June 29, 2008 – The Seventh Sunday after Pentecost
John 21:15-19
Grace and peace to you from God the Creator and the Lord Jesus. Amen.
In his poem titled “Mending Wall,” Robert Frost has a rather grumpy neighbor who keeps insisting that “good fences make good neighbors.” That’s such a memorable line that a lot of people who have heard of that poem think that that was its message. It was not. Frost recognizes that there is a kind of temporary truth to the claim that good fences make good neighbors, but he knows that there is a deeper, more enduring truth. It is that, as he puts it, “Something there is that doesn’t love a wall, that wants it down.”
Every year, gaps appear in the stone wall that separates the poet’s field from that of his neighbor. So every spring the two meet at the boundary to repair the damage. The damage is caused by – who knows what? By the ravages of winter; by hunters; maybe by elves, wonders Frost. Regardless, the gaps keep appearing because “something there is that doesn’t love a wall.”
So as the two men pick up and put back into place the small boulders that have become dislodged, the neighbor repeats a line that he picked up from his father long ago, an unexamined saying that he has simply adopted: “Good fences make good neighbors.” Frost writes this: “Spring is the mischief in me, and I wonder if I could put a notion in his head: Why? Why do fences make good neighbors? Isn’t it where there are cows? But here there are no cows. Before I built a wall I’d ask to know what I was walling in or walling out. … Something there is that doesn’t love a wall, that wants it down.”
The two figures we celebrate today, Saint Peter and Saint Paul – each of them an immensely effective leader in the early Christian movement – discovered for themselves that indeed, Something there is that doesn’t love a wall; and that that Something is actually a Someone, none other than God.
God doesn’t like walls. Paul discovered that truth when he was at the high point of his career as a persecutor of Christians. Paul was at the top of his game as a chief enforcer for the Jewish religious establishment. Born about 10 years after Jesus, Paul was raised in Jerusalem and educated strictly in accordance with Jewish law. He grew up with an absolute dedication to the traditions of his ancestors, and it was that zeal to maintain the integrity of the past that led him to such anger at the Christians, who refused to live by the letter of the law because of what they experienced as a newfound freedom in Jesus Christ.
Paul had walled himself in with the bricks of his own self-righteousness and self-assurance.
But God doesn’t like walls. So it was on one of his missions to round up and imprison the followers of Jesus that Paul had a dramatic conversion experience that included a revelation of the crucified and Risen Christ. The figure that he had so scorned and rejected had come to him to break down his wall of self-righteousness and intolerance and to open the eyes of new faith.
Paul went on to establish Christian churches throughout the Middle East; nearly a quarter of the writings of the New Testament are attributed directly to him. Though Paul and Jesus were contemporaries, there is no report of them having actually met face to face, until that day the Resurrected Christ changed Paul’s life – for good.
Paul’s primary partner in the Christian movement, Peter, was a close associate of Jesus, often mentioned first in the list of the 12 disciples. He was a businessman, probably solidly middle-class for his day. He was in the fishing trade, partnering with his brother Andrew and a couple of other brothers, James and John. When Jesus invited him to follow him and to “fish for people,” Peter was surprisingly open and accepting of the invitation. In the company of Jesus and as a student of the ethic that Jesus taught, Peter displayed both great insight and great bewilderment. But it was at the end of Jesus’ three-year ministry that Peter encountered his moment of truth.
Just before his arrest, Jesus had told Peter that Peter would deny three times that he even knew him, a concept that Peter found inconceivable. But when the authorities started looking for Jesus’ friends, Peter couldn’t disappear fast enough. “Jesus? Never heard of him.”
Three times.
Now, in our Gospel lesson, it’s been more than a week after the Resurrection; time to face the music. At least it’s time for Peter to face Jesus.
You can almost see the difficulty Peter has in meeting Jesus’ gaze. Have you ever experienced the prison of personal failure? That’s where Peter was, and he had had plenty of time to relive that failure again and again, and each time he did he built the walls of his dungeon higher and higher.
But God doesn’t like walls.
Three times, Jesus asks Peter the only question that matters. Three times, Peter gives the only answer that heals; and by the time Jesus is done, Peter’s wall is demolished.
God doesn’t like prisons, God doesn’t like shackles, God doesn’t like barriers, and God doesn’t like walls. But to discern that dislike requires the eyes of faith.
In the middle of the last century, the nation of Germany was divided into the Democratic West and the Communist East. The boundary ran through the center of the city of Berlin, and to prevent its citizens from fleeing and taking up permanent residence in the West, the East Berlin government sealed a barrier along the boundary. The Berlin Wall was built in 1961 to keep the East Germans in and the influence of the free West out. One hundred thirty-three people were killed trying to escape to the West by the time the Wall was dismantled in 1989.
