Breakfast
Acts 9:1-20; John 21:1-19

April 22, 2007


It’s by now a standard set piece in any science fiction movie worth its salt. Someone is driving at night along a lonely wide open road, the desert or prairie are best, and all of a sudden an incredibly bright light overwhelms the driver and stops him dead in his tracks. Different movies, but the light is the manifestation of an extra-terrestrial form of life, whether an actual space ship or an alien creature. Words or ideas are sometimes exchanged, but often there is just that amazed and awed silence. It is a moment of revelation to that lonely driver who typically will not tell another human soul or will discover that no one really believes him.

It’s obvious this is the way it’s supposed to happen when alien life comes to call? It’s so obvious because all stories about a bright light in our culture are derived from Saul’s lightning on the road to Damascus. When the nature of things is turned upside down, a blinding light is an oddly positive way to depict the catastrophic event. Too much of a good thing can zap you; and when you are zapped, you are changed beyond recognition. It is hard to keep on doing business as usual once you have seen and experienced a kind of life that is alien to what you have lived before. Saul certainly didn’t; the disciples had no other choice; and you and me, whether we want to admit it or not, are changed.

It doesn’t matter into which church you go or where Christianity is discussed, somebody is always going to be talking about Jesus. Some churches only talk about Sweet Jesus and have seemed to lose a grip on who Jesus really is; and others, perhaps like ours, will talk about Jesus at arm’s length, in admiring but controlled tones about the excellence of his teaching, and so never really getting a grip. Most talk tends to be about the pre-Easter Jesus, the teacher and parable teller, the healer and controversialist. We seldom get around to talking about the post-Easter resurrected Jesus, because it’s just too hard, too daunting, and too frightening.

Today we have an embarrassment of riches with two reports of how different people met the resurrected Jesus. Note that none of these people found it to be a delightful encounter at first blush. In fact, none of these people, the disciples of the pre-Easter Jesus and the post-Easter persecutor of Jesus, Saul of Tarsus, recognized who Jesus was at first. Saul had to ask, while the disciples were afraid to ask.

Saul was a man possessed by God in his first life to preserve the integrity of Judaism against those who wished to dilute its purity and uniqueness. In his second life, he became even more possessed by God so that he realized his first possession was deeply flawed. In his first life he was determined to kill those who spoke counter to his faith; in his second life he was so determined to speak for his faith that he was willing to be killed for it, and he was.

Nevertheless, the way in which he came to know Jesus has burdened a thousand generations of Christians. The lightning bolt that announced God’s revelation to him was a gift over which he had no control. He had not sought it. Many a church has insisted that Saul’s experience is a requirement for authentic discipleship, but you cannot make a gift into a requirement. Not everyone speaks in tongues, nor is slain in the Spirit with an ecstatic convulsion, nor does God pick a finite moment that each and every person is obligated to remember. God works in mysterious ways, we always say, and often being very slow and obscure is the mysterious element.

Saul or Paul’s conversion is too definite, too particular to apply to every other Christian, and the real danger is that a person anxious to achieve the holy status may manufacture on his or her own the supposedly correct signs or characteristics. Even John Wesley sought for a decade to experience some kind of Damascus Road for himself, but could not. He prayed and fasted and read the Bible and gave alms and did good works, but it just wouldn’t come. Then unexpectedly, but quite definitely, on May 24, 1738, Wesley went to a Moravian prayer meeting on Aldersgate Street in London, and as he was listening to a reading of Martin Luther’s preface to Paul’s Letter to the Romans he reported “I felt my heart strangely warmed.” This was Damascus Road on a damp English night. Fortunately, Wesley’s Methodist movement did not insist that its members have strangely warmed hearts to maintain membership, or else a good number of us here in this originally Metropolitan Methodist Church edifice would be disqualified. The rest of us Knox people would simply continue to be Presbyterian about all of this - and you know what that means!

Anthony Robinson reminded me that for most of us Damascus Road has settled down. Horace Bushnell was the minister of North Congregational in Hartford, Connecticut, whose book Christian Nurture defined the way it should be for generations. He and others believed that a person should grow up in a Christian Church environment so that he/she would never know that they were not a Christian. It would be a given about one’s life, so he wrote about the kind of education and disciplined life that would mold and maintain such a secure Christian existence. Do you know the way to Damascus? No longer necessary.

Yet, what is necessary after you enlightened on your road to Damascus is that you can no longer live in the same way. Remember all those people in Close Encounters of the Third Kind who were flown over by the UFO’s and could never be the same, obsessed by the revelation imprinted on their subconscious minds. Roy Neary, played by Richard Dreyfuss, makes his way to Devil’s Tower, Wyoming, where he encounters the peaceful aliens and is sent as an ambassador of Earth to journey home with the aliens into the vast beyond.

Roy Neary could never live the same life again, so he literally left this world. Paul would preach for the other team and John Wesley invented a way of living Christianity that does not fade away.

Once again we see the paradox in John’s portrayal of how the disciples responded to the resurrection. They heard witnesses to the risen Christ and empty tomb, yet locked themselves up in a dark room. Jesus appears to them, yet a week later they are still boarded up in fear. Now the disciples are back in Galilee after all of this and Peter has decided to return to fishing, to do what he had done before Jesus. But you can’t go home again.

First, he couldn’t catch anything, and then Jesus shows up and revealed himself. That is the telling phrase: they did not find Jesus or discover him. He revealed himself to them and even at first they did not know who he was, and when they did recognize him they were so awed they could not say anything to him. There were no flashes of light, no strangely warmed mystical feelings, nothing dramatic, just a nice shore breakfast. No doubt about it, the breakfast Jesus had prepared was an ordinary meal transformed into the eucharist, into communion. Plain food, but they were eating in heaven. You and I have our close encounters of the third kind with Jesus usually around a table sharing simple food. Potlucks, of course; banquets are distracting.

I don’t believe that Horace Bushnell was completely right, that in the appropriate environment one could always participate in the Christian world. Nothing wrong with a Christian upbringing, but something new does have to happen along the way, something that turns upside down all your perfectly worked out plans and assumptions, something that compels you to live differently, a resurrection that tells you how alive you really are. Maybe after all, it’s not the dramatic lights or UFO’s or inspiring words, but the food and those who share it with you.

Preached by Robert Kitchen
Knox-Metropolitan United Church
Regina, Saskatchewan