The Third Sunday of Easter
April 22, 2007
Homily for the Anglican Usage Mass at
St. Clare Church,
John 21:1-19
In the Name of the Father, the Son, and the
Holy Ghost. Amen.
I want to begin today by telling you all how thankful I am for your participation in the wonderful celebration we shared yesterday morning. I can hardly express my gratitude for what your perseverance made possible. In case you didn’t see it, there is an article about my ordination in the Sunday Times this morning, and since the reporter and I talked for such a short amount of time, he quoted practically everything I said. But what I said is important – I told him that our purpose now as a Catholic congregation is far different than it ever was as Episcopalians. Whereas we did not imagine when we were at Good Shepherd that our mission was to reconcile people to Christ’s Church, we know now that that is exactly what we have been called to do. With my ordination to the priesthood, a new journey is beginning. We have now been made whole. We are now a complete Catholic community, with our own priest, dedicated to helping others receive what we already have.
Now imagine that today we all decided to go back to the Episcopal Church.
It sounds ridiculous, doesn’t it? It sounds as ridiculous as Peter going back to be a fisherman after the Resurrection of Jesus Christ. Peter had been given a new mission, a new responsibility, yet he was not fully aware of what that responsibility entailed. Jesus had to come meet him on the beach to remind him, to give Peter the marching orders that he should have understood were his from the moment he knew Christ had risen from the dead.
But Peter did not know. We heard on Easter Sunday how Peter had seen for himself the empty tomb. Last week we heard the Gospel about Thomas and his doubts, which included two appearances of Jesus to his disciples at which Peter was present. Peter and the other apostles had been given the authority to forgive sins and Jesus had said explicitly that he was sending them forth into the world to share the Good News. And today, after all these things had happened, we find Peter going back to what he had done before Jesus had even called him, to the profession he had before his three years on the road with Jesus. What was going on?
In our Gospel today, Jesus tells us what was going on by how he questioned Peter. Three times Jesus asked Peter, “Do you love me?” Peter was not loving Jesus as he was supposed to, so Jesus told him how. He said, “Feed my lambs”, “Tend my sheep”, and, “Feed my sheep”. In other words, he gave Peter the assignment to be the good shepherd. Thenceforth, Peter’s role would be to provide for and protect the followers of Jesus. And Jesus wasn’t telling Peter to provide his followers with fish, nor could Peter protect them very well by spending every night in a boat. Rather Peter was to provide the followers of Jesus Christ with bread from heaven, and to protect them he was going to have to take risks and go places he had never imagined.
Peter’s faith had not yet matured. Of course, his faith eventually would mature, so that he understood that to love is to sacrifice, and to love completely is to give one’s entire life. Peter became the leader and the missionary he was supposed to be, and eventually he received the crown of martyrdom that Jesus told him he would get. But looking at him that day on the beach we see a man unsure of himself, unsure of his mission, and all too eager to go back to what he had always known before Jesus turned his life upside down. We see a man not quite ready to sacrifice, one who hasn’t apprehended that to love Jesus means self-preservation can’t be our first priority.
I thought of the immature Peter when I heard about the shootings at Virginia Tech on Monday. News reports told of students hiding under desks, jumping out windows, and playing dead, all in an effort to preserve themselves. When asked by a reporter why he had not attempted to confront the shooter, even as he reloaded his weapon in the same room, one young man replied, “There was no way to confront him safely”. Like Peter, he preferred safety over sacrifice, even if it meant that those he was called to protect fell prey to the works of the devil.
It may seem absurd for me to question the actions of people
who found themselves in a terrifying situation that few of us will ever
experience. But at least one man
recognized the face of evil and knew what to do to provide for and protect his
sheep. Liviu Lubrescu was a
Holocaust survivor from
How grateful we must be that this elderly European Jew was willing to make the supreme sacrifice to protect the lives of our countrymen. And how ashamed we must be that our countrymen were not standing by his side, risking their lives to preserve the lives of the vulnerable, giving their all to protect the innocent from evil and death. There’s something wrong with our country when in a building full of 18 to 25 year old men there isn’t one American willing to risk his life to stop a psychotic on a rampage.
The vast majority of Americans claim to be Christians. Yet what happened this past week, and what has happened in school shooting after school shooting, indicate that we as a nation have forgotten that to confront evil requires we shed blood, sweat, and tears. Sixty-five years ago thousands of American Christians were willing to die in order to save the lives of European Jews. Where was the American Christian on Monday willing to lay down his life for Liviu Lubrescu? If we are unwilling to make such sacrifices we are very, very immature in our faith, unworthy of the name Christian – we are like Peter before he understood that to love Jesus meant that he, too, would have to be crucified.
W e should not forget either that well more than sixty-five million Americans claim to be Catholic. I have talked today about St. Peter and the task to love that was given to him by Jesus before our Lord ascended to heaven. This task, however, is by extension the task of every Christian in communion with the See of Peter. If we are a part of the successor to St. Peter’s flock, and as Catholics we are, then it is our responsibility to offer ourselves in the task of protecting and providing for the vulnerable, the ignorant, the wayward, and even the wicked. To be a Catholic is to know the example of St. Peter and to desire to follow that example, because we know that by his death St. Peter was showing to Christians for all time how we are to love Him who died for us.
We as a people, as Catholic Christians living in
To proclaim the Good News we can use words. But we will be much more effective if in times of trial we proclaim the Good News by acts of love, sacrifices that issue in protection and providence for the sheep and the lambs. In practice that means following the example of the mature Peter, proving to be an example of faith and courage even in those places, like Virginia Tech on Monday morning, where it looks like the devil has the run of the place.
In the Name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost. Amen.