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Rock?                        John 21: 1-19                   April 18, 2010

Would an actor sell his own soul for a great performance? Or put it on ice for a while so it wouldn't keep him from playing a particular part? Paul Giamatti - an actor, whom I loved in Sideways and Cinderella Man and particularly enjoyed in the title role of John Adams in the made-for-TV series, plays himself in the movie Cold Souls. He plays an actor who is struggling through rehearsals for a particularly difficult part in an Anton Chekhov play.

The role he is playing, it seems, is dark and troubling - and it is haunting every aspect of Giamatti's life. His soul is weighed down and it tortures him. So much so that his wife is miserable just living with him.

So when he sees an article in the New Yorker magazine about a new phenomenon called Soul Storage, he can't resist. People are evidently having their souls extracted, temporarily at least, to lighten their burden. So they can live less complicated lives.

What a concept. He wants to find out more.

You can probably guess the rest. After an interview with the doctor who runs the Soul Storage facility, Giamatti signs up. His motivation is simple, or so he says: "I don't want to be happy," he tells the doctor, "I just need to not suffer."

So he allows his body to be inserted into a device that looks a lot like an oversized MRI machine, where his soul is successfully extracted and placed in a canister. Reluctantly, he looks at what the machine has removed, and much to Paul's surprise and dismay, his soul is smaller than everyone else's. It has the size and appearance of a chickpea.

Post extraction, Giamatti gets to choose the site where his chickpea-shaped little soul is stored. "Your soul can be stored here, in New York," the doctor amusingly tells him, "or if you'd prefer to avoid the sales tax, it can be shipped to our storage facility in New Jersey."

He chooses New York. But storage location aside, he is now soulless. And lightened of the burden of a soul, Giamatti becomes a different actor. He is suddenly - if only temporarily - easygoing, confident, upbeat and energetic; released from the darkness of his troubled soul.

The movie is marketed as a comedy, and at times it does prompt a chuckle or two, but the notion that our soul - the very essence of our self - is vulnerable and can be lost or extracted is a serious subject indeed.

The question is this: Should we be concerned about losing our soul? Jesus evidently thought so. He once thought aloud about it with his disciples: "What good will it be for those who gain the whole world but forfeit their soul?" Jesus asked them, "Or what will they give in return for their soul?ⁱ"

Which brings us to our Gospel Lesson for today.

The Disciple Peter is the central character in the drama that unfolds in our text. And when we encounter Peter, today, a few weeks after Easter - both our time and his, it appears - to me anyway - that he has been separated from his soul.

Let me explain what I mean.

We know more about Peter and his soul than any other of the Disciples. Peter was almost always the first one out of the gate; the first to leave his fish nets and follow Jesus, the first one to step out of the boat and try walking on the water, and the first to volunteer his opinion on just about any subject Jesus was teaching about.

When Jesus asked his disciples, "Who do you say that I am," it is Peter, naturally, who replied, "You are the Christ, the Son of the living God." And as we know, based on this response, Jesus told him "Peter, Blessed are you! You are the rock on which I will build my church; you will be the one who has the keys to the Kingdom of Heaven."

So if we could have extracted Peter's soul, it would most likely have been a rock.

On the other hand, as we also know from our recent revisiting of Jesus' last hours before his death, Peter went from being the cornerstone of the church to the one who loses his heart - and his soul - when he denies any knowledge of Jesus, saying "I do not know the man" not once but three times.

It was the night of Jesus' arrest, you'll recall, and as Peter stood in the courtyard of the house of the high priest they said to him, "You are not also one of this man's disciples, are you?" And Peter said, "I am not."

Not once, not twice, but three times, Peter denied that he even knew Jesus Christ.

Where was Peter's soul on that Good Friday? Where was the Rock? Nowhere to be found, I would say.

Fast forward to today. Two weeks have now past, and Peter's final encounter with Jesus - recorded in the text that is our lesson for today - takes place on a beach, where the risen Lord has cooked breakfast for his disciples.

As soon as the meal is over, Jesus turns to Peter and asks - not once but three times - "Do you love me?"

Three times Peter replies, "Yes, Lord, you know that I love you. And three times Jesus replies again, "Feed my sheep."

Jesus gives Peter the same number of chances to affirm his love that Peter had previously taken to deny it, that Good Friday morning. Jesus forgives his friend. And once again, he trusts him to be the Rock on which the church can be built.

Jesus, as he did so many times before, gives Peter the chance to start over. To reclaim his life. And this time, Peter gets it right. You might even say that the Disciple is reunited with his soul.

If Peter is the rock on which the church is built, that is very good news for all of us - because Peter, perhaps more than any of the Disciples, is one of us. Jesus picked a bullheaded, bighearted, fallible, never-say-die rock - who lost his soul and then, by the grace of God and only by the grace of God, found it once again.

What happened to Peter can also happen to you and me. We might never succumb to the temptation to have our soul extracted, but, like Peter, we might just let it slip away.

And we can also find it again. "Come and have breakfast," says the Risen Christ. Pull up a chair and let me feed you with "the bread of life." Eat of the food that I provide and you might even get your soul back; you might even discover the purpose and meaning of life.

"Come," Christ says to you and to me, as surely as he said it to his disciples. "Come, and have breakfast."

And then, after breakfast, Jesus asks us the question: "Do you love me more than these?"

When he asked Peter that question, Jesus probably did it with a sweep of his hand that took in the fishing boats and the nets and even the fish. In other words, "am I more important to you than anything - even your way of life?"

Think about it. Jesus is ready to leave this world, and leave his church in the hands of Peter, and what does he ask? "Do you love me more than these? Then feed my sheep. Show them my love."

That's it. As one scholar aptly puts it, "All the rest is commentary.ⁱⁱ"

This is what the soul of a Christian is all about. "Peter - or John, or Steve, or Ruth, or Susan, or Joe, or Jeff" - fill in your own name - "do you love me more than these?"

Whenever you and I have to make decisions about how we're going to act in this world, whether it be with our parents, our children, our spouse, our colleagues at work or with our friends and neighbors; whenever we have to decide how our country should respond to terrorism or to the plight of the poor, may our heart hear that question that Jesus asked his friend Peter, again and again and again: "Do you love me more than these? Do you love me? Do you love me?"

Because if our answer is like Peter's - if we have re-connected with our soul and our answer is "Yes, Lord, you know that I love you" - then we can be confident that God's precious, hungry sheep will be fed.

                                                                             AMEN

ⁱ    Matthew 16: 26
ⁱⁱ   From a sermon by William Sloane Coffin, April 13, 1986, entitled "Do you love me?"

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