“Good is All We Got”
Easter 3C
4 May 2025 9:00 a.m. Sung Eucharist
The Rev. Dr. Anthony Hutchinson, homilist
Parish Church of St. Luke, Grants Pass (Oregon)
Acts 9:1-6, (7-20) ; Psalm 30; Revelation 5:11-14; John 21:1-19
Dear God, let us not accept that judgment, that this is all we are.
Enlighten our minds; inflame our hearts
with the desire to change—with the hope and faith that we all can change.
Take away our hearts of stone and give us hearts of flesh. Amen.
(Dorothy Day)
The story is told of an early Zen Buddhist master in China: seeking enlightenment, he fled to solitude in the mountains, where he sat in silence for years, meditating, cultivating his Buddha nature, and waiting for the moment of wu, the moment of emptying one’s mind and achieving bliss, what the Japanese would call satori. After years of disappointment, he finally decides he has had enough and gives up. He comes back down into society, into the local village. It is a market day, a raucous and lively scene of people haggling over prices, and trying to get the advantage of each other. A butcher (not a particularly praiseworthy figure in Buddhist ethical systems) is having problems keeping up with the demands of the crowd. One woman calls out “the trotters, I want the trotters!’ Another, “the pork loin for me.” Another, “the ribs, the ribs!” The monk notices that one woman stands silent, watching the butcher intently as he occasionally discreetly palms bits of less attractive flesh into the masses he weighs and passes to the consumers.
Suddenly she calls out, “The good bits. I want the good bits.”
The crowd falls silent at the implied accusation the woman has rudely made: he is selling bad stuff as if it were good.
The butcher, without missing a beat, chimes up, with an affable shrug to his accuser as if she were an old friend, “Hey lady, all we got here is good.”
The crowd, including the accuser, breaks into laughter. The monk laughs heartily with them all. And at that moment, the story says, the monk finds enlightenment.
The point of the story is this: the monk finds a sudden release of control in laughter, embracing the absurd idea that, indeed, what we see before us is all good, no matter how bad—that this is as good as it gets—and that’s okay. And this is how in an instant he reaches Nirvana.
“Is this as good as it gets?” Usually for us in the West, the question is a complaint, an expression of dissatisfaction. The idea is that things ought to be better than this, and we ought to be enjoying things more than we are. Not accepting how things are, not being reconciled to the status quo, is here understood as a necessary prelude to needed change, reform, or improvement.
Many of the spiritualities of Asia believe that acceptance is a core character trait, something you need for serenity and peace in yourself and in society.
Some Western wags criticize the Asian values that cultivate acceptance and detachment by pointing to the endemic poverty, injustice, corruption, and abuse of political authority in many of those societies and saying a culture needs some dissatisfaction, because “when it comes to societies, you get as much bad as you are willing to accept.”
But many Western spiritualties also teach that we must cultivate acceptance to have serenity and peace. Reinhold Niebuhr, the great progressive American Protestant theologian of the mid-20th century, wrote the original prayer that sought to reconcile these differences, which in shortened form has become a classic in 12-step recovery spirituality: “God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, Courage to change the things I can, and the Wisdom to know the difference.”
Today’s scripture readings all touch on acceptance and desire for change in some way, and do so with rich, rich images. They all in some way reflect on the point made by St. Paul again and again in his letters: the death and resurrection of Jesus changes everything in the world, and should change what we expect out of life. This is because, with Christ raised from the dead, “All we got is good!” The feelings we have absent a risen Christ that life is hopeless and pointless, that we have to struggle and strive, and do hard, even horrible things to please God, well, that’s just wrong!
In
the Acts passage, we hear Jesus’ question, “Why do you persecute me?” Saul’s
reply, “and who, sir, are you?” receives the shocking and surprising answer
that turns Saul’s world upside down, “”I am Jesus of Nazareth whom you persecute.” With Saul, we hear the call to retire in our
blindness to a “Street Called Straight” where new friends can direct us, help
heal us, and clue us into just how the world has so deeply changed.
