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+ + + In Nomine Jesu + + +
Please join me in prayer: May the words of my mouth and the meditations of our hearts be pleasing in your sight, O Lord, our Rock and our Redeemer. Amen.
Dear Brothers and Sisters in Christ,
Grace to you and peace from God our Father and from the Lord Jesus Christ.
Alleluia! Christ is risen! (He is risen indeed! Alleluia!)
By a simple show of hands, how many of us ate something for breakfast? Although the experts are not in complete agreement, they usually say that breakfast is “ the most-important meal of the day” ( Wikipedia ). For largely different reasons, the breakfast in today’s Gospel Reading is important , and, as we reflect on its account of the third time that Jesus was revealed to the disciples after He was raised from the dead, we realize that in some sense we also can have “Breakfast with the Resurrected Lord”. Thus, the theme for the sermon this morning is “Breakfast with the Resurrected Lord”.
Today’s Gospel Reading picks up right where last week’s Gospel Reading left off. As we heard last week , on the evening of the day that Jesus rose from the dead and again a week later, Jesus miraculously came and stood among the disciples, who were behind locked doors (John 20:19-31). Today we heard how Jesus miraculously revealed Himself again to a majority of the disciples by the Sea of Tiberias, recalling a time some three years earlier recorded in St. Luke’s Gospel account, when Jesus gave the disciples an earlier miraculous catch of fish in a similar way on the same sea and afterwards called the disciples to “catch” people (Luke 5:1‑11). By this second miraculous catch of fish and the breakfast that followed, Jesus moved the disciples from not knowing that it was Jesus to knowing that it was the Lord .
Today’s Gospel Reading does not tell us precisely either why Simon Peter said to the other disciples that he was going fishing or why the other disciples, some of whom we do not even know to be fishermen, said they would go with him. They had gone back to Galilee as Jesus and the angels had told them to do (Mark 14:28; Matthew 28:7, 10), and they may simply have wanted to pass the time until Jesus directed them further. Or, they may have been hungry and, lacking other means to feed themselves, wanted the fish to eat . The all-knowing Jesus’s question from the shore asks doubtfully whether they have anything to go with bread , such as the fish that were a staple of the Galileans’ diet. Jesus moved the disciples from trying to feed themselves to being fed. In the Gospel Reading, Jesus Himself provides them “fish and more” (and I do not mean “fish and more” in the Long John Silver’s sense of French‑fries, hush‑puppies, and cole‑slaw).
Jesus invites the disciples , “Come and have breakfast”. We probably can imagine how good fresh fish and bread off a charcoal fire would have been after working hard all night and being frustrated by not catching anything. But, more than the provision of food and rest for their bodies , the Resurrected Lord invites them to come with repentance and faith and have, as it were, table fellowship with Him on that beach. The disciples could turn from their grief and sighing, sins and sorrows, fear and failure, doubt and denying ( Lutheran Service Book 485:4); the disciples could trust God fully and freely to forgive them for the sake of the Resurrected Lord, Who came to them and took the bread and fish and gave it to them. Jesus likewise invites you and me , “Come and have breakfast”. Come with repentance and faith and have table fellowship with Him . The Holy Spirit enables us to turn from our sins, to trust God fully and freely to forgive our sins for the sake of the Resurrected Lord, Who through His called and ordained servants gives us Bread that is His Body and wine that is His blood and so reveals Himself again to us .
In the revelation to St. John that we heard as today’s Epistle Reading (Revelation 5:18-14), the four living creatures, the twenty-four elders, and thousands of thousands of angels praise the Lamb Who was slain but lives again for by His blood ransoming (or “redeeming” [KJV]) people for God from every tribe and language and people and nation. The death of Jesus, the God-man, on the cross, was for you and for me, so that He might “purchase” (ASV, NIV, NASB) us from our slavery to sin. Jesus’s Resurrection from the dead shows that God the Father accepted Jesus’s sacrifice on our behalf. As we sang in today’s Psalm (30), the Lord has mercifully and graciously drawn us up from the grave and hell that we deserve, that we may sing His praise and give thanks to Him forever. And, most of us first experience that rescue for sure at the Baptismal Font.
