title: The Third Sunday of Easter
author: "St. Paul's, Monroe"
date: "May 1, 2022"
Opening
^1a "This is the day the Lord has made. Let us rejoice and be glad in it." (Ps. 118:24) So begins the well-known children's hymn. Today is the day the Lord has given to us. There will never be another like it. Count your blessings. Make every moment count. Life is not measured by the number of breaths we take, but by the moments that take our breath away.
Conversion
During the season of Easter we hear from a series of readings from The Acts of the Apostles. Popularly this is known as the narrative of the birth of the church. It relates foundational episodes in the early years of the Jesus movement, known in its earliest manifestation as The Way. Today's reading introduces one of the most important episodes from that, the conversion of Saint Paul. The writer of The Acts of the Apostles -- the same author that gave us the Gospel of Luke -- thought Paul's conversion so important that he related it three times in his narrative. We are to get the idea that Paul's conversion is important. For a long time I thought the particulars of his experience were normative for Christians. That the normal passage to Faith went through
being an opponent of faith,
a climactic event of some kind, like getting knocked off your horse
a changed life.
I came to realize over the course of many years that it is not the knocking off one's horse that is normative, but rather the devotion of one's life, flawed as it may be, to God's purposes in the world around us. To be Christian means to recognize at some level of one's being that the only thing important about life is our life as a child of God. It may only be a wisp of a spark, easily forgotten, but somewhere within it is working to warm one's awareness that in the end it is our relationship with God that matters.
Paul was passionate. To share in Christ's passion requires a passionate devotion to Life In Christ.
In the Easter season we hear week by week readings from The Acts of the Apostles. As we listen to them, we accumulate glimpses of the Christian Life. It doesn't follow an easy timeline. The final episode we will hear in the season of Easter is Pentecost. It is the author's account of the gift of the Holy Spirit which is the foundational energy and mark of the Christian life.
Fresh fish over fire
You may remember that I described Easter season as an echo of the Resurrection, repeated through the ages. Last week we heard from the 20th chapter of the Gospel of John. From the evidence of the gospels that we have it seems clear that the early Christians relished telling the stories of the appearance of the Risen Lord. The stories fed their passion to be a part of the Christian Movement. The stories gave them strength and fortitude.
In the Gospel of John, the narrative we hear today was added to that of the passage about Thomas that we heard last week. I have sometimes thought that anyone who hasn't fished can't really know what those earliest Christians were about. Fishing was such an important metaphor. "I will make you fishers of men," Jesus says in the gospel of Matthew. Indeed some of Jesus' earliest followers were fishermen. When Jesus miraculously fed the multitude he fed them bread and fish. In today's passage it is in sharing a breakfast of fish cooked at the beach that the disciples recognize the Risen Lord.
It makes me grateful that I have experienced at least a couple of times in my life a breakfast of freshly caught rainbow trout cooked over a fire. In a small way every piece of fish I have eaten since those days has been an echo of that first breakfast.
But it doesn't matter whether we've actually caught fish and cooked them over an open fire. It has to do with whether we've heard Jesus' words, "Follow me," And how much we've taken the words to heart. Something in the grace of that day led the apostles[^1] to recognize in a simple act the presence and power of the living God.
That can happen for any one of us at any time in any way. This is the day the Lord has made, let us rejoice and be glad in it.
To Warner
At ordinations it is a custom to address a personal message to the one about to be ordained. Because it's personal it is often poignant. For Warner Martyn, today is such a momentous day. A baptism has much in common with an ordination.[^2] Baptism is unrepeatable. It is aspirational. As if Warner is saying, "I want to set myself on a trajectory to live into the promises made for me this day. I want to be accountable and responsible for the gifts that Jesus has given to me because of the victory of his Resurrection. I'm not there yet, but I want to be when the time is fully ripe.
That vocabulary is beyond her for the moment. But I am fully confident, having got to know her parents a little bit, that someday her vocabulary will outstrip mine. But along the way I can imagine her saying:
"I may not be where I want to be, but thank God I am not where I used to be." (Joyce Meyer)
or
"I may not be there yet, but I'm closer than I was yesterday. :)" (― José N. Harris, MI VIDA: A Story of Faith, Hope and Love)
or even
"In the end, everything will be ok. If it's not ok, it's not yet the end." (It was originally made as an interpretation of an Indian proverb, by Fernando Sabino who is a Brazilian author.)
Warner, you are surrounded in this room by a whole lot of people who are older than you, people who probably feel like they've traveled so much more than you. Hang onto the thought that you may have as much to teach them as they have to teach you. You are, after all, made in the image and likeness of God. And today you will be reborn as a Christian. The newest Christian in the world.
A whole cloud of witnesses have gone before you to prepare the way for you, and you will now be in their company.
Dorothy Day, Mother Teresa, Hildegard of Bingen, Francis of Assisi, Oscar Romero, Julian of Norwich, Mary Magdalene ...
The list could go on and on.
In your baptism you will become a part of the host of heaven, from St. Paul to the present day and beyond. You become today a member of the Saints of God. May God be praised.
Notes
Brainstorm Easter 3
[^1]: Peter, Thomas, Nathaniel, James and John and 2 others
[^2]: A bishop of the church once taught that it is the size of certificates that demonstrates the importance of a ritual. Ordination certificates he said were usually large and ornate.
