John 21: 1-19; Acts 9:1-6

Encounters with Jesus

Life is full of strange encounters. A number of years back when we were traveling through Morocco, we met a young man named Abdul.  If you are traveling in a Muslim country, Abdul is one of those names you would expect someone to have.  So that was not that unusual.  Turns out Abdul was working for the government tourism department and we concluded that he was expected to get cozy with unsuspecting train riding tourists.  His route apparently was Casablanca to Fes in the interior.  He gave us advice on where we should stay and where we should eat.  We followed quite a bit of his advice.  The next few days wherever we went it seemed Abdul would pop up.  In the hotel:” Are you having a good time?”  In the restaurant :”How are you doing?” One of our boys quipped that we should be checking under the bed, or in the bathroom for Abdul before doing anything. But you can’t say, as much as it seemed so at first, that there was anything miraculous about meeting Abdul.  In a way we were following his script.

Friends, what about the encounters between the disciples and Jesus and the encounter between Jesus and Paul.  What was going on there?  What was so special?  What was the script. Well, first we could say that the encounters changed lives. The disciples would be so heartened by seeing Jesus again and the breakfast he cooked them.  The encounter was crucial in motivating them for a lifetime of service. Paul’s encounter with Jesus caused a huge turnaround in his life.  He went from Saul to being Paul, from being a persecutor of Christians to a caller of Christians, from being an enemy of Christ to one who loves Christ.  The text makes clear that it was an entirely transforming experience. Second, there was room for doubt and confusion.  There on the water’s edge it wasn’t completely clear to the disciples that this person was actually the Jesus he had known.  They did not recognize Him at first, but it slowly dawned on them.  For Saul the vision was a light flash that blinded them. Then there was a voice. There was a lot of room for interpretation.  Finally, the encounter with Jesus was unexpected.  It came out of the blue.  This was not something either the disciples or Saul were counting on.

Friends, we just talked about the brief encounters Frederick Buechner (“Yellow Leaves”) had with Presidents Roosevelt, Truman and Eisenhower and how he got to know Maya Angelou and what his boarding school teachers meant to him.  I once had quite a lengthy private conversation with the man who would not long after become Indonesia’s fourth president, although that would have not been clear to either one of us.  I was working in the office if the National Council of Churches and his office was just a half mile down this crazy wide steamy dirty boulevard with rusty pedestrian overpasses with beggars. He was then the head of the world’s largest Muslim social organization, the Nahdlatul Ulama, with thirty million members. I wanted to show him a small book I had just written on addiction I thought might be useful to his organization.  Even though he was nearly completely blind, he leafed through the pages.  Then he talked how he was always in danger, how the generals were after him. He also warned me about other Muslim organizations and how they were no good, talking like anyone would about their rivals.  His office was an absolute chaos, with folders and files stacked on top each other.  But, you know what, friends, visits like that with powerful people do not come often in our lifetime, it is an encounter I do not often think about.  It did not transform me.  It was a side note to my life.  Isn’t that ironic? The meetings we had with important people may not be the encounters we remember.  The ones we remember are the ones where we felt truly loved, truly guided, truly understood, truly accompanied.  Those are the encounters are often transforming like the ones in our texts for today: they may not always be completely clear and often unexpected as we see in the text.

This leads us to an important question: how are our encounters with Jesus related to the encounters with other people?  Those people, however powerful they are or may become, they are after all just people.  The text in Matthew which forms our call to worship, gives us a clue here. Jesus says:” whatever you did for the least of these, you did for me.” “Whatever you do for others, you do for me.” It’s that simple, but what does that mean?  What that means, friends, is that in our encounters with others we may encounter Christ.  This means that in our encounters with other people, Christ may be present there. Do you realize how powerful that is?  It means that when we least expect it in the encounter with another we may be transformed.  Christ may be at work in that relationship. What this does is turn the everyday into the potentially sacred. May God give us many experiences like that.