No More Hiding
No More Hiding
John 21:1-15
So, I have good news and I have bad news this morning. The good news is that God loves you and is with you every step you take. God is present in the simple joys that you notice on a spring morning in the woods: the trillium in bloom; the birds building their nests; the wonderful smell of the fertile earth coming back to life. God is present as you move through a day, nudging you to be your better self, poking you and whispering, “Hey, how about we help that person!” God is present in the meal we share with those we love, in the rest that comes at the end of a long day, in the dreams that enlighten us and disturb us into making new choices tomorrow.
Are you ready for the bad news? God loves you and is with you every step you take. In the words of the classic Martha and the Vandellas’ song, “There’s nowhere to run. There’s nowhere to hide.” It is possible to edit yourself in such a way that the people who know you at work only know you as the person you are at work. Early in a relationship, it is possible to edit yourself and present your best self to that potential new love interest. You can manage the time that you spend with friends in such a way that you keep them at arms length. They will only know you as the person whom you want them to know. All of this editing takes a lot of energy but it can be done. However, the more intimate the relationship is, the less we get to edit things to our liking, the more people come to see us as who we are—all the warts and quirks and broken edges that are a part of who we are. Maybe, if we pour energy into the hiding and editing, we can hide one or two things from those who know us best and even hide them from ourselves. Here’s the thing though…God knows you exactly as the person you are—even the stuff you hide, even the stuff you don’t even know about yourself.
This is one of the biggest implications of the Spirit driven faith that I am trying to articulate. If God is not removed from the world and just observing things, if God is not the one who intervenes every now and then to teach us a lesson, if God is not the one who showed us how to live and then left but instead, God is the one who so loved us that God moved inside of our hearts and minds and permeated the world around us, then what we have is an incredibly intimate relationship with God. God’s presence isn’t a topic for speculation. That presence is something we feel deep in our bones, that we perceive through the words someone speaks to us or that we discover in a moment of conscience or in that dream in the middle of the night. God is the one in whom we live and move and have our being.
The problem, of course, is that most of us really struggle with intimacy—with being willing to let someone else come to know us as we are and with coming to know someone else as the person whom they are and having the fundamental features of that connection be honesty and openness and acceptance. If we had a hymn to sing this morning, I think I would pick, “Just as I Am, Without One Plea.” Last week, we talked about trust. It takes a ton of trust to be who we are in this world, to be that open and believe that the other won’t just belittle us for the things with which we struggle. It also takes discipline to have someone else open up to us in that way and just listen and accept and honor who they are and understand that they struggle, too.
There is a great little book by a guy named H. Jackson Brown called, “Live and Learn and Pass It On.” On his fifty-first birthday, Brown sat down and wrote the phrase, “I’ve learned that…” twenty times on a piece of paper and then he completed the sentences. He enjoyed this so much that he invited his friends and family to do the same. Eventually, he recruited hundreds of people to do this, from kindergarten students to senior citizens. The book is a compilation of the answers. A twenty year old wrote, “I’ve learned that trust is the single most important factor in both personal and professional relationships.” An eighty year old wrote, “I’ve learned that even when I’m in pain I don’t have to be one.” A fifty-two year old woman wrote, “I’ve learned that you can tell a lot about a man by the way he handles three things: a rainy holiday; lost luggage; and tangled Christmas tree lights.”
In the spirit of that book, what I’m saying to you this morning is, “I’ve learned that we are all complicated, that we are all a piece of work.” I’m also saying that it is one thing to affirm this truth about someone else but it is an entirely different thing to affirm this truth about ourselves. Those are two of the main projects in this lifetime: to allow others to not be perfect but realize that they are still perfectly lovable and to allow ourselves to not be perfect but still believe that someone else can know that about us and love us anyway. What I’ve learned is how much energy people can waste in this life looking for the perfect friend or the perfect mate or trying to raise the perfect child. What I’ve learned is how much energy people can waste trying to hide their own imperfections.
Of course, there are certain situations in life which give us no choice but to face these facts. I used to think the perfect premarital counseling assignment would be to send all prospective couples on a camping trip. I’m not talking about some “glamping,” gussied up, outdoor experience. I’m talking about 10 days during bug season with some non stop rain mixed in. It doesn’t take long when everything is wet and cold (and it turns out that mosquitos like the wet and cold) to find out who you’re spending time with and for them to find out who you are. There’s a reason why people who go through boot camp together or who go through medical training together or who are college roommates can turn out to be lifelong friends or mortal enemies. In such moments of forced intimacy, amazing things can happen that might have taken a lifetime to unfold in other circumstances. Ask most couples to tell you about their best days and many will tell you of the early days, in the not all that great apartment, eating not all that great food, but learning a lot about one another.
