hand of kindness

This is my sermon for this week, based on one of my favorite stories in the gospels, which I came to see in a new light based on the way life has been crashing down around here lately. It was a Communion Sunday for us, so my sermon led us into the meal. I hope you find something that feeds you here.

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I have spent most of the last week driving back and forth to Yale New Haven Hospital, as many of you know. Our week started with Ginger taking Rachel, her mother, to the Emergency Department at Goose Lane, which led to her being admitted and then having surgery on Wednesday. She is still there as we try to figure out what comes next, which is not so easy to figure out.

Most every day this week, I read the passage for this morning and tried to think of what to say to you that felt true to the story and true to life.

Perhaps it is my heightened sense of how fragile we all are that made me more mindful of the fact that none of the gospel writers spends a lot of time on Jesus’ appearances after his resurrection. All four of them bring their books to a close rather quickly. You can almost count the times Jesus shows up on one hand, which makes me think perhaps Easter mattered to them not because it is the day that death was somehow vanquished, but that it opened the door to trusting God in a more profound way.

First, let’s look at the story.

After Jesus had appeared to them in the room with Thomas, it seems at least some of the disciples made their way back home to Galilee—Thomas being one of them. Maybe his realism was contagious. They were just trying to figure out what to do next.

We don’t know how much time had passed when they decided to go fishing, which was what they had done before they met Jesus, but Peter, Thomas, Nathaniel, James, and John were out in the boat together—and I think that’s the part that mattered most to them.

When you don’t know what’s coming, stick together.

After a night of nothing in the fish-catching department, they were just a little offshore when someone on the beach asked if they had caught anything to eat. When the said they had not, he told them to try one more time on the other side of the boat. Since they had nothing to lose, they followed the stranger’s instructions and their catch almost sunk their boats.

John looked at the man on the shore and said, “It’s Jesus,” which prompted Peter to jump in the lake and swim to shore. The others pulled the boats and the bursting nets on to the sand and found Jesus, who already had breakfast cooking. He didn’t even need their fish in order to feed them, though he told them to bring some anyway.

In the middle of it all, someone counted the catch: 153 fish.

That piece of information has always fascinated me. What are we to make of that? Trust me, you can spend a whole afternoon on the internet about what that number means. Some of the most helpful are these from theologian Karoline Lewis who says to take it as a clear statement about the grace of God. She says,

Don’t metaphorize this. And I don’t care if that’s not a word. What if it was really true? 153 fish? That is a crazy amount—and why? Because that is how much God loves us. . . . What good is the incarnation if you can’t touch, taste, smell, see, and hear it? So, 153 fish is that very truth. This fourth resurrection appearance is to reveal that grace upon grace is true. . . . To show, by a ridiculous amount of fish, that God’s grace cannot be limited to the incarnation, to the crucifixion, to the tomb, to the resurrection, and certainly not to the end of a Gospel story called John. . . . Resurrection is abundance.

Resurrection is abundance. Just when we think it was over, we pull up more fish than we know what to do with and we have to figure out how to take it all in.

This is not the only place in his gospel that John made this point. He is the one who tells of Jesus’ first miracle at a wedding in Cana where Jesus turned the water into wine so the party didn’t have to stop—and it was really good wine, too.

John also told about feeding the masses on the hillside with the five loaves and seven fishes. The disciples could only see too many hungry people and one little lunch and when the meal was finished there were twelve baskets of leftovers.

Resurrection is abundance. Just when we think it was over, God shows up with more than we know what to do with and we have to figure out how to take it all in.

How then do we learn to digest it? How do we learn to trust the extravagant abundance of God?

God’s grace upon grace. Let’s talk about that word.

Biblical translator Sarah Ruden points out the word grace is hard to translate because it is so “heavily abstracted” in English, which is another way of saying we know how to make things more complicated than they need to be. Ask a minister or a theologian what grace is, and they are likely to say something like “unmerited favor,” which doesn’t clear up much. Ruden points out that the Latin word means “thankfulness” and the Greek word we translate as grace means “kindness,” which she says, “seems more useful than our theologically overwrought grace.” Indeed.

Grace upon grace: kindness upon kindness.

As long as I’m digging up roots, let me give you one more. The root of the word kindness is linked to kinship and means “with the feeling of family.”

My friend Bob Bennett, who is a singer-songwriter, wrote a song called “Hand of Kindness,” which says it like this:

forgiveness comes in just a moment
but sometimes the consequences last
and it’s hard to walk inside that mercy
when the present is so tied up to the past
in this crucible of cause and effect
I walk the wire without a net
and I wonder if I’ll ever fall too far
but that day has not happened yet

there’s a hand of kindness holding me, holding me
there’s a hand of kindness holding me, holding onto me

Resurrection is abundance, grace upon grace, kindness upon kindness, gratitude upon gratitude. To digest all of that means to talk about something other than hypotheticals. To take it all in, we need to talk about where it hurts, what we need, all that we can’t see coming. When the net is empty and the wine is gone and we are trying to feed the world with a sack lunch is when we find once again how much God loves us.

Morning by morning new mercies I see . . .

I know I’m pulling in all kinds of folks whose words can help us find “the feeling of family” this morning because I feel like one of those in the boat on the Sea of Galilee—I have been fishing all week and my nets are empty. And I feel you there with me, whatever your week has been like.

We all need to feel the hand of kindness that is holding us. Here is another one of the voices that speaks to me in times like these: W S Merwin’s poem, “Thanks.”

Listen
with the night falling we are saying thank you
we are stopping on the bridges to bow from the railings
we are running out of the glass rooms
with our mouths full of food to look at the sky
and say thank you
we are standing by the water thanking it
standing by the windows looking out
in our directions

back from a series of hospitals back from a mugging
after funerals we are saying thank you
after the news of the dead
whether or not we knew them we are saying thank you

over telephones we are saying thank you
in doorways and in the backs of cars and in elevators
remembering wars and the police at the door
and the beatings on stairs we are saying thank you
in the banks we are saying thank you
in the faces of the officials and the rich
and of all who will never change
we go on saying thank you thank you

with the animals dying around us
our lost feelings we are saying thank you
with the forests falling faster than the minutes
of our lives we are saying thank you
with the words going out like cells of a brain
with the cities growing over us
we are saying thank you faster and faster
with nobody listening we are saying thank you
we are saying thank you and waving
dark though it is

This morning with Rachel in the hospital and our country going up in flames, with wars around the world, with all the hurt and grief we are carrying, with our questions and our struggles, our dreams and our failures, with tag sale leftovers and coffee hour waiting, waiting for the rain that was supposed to come and didn’t, living day to day without knowing what is coming next, we are saying thank you.

Thank you that resurrection is abundance, that grace is kindness, that God’s love is extravagant and untiring, even when we are exhausted. That is one of the big reasons we keep coming to this Table to be fed, just as Jesus fed the fishers when they came up from their boats.

This meal is more than a metaphor, it is a statement of trust. We are here together, caught and held once again by God’s hand of kindness. Amen.

Peace,
Milton