May 4 2025, Easter 3, ‘Hope’

Lisa Wiens Heinsohn

Hope

Homily by Lisa Wiens Heinsohn given for the people of St. John’s Episcopal Church

May 4, 2025, the Third Sunday of Easter

One of the best kept secrets of St. John’s is the beautiful little group of people who gather every Tuesday in the chapel to have Holy Communion in a circle, to discuss the scripture reading for the upcoming Sunday, to share our lives and thoughts with each other as we seek to follow Jesus’ Way of Love. I truly hope every one of you will try that service at least once, Tuesday at noon in the chapel. This last week we were discussing today’s gospel reading and I felt prompted to ask them, what do you really need to hear in sermons these days? These times are so crazy, and I know what I myself feel the need to focus on. But I never assume I know what’s going on in your minds and hearts and lives. So actually, I’d invite you all to tear off a corner of the bulletin or find a piece of paper and put it in the offering plate to answer this question: what do you most need to hear about in Sunday’s sermons these days?

What the group on Tuesday talked about was hope.  They needed to hear about hope. Things are so hard and scary out there, even for those of us who have privilege and never have to worry about food or shelter or being hated by the dominant culture. So what gives hope? In this Eastertide, the great 50 days after Easter, how do we recognize Jesus in our daily lives – and why should we do that? How does that provide hope?

In today’s gospel reading we have another story of the disciples encountering the risen Jesus. Peter tells his friends he is going fishing. Now we shouldn’t hear this like we would hear it today: fish opener is next weekend and lots of people fish for recreation. Not Peter. Peter’s first vocation was as a fisherman. So for him to say he is going fishing, it could mean, I’m going to go back to what my life was before. Notice this happens after Jesus appears to Mary Magdalene in the garden, and she goes to tell the disciples, “I have seen the Lord.” Notice this happens after Jesus appears to the disciples in the upper room and shows them his hands and his feet. Even after these things, Peter says he is going fishing. The resurrected Jesus isn’t going about business as usual with them, apparently. He doesn’t just pick up where he left off to walk the towns of Judea and Samaria and Galilee to preach and heal and teach.

So Peter goes fishing. Maybe he thinks, this great experiment I gave my life to has failed. Before Jesus died a terrible death, Peter denied Jesus three times  instead of standing with him. So Peter has to live forever with the guilt and bitterness and shame of having failed, not a rule, but a person he loved most in the world.  And now, Jesus may be raised from the dead, but he isn’t walking the earth with his disciples on his great mission. Maybe some people today feel that way. We worked so hard to create a society where all people would be valued. Women and people of color and LGBTQ people and people with disabilities and immigrants and citizens and everyone. We worked so hard to promote justice as the societal expression of Jesus’ Way of Love. It can seem the world has gone mad.

So Peter goes fishing. He goes back to what he knew before Jesus came into his life and turned it upside down. And the thing is, he fails at that too. He fishes all night and catches nothing. He must have been at an all-time low. He couldn’t even succeed as the shell of a life he had left for Jesus. There is no way to go back to the way things were before. There is nothing left there for him. And in those grey hours before the dawn, I wonder if Peter was tempted to do what the other disciple who betrayed Jesus had done. Judas turned Jesus in, and then Judas hanged himself. He couldn’t live with what he had done and he saw no hope for life afterward. I wonder if Peter felt that way. I wonder if you and I have ever felt that way.

This is where the resurrected Jesus appears, and shows the disciples where all the fish are. It’s like Jesus is giving them their lives back in a way they couldn’t do for themselves. Remember the loaves and fishes? It seems Jesus is saying to them, remember when you were at your wits’ end, exhausted beyond exhaustion, and I told you to feed five thousand people, and you only had five loaves and two fish, and in my hands they turned into enough to overflowing?  That same possibility is still here. I can still show you where so many fish are that your nets will tear. But the next thing Jesus does is even more profound. He asks Peter, Do you love me? That might seem like a manipulative, needy kind of question. It isn’t. It’s giving Peter the chance to say what he wished he would have said that other long night when his whole world came apart. Three times, Peter denied Jesus, on Good Friday. Three times, this Sunday morning on the beach, Peter gets the chance to say what’s more true than his own fear, what’s more true than his failures. He gets to say, I love you. It’s not a do-over; Peter can’t take back what happened. But he can start over. He can say what really matters. He can do the thing that aligns with who he really is, the thing that has integrity, the thing he missed the first time.

