22 04 07   Resurrection - dreamers and realists   John 21: 1-19    Steve Butler

I've been reading Mr Seymour's New Complete Guide of Self-Sufficiency – The Classic Guide for realists and dreamers. What a great strap line for the bible...... Scriptures like these are principally stories about people - and that is how we should read them. To read them at face value is clearly a mistake, and it's therefore frustrating that so many people do. If we read them as stories about people we will inevitably find ourselves in them. We will find ourselves as realists and dreamers.  

The older you get the more data you have in your 'memory' (let's use that word advisedly). I'm growing suspicious of when folk say, 'ah yes, I remember it like it was yesterday'... Especially if they refer to something that happened many years ago. Policemen will tell you that 25 different witnesses to an incident will give as many as 25 accounts of it - about something that happened yesterday.  

That's because we don't walk a simple path where we're always plumb in the present, with the past behind us and the future ahead of us. Our minds don't work that way. We are creatures of story, - creatures of creative thinking - our experience & interpretation of the world is constantly in a flux of learned responses, emotional containment, unexpected succumbing to the unconscious fears and loves and passions – the web of things that have slowly formed us into who we uniquely have become. Memory is a some combination of reality and dream, and we should be aware of this as we read the scripture stories of people – like the people in these resurrection stories. Biblical scholarship would fairly unanimously say (I think I'm right in saying) that John 21 was added to this gospel by later writers/editors (you can tell by the character of the writing, - the grammar, the vocabulary etc). The story on the beach is strikingly/suspiciously similar to other 'miraculous catch' stories from the other gospels. Whose 'memories' of what happened, or seemed to happen, might of happened, or other people said happened, - which of these is more useful to us than the others? What matters is that something about these stories has made us want to become part of the story... What made Saul of Tarsus want to become part of the story of the resurrection? I'm struck by the way his story confronts us with the realism of a world of agonising hatred and abuse. Think of terrible images of people being rounded up in Nazi Germany, or at Szrebrenica (recent war crimes footage of boys being herded into the trees to be shot). Think of Radovan Karadzic and Ratkp Mladic.  


That's the spirit of Saul's 'breathing threats and murder' as he rounded up the Christians - Luke has told us, in Acts 8:3, that in Jerusalem “Saul was ravaging the church by entering house after house; dragging off both men and women, he committed them to prison.” This is the man who by his own account (slightly different versions of this story can be found in 22:3-21 and 26:2-28, Paul’s speeches of self-defence. Paul’s own account, which is closest to 26:2-28, is in Galatians 1:11-17), is transformed by what he remembers as an encounter with the risen Jesus. This is the man, who as Paul, wants to pioneer the church of Jesus, and become it's main spokesman. No wonder Peter and the other apostles are very wary of him. Is he a dreamer? (what did he experience, - we'll never know), is he a realist? (his change of heart led him into all sorts of trouble) It's a stunning story of transformation, and 'Damascus Road', of course, has become a by-word for anyone describing a dramatic change in understanding.  

As part of the community of the resurrection, (whatever that might mean for us), we acknowledge that we are dreamers.... Inspired by the hope that this world, in all of its glory and shame, is the crucible of transformation - the very place where we can choose to overcome meaninglessness and death. But we have to distinguish between dreaming and escapism. Escapist religion is attractive – I subscribed to it myself for many years, and probably retreat to it still sometimes..... 'this world is not my home, I'm just-a-passin through', so to speak. But escaping from the world is not only woeful misunderstanding of the message of Jesus (for whom the kingdom was a present material reality), but it is a dangerous thing – follow it to its conclusion and you end up with suicide bombers. Escapists don't really believe in resurrection – that Christ is redeeming the world. They just want to be beamed up. Rather, the community of the resurrection dream of a world transformed and ultimately made new - and of lives transformed and ultimately made new. The kingdom of God is here, said Jesus, be it in small mustard seeds that will ultimately grow, in particles of yeast that will ultimately leaven, in the little people who will ultimately be first in the kingdom of God. In that sense, the dreamers of the community of the resurrection are realists.

To finish – can I paint a picture or two of scenes from a walk I took to Portobello beach yesterday morning as I mulled over these things.....
* the  realist city fading out as the dreamer sea faded in
- the  lonesome digger, and his two rovers. An escapist?
* the  dreaming Lib Dems – how realistic?
* the  Trident protester – dreaming of a transformed world and doing  something about it in a mustard seed sort of way