April 17, 1983

World famous theologian Jurgen Moltmann was 17 in 1944. That was the year he was drafted into the German Army. In less than a year, Germany was defeated, and young Moltmann was in a prisoner of war camp for some two years. Having grown up in a non-religious family, he seriously encountered Christian faith for the first time as a prisoner. Amid despair of defeat and ugliness of war, he began his faith journey with Christ. In the Christian way of life he found the resources to plunge back into living with energy and play a part in rebuilding his country. 

Those of us who read theology books know that he has written several powerful works explor- ing the meaning of God, Jesus, and the Spirit for life in the now and hope for the future. Much of the preparation of this sermon came from his book A Passion for Life. I take his words about living life with passion, excitement, and joy a bit more seriously because I know he has known despair and defeat.

He writes: "Today, it appears as though love for life is disappearing. (By the way, these words were written not in the aftermath of World War II but just a few years ago)...We... become accustomed to death before it comes. Why? Because when passionate devotion to life is missing, the powers to resist are paralyzed. Therefore, if we want to live today, we must consciously will life. We must learn to love life with such a passion that we no longer become accustomed to the powers of destruction...and must be seized by the passion for life.”

There are signs that Moltmann is right. We kind of live our lives with one arm tied behind us, with one foot on the accelerator and one foot on the brakes. We get through the days draggingly, tired before we start. We are afraid to really let go and love each other all the way. 

After all, the more you love, the more it can get you hurt. A youth told me recently that it isn't considered cool at school to make good grades. "They (the mysterious ‘they’) make fun of you if you look like you are trying hard. " I wonder what would happen to job productivity if a person just did what needed to be done each day without worrying if he or she is going to do a little more than another person on the job. All of this goes on against the backdrop of our world's massive devotion of money, people, resources, and energy to doomsday weapons. We try to secure life with weapons of death. We try to stop crime with electric chairs. A society that tries to build life on death weakens and cheapens life for us all. No wonder, a Moltmann who has seen the deadness of war perhaps a bit closer than many of us writes: "We become accustomed to death before it comes....We must learn to love life and be seized by the passion for life." 

Passion? What's that? Is being a passionate person something more than the steamy stuff of which soap operas and fleshy movies are made? Can we retrieve the real, deep meaning of passion: the living of life with intensity, excitement, feeling all the 'ouches' and the 'wows' which come our way? There is nothing wrong about passionate love expressed in sexuality in the appropriate relationships. But is that all it is? Isn't passionate love simply the ability to let go and really love and let ourselves be loved in all our relationships with children, parents, friends, spouses, even the folks we go to school, church, or work with?

The scripture today tells us that shortly after the death and resurrection of Jesus, Peter decided to go fishing. That rings and stings of truth. It was Easter around here a couple of weeks ago...maybe despite appearances to the contrary God is stronger than death and with us to give us new beginnings in the midst of the deadness of our daily predicaments and relationships. But except for a shred or two of fake Easter basket grass on the carpet and an Easter card or two piled in the junk drawer, Easter has gone and we are back to ho hum normal. Peter goes back to fishing and we go back to groaning and moaning through the days.

But then Jesus shows up again. Bible scholars call the story here an 'after resurrection appearance account'. Peter and his buddies are fishing. They aren't having any luck and don't even recognize Jesus at first. He calls to them to throw the fishing net on the other side of the boat. Lo and behold, they catch almost more fish than they can pull in. When Peter recognizes Jesus, he can't wait. He jumps in the water and splashes his way to Jesus. It had been a while since Peter, I suspect, had felt much excitement about anything.

Then, John tells us, they had a big fish dinner. Red Lobster didn't have a thing on them. While they were eating Jesus asked Peter the same question three times. To Peter who had denied he knew Jesus three times, Jesus asked, "Do you really love me?" "Yes... Yes... Yes!" Peter blubbered. "Well, then, put your life where your mouth is, Peter, and feed my lambs, Jesus said. And by lambs he did not mean livestock but people on this earth hungry for food and love and hope and maybe even what Moltmann would call the passion for life. 

We aren't fishing today, although some of us might like to be. But we too are very much with those disciples in the after Easter ho-hum-so-what crowd. What does it take for us to have a passionate, give-it-all-you've-got-go-for-it life? If the Easter message is right, that God's love is stronger than death which terrorizes us and hurts which paralyzes us, that God can bring new life to us before and after death, then what does a passionate life look like? Some notions follow for your consideration.

A Passionate Life Needs a Passionate Faith 

It has been said enough that an alive faith, an energetic trust, in God does not exclude doubts, that perhaps we are beginning to believe it. Frederick Buechner has written that "doubt is the ants in the pants of faith, it keeps it alive and kicking." 

In Graham Greene's new novel Monsignor Quixote, a grizzled old priest from an obscure little village in Spain says to his Marxist friend who cannot understand why the priest can believe in God in a world of so many tragedies and injustices: "Not necessarily believing. We can't always believe. Just having faith... Sancho, it's (really) an awful thing not to have doubts." 

A passionate faith means wrangling with God and what he wants from our lives even on the days we do not know what we believe or if we believe about and in God. I know that sounds contradictory. Most of life, certainly that which is worth living, usually is. Think about it. What makes a good marriage, what takes true commitment? Being loving and faithful on the days when everything is neat and sweet? Or is true faithfulness something that either happens or does not happen on the days you had rather not be faithful and would rather not put up with that aggravating mate but you do anyway. That’s real marital commitment: being married on the days you don't feel like being married. It’s similar with parents. Parenthood is a breeze when your little one is angelically asleep in their bed or has brought home all A's. It is something else when a parent keeps on keeping on when the child has spilt the third cup of milk or shouted they hate you because you won't let them do what they want to do. Real parenthood is being a parent when you don't feel like it. That's real love. And it works the other way too. It is easy to love your parents when they are in good moods and saying "Yes, how much do you want?" But what about the days when Dad or Mom has had a bad time and seem to take it out on you? You still love them even though you don't feel like it. That's when you are really learning what it means to live by the commandment "honor your mother and father," on the days when Mom and Dad aren't so honorable. 

Again, I say, a passionate life needs a passionate faith. And a passionate faith means believing in God even on the days you don't believe in him, when it doesn't seem to make much sense. Easter teaches us that God usually does his stuff in the world most when it looks the most like he is not. There, in the midst of the muck and mess of life, in all the ways we humans cook up to crucify each other with words, cold shoulders, and bombs, God keeps needling us, keeps us going just when we feel we can't move another inch, brings about love just when we question if we will ever love again. It takes a passionate faith to make contact with the surprising, amazing God of Jesus Christ. Just as those after Easter fishing disciples discovered, God just keeps popping up again when we think we have about finished him off. 

A Passionate Life Requires That We Discover a Godded You and Me 

I guess I have and have read 10 or 11 of minister-writer Frederick Buechner's 17 or 18 books. Bouncing my life experiences off his writings has created one of my basic convictions that undergirds all the rest and seems to stay when other convictions teeter-totter. That conviction is that if God makes any moves in life at all, then he does it through humans. God does his stuff through humans. The incarnation of Jesus shows us what God plans to do in the crinkly-wrinkly flesh of us all: love the pain and hate out of us. 

Buechner's latest book Now and Then is an autobiography of his adult life. In it he writes:  "Listen to your life. See it for the fathomless (bottomless) mystery that it is. In the boredom and pain of it no less than in the excitement and gladness: touch, taste, smell your way to the holy hidden heart of it because in the last analysis all moments are key moments, and life itself is grace.... Depression, desperation, anxiety... there is no such escape for any of us as far as I know. But the shadows themselves contain treasures if you keep your eyes open." 

A passionate life means that you and I never sell ourselves or each other short. Even a you and a me are Godded creatures: creatures God gets his love into and out of. Sometimes the most rotten times of our lives create in us more understanding and patience for others than we ever knew before. Sometimes when we feel kicked in the stomach by life but against all the odds we survive, we discover something we never knew before: we live always by strength beyond our own. Even when we must face the unchangeable that makes our lives shorter and more painful then we want, somehow God's sustaining love often shows up. 

God even uses our goof-ups to bring us and each other to our senses and his love. Do you think Peter would have ever guessed that his disgusting denial of Jesus would help countless millions discover that God forgives, that second and 99th chances come from God even after we have royally blown it? Even a you and a me are godded creatures.

Moltmann says we humans are to be "visible images of the invisible God on earth.” Jesus the Messiah, the one God sent into the world to bring it to its senses and his love. Yet, Moltmann says, each of us are meant to be "messianic signs to others"... "A small part of God's great history of liberating the world." When God gets his love into and out of accomplished stinkers like you and me, we become signs of what God is in the process of doing in this world. A passionate life reveals a Godded you and me!

A Passionate Life Breeds a Compassionate Life or Maybe It's Vice Versa 

Some time ago, I quoted what Antonio says about the terminal illness of his sister. Antonio is a character in Buechner's novel Lion Country. "When Miriam's bones were breaking, if I could have pushed a button that would have stopped NOT her pain but the pain of her pain in me, I would not have pushed the button because, to put it quite simply, my pain was because I loved her, and to have wished the pain away would have been somehow to wish my love away as well.”

Compassion means the capacity to feel for and with each other deeply. Yes, that means at times we hurt. The more you love, the more you hurt when the loved one hurts or hurts you. A passionate life is not a painless life. A painless life, if there be such a thing, is a passionless life: it is numbness, monotony, walking deadness. We all know people who have a lot of money, stuff, and even good looks. But because they have built their lives around the Big Number One, they are never ever really satisfied. They may not know it. But they are among the walking dead. 

If we are ever going to have a life worth living with our loved ones. If we are ever going to do something for those who are hungry and kicked around on this earth. If we are ever going to come to terms with our enemies like the Russians. Then we are going to have to feel for them, recognize they hurt and hope just like us, that it is a lot more luck than anything good you or I did that put you and me where we are and they where they are.

Jesus said to bumbling, stumbling Peter: "If you love me, then feed my sheep, follow me." The passionate, joy-full life is not an individual sport or achievement. It is a gift that the life resurrecting God gives to those who love and care for each other like Jesus loved and cared for people, even people like you and me. 

Moltmann again: "In the passion of Christ I see the passion of God himself, and I discover again the passion of my own heart.” 

God, heat us people and this place up with life passion. Amen.