Just after daybreak, Jesus stood on the beach: but the disciples did not know that it was Jesus.

This is the story that brings Easter home for me each year, it is the story that takes Easter from a distant and hazy miracle story in the lives of other people, or from a once a year spiritual feast, and focuses in on my life and your life and our lives together, transforming Easter into a daily possibility in our homes.

I have always found it hard to imagine how the Easter morning witnesses to the resurrection felt and what they thought, but it takes no effort at all to imagine how the disciples were feeling in this story: they were frustrated, they were confused and they needed to do something.

Think about it from their point of view, a few short weeks ago it was Easter. Christ was alive and they spoke with him and ate with him and they must have been sure that it was onward and upward from that moment on.

But it apparently wasn’t.

They were back in Galilee, as they had been told to be, but nothing was happening.

Life was not turning out the way they thought it would.

Does it ever?

They knew that things were going to be different but God was being remarkably silent and so they didn’t know what different was going to look like.

That scene from Revelation where John describes myriads of myriads and thousands of thousands singing God’s praises? The disciples weren’t hearing it anymore than you and I were hearing it this week at work or at home. That was Easter music and it wasn’t playing anymore.

But it was supposed to be! The world changed two weeks ago, remember . . . but it didn’t seem any different to them, and so the frustration was building, just as it builds for us when we don’t know what is coming next and we can’t find out until it happens and it’s eating at us and all we can do is wait.

And wait.

And wait.

Whatever they might have thought the resurrection was going to mean for them, individually or collectively, several weeks earlier when Christ had greeted them on Easter, this wasn’t it.

Life was not turning out the way they thought it would.

It rarely does, for any of us, and sometimes that feels pretty bad as dreams shatter and plans dissolve and hope evaporates; but sometimes it feels very, very good – who could have imagined that 33 years ago, when I baptized a certain little boy at that font, in this room, that I would be baptizing his daughter. I promise you that was not in my plan for life on that distant morning in 1977. And if you can tell me, with a straight face, that you knew that this was going to happen then we’re going to advance you some money out of the plate this morning to go and buy the Church some lottery tickets.

And if there have been this many twists and turns in our lives over the last 33 years, who can imagine where the next 33 years will take Annabelle or the rest of us. Although I doubt that I will be here and baptizing her children . . . but, given the way the Reformed Church Retirement system works, you never know. But if I’m not here the church still will be.

That’s part of the purpose of the Church, especially in these confusing and changing times, to be the still point of stability in the turbulence, to be the port of refuge, the sanctuary, the place to come home to, to remind us that while the world is running around like Chicken Little insisting from both sides that either changes or the status quo – depending upon who is shouting at the moment - in health care, education and taxes will produce the end of the world.

I even read this week about someone who described one of the current crises as “The Apocalypse”.

Interesting word, Apocalypse.

This is just a side note, but I’m not sure I can think of a more widely misused word.

Do you know what the word apocalypse means? Do you think, as most people do, that it means a great and dramatic end of the world, well it doesn’t. The Greek word apocalypse simply means “to reveal”.

Getting married, having children, graduating, taking a job, moving to a new place, these things are all apocalyptical events, they all provide a revelation: how true are our values? How loyal are our friends? Does our faith calm us or panic us?

How we deal with the events of life continually reveal God to us and reveal us to God and each other, so life is just one apocalypse after another, isn’t it?

What is it that is being revealed about us in all of these momentary apocalypses of our lives? I’ll leave you to answer that for yourselves.

But this much is true: the things that we face in life, the things that reveal us seldom turn out the way we think they will.

So we need to learn to wait and see what happens, and we don’t wait well, do we?

Well, we keep good company, neither did the disciples.

They were back home, in their common, everyday world and nothing was going on.

Easter was quickly becoming more memory then reality. It felt like it had all happened a long time ago and they were getting frustrated because they didn’t know what they were supposed to do next.

We know that frustration, don’t we?

How do we choose what to do next, where do we find the apocalypse, where do we find Easter?

Well, it’s not always easy with the world screaming at us and, quite honestly, it seems to get harder and harder with each passing year.

As Bob Seeger put it “I’ve got so much more to think about, deadlines and commitments, what to leave in, what to leave out.” Job offers come along and we aren’t sure what to do.

Or, more commonly these days, jobs are taken away from us and we aren’t sure what to do.

Relationships teeter on the edge and sometimes they take so much time and energy and we’re not sure whether or not they are worth it.

Illnesses and accidents strike and leave us stunned and lost and alone.

Life doesn’t turn out the way we plan.

When all of that happens, Easter seems like a long time ago, doesn't it?