In today’s First Reading (Acts 9:1-22), Saul, the great persecutor of the Church, at first did not recognize the Resurrected Lord Who appeared to him on the road to Damascus, but later he was given sight and understanding, passed through the waters of Holy Baptism, and, taking food, was strengthened. Our experiences are similar to his and the disciples experiences of the Resurrected Lord. The Holy Spirit works through His Word in all of its forms to enlighten us with faith, forgive our sins, and strengthen and preserve us in body and soul to life everlasting. Today’s Gospel Reading especially leads us to this Altar and to its Rail, where those who are baptized and individually absolved are admitted to have fellowship with the Resurrected Lord, Whose Body and Blood are present, distributed, and received in bread and wine. Early Christian imagery of the Sacrament of the Altar even used pictures of bread and fish and seven people eating to connect this Gospel Reading with the Lord’s Supper ( Brown, ad loc Jn 21:1-14, 1100), and our English word “breakfast” apparently even comes from the idea of fasting—going without at least food—after the evening meal of one day, until the receiving of the Lord’s Supper the following morning, and that Communion breaking—or ending—that fast (Wikipedia).
Many of us may be familiar with booths that are sometimes set up at carnivals or parties, at which children cast a fishing line over a divider of some sort, and someone on the other side attaches some kind of prize to the end of the line. Such prizes are not “ caught ” but given . One commentator on today’s Gospel Reading points out that in the Gospel accounts the disciples never catch a fish without Jesus’s help (Brown, ad loc Jn 21:5, 1071). The same may be said for us. Everything we have is a gift from God, including our faith and the good works that flow from our faith. Are all the gifts God gives us any less notable than the 153 large fish that filled but did not tear the disciples’ net? As the disciples were instruments in that miracle , so are we , in a sense, instruments in the miracles of our lives . We work in the various callings that God gives us, and, through them or in other ways, God provides all that we need to support our bodies and lives. As Jesus did with the disciples in the Gospel Reading, God for a time may delay His help and gifts to us, but in so doing, the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther notes, God urges us to call upon Him in prayer more and wait for when and in what way He will help and give to us His good gifts (Luther, AE 78:212-213). As one of the hymns selected for today’s Communion distribution puts it, Jesus “sees and blesses / In worst distresses; / He can change them with a breath” ( LSB 818:2).
Most experts say that people who skip breakfast are “disproportionately more‑likely to have problems with metabolism, weight, and cardiac health” (Wikipedia). People who skip this “Breakfast with the Resurrected Lord” have a different kind of health problem. For, here, in a far more important meal, our Resurrected Lord invites us to come in repentance and faith, have breakfast, and so receive the forgiveness of sins, life, and salvation. This morning’s Closing Hymn is apparently is new to the Pilgrim congregation as a whole, though perhaps not new to all of us individually; its author, Anglican priest Timothy Dudley‑Smith, reportedly for several years had wanted to compose a hymn text based on today’s Gospel Reading, until he finally did so, while on a vacation in southern England, where his frequent visits to the beach of Poldhu Cove helped inspire his hymn of the Resurrected Lord’s appearance on the shore of the Sea of Tiberias (Blohm, #832, Hymnal Supplement ’98: Handbook , 95). We conclude now with the concluding stanza of that hymn , focusing on our Lord’s presence in His Supper this morning, every morning, and for eternity:
Morning breaks, and Jesus meets us, / Feeds and comforts, pardons still;
As His faithful friends He greets us, / Partners of His work and will.
All our days, on ev’ry shore, / Christ is ours forevermore! ( LSB 485:5)
Amen.
Alleluia! Christ is risen! (He is risen indeed! Alleluia!)
The peace of God, which passes all understanding, keep your hearts and minds in Christ Jesus. Amen.
+ + + Soli Deo Gloria + + +