I preach every Sunday, but somehow on the first Sunday of the month, preaching takes a back seat to the proclamation that is the Eucharist. Yes, the Eucharist is a response to the Word, but the Eucharist reshapes the service, pulling itself to the center, even though it takes place nearly at the end. I have always had a sense that the saints who have gone before us come to partake with us at the table.
It doesn’t seem that Peter is handling the aftershocks of Easter particularly well. It is never a good sign to be found naked in a boat. Your reaction may be like mine—this is risky content for the Bible, and this is not even the first story in the Good Friday/Easter narrative to mention someone without clothes! In Mark’s Good Friday account there is a “certain young man wearing nothing but a linen cloth” who, while fleeing the Gethsemane garden, “left the linen cloth and ran off naked.”
Jesus knew exactly who was going to betray him. Yet he acted out of love to provide a foot washing for each of the disciples. In a sense, Jesus knows that we are going to be tempted to betray God in our words, actions, and deeds, and yet God acts out of love to provide for us a cleansing, called baptism. Remember your baptism.
I’ve been feeling less imaginative lately, and I have realized that I gave away a great deal of my creativity to COVID-era videos and parking lot services. As my creativity has dwindled, my exhaustion, impatience, and thirst for fulfillment have grown. Even (and maybe especially) as society has “returned to normal,” the gumption behind my own pastoral identity still feels tasteless lately.
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