Of course, such moments are not just occasions for interpersonal learning. Times of challenge are invitations to us to face things about ourselves that we might have otherwise avoided. They may be things that I intentionally choose not to act on—an intense anger or a core exhaustion or even a lingering temptation to put my needs first. However, if the right set of tough circumstances reveals that those things are a part of me then I can’t ever really look at someone else’s broken parts in the same judgmental way again. Someone I was reading said that the only way to become holy is to become fully human first. Part of becoming fully human is facing the ugly instincts and inclinations inside of myself and realizing that all that stands between me and being those lesser things are the choices that I make—may God help us all. The truth is that I will blow my fair share of those choices.
Again, it is possible to try to hide these truths about ourselves or to hide from these truths about others. Again though, this requires a tremendous amount of energy. People who are committed to not letting anyone know me as I really am will practically do backflips to edit themselves. People who are committed to editing their views of others will vacillate between being nearly blind to things that are real issues and being enraged that those others just don’t seem to be willing to cooperate with creating the illusion of perfection. If we don’t just end up totally exhausted from all this work, our big reward will be insecurity and loneliness. In the end, because we are never who we are or never willing to allow others to be who they are, we are never sure that we are loved or that we have loved at all.
Maybe more than any other time in which I could preach this message, I think everyone has a chance to get this right now. You can’t be quarantined and practicing physical distancing and be editing yourself or editing those around you at the same time. People are going to get annoyed with one another. People are going to get frustrated and scared and angry. There are going to be those horrifying moments when we realize that we have just managed to be our worst selves in the presence of those we love the most. Quarantine and perfection are mutually exclusive—Thank God! We have an incredible chance to come as we are—to have some tough moments—and realize that there is room for forgiveness and that life and love go on.
When we meet the disciples in our text this morning, they’ve had it. They aren’t quarantined but they’ve found their own way out to the “end of their ropes.” They’ve seen the risen Christ twice but they still don’t really have a clue what to do. Peter suggests that he’s going to go do what he used to do (which is a choice that all of us have made at various times in our lives: when in doubt, do whatever it was that I last quit doing!) So, Peter says, “I’m going fishing.” For a handful of the other disciples this would have been a familiar choice because they had been fishermen, too. Essentially, they are saying, “We’re going back to the office!” The other disciples, though, had never been fishermen at all. Instead, they are saying, “I don’t have a clue what to do so I’ll just do whatever you’re doing.” Again, most of us know how well this tends to work.
For a moment, for the fishermen, there had to be comfort in the familiar. For a moment, for the non-fishermen, there had to be at least the distraction that comes with doing something new. However, for everyone in that boat, as the night fell and the nets kept coming up empty, there had to be a collective experience of utter despair. “Nothing we try is helping. I’m cold and tired and hungry and the only thing emptier than my stomach is my soul.” The weird thing is that they all thought that when they started out that night that somehow the answer to what they were supposed to believe and do was going to boil down to a full net of fish and a full stomach. (But again, upon further scrutiny, haven’t we all had some pretty misguided theories on what a full bank account or a full wine cellar or a full calendar might solve for us?)
Dawn breaks. Once again, the night that felt like it was going to last forever, doesn’t. A figure shows up on the beach and calls out to them, “Hey, kiddos! I’m not seeing any fish.” If they weren’t lost in their own stuff, they might have remembered at this point that Jesus always loved a good laugh (and isn’t a good laugh almost always the remedy to despair?). Then, the stranger gives them a hot fishing tip: “Try the other side!” At which point, someone in the boat mumbles, “Thanks a lot!” Immediately, the net is so full of fish that it will hardly budge. One of the disciples yells out, “It’s the Lord!” And what does Peter do? He gets dressed—he covers up—before he starts swimming to shore to meet Jesus.
It’s such a telling, human moment. Instinctively, before Peter can head to the person who loves him, no matter what, he has to cover himself. He has to hide. He has to learn the lesson that we all have to learn. There is no place to run. There is no place to hide. There is only the chance to be loved, just as we are. Peter is about to learn this lesson over breakfast on the beach with the risen Christ.