Haven’t you felt that in your own lives? Over the last two weeks we have gone back to the routines of our lives and we have found that all of the fears and doubts that seem to rule in our world are still there.

Peter and the other disciples went back to the routines of their lives to discover what they were supposed to do next.

And they waited.

And the longer they waited, the more Jerusalem and the Upper Room and the Holy places and the Sacred Words and all of that seemed far away in time and distance.

And they waited.

And nothing happened.

Finally Peter could wait no longer.

"I am going fishing!" he said and the others followed.

It’s strange, I’ve read so many articles and listened to other ministers talk about this passage and almost all of them talk about the disciples wrong-headed desire to go back to their past lives, but I’ve never heard the story that way. For me it has always been the definitive Easter story, the one that is written for people like us, people who need to do the things that we were created to do and to be.

“I am going fishing!”

That’s what fisherman do, they were back where they belonged, out on the water where the wind was blowing the sails and they had the old familiar feel of the nets and lines and the smell of the boat itself filled their senses - they went home.

I understand that.

When my soul is running on empty, when I am unsure about the next step, when all of the great inner callings that I have known in my lifetime seem empty and meaningless and I wonder if the whole thing has really been worth it, I tend to return to the places and the activities and the people where I once found meaning, I go home.

I’ll go for a walk on the beach, I’ll mow the lawn where the phone doesn’t ring, I’ll go lose a couple of golf balls in the woods, I’ll play a few old Simon and Garfunkel songs and think about old friends, I do whatever I can think of, all in a search for some old familiar patterns that will help me to focus and refocus my soul.

That's what Peter was after that night.

They went fishing.

And I know that some of you understand, I know some of you who are teachers have gone back to your classrooms and shut the doors and spent time with your students during these last few months when the rest of the world seems to have turned against you, I know others among you who have focused on the gift of each day – maybe you exercise a little more, or pray a little more, or paint a room or read a book - because right now your future doesn’t look very good on the job front or the health front or in your shattered relationships.

You’ve gone fishing, just as Peter did.

And they caught nothing.

But that didn’t matter.

I’m sure that Peter would have loved to have caught a few fish, but it was the doing that brought him fulfillment and he had been around long enough to know that if you do the right things, good things would come in the long run.

Peter went home to himself and when the night was over he was tired and wet and hungry and feeling pretty good. And there, on the shore in the dawn, stood Jesus waiting for Peter.

Easter happened all over again for Peter and the disciples, not in the holy place, but in the common place, Easter came home.

You see, as long as they were sitting on the shore nothing happened, but when they were out there doing something, even though it turned out that Peter would again leave the nets and boats behind, when they were out there doing something, Christ came to them.

Peter had a lousy night fishing and was on his way back to shore when Jesus told him to try again.

It always makes me wonder, how many blessing do we miss out on because we give up too soon?

We try things and they don't work and we say, "Well I guess that's that" or if we want to make it sound religious we go: “I guess it wasn’t meant to be!”

And God says "Try again."

Peter did and the nets were full beyond their capacity.

That’s what Easter brings to our live where we lead them, isn’t it?

The reminder that we cannot ever give up on the things that we do.

The promise is that great blessings will follow long nights of failure when our faith remains intact and that in all of the things that really matter in life – peace, integrity, relationships, joy and affection – in all of those things we will receive beyond our capacity, our nets will overflow.

Our problem is that we always want to shortcut the process. We want to get all the blessings without the dark night of the soul, we want Easter without Good Friday, but it doesn’t work that way.

Or we want to reverse the process and we tell God, "Well give me the proof and the blessings and then I'll have faith." But it doesn't work like that either.

Faith gives us an accurate vision of life and of reality that is hidden to those with no faith.

You see, for those with faith Easter happens over and over again here and now, not in a distant and holy place, but in the places we call home, among the people God has given us, while we are doing the things we are created for.

So as we make our journey away from Easter on the calendar this year, as we make the journey from Jerusalem to Clover Hill, from the high holy moments to the daily drudgeries of our lives, we never really leave Easter and we will be met by the risen Christ. And he will lead us to full nets and he will feed us with his own meal and we will again hear the songs of heaven, the apocalyptic revealing praises of every creature as Easter appears on the shores of our lives.

You see Easter is not limited to a day or a sanctuary, Easter is the presence of Christ in our lives, our Galilees, the places where we live and work and love and die. And if we don’t meet him there – in the places where we face temptations and loneliness and sorrow and crisis - then we have not really met him at all.

But when we do we will resist the temptations, as he did; we will find companionship, as he did; we will receive comfort, as he did; we will endure the crisis, as he did.

Keep watching for him on all of the familiar shores of your life, he will be there.

Just before daybreak, Jesus stood on the beach: