BREAKFAST BY THE LAKE 2002 | Luke 5:1-10; John 21:1-12

*Preached at Grace North Church April 28th, 2002.*

I've backed off in the last couple of years from talking about my fundamentalist upbringing. I fear I concentrated too heavily on it in my preaching for many years, and so I've been taking a break. So those of you who are new to our parish may not have heard some of the horror stories. You may not have heard how I used to go down to the roller rink every Thursday night, stand up on one of the tables, wave my big red bible in the air and shout at the top of my lungs about how everyone there was going to hell.

You may not have heard about when I and a vanload of other youth group members would descend upon a shopping mall, whereupon we would accost passersby with such "Jesus pick-up lines" as "Hey, if you died tonight, do you know if you would go to hell or not?"

And of course we would also peddle Jesus door to door, interrupting people's naps and dinners with gleeful abandon. It was way more annoying than door-bell ditching, and what's more, we were doing it for Jesus.

But were we wrecking all this havoc out of our love for Jesus, or out of fear of Jesus if we didn't? If you had asked me then, I would have loudly protested that we were being a public nuisance out of love for Jesus, but I don't think I would have been able to look you in the eye as I said it.

My evangelical zeal at the time was driven by genuine philanthropy, as I really didn't want ANYONE to go to hell, and it was my duty to warn them. But it was also in large part motivated by more neurotic forces. I was told that every person I came in contact with that I did not tell the good news of Jesus to would confront me on judgement day, and their blood would be required at my hands. I would have to watch them be cast into hell, and it was all my own fault. I was terrified of what God would do to me if I didn't do my evangelical duty.

But I was also witnessing to bolster my own sense of security. After all, if I can convince you to follow my own peculiar religious formula, it reinforces my own feeling that I must be right to place my faith here. A group's delusion is much easier to buy into than an individual's delusion, after all.

Thus my zeal was heartfelt, but neurotic. It was one part love of my fellow man, one part fear of God, and one part shoring up my own crumbling sense of security. It was an immature faith, one that needed to be evangelical in order to meet MY needs, not those of others.

In college, I had a terrible crisis of faith in which I came face to face with just the sort of monster I was worshipping as God. I had to ask myself, "Would I send my own child to hell, no matter what he or she had done?" I couldn't bring myself to admit that I would. Now if my child had killed someone, I could see how a just punishment in some cultures might be for the child to be cast into flames until they died themselves. An eye for an eye.

But that pain is finite. They would suffer until they died and no more. But hell promises that the pain will never stop. That, my friends, is not the invention of a loving god, but of religious sadists. I had to confront the fact that since I could NOT commit my own child to eternal torture, I was morally superior to the God that most people in the world actually worship today. And these days for a priest to assert moral superiority over anyone is an act of chutzpah, let alone moral superiority over God!

It is, of course, a logical impossibility that I am morally superior to God, therefore, logically, God cannot be the monster most religions make him out to be. After this realization, I had to find a new motivation for following Jesus. I have to admit that I still follow him partly for compulsive reasons, but love has replaced fear as my primary motivator. I do not believe God will cast me or anyone else into hell for not believing. Following Jesus is an act of gratitude, not ingraciation.

We see both the neurotic evangelical impulse and gratitude as motivating factors in our gospel readings for this morning. Both readings render what is essentially the same story, yet the evangelists place this story in radically different time frames, and assign to Jesus radically different motivations for his actions.

Luke's account is the less mature of the two. It was written earlier than the other, and it doesn't really fit where Luke has stuck it, there on the heels of Jesus' teaching from the boat. Chalk it up to biblical stream of consciousness editing. Jesus is in a boat-"Hey, here's another story with a boat in it."

Anyway, Jesus works a miracle in which the disciples catch more fish than they can handle, after a hard night of luckless fishing. What is Jesus' motivation for working this miracle? Well, according to Luke's gospel it would appear to be Jesus' own insecurity over how he is being perceived and whether or not his friends even believe him. Jesus is just starting out his ministry, and he wants to convince the disciples beyond a shadow of a doubt who he is and how much power he really holds. His motivation is neurotic; it does not come from a centered place of power or security.

