In Just-
Spring when the world is mud-
Luscious the little
Lame balloonman
Whistles far and wee
Sunday, April 29, 2001
John 21:1-19
Standing on the shore, Jesus shouts to Peter, "Throw your net on the other side of the boat."
Standing on the shore, Jesus shouts to Peter, "Throw your net on the other side of the boat." From catching nothing they become nearly unable to haul in such a heavy netful of fish.
Jesus welcomes them back to shore, and fixes them breakfast, a mess of fish, of course. When they finish eating he begins to interrogate his friend Peter. "Do you love me?" And, "do you love me again?" In the darkest night of his life, Peter recently told three different people that he didn't even know Jesus, let alone love him. He has asked for forgiveness, perhaps, but he has not entirely forgiven himself:
A third time Jesus said to him,
"Simon son of John, do you love me?" ...
Peter said,
"Lord, you know all things; you know that I love you."
Jesus said,
"Feed my sheep.
I tell you the truth, when you were younger
you dressed yourself
and went where you wanted;
But when you are old
you will stretch out your hands,
and someone else will dress you
and lead you where you do not want to go."
And in such a few words Jesus sums up the shape of Peter's life, the lives of all of us. Love God, love your neighbor as yourself, and yield to the movement of life into death.
Life in the spring is so full of breathlessly beautiful new. Birds start their singing at 3 am and fill the forest with their songs. Brilliant flowers, brighter in April and May than any other month, open wide red and yellow throats by middle morning, stretching up to the sun. Babies born in spring release their mothers from the heaviness of carrying before the heat of summer comes. Her baby makes this mother new, even as she knows her body older.
What kind of world is this, where last year's leaves, old flowers, dead dreams are the fertilizer for fresh springing life again? So beautiful this world. And so deadly. I don't stay long at one time, only the freshest instant. And I don't stay long in one place, there is nothing static about my life. I hold on, I hold tight, I lose fast.
So I slow down, and love my God, and he loves me. And I listen to the warm of the grass growing up in my toes, and I work with what God gives me. All the people walking around are not shadows, they are made in God's image, they are sweet and precious, and I love them.
Looking at E.E. Cummings' ("above all a religious poet") introduction to his own collected poems, I found some words to bring me up short and gasp in joy ...
you and I are not snobs. We can never be born enough. We are human beings;for whom birth is a supremely welcome mystery,the mystery of growing: the mystery which happens only and whenever we are faithful to ourselves. You and I wear the dangerous looseness of doom and find it becoming. Life, for eternal us, is now; and now is much too busy being a little more than everything to seem anything,catastrophic included. ...
Always the beautiful answer who asks a more beautiful question
Wending our way back to Peter. We can watch Peter move through his ministry forgiven and whole, know how he will finally feel the strange strangulation of his physical strength (such a rock!), but there is something new growing in him even then, especially then, oldness forming the fire for God's phoenix. Peter dies to live, he learns the sweetness of yielding to his Jesus, and I would do well to learn it too, welcoming each death, each stillness, each silence, each dark place, knowing will come soon the new green shoots.
Shout to the Lord, all the earth! Let us sing,
Power and majesty, Praise to the King!
Mountains bow down
and the seas will roar
at the sound of your name ...
I sing for joy at the work of your hands.
Forever I'll love you,
forever I'll stand,
NOTHING COMPARES to the promise I have in you.
";
