. That said, if doubt is the primary mode of religious imagination, it seems to me we’ll never be able to find our footing. We’ll be captive, it seems, to infinite regress. What’s more, such an approach is helplessly individualistic, finding no recourse to the community of the faithful, the communion of saints of which we are a part, and, thus, more-than-a-little arrogant. No, it seems, if we’re to have any foundation at all, it must be upon convictions which have by some process and at least to some extent been inoculated against doubt. I happen to believe the deposit of faith is trustworthy because it developed by the direction of the Holy Spirit over the course of hundreds of years. Even if one doesn’t believe that, it seems to me manifestly obvious that I am not as smart as the Church Fathers, and edgelords on the internet sending tweets and making youtube videos are far less circumspect and careful in their analysis than those who wrestled with the finer points of the theology of, say, the Incarnation and the Resurrection within communities of faithful inquiry and Christian practice.

However, we shouldn’t view doubt and faith as moral antipodes, but rather as spiritual givens? Each, no doubt, abides alongside the other. Thus the father of the epileptic boy in Mark’s Gospel can without self-contradiction proclaim, “Lord, I believe; help thou mine unbelief.”

The blessedness of those who have not seen and yet believe, then, does not make them morally superior to Thomas, but simply spiritually better off in the moment. It is what is done by the seed of faith, no matter how small, no matter the concomitant doubt and fear, by which we are judged. That mustard seed of faith was enough to raise Thomas from doubt and despair to a heroic life spent, even to the last, in service of the Gospel.

So must we acknowledge our misgivings, our uncertainties, our lack of perfect confidence and ask the God of all confidence to give us the strength to persevere in belief and in trust that he will not leave us comfortless. We’ll not be on the wrong path so long as we keep praying for that assurance, so long as we can honestly say, “Lord, I believe; help thou mine unbelief.”

+In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

Alleluia. Christ is Risen.

The Lord is risen indeed. Alleluia.

+In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

There is an icon which sits on my desk, right where I see it every time I look up from my paperwork or computer screen. On the left is Mary Magdalene, taking the classical pose of a teacher (left palm up, right index finger pointing). On the right are the eleven remaining apostles, after Judas had left their number, all gesturing in a way that indicates that they are being taught. This might just be projection on my part, but to me the faces of the apostles all look a bit sheepish. And the Magdalene’s expression seems to me as if she’s thinking “now c’mon you dolts. I told you so!”

That icon was one of the few things already in my office when I arrived. I don’t know to whom it originally belonged, but there’s good reason that I kept it and that I keep it in such a prominent place. As a man in a traditionally masculine role with a fair amount of authority (both objectively because of my ordination and subjectively because of what people might project, rightly or wrongly, onto me because of the clerical collar or the deep voice or the slightly greying beard or whatever), I need to listen to and take seriously what I need to hear from those seen for whatever reason as less authoritative–laypeople, the young and the elderly, and especially women.

I share all of this to explain how important it is that Jesus, before he appeared to his chosen band, decided that the moment he miraculously overcame death went to Mary Magdalene and revealed himself to her first. There has been a great deal of ink spilled in the last few decades to explain that Mary Magdalene was neither the prostitute whom Jesus forgave in Luke 7 nor the woman who anointed Jesus’ feet in John 12, that this is all an invention of Pope Gregory I in the late sixth century. I don’t know whether or not Mary Magdalene was the remarkably inappropriately behaved woman of those stories or not (neither can be proved from scripture) but I’m more than a little curious about why so many have spent so much time distancing the woman who was the apostle to the apostles had to be recast as something other than a sinner who needed saving or an innapropriately emotional woman whose excesses Jesus needed to justify to Judas. Maybe Mary Magdalene was neither the “sinful woman” nor the overly emotional woman who wiped our Lord’s feet with her tears and hair (that remains an open question) but the insistence that she could not have been either of these women strikes me as a “solution looking for a problem.”

I guess I like to think that the woman depicted in my icon lecturing the apostles loved Jesus so much because her sins were so great, because my own sins are great, and she didn’t have the benefit of being able to hide from them to the same degree that those eleven guys did, that I do. Because the news of Our Lord rising from the dead didn’t need to be glossed as far as she would have been concerned. Somebody whom she loved more than anything, because he loved her in spite of everything, was alive. There was no need for figuring out the metaphysics of it; she was ready to see him, and so she did.

So, going back to how I have a y-chromosome and all that accompanies that and I have an indelible indentation in my skull from where my bishop laid his hands on me more than a decade-and-a-half-ago, I want to see Jesus just like somebody who needs a lot more grace than I think I do can see him. And I want to be just as excited to tell others how he changed my life. I want people with all the privilege I have to be able to see in the same way that the Magdalene saw how the Resurrection means everything!

I’ll not belabor the point, because we have a brunch and an egg hunt and all sorts of obligations for those attending neither (I know), but there’s nothing in the world more important than the fact that Christ Jesus was dead as a door-nail and then he was alive again, not in some metaphorical sense, but literally. If that weren’t an honest-to-God fact you all might as well be on the golf course this morning, and I might as well be teaching high school Latin (that used to be my favorite threat before most high school Latin classes went the way of all things, so help me think of a new one…). Jesus Christ, the same yesterday, today, and for ever lives. It doesn’t matter if you’re an “unruly woman” like Mary Magdalene or a rather boring middle-aged dude. It doesn’t matter if you’re a pillar of the community or a nobody. It doesn’t matter if you’re black or white or something else, or rich or poor or something in between, or straight or gay or something in between, or conservative or liberal or something in between, or convinced or questioning or something in between. None of that really matters in the final analysis. The only thing that really matters is that Jesus Christ was dead and now he is alive. And he would come to us, as he came to the Magdalene, if only our love were so sincere. May God give us that love, over which even the gates of hell cannot prevail.

+In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.