Luke's motivation is similar: the whole story seems to be an elaborately contrived object lesson to set Jesus up for a great one-liner: "From now on, you will be fishers of men." Luke is a Pauline Christian, for whom the Christian message must be carried to the ends of the earth. Could it be that Luke is so evangelical because he himself harbors secret doubts about his faith? The more people he can convince to follow Jesus, which is, after all, the goal of his gospel, the better he can feel about his own commitment to the strange little religious movement he's joined.

John's episode, by contrast, demonstrates a mature expression of faith. Instead of hawking the Pauline manifest destiny found in Luke's account, John's gospel places the account at the end of Jesus' ministry, rather than at the beginning. John's Jesus has already died, already rose from the dead, already conquered sin and hell forever. He has nothing more to prove. He does not fill the boat with fish so that the disciples would believe him and buy into his vision. Instead, his motivations are much less neurotic and much simpler. He brings the fish because he knows his friends are hungry. That's it. Jesus's motivation in this story is not convincing the dubious or conquering the planet. His motivation is his love for his friends, and the simple desire to cook a good meal for them. There is no neurotic agenda, no hidden motivations. Just a fish-fry on the beach.

How much cleaner, how much healthier John's Jesus seems than Luke's. Unfortunately one cannot say that about the whole of John's portrayal, but in this one story, it is very true. Love is a much grander motivator than insecurity and fear.

In the year 480 BCE, at the pass of Thermopylae, history records that the Persian army was poised to sweep over Greece. Two million Persians in King Xerxes' army were preparing for battle. Their opponants? 300 Spartan soldiers, determined to hold the pass. But here is the rub: these 300 Greek soldiers were free men, who faught and gave their lives willingly. The Persian soldiers were largely conscripts from conquered peoples. Now the Greeks did not conquer the millions of Persians that opposed them, but they did hold them at bay for seven days, time enough for the rest of Greece to rally. The Persian army was utterly defeated.

The Spartans fought for love of their country; the Persians fought out of fear of their ruler. It doesn't take a mathematician to figure the sums.

Now as most of you know, I am no fan of St. Paul, but he did say some profound things now and again. Once he wrote, "True love casteth out all fear." And so I ask you this morning, is the love between you and God true? Is your relationship motivated out of fear or love? Is your relationship a neurotic one, or is it healthy and mature?

Only you can answer that question. And if you come to the conclusion that there may be some fear motivating you in there somewhere, only you can change that. Most of us fear God because the church has not been a very good steward of the Gospel. Religious leaders discovered long ago that fear is a potent motivator. But it is not Jesus' way. It is not the Gospel. The word "Gospel" comes from the Greek work eurangellion, meaning "Good News." The good news of Jesus is simple. It is so simple that we have for most of the church's life done everything we can to ignore or obfuscate it. But here it is.

God loves and accepts you just as you are. It doesn't matter what you've done. It doesn't matter what you'll do. It doesn't even matter if you change your ways. Jesus had dinner with prostitutes, traitors, thieves, priests and every other sort of unsavory character. This is a terrible breach of Jewish custom, where the act of eating with someone asserts that you approve of them, and furthermore, you believe God does, too.

But that was Jesus' magic. That IS the Good News. Jesus ate with screw-ups and sinners. He made dinner on the beach. And he invites us to dinner again this morning at this very table. Not to convert the world, not to separate the clean from the unclean. But because he loves us. We are his friends and he desires to share a table with us. It may not be a fish-fry on the beach, but it is from the heart just the same.

You don't need to follow God out of fear. No one will cast you into hell for not believing. You don't need to convert to anything or accept any dogmas. Not in this community, anyway. In this community we follow Jesus, but not because we think something bad will happen to us if we don't. We follow Jesus because our hearts are grateful for the blessings and the grace we ourselves have received. The Gospel is GOOD news. Don't settle for anything less.

Let us pray

Jesus, we are human, and our motivations are not always clear, even to ourselves. Fill us with true love, that our fear may be in truth cast out. Help us to follow you for mature and healthy reasons, and to accept the give of unconditional love and acceptance you hold out to us so graciously. Help us to receive this good news and to offer it to others, for we ask this in your name. Amen.