Between noon and three

This sermon was preached on the third Sunday of Easter, May 4, 2025, at St. Mark’s, Berkeley.

Collect: O God, whose blessed Son made himself known to his disciples in the breaking of bread: Open the eyes of our faith, that we may behold him in all his redeeming work; who lives and reigns with you, in the unity of the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever. Amen.

Readings: Acts 9:1-20, Rev 5:11-14, John 21:1-19

In the Name of God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, Amen:

Having a three-year old means reading a lot of children’s stories. One of Oliver’s favorites at the moment is one of Beatrix Potter’s, about the Tailor of Gloucester. Maybe you know it: the tailor is making an embroidered waistcoat for the mayor of Gloucester, who is getting married on Christmas Day. But the tailor gets sick at just the wrong time, and can’t work on the waistcoat. His cat, Simpkin, helps with a number of errands, and then a lot of mice show up to do most of the sewing. So the waistcoat does get finished in time, and it’s of such high quality that the tailor is rich and famous thereafter.

Why this is currently Oliver’s favorite I have no idea — I think it could use a few more pictures given the number of words; and most of the language — about silks, taffeta, ruffles, twist, and late medieval city life — must be a total mystery to a toddler. If nothing else, I think Oliver must like the cat and mice and the games they play, but maybe he understands more than I think.

One of the strangest parts of the story is a long interlude on Christmas night. According to Beatrix Potter, on Christmas night, all animals speak in human language, though not every person can understand them. We, her readers, are the privileged few,  and we are treated to a whole series of animal Christmas carols, with general animal merriment, before the matins bells chime and the happy creatures return to their usual birdsong, barks, and meows.

While the story is set at Christmastime, this bit about the animals talking gives it an echo of Eastertide. Throughout the resurrection appearances of Jesus in the gospels, there is an ongoing play on whether the disciples recognize him or not — and if not, why not, and when they do, when exactly their eyes are opened, and whose first. Today the play, on sight vs blindness, recognition vs hiddenness, builds to an almost fever pitch, spilling into the other readings as well. Even the collect gets in on the act, praying that God may open the eyes of our faith to behold his Son in all his redeeming work. 

In our first reading, Saul goes breathing threats and murder to persecute Christians in Damascus, but on the road he sees the Lord and is blinded by the sight. He goes to Damascus and visits the believer Ananias as instructed, when something like scales fall from his eyes, and his sight is restored. Ananias has his own experience with recognition and sight: he thought he knew what this Saul was about, but the Paul whose eyes he heals is a changed man, and Ananias has to rethink his prejudice and fear.

Meanwhile in the Gospel, once again the disciples do not recognize the risen Lord, and only at the miraculous catch of fish does John realize who it is. Around the cooking fire on shore, Jesus finally reconciles with Peter, with his threefold “Do you love me?” matching poignantly Peter’s threefold denial.

And in the passage from Revelation, the author sees in a vision the whole heavenly multitude praising God. Soon the vision turns to the earth as well, and he sees, “Every creature in heaven and on earth and under the earth and in the sea, and all that is in them, singing, to the one seated on the throne and to the Lamb be blessing and honor and glory and might forever and ever!” Every creature: suddenly the tailor of Gloucester doesn’t seem so far off. Every creature singing: from humans and angels, to cats and mice, to trees and flowers and rocks, to water itself and the elements and minerals that make up the building blocks of the material world. Every creature means every created thing, and the author of Revelation sees them all singing.

This is wonderful stuff, fantastical even. It makes for captivating children’s stories, beautiful poetry, and richly symbolic works of art, no doubt. But is it real? What can it all mean? Lovely as it is, it’s hard for sophisticated, educated, modern people to take any of it very seriously. Birds speaking? Stones singing? The dead coming back to life? “Come on, this is the real world,” someone will say, “It’s all very nice but surely you can’t take it literally, it must be symbolic.” 

I suggest, though, that if we’re quick to dismiss it all as hyperbole, as mere religious imagery, then perhaps we need to ask if we are not more blind than we like to think. There are so many things we cannot see. There are so many ways we cope with our blindness by methods that limit our sight yet further, rather than opening it up.

One of the most popular of these is probably thanks to our culture, to this particular moment in the progression of western civilization, where we’ve been thoroughly conditioned to work very hard at earning our place in the groups, professions, and positions that we enjoy.