The Gospel story, an add-on after
the end of John’s Gospel, tells of Peter fleeing the scene after Jesus’ death
and reappearance. “I’m going fishing,”
he says, apparently seeking as we all do at times refuge from things we don’t
want to think or feel by losing ourselves in habit and the details of
work. He wants to get away from the
shame of encountering the man he has betrayed three times but now has come back
from the dead in a surprising and unprecedented form. Jesus seeks him out all the same.
The
resurrected Jesus’ question, “Peter, do you love me?” repeated three times,
seems to “undo” the threefold denial of Jesus by Peter during the Passion
story. Jesus makes Peter his disciple
again by giving him as many chances to reaffirm his love and friendship as he
had denied it.
Most translations of the story miss
a major element in the drama of how it is told in Greek. Jesus, pointing to the abandoned fishing
tackle, asks, “Peter, do you love me
more than these things?” But Peter
replies with another verb for love, a word that is primarily about the
affection of friendship rather than the usual word for love itself that Jesus
has used. “Of course I like you.” Jesus replies: “Then feed my sheep.” Jesus asks a second time, “Peter, do you love me?” Again, Peter replies, “I like you, Jesus.” Jesus says again, “Then tend my sheep.” And then, as if Jesus has gotten tired of
Peter misunderstanding Jesus’ question and the nature of their relationship,
Jesus softens his question, adopting Peter’s verb for love: “Well then, Peter,
do you like me?” Peter:
“I really do like you,” is the
reply. And again, “Feed my sheep.”
Jesus here accepts Peter for who he
is and where he is. Even if Peter’s love
is not quite what Jesus has in mind, it is enough. And this acceptance
is what brings Peter back into the circle of love and fellowship, undoing
the harm of his betrayal and denial.
Are
there ways that we, like Saul, persecute Jesus?
Do we scapegoat others, label them as insufficient, decline to seriously
take to heart what they are saying, but rather transfer our hurts, guilts and
fears onto them and try to make ourselves feel better about ourselves by
labeling them, isolating them, gossiping about them, working them harm, and or
outright persecuting them? And do we do
this, like Saul, for what we think as the best of reasons, the noblest of
causes?
Are there ways that we, like Peter,
deny even knowing Jesus even as we proclaim that we will never forsake
him? Do we say we believe in Jesus, but
then not act as if he lives and reigns?
Have we failed to live up to the values we profess: openness,
hospitality, diversity, welcome, and reverence”? Are we negligent in prayer and worship, and
fail to commend the faith that is in us?
Are we deaf to Christ’s call to serve others as Christ served us? Have we instead sought to comfort ourselves
and reduce or cloak our guilt by avoiding Jesus, burying ourselves in tasks,
returning to routine and habit, and not letting ourselves be challenged and
changed by the new situations and people that God has put in our lives?
Sisters and brothers here at St.
Luke’s: we all fall short of the mark, and in some ways we are all Saul or
Peter. But know that it is okay. Jesus loves us regardless. He accepts us and the way we are. He expects us to accept our weakness and
brokenness, the way we are, even as he accepts this. But he also promises to heal us and change
us. He regularly seeks us out and lets
us know in startling and shocking ways, like he let Saul know, how we have
gotten things wrong. And then he calls
us to go to our sisters and brothers who live on a Street Called Straight so
they can help us heal and be better.
When
Jesus asks us, “do you love me,” and we reply “I like you,” he keeps asking us
the question. When we persist in a
multitude of ways to say “love is maybe way too much for me right now, how
about ‘like’,” he keeps at it, but ultimately says, “Like is good enough for
now, my friend. Love will come tomorrow.”
Let me conclude with the words of
the full original prayer of Reinhold Niebuhr for Serenity, Courage, and
Wisdom:
God, give us grace to accept with
serenity
the things that cannot be changed,
Courage to change the things
which should be changed,
and the Wisdom to distinguish
the one from the other.
Living one day at a time,
Enjoying one moment at a time,
Accepting hardship as a pathway to peace,
Taking, as Jesus did,
This sinful world as it is,
Not as I would have it,
Trusting that You will make all things right,
If I surrender to Your will,
So that I may be reasonably happy in this life,
And supremely happy with You forever in the next. Amen.
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