In-The-Flesh

1

In-the-Flesh

Resurrection

John 21:1-19

A

Sermon

by

The Rev. David R. Anderson

April 18, 2010

3 Sunday of Easter

Saint Luke’s Parish

Darien, Connecticut

Alleluia. Christ is risen.

The Lord is risen indeed. Alleluia.

For the third time in John’s gospel, the risen Christ appears to his old friends. It’s a masterful story on so many levels, but I’m taken this morning with its sensuousness, the richness of taste, touch and aroma that permeate the story.

Peter and the others are out fishing, when it happens. John says it’s “just after daybreak,” in that weird, liminal time between darkness and light, especially when you’ve been up all night.Jesus stands on the shore, but in the half-light they don’t recognize him. Are you getting the feel for this scene?

The stranger calls out some fishing suggestions—“Cast your nets on the right side of the boat,” and when they do the catch of fish nearly swamp the boat, 153 of them (isn’t that a delicious detail? 153 . . .). And at this, John is staggered. He knows this fishing coach. “It is the Lord!” he says.

And when Peter hears it’s Jesus, it says, “he put on some clothes, for he was naked, and jumped into the sea.” Adrenaline is pumping against exhaustion. So we’re naked at dawn, swamped with 153 big fish, throwing on some clothes and jumping in the sea. I can’t escape the sensuous feel of this story—Peter naked in the salt sea….

And then when they wade ashore, Jesus is there by a charcoal fire—it’s not just “a fire” (as in other gospels), but a charcoal fire. And Jesus has fish and bread on the grill. You know, I’ve had a gas grill for so long I’ve kind of forgotten what it tasted like when my father-in-law, a master griller, use to charcoal grill fish, and garlic bread—and I think I liked the grilled bread more than the fish. This unmistakable aroma and mouthfeel.

All I can take from this story is that—the medium is the message. That resurrection life is about living richly and powerfully right here. Resurrection is not just what you get when you die, it’s what you get when you live now. The story isexuding sea salt on naked skin, in the gauzy light of morning, the squirming weight and smell of all those fish, the exultation and terror of recognizing someone you’ve both beloved and betrayed to execution, and the smell of the charcoal fire, and then the taste of charred fish and bread. It’s bracing, alive.

Yet somehow we’ve allowed religion to turn this whole realm of spiritual life into a belief system that turns perfectly alive people into gray shadows. If you asked the average person if they associated a deeply sensuous life with religion, they’d laugh. Algernon Swinburne, the 19th century English poet wrote that infamous line in Hymn to Proserpine, “Thou hast conquered, O pale Galilean; the world has grown grey from thy breath.” In other words, Christianity had sucked the color and life out of people, out of the world. It’s never easy to say this, but we have to acknowledge that Swinburne is mostly right. We’ve taken this story and sucked all the taste and touch and smell, the terror and ecstasy right out of it. We’ve made religion about being niceinstead of about being alive!

More and more, this is what the world needs to hear from us: how to come alive. How to feel something—anything. We are the numbest generation. We don’t feel anything, good or bad.We are, as Pink Floyd sings, “Comfortably numb.”

I once sat at a conference on prayer, and the speaker said, “There are thousands of nerve ending in your upper lip—that one-inch square between your lip and your nose. And we’re going to sit still for about five minutes and I want you to feel all the sensations of those thousands of nerve endings.” The exercise started,and I couldn’t feel a thing. Not one thing.

Resurrection—John says extravagantly!—draws us deeply down into an earthy and fleshy experience of life. We need this. We are so good at managing life, but not really very good at living it. The really successful people in our culture are managers. They know how to “get things done.” They’re good at organizing things, good at scheduling things and people, good at programs and processes and systems. We teach our kids to manage their lives, their high school and collegiate careers and then their working careers. We learn this young.

We know how to manage life, but not how to live life. I was watching “Up in the Air,” with George Clooney. He spends all his time flying for his job because—as he says—he does not want to go home. He has no real relationships, not with his sister or his parents. He has no friends. He has no wife, no children. He has one goal for his whole life, and he’s sort of reluctant, even embarrassed to say it. It’s to reach ten million frequent flyer miles on American Airlines.

Ryan Bingham (the Clooney character) is a motivational speaker. His one schtick is, “What’s in your backpack?” And if you’re weighted down with the past, with people and relationships, you can’t “succeed.” His version of “travel light” is, travel without relationships—the things we can’t control and manage, the things that give us pleasure and joy and also make us feel things like anger and remorse and sadness. Things we can’t “fix,”can’t manage. If you get free of that messy stuff you, too, can amass ten million clean, invisible miles . . . up in the air.

The medium is the message, people. If we can hear John’s story, splashed with sea water, writhing with 153 tilapia, peopled with naked fishermen and perfumed with salt and charcoal—if we can taste this and imagine that resurrection life is something “spiritual,” something that doesn’t exactly refer to anything concrete in the real world, we have missed the whole point. Like reading Moby Dick and saying, “ . . . there was a whale in that story? Gosh, I must’ve missed it.”

In John’s sumptuous telling, a very much in-the-flesh Christ appears, tending that charcoal fire and serving breakfast. This is what it means to know resurrection—it means to come deeply into the body of Christ, into your own body, into the body of the earth. So many books have been written about out-of-body experiences, often at near-death, and people flock to these books for proof of another realm beyond the purely physical. I understand that yearning for a transcendent life. But this teeming moment of resurrection tells us emphatically, blessedly: The divine life is not hovering somehow above this life; it is right here with us. As soon as we come into this moment, the risen Christ stands among us. As soon as we open ourselves to joy and pleasure and delight . . . and equally to sadness, grief and remorse (as Peter does so poignantly at the end), the risen Christ stands among us.

If we want to practice resurrection, the best thing we might do is to leave this church and go out there and see just how much joy and pain, just how much beauty and suffering we could actually feel.

Alleluia. Christ is risen.

The Lord is risen indeed. Alleluia.