Come and Have Breakfast
By Rev. J. Mary Luti
June 01, 2008
Third Sunday after Pentecost
Lessons: John 21: 1-19
I’ve preached this sweeping graciousness just in case there’s someone among us who has never heard God’s love song before. I always hoped it might captivate at least one heart. I’ve preached it just in case someone is still wasting time trying to measure up to a false God’s demands. I always hoped one person might be set free. I’ve preached it hoping that just one of us, maybe me, might stop trying to settle a debt we really don’t owe.
It’s also no secret that I’ve wanted you to find this gracious God in the person of Jesus. To know him as the mirror of God’s character, the key who opens the door to God and invites us in. I have therefore also insistently preached Jesus, to the delight of some and the occasional consternation of others.
Sisters and brothers, I’m not about to go off message now. As I prepared for this leave-taking today, in my grief and gratitude all I could think to do was to play this broken record again, commending to you one last time the God who is gracious beyond all reason—the God I know, and have longed for you to know, in the most merciful, most tender, most compassionate Jesus.
Because, dear ones, as our gospel story tells us, he brings the morning with him, a clear shining that ends long nights of disappointment. His voice over the water turns heads and quickens hearts. He names his disciples fondly, calls them “children” and “friends.” He names a hard truth for them as well—they have caught nothing. Without him, they are empty-handed.
He supplies their lack. “Throw the net in on the other side, and you will find something.” And they do. The haul strains their nets and their imaginations, and yet those full nets and their full hearts hold.
This kind of authority changes them. His generosity captivates them. His tenderness anticipates them. On the beach he gives them fish and bread they did not provide. They don’t know where it came from, they who thought they knew everything about fishing and who were used to feeding themselves. And yet he makes room for their work too, welcoming their catch, the catch made possible by grace and their willingness to follow his command.
They had thought him dead and gone, yet no one asks the obvious question. Is it really Jesus? No one needs to ask. Who else but Jesus would say—after days of terror, abandonment, betrayal, and death; after the dashing of every hope and the destruction of every dream; who else but he would say something so unbearably kind and un-reproachful, so unimaginably sweet; who else but Jesus would say to the lonely, the exhausted, the fearful and depressed; say only, and say simply, “Come and have breakfast”?
Come and have breakfast. The way I see it, that’s been God’s way with us over these last eight years. In Jesus God has extended to us one continuous invitation to be surprised by graciousness, as our ordinary life together was repeatedly shot through with extraordinary generosity, hospitality, forbearance, service, vision, and joy. This has been God’s doing. By ourselves we would have caught nothing. But we were never fishing alone. Jesus was always with us, telling us where to look, where and when to cast. And by his grace, we listened. We did what he told us. And he filled our nets.
For purposes only God truly know, I’ve been called away to a new ministry. It’s a wrenching change for me, and some of you have told me that it is for you as well. Here is all I can say about it, the only thing I know is true. I am leaving, but because Jesus is not, nothing important will change. The grace that brought you this far by faith remains.
Haven’t you heard the news? Forgive me if I never told you. Here it is: God is gracious! Generous to a reckless, eternal fault! And you will know it for yourselves whenever the Holy Spirit leads you to remember Jesus. He is your past, he has been our present, he will be your future. No matter who else may lead you from now on, he will be leading you. And he will be the same merciful, loving brother, the same generous servant, the same mother hen with her wings spread out over her brood, the same passionate lover of your life together that he has always been.
Tomorrow, the next day, a year from now, or twenty years from now, when you are busily fishing, when you have slipped back into old, untrusting ways (as we always do sooner or later), and you find yourselves out there in the wee hours unsure about whether that great flapping gilled creature called hope is still somewhere down in the depths to be fished; and you wonder if you will be capable of hauling it in; and the night is wearing on, and your nets are coming up over the side much too easily because they are empty—then, I assure you (because I know him, I know how he is) he will bring you morning. You will glance up from your fruitless labor, and there will be light.
You will turn your heads toward shore at the sound of a familiar voice hailing across the water with that clarity and closeness possible only in new dawn air. “Children,” he will name you, and then name your truth: “You try so hard, but you catch so little.” He will command you to cast again, but this time where he tells you.
And I assure you (because I know you, I know how you are), you will listen to him. And because you will let his Spirit tell you where and how and when, life will surge again in your nets. It will threaten to burst them, yet all those tensing knots will hold. You will be exhausted with joy, done in by delight.
Then Mercy will summon you to rest, “Come and have breakfast!” You will hurry to him, bringing what you have accomplished by his grace alone. You will sit at a fire that was already burning for you long before you looked up to see it. You will eat fish that were already on the fire before you brought him your own.
Betrayals, failures, desertions—all will be forgotten. Talk will not be necessary, and if there is any talk, it will not be about opinions—who is it? Is it really he? Because there is a need in you that is greater than your need for knowledge—the deeper need in you is to have your gnawing hunger fed. And he will tend to you. And you will let yourselves be tended.
Afterwards, he will take you apart and ask you questions about love. And he will haul up out of you the deepest truth of all, the one you keep hidden even from yourselves for fear of breaking apart, for fear of becoming wholly new—that you believe his love for you, and that you love him too, you really do.
And this lovely litany of love will be woven through with strands of sacrifice and service—tend my flock, he will tell you; feed my sheep. You will find yourselves saying yes to going where you always feared you would have to go. But you will not refuse him. Not now that you know he lives, and lives for you. Not now that you know that he is all for you. Not now that he has called you ‘Child.’
He is the one to whom I entrust you now. The one to whom I have entrusted you every day for eight years. You belonged to him from the start, never to me. You were his unmerited gift to me for a little while. I alone know what a grace that has been. And if I served you even a little bit well, it was his doing, not mine. You have him to thank, and I pray that you will.
But if you wish to honor me, to thank me in some way, then do this—listen to him, do what he tells you, eat what he puts in front of you. Then let him take you aside. And when he asks you, as he always will, “Do you love me?”, which means, ”Will you follow?”, acknowledge that he knows all things, confess that you love him indeed, go wherever he goes, serve each other breakfast every day, and tend with utmost care and courage, with infinite mercy and compassion, all his other hungry, lovely lambs.