We work so hard, so conscientiously, to get into a good school, to get good grades, find a good profession, get the right promotion, meet the right partner, live in the best neighborhood, have meaningful hobbies, make the most of our time, produce respectable kids, die an admirable death. Who do we think is watching? What do we think we have to prove? 

We work so hard, so much of the time, to feel we deserve our identities, that we are totally blind to the abject beauty of what is given. I don’t just mean we ought to “count our blessings,” like we do at Thanksgiving, though that’s always worth doing. I’m suggesting something deeper, and hopefully more liberating — that we don’t actually have to create who we are from scratch all the time.

For example, if a teacher hadn’t shown me how to love Bach, I certainly would not have figured it out by myself. Does that mean my own love for Bach isn’t authentic? No, it’s very much a part of me, just one that was, blessedly, totally given by someone else.

Or for another example, I did not choose to grow up as and where I did. There were many joys to be sure, but there were also many frustrating things about growing up in my community, plenty of personal failures, embarrassments, and pain points too. But my own history is now a given — one I can grow from, recover from, reinterpret, to be sure, but ultimately my history is inescapable, and therefore it is redeemable. It is not just an archive of past events, it is a place of present encounter with the love of God.

When we rush forward headlong, as if every day we have to create our whole lives from scratch, in order to win best in show and therefore prove our worthiness to be here, we ignore, miscount, or are otherwise blind to the many givens that cry out for our time, our wonder, and our delight. If only our eyes were opened, we might see what glories there are to be seen, in what is already true of us.

Or another popular one: we absolutely love to turn things into instruments, to make means of things that are actually ends in themselves. Mindfulness is a perfect example: Christian meditation is a very ancient practice of prayer with many schools of thought and avenues of approach, with a robust and well-documented body of wisdom to govern its healthy practice. The point of the whole thing is to love God, in a unique and special way, less mediated by the things and images which normally define our thinking and constitute our language. Yet now, adapted for the modern wellness market, corporations sponsor meditation workshops for their employees in order for them to be happier and more productive at work. One of the highest-grossing apps in Apple’s App Store is the “Calm” app, ostensibly designed to foster inner peace in its users, but in any case wildly successful at lining the pockets of its creators.

There is something obviously sick about this “instrumentalizing” of meditation. But how often do we justify our own religious practice, or other parts of our lives for that matter, in terms of some other end? We pray because it helps us focus. We come to church because it inspires us for the week ahead. We read the Bible because it offers some insight or meaning for our lives. We feed the hungry because social justice demands it. We help our kids with their homework so they can get good grades, get the good job, get along in life. 

All these things are good, but they are not good because they enable some other end. They are good because they are already good ends in themselves. Prayer, feeding the hungry, spending time with your kids, caring for your mom — this is it, these are the ends of a good, virtuous, happy, beautiful, holy life, not the means. And when we make them means, we lose everything that is wondrous about them. So, again, we are blind to the glories right in front of us.

These are just two examples. No doubt there are countless more. But if we are so blind as this to so much of real significance in our lives, can we really say so confidently that cats cannot sing carols on Christmas Eve when we’re not looking, that an enemy cannot become a friend, that a betrayal cannot be forgiven, that the dead do not come back to life?

Perhaps the worst way we are habitually blind is to be convinced we know the narrative that’s being told about us and the world we inhabit, that we know our role, our place in it, that we have some sense of how it’s turning out, that we have some control over what it might do for us.

But the big story here, at Easter, on the shore of the Sea of Galilee, on the road to Damascus, and in my own life, is, to quote theologian Andrew McGowan, that, “the story [we] are a part of is not the one [we] had assumed.” God is telling a different story: a different story in our life, in creation, than the one we have been telling ourselves — a story of freedom, of life; of interruption, of reversal. 

For us to hear and understand the story God is telling will require that our eyes be opened to see in ways we did not imagine before. This is what the Easter, resurrection appearances of Jesus begin to do for the disciples, and for us. 

And in a sense, this is what the Church, the whole of Christian life, is all about: to be a place where we can celebrate God’s many surprises and interruptions for what they are, where can even make a certain kind of sense of them. Here, baptized into Christ’s Body, nourished by the Sacrament of his own flesh and blood, the scales fall and we begin to catch glimpses of what finally will be revealed in full: what yesterday was a sealed tomb, today is the open door of heaven. What yesterday was my deepest shame, today is my greatest joy. What yesterday was only mute stone, today is a voice crying, “Glory in the highest heaven.”

In the Name of God, Father, Son and Holy Spirit: Amen.