The political history of the world will record that the Wall was brought down by massive civil unrest in East Germany and the looming disintegration of the Soviet Union. But the eyes of faith see what political historians will not: God doesn’t like walls.
The security barrier that is being built in Israel is intended by the Israeli government to separate the Israeli and Palestinian populations, as a defense against terrorism. Proponents of the wall say it has reduced the incidence of suicide bombings; opponents say it’s simply an attempt to annex Palestinian land and to separate Palestinians from their employment in Israel. But whatever the political reasons for that barrier, the barrier is, at best, temporary. It will fail, because God doesn’t like walls.
When I met recently with the members of our Gardner-Spring Hill ministry the topic was the Bible, how and why we should read it. I asked if they found it easy to get into and stay with. Would you like to guess their answer? It’s probably similar to the one many of you would give. To a person they said No. The wording is too strange. The stories are too weird. The culture of the Bible is too different. And on top of all that, where in the world do you start?
Some said they started with Genesis, and I thought, “Now there’s the real problem! If you start with Genesis with the intention of reading all the way through, only someone with a profound sleep disorder can make it through Genesis and Exodus, and then you’re standing on the verge of Leviticus. The people of Israel trying to cross the Red Sea faced an easier task than someone battling their way through Leviticus.
No; to get into the story of God as reflected in Scripture, it helps to have an organizing principle. So here’s one: The Bible is a consistent record of a God who, day after day, year after year, generation after generation, simply hates walls, who won’t stand for them. It’s just about the oldest story in the Book.
In fact, it starts at the end of Genesis. There’s a famine in Israel, so the sons of Jacob travel from Israel to Egypt in search of grain. They cross a river and a desert to get there. In the Bible it wasn’t the Rio Grande and the Arizona desert but the Nile River and the Sinai desert, but the idea was the same, people uprooting themselves because of despair in one location and migrating toward hope in another. And the people of Israel settle in Egypt, and they grow strong in this new land of hope.
And the Egyptians grow fearful. “We’ve got to control these people so they don’t wreck our economy, disfigure our culture, overpower us.” So they enslave the people of Israel; profit from their labor; wall them in, figuratively and literally.
Ah, but God doesn’t like walls.
God sends Moses to confront Pharoah, the leader of Egypt. And after a series of tragedies Pharoah at last agrees to free the Israelites, and they flee their shackles and chains for the Promised Land.
But the journey out of slavery and into freedom is hard. It’s hard both physically and psychologically. And when the going gets particularly difficult, the people of Israel want to go back to Egypt, back to the security of their enslavement. They might not have been free, but at least life was predictable.
But God doesn’t like walls, not for oppressors who want to hold on, not for former slaves who are afraid to let go. So God continues to open doors so that the people of God can encounter a new tomorrow, and flourish.
By the way, that event of the Exodus from Egypt is remembered every year by our Jewish neighbors as they celebrate the Seder meal during Passover. When they recall that miracle they don’t simply tell the story of a God who once acted back in history to save his people from slavery and brought them into a new land and a new future; when they tell the story the Exodus is always now; the Exodus is always a current experience; because God is always breaking down barriers, breaking open prisons, bursting shackles, snapping chains.
That event of the Exodus becomes the model for how God operates, and we see it again and again throughout the Hebrew Scriptures, the Old Testament. God breaks people free, God liberates, God makes new.
And that becomes the model for the ministry of Jesus in the New Testament. When he preaches his first sermon in the Gospel of Luke he borrows a text from the Old Testament prophet Isaiah: “The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me to bring good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim release to the captives, and recovery of sight to the blind, to let the oppressed go free… .”
Jesus releases, Jesus unbinds, Jesus sets free; it’s who Jesus is, it’s what Jesus does. And he does it for you, and for me too. The isolating walls we construct around ourselves, walls of pride and of fear and grief, walls of anger and intolerance and privilege – Jesus is coming, and he’s coming to take them down.
Name your wall. What is it that separates you from your neighbor? Or separates you from your family? Or separates you from yourself? What is it that you need God to break open so that you can live the life that God wants for you?
You can name it in your heart. Take a moment. …
Whatever you have named, God is after it, and he is able. Because, as St. Paul and St. Peter discovered for themselves and as God announces to us each time we celebrate Holy Communion, God has already broken down the biggest barrier of all, the ultimate barrier of brokenness, sin and death that separates us from God. God does not allow the barrier of death to keep God out of the tomb, whether Jesus’ tomb or our own; and he announces to us that we are forgiven and accepted and loved by God unconditionally and that nothing in all creation will be able to separate us from the love of God in Jesus Christ..
When the Resurrected Jesus came to Peter, when he came to Paul, when he comes to you and to me, as he does this morning, the invitation is the same. Listen for it. You can hear it. “Follow me. Follow me, and leave the walls behind.”
Amen.
