IN THE LIMINAL TIMES
Rev. Karen Pidcock-Lester
First Presbyterian Church, Pottstown, Pa.
Easter V/Mother’s Day 2010
Psalm 30
John 21:1-19
Our house is—as they say – “in flux” right now.
And this is what it looks like: for some time, now, the cars have beenparked on the street rather than in the garage, because in the garage are the things we are clearing out of our attic and family room and living room and bedrooms to make room for the things which are coming into the attic and family room and living room and bedrooms when our daughters and my mother move out of the places they are living in now and move the things they won’t have room for into our house which we can’t yet fit into our shed until we take the porch furniture out for the summer, when perhaps there will be room for the bookcases and tables and bedframes and boxes…
but who knows? It’s all a bit ‘in flux’ right now.
In the next four months, each of our daughters and my mother will make a move, major change -- Kate will (hopefully!) take her first permanent, professional job, who knows where?
Molly will leave her first job and go to grad school, and live who knows where?
Elizabeth will leave home and go to college—at last she knows where!
and my mother will move out of her home of 40+ years into a retirement community.
They are each in what is called a ‘liminal zone’, a liminal place: that is, they have come to a boundary, a threshold in their lives, and they are crossing into an unknown. For each of them – and for that matter, for Carter and me, too, even though we are living in the same place -- something is coming to an end, and something new has not yet taken shape.
A liminal moment, like the earliest hours of the dya – after the night has ended, but the dawn has not yet come. A liminal place in our lives.
Many of you are in liminal moments in your life, too.
Some of you have come to it of your own choosing.
You are engaged to be married, or you are expecting a baby,
you are about to retire, you are moving to a new community, looking for a new job.
Some of you have come to a boundary place that is not of your own choosing.
Your parents’ marriage is breaking up and they are separating,
or you have lost your job and not yet found another,
or your spouse has died and you are no longer part of a twosome,
or you have suffered a disabling illness and your life must change,
or you have received a diagnosis and are waiting to die.
Whether it is of our own choosing, or not,
life often brings us to thresholds, blurry boundary zones,
when one way of life comes to an end,
and another has not yet taken shape.
Peter and the other disciples have come to a liminal place, a liminal moment in their lives. Their former life came to an end when Jesus died, and nothing has replaced it yet,nothing new has yet taken shape as they wander by the Sea of Tiberius. They are living in between.
Like many people who come to such a place, Peter is unsettled, confused, dispirited. Limp. This boundary Peter has come to is not one of his own choosing – it is hope which has ended for Peter. Life’s promise has shut down. Peter’s purpose has dried up. He has no place in the world, no identity – how can one be a disciple of a dead man? Who is he now? He is like Alice in Wonderland:
“Who are you?” said the Caterpillar…
“I –I hardly know, Sir, just at present,” Alice replied rather shyly,
“at least I know who I was when I got up this morning, but I think I
must have been changed several times since then.” (Lewis Carroll,
quoted in Bridges, Transitions, p.. 8)
Like many people who come to a liminal place, Peter has lost his ability to see clearly – scripture says “he did not recognize Jesus…” Like many people in a boundary zone, he is unproductive: after a whole night of work, he ‘has caught nothing.’ Do you know what it is like not to be able to see or think clearly, to spin your wheels, seeing no fruit of your labor?
Peter tries to return to his former place, his old way of life, “I am going fishing.” But Peter can no more go back to the way things were before Jesus than a woman can go back to being childless after she has given birth. The old life doesn’t fit him anymore, the old has passed away, but the new has not yet come.
Liminal places can be tough places to be, as many of you well know. Perhaps Leo Tolstoy expresses what Peter – and many of us – have felt in such a time in our lives: “I felt that something had broken within me on which my whole life had always rested, that I had nothing left to hold onto…” (quoted in Bridges, Transitions, p. 118)
Peter will not always be in such a place.
By the end of this passage, Peter will have a new purpose, a new identity. The old will have passed away, the one known as The Betrayer will have become the one whom Jesus trusts and commissions to carry on his work. The ‘new’ will have come.
But between verses 1 and 19, Peter dwells in a liminal place, at the boundary between the old and the new, and his experience shows us some things about living in those times when we find ourselves unsettled, even dispirited, because life as we have known it, hope as we have held it, are coming to an end.
Let us look at the scriptures, listen, and receive what they give us to hold on to in the liminal places.
Verse 1. “Just after daybreak.”
Literally, this means, “as morning was coming to be.”
Here, in the middle of Peter’s shadows and confusion, morning is coming to be. The first thing to hold on to in the liminal places is this: life will not always be like this. Even while we are in the shadows, “morning is coming to be.” There is something new taking shape which we cannot yet see. God is already forming a new day, a new life… across the threshold.
Verse 1 also says “Jesus showed himself,” and verse 4: “Jesus stood on the beach.” The second thing to hold on to in the liminal moments of our lives is that we are not alone. Jesus is standing near and he looks upon us with tenderness and compassion. “Children,” he says to these grown men who are disciples….like a mother who appears at the bedroom door in the middle of the night when we are scared and lonely... and he sees – he understands our condition, our situation. “You have no fish, have you?”
You have no direction,have you?
you have no joy, have you?
you have no purpose or excitement or success or peace, have you?
Jesus stands near, and sees, and understands.
And Jesus comes to our aid. This is the third thing to hold on to in the boundary zones of our lives: Jesus shows up to help.Verse 6: “Cast your nets to the right side of the boat,” he tells Peter. He gives guidance. Jesus is not just a bystander, a cheerleader -- he lends Peter and the disciplespower that comes from the right hand of God. To be sure, they have to do hard work, they have to cast and drag and lift the nets. But Christ gives them something to show for their efforts.
When we are living in the shadowy zones, Christ will lend us his aid. We have to do hard work. And we must recognize Jesus’ voice and trust him, do what he says. Peter and the disciples come to recognize Jesus in the shadows because they have a history with him in the light. They remember another time he had appeared and told them to cast their nets on the other side of the boat, and so now, when they are confused and adrift and not seeing clearly, they can still recognize and hear his voice. How critical it is to have known Jesus before we come to the difficult, lost places in our lives, so that when we are depleted by the effort of living, we can recognize his voice, and hear his commands, and be able to receive his strength and power!
What does Jesus do next? He feeds them. Jesus knows that life in the liminal places can wear us out, body and soul. Like a mama caring for her weary children, he says, in verse12: “Come, have breakfast.” This is the fourth thing to hold on to in the shadows: Jesus invites us to sit with him. Just sit, and eat.
And when we do, he serves us. I can only imagine how good that felt to Peter and the others, after all they had been through, all they had lost, all their effort, how good it must have felt to sink down on the sand in the warmth of that charcoal fire, and rest in his company again.
So can we. Hold on to this in the liminal places: Christ invites you, and me, to sit down with him, to share the warmth and light of his presence, even when – especially when --there is nothing but shadow all around us. Christ bids us to let him feed us, body and soul. He will. He does.
The next thing Jesus does is talk to Peter. “Do you love me?” three times he asks Peter the question. “Lord, you know that I love you,” three times Peter answers.
What is going on here? Jesus is setting Peter free. The old must pass away before the new can come. In Peter’s case it is old shame, past failures, old wounds that must be closed up before Peter can move across the threshold into the new life he is called to.
Jesus is putting the past in its place – that is, in the past. Who Peter was, and what Peter did is not forgotten, but after this fireside chat, it will exist in the past, and it will not define Peter in the future.
This is one of the things that must happen in the boundary zone of our lives: the past must be put in its place. Life has its necessary endings-- expecting a child or preparing to let them go, getting married or getting divorced, entering the world of work or leaving it -- and whether we come to them reluctantly or eagerly, we must meet them. And when we do, we must let the past become the past.
Not every past is one we are eager to shed. Some pasts we are reluctant to let go of.
And some pasts we carry around like a ball and chain, and cast a shadow over the morning that is coming to be.
In either case, we must be set free of them, because we cannot embrace the morning that is coming to be if we are clinging to the past that has been.
This is the fifth thing we can hold on to in the liminal zone:Christ can, and wants to do for us what he did for Peter: put our past in its place, and set us free for the future.
There is one more thing that happens in this text.
In this ending of Peter’s old life, his new one begins. “Follow me,” Jesus says to Peter. Peter has good things ahead of him, a glorious life ahead of him. He will have adventures, and make new and deeper friendships, he will travel to distant lands, display extraordinary power, he will make lame people walk, and speak before emperors and raise a woman from the dead.
Oh! what a morning is coming to be for Peter, here at the edge of the Sea of Tiberius, precisely when he and his companions are limp and lost! Who knows what the morning that is coming to be holds for us, we who wander around in the liminal places, in between what has been and what is yet to be?
God is preparing it, even now.
In the meantime, Christ shows himself, in the between- time.
A man I know ,knows this. He has been keeping company with Christ for a long time, so that now, as he finds himself in a liminal place, he knows how to recognize Christ in the shadows, and hearhis voice. At this point in his life, he finds himself struggling to care for an aging parent who cannot care for herself, yet she will not let her children care for her. This son lives between what used to be, and what is yet to be. In the shadows of this threshold time, he has accepted Christ’s invitation to sit with him… and Christ has servedhimrich spiritual food.
In prayer one day, he asked God to show him something -- the way, or a sign-- something that would sustain him in the difficult days and difficult choices. In response, the Holy Spirit served up an image: the man saw, in prayer, a corner of a tapestry--the kind we think of when we say that life is like a tapestry in which we see the underside, with the knots and broken threads and blurry picture, while God sees it from the other side, finished and clear and beautiful.
The corner this man was given to see, from the underside, was dark, and the picture was obscure, unrecognizable.
The image unsettled him. What was he to make of this? It was not what he was hoping for: it did not relieve his anxiety.
He went back into prayer and asked again to be given something to help him. Again, the dark corner came into his spiritual vision, but this time, the Holy Spirit lifted the corner and the man could see beyond it to a place that was brilliant blue, like the bluest sky, with the light of the sunof a new day, shining.
He heard the Holy Spirit say to him, “Ok?”
“Ok,” the man answered, smiling at himself, and God…
and gave thanks.
In the in-between places in our lives,
when things are uncertain and confused and blurred,
Christ comes, and stands near to usuntil the morning that is coming to be shines in fullness.
As the poet has written, “To make an end is to make a beginning…
The end is where we start from….” (T.S. Eliot)
Ok?
Ok.
Thanks be to God!
Amen.