Cavalry or Calvary?
Cavalry or Calvary?
John 21:1-14
When I was little, I believed with all my heart in the cavalry. You know…in a t.v. show or in a movie, the good guys are fighting a noble battle but they are being overwhelmed. The bad guys are surrounding them. The marginally good guys, the one’s you haven’t been led to care so deeply about, are slowly being picked off, one-by one. Then, in the distance, you hear a trumpet blare. Soon, the call of the trumpet is overwhelmed by the sound of thundering hooves. The good guys, still trapped, eye one another up and nod and smile: the cavalry has arrived. They’ve come to save the day.
Honestly, there is a part of me that still wants to believe that if we are good enough and diligent enough and resilient enough, then the cavalry will come. Maybe you’re in a tough job or you’ve got a tough assignment in a job that you otherwise love. Maybe you are a long suffering parent, working hard to hold onto hope for your struggling child. Maybe you’re accompanying someone through a long cancer treatment or maybe you’re the patient. There is a part of us that wants to believe that things will work out in the end, that the wrongs will be righted, that what seems senseless and meaningless will turn out to be meaningful in the end.
Sometimes…sometimes…those magical, miraculous things do happen. The person who has been quietly trying, against all odds, to do their job gets recognized and rewarded for all that dedication. The parent who has stood by their kid for so long lives to see the day when things come together for that child. The scans come back and the cancer is gone. That’s the movie that we pay to go see. Those are the moments that inspire us. This is the reality in which we want to live. We just want things to be fair.
We’ve seen those things happen…sometimes. However, if we are paying attention at all, we have also seen the most unfair outcomes imaginable. We’ve thought to ourselves: “Right about now would be a great time for the cavalry to arrive!” We’ve tried to harness the power of positive thinking. We’ve done our best to cure disease with laughter or with good deeds or with a cleanse or a fast or by making our lives sugar free. We’ve prayed unceasingly to God because deep down what we really want God to be is the cavalry.
That’s the thing. God is not the cavalry. The God whom I know does not fix things if we say the magic words. The God whom I know is not weighing who’s been naughty or nice like Santa Claus. The God whom I know is not the one who makes sure that everyone gets their fair share of whatever we care about.
When I think about God I don’t think about the cavalry. I think instead about Calvary. Calvary—also known as “Golgotha,” which meant “the skull,”— was the place outside of Jerusalem where Jesus was crucified. This was where Jesus suffered, where it looked for all the world like the worst of this world had won. This was the place where Jesus kept on loving, even as he was dying, making sure that his mother was cared for; caring for the criminals who were dying next to him; beseeching God to forgive those who were killing him because they did not know what they were doing. The God we meet on Calvary is the God who loves this broken world no matter what and wants us to be loving people, no matter what. The question isn’t, “How’s this going to turn out?” The question is, “What’s the next loving thing to do.”
When you believe God is the cavalry, you get to console yourself by thinking, “Was that a trumpet I just heard,” right up to your last moment. “You just wait! We’re going to win! They’re going to show up in the end!” When you believe in the God we meet at Calvary, the biggest battle has already been won. You’ve already overcome the self-centeredness that can take over a person’s life. You’ve moved from, “Why me” to “Why not me?” You’ve left “What’s in it for me” behind in favor of “How can I help?” You’ve met the God who is going to love you, no matter what, and that kind of love puts “outcomes” in perspective.
We went down to Missouri this past Sunday to scout out the work sites for this year’s work trip. After years of trying to micromanage work trips, I’ve changed. I still do what I know we need to do but I’m at least as interested in the unplanned, surprising things that often make the whole trip. Still, ideally, if I were God, the drive down would be super easy, the sites would immediately appear, we’d wrap up the planning and be home for dinner. “We’re doing something good here so this should be easy, right?”
Work trip—even planning the trip—is never easy. It’s just a question of what this year’s challenges will be. On Monday, we met our friend, Marsha, who helps us find our sites. Then, we started waiting. Surprise…the folks who we wanted to meet couldn’t meet us until after lunch. We had already waited for hours because nothing happens before 9:00 a.m. (How much coffee can you drink between 5:00 a.m. and 9:00 a.m.?). Now, we were going to keep waiting util noon. Earlier in my life, I would have been doing a slow burn. I’m older now, though. I know the world doesn’t run on my schedule, even if, deep down, I still think it should.