In today’s world when we so desperately need hope, when the life we had seems to have died and there is no way to get back to where we were before, we are not so different from where the disciples were that day on the beach, when Jesus finds another new way to show up for them exactly where they were, how they were, with the stories of their grief and failures raw and fresh and aching. The Tuesday group’s questions are, how do we have hope? And how do we recognize Jesus in our daily lives? And who is Jesus for us today, two thousand years later, when so many are using his name to justify hatred and intolerance?

Richard Rohr is a Franciscan monk who is the author of many books and a daily reflection that you can subscribe to via email. One of his books is called The Universal Christ: How a forgotten reality can change everything we see, hope for and believe. In this book Richard Rohr talks about how in the original church, people understood the title “Christ” to mean the transcendence of God literally within everything. Jesus was a shining, unique revelation of this reality, this reality that preceded him as the logos. But this reality has never left us, and we need it desperately today. The Christ—the immanence of divine sacredness—is with us and we can recognize it. Christ is with us today, and we can derive unshakable hope from this, because once we see it we know how to see and look for it, we know we don’t have to try to get back to the way things were before. Once we know that divine sacredness truly is at the root of all things and all people, we can have hope.

At the beginning of Rohr’s book, he shares the story of Caryll Houselander from her autobiography, how she encountered this understanding of Christ as the divine light dwelling in all things. She was in a crowded underground train, and she said this:

Quite suddenly I saw with my mind, but as vividly as a wonderful picture, Christ in them all. But I saw more than that; not only was Christ in every one of them, living in them, dying in them, rejoicing in them, sorrowing in them—but because He was in them, and because they were here, the whole world was here too, here in this underground train; not only the world as it was at that moment, not only all the people in all the countries of the world, but all those people who had lived in the past, and all those yet to come. I came out into the street and walked for a long time in the crowds. It was the same here, on every side, in every passer-by, everywhere—Christ…. I saw too the reverence that everyone must have for a sinner; instead of condoning his sin, which is in reality his utmost sorrow, one must comfort Christ who is suffering in him. And this reverence must be paid even to those sinners whose souls seem to be dead, because it is Christ, who is the life of the soul, who is dead in them; they are His tombs, and Christ in the tomb is potentially the risen Christ…. Christ is everywhere; in Him every kind of life has a meaning and has an influence on every other kind of life. Realization of our oneness in Christ is the only cure for human loneliness. For me, too, it is the only ultimate meaning of life, the only thing that gives meaning and purpose to every life.[1]

This is such an important understanding, it’s such a paradigm shift, that I am inviting anyone who wants to to read this book with me. We will have a group that meets eight times. Precise day and time and format—whether in person or zoom—will depend on who wants to do it and what the needs of the majority are, but we will try to find a way to make this accessible to everyone. If you are interested in doing this with me, please email me by next Sunday May 11, or drop me a note in the offering plate today.

We are people of faith, and we take the long view. We are not the first to be in crisis nor will we be the last. We are not alone. The love of God in Christ is as present today as it has always been, as it was when the Spirit of God hovered over the deep and gave birth to the cosmos, as it was when Jesus fed the grieving disciples at the fish fry on the beach, as it was when Mariann spoke words of love and power to the President in January, as it is every day in each of our lives. We can know this, and touch it, and live it. Amen.

[1] Caryll Houselander, A Rocking-Horse Catholic (New York: Sheed & Ward, 1955), chap. 13, quoted in Richard Rohr, The Universal Christ (Center for Action and Contemplation, 2019), “Before We Begin.”

10am Service