So, the question—one of the really important questions in life—is, “What should we do while we’re waiting?” (Really, this is a question that everyone should ask!) We decided to go visit a few past work sites. We met old friends. Our decks still looked good! We talked more with Marsha, our host, than we usually do. We even had lunch at the “Hard Times Bar and Grill,” an old favorite where people still—inexplicably—sit at the bar and smoke cigarette after cigarette while they drink…at noon. But I digress…
Finally, it’s one o’clock. We have a seven hour drive home and we haven’t seen a work site yet. Marsha told us that this family had an 18 year old son who went through some sort of medical crisis and lost both legs, both hands, and lost 95 percent of his hearing. Think about that…both legs, both hands, and 95 percent of his hearing. We knocked on the door and met Dane and his mother. Can you imagine being his mom? She and I went outside. I asked her what in the world had happened? She told me the story of how, at the end of October, Dane was the captain of his soccer team and a star student. Within three days, Dane went from having a strep infection, to becoming septic, to being on life support. He would fight for his life on life support for months.
(I have to pause to tell about something that actually made me laugh in the middle of such intense sadness. Currently, the most personal, potentially unfair thing that I’ve been mad about is having the whole fire sprinkler question come up again in the village. We had an agreement! Anyway, I asked the mother what her husband does. Wait for it. He installs fire suppression sprinkler systems! And you think God doesn’t have a sense of humor?)
So, there are people who think that God doesn’t give us more than we can handle, that everything that happens is God’s will, that in the end, everything is working out just the way God planned. Not only do people think such things but they will actually say those things to people who are suffering. That kind of theology makes me crazy! I don’t think God looked at Dane, running up and down the soccer field and said, “Let’s mess with him!” No…I think God demands that we look at Dane and listen to his mother. Then, God asks us, “So, what are you going to do?” God’s not asking for our thoughts and prayers. God’s asking for action. God wants to know how we might ease this family’s pain. What are we going to do to show a family in the backwoods of Missouri that people from Chicago actually care?
Dane’s family bought an above ground pool for his physical therapy. We’re going to build the ramps and the walkways and the deck that will make the pool accessible for him. We’re also going to build a gazebo that will give an 18 year old boy whose life is forever changed a place to hang out with his friends and try his best to remember what it means to be an 18 year old boy again. Trust me, I wasn’t thinking for a minute at Dane’s house about our drive home.
Then came site number two—a mobile home owned by a couple. We got there before they got home. When they arrived, I approached them and reached out to shake hands. The man held his hand out but nowhere near my hand, which seemed… awkward…until I realized that he was blind. He lost his sight 3 months before. (“Oh my God…”) I asked him, “What can we do to help?”
Before they arrived, I was thinking about how, if I was home, I’d be out walking my dogs. I always miss that time on the rare occasions when I’m gone. Now, this man was locating me by the sound of my voice. He cleared his throat and spoke up, “Um…I have kind of a big ask. I know the deck is falling apart. That would be amazing if you could take care of that. What I wanted to know is if you could put a ramp on both ends. What I really love to do is walk my dog. If I have a ramp on each end, then I can walk my dog in a circle.” “Yes…we will absolutely make a deck with two ramps” said the guy who walks his dogs in a circle—just a bigger one—every day.
Our job is to wade into the sadnesses and losses of the people we meet along the way. We don’t have the power to give Dane his limbs back, though he is making progress on his prosthetic legs and is determined to walk at graduation. We don’t have the power to make blind eyes see. However, we care. Because we care, we have no choice but to ask, “How can we help?” Then, we get to work.
So, seven of the disciples are together. (Aren’t you curious what happened to the other four?) The seven are in a boat on the sea at night. (“How did we get here?) Almost all of them don’t belong there. Peter, who was supposed to lead the church, instead has chosen to do what he used to do, probably because he used to be really good at fishing. When things aren’t going well, we all tend to go back and do what we used to do, what worked so well before. This almost never works. What unfolds on the boat is a very long night. There’s not a fish to be found. Peter’s attempt to make things better has made things even worse. (Been there. Done that.)
Jesus shows up. He pokes a little fun: “How’s that fishing going?” I imagine him saying, “You remember I was going to teach you how to fish for people, right?” That’s when the disciples recognize his voice. Jesus can’t live their lives for them or fix their despair. There’s work they have to do. However, he can let them know that he’s there and he cares. He also can give them a really reliable fishing tip. (Try the other side! Do something different. Stop doing the same thing that’s not working over and over again.) They won’t remember the fish, though. They’ll remember that he showed up for them.
We all long at times for a God who will fix things and fix us and make everything right. God loves us enough to give us the freedom to make choices. God wants us to grow. We are lovingly invited to stop offering those in need our thoughts and prayers and offer them actual, concrete help instead. When we do, God will guide us. God will energize us. God will whisper to us, “Nice work!”