“Wake Up! It’s Time for Breakfast!”
Suggested scripture reading: John 21:1-24
Think back to when you were a kid.
Think about how your day started.
Did your mom yell up the stairs, “Wake up! Time to get up!”
How many times did she have to call you?
What was your favorite breakfast?
In my house, my mom and dad both worked outside the home,
and from the time I was very young I was on my own for breakfast.
Most often it was Cheerios and a comic book.
Except for weekends.
On Saturdays and Sundays, Dad made breakfast.
He got up early and cooked bacon and eggs and toast and juice,
and when it was nearly ready, he’d call us—
though the aroma of the bacon had already awakened us—
and my mom and sister and I would come in our bathrobes
and Dad would serve us his delicious breakfast.
Jesus knew how to make breakfast, too.
John tells us that in a wonderful story found in John 21.
This is one of the post-resurrection appearances.
The disciples are out fishing and when they come to shore,
there is Jesus on the beach, frying fish.
There’s something about eating fresh fish in the crisp morning air,
fish cooked by a man who had just been murdered by the state,
that would make you wake up.
Someone once said that Jesus was sent into the world with just one message:
Wake up!
Buddha, which like Christ is not a name but a title, means “the awakened one.”
Perhaps that is part of what resurrection is about.
It is about waking up.
The Risen Christ is the Holy Alarm Clock who says wake up!
What you thought was just breakfast is a holy encounter.
The Holy One that you thought was far away,
confined to the past (history)
and the future (heaven)
is present in the present,
right now,
in this moment,
in this place.
The Sacred is in our midst.
When I was a kid, one thing that made those ordinary weekday breakfasts special was the hope that maybe I’d be the one to find the prize in the cereal box.
I remember that once out of a Cheerios box
I got a deed to one square inch of land in Alaskan gold country. I felt rich!
What treasures are possible!
It is vital not to sleep through breakfast,
or treasures,
or life.
But most of us are pretty sleepy—
good intentions, of course,
but always hitting the snooze button.
Thornton Wilder’s play Our Town has a powerful breakfast scene
that is about holy moments and waking up.
Emily Webb has recently died at the age of 26.
Against the advice of the older dead, she chooses to go back for one day.
It’s allowed, but if you want to relive your life,
you have to watch yourself doing it.
That’s the condition laid down by the Stage Manager
who runs things on heaven and on earth.
So Emily chooses to return on the morning of her 12th birthday.
“Good morning, Mama,” says 12-year old Emily.
“Well now, my dear, “ says her mother, “very happy birthday to my girl,
and many happy returns.
There are some surprises waiting for you on the kitchen table.
But birthday or no birthday,
I want you to eat your breakfast good and slow;
I want you to grow up and be a good, strong girl.”
Mama is busy at the stove and not even looking at Emily as they talk.
The 26-year old Emily cries out, only her mother can’t hear her,
“Oh, Mama! I married George Gibbs, Mama.
Well, he’s dead , too.
His appendix burst on a camping trip in North Conway.
We just felt terrible about it,
don’t you remember?
But just for a moment now, we are all together.
Mama, just for a moment we are happy.
Let’s look at one another.”
But Mama goes on with her routine, not paying attention,
just being busy and letting the moments pass,
and finally Emily says to the Stage Manager,
“I can’t go on. It goes too fast. We don’t have time to look at one another.”
She breaks down.
“I didn’t realize. So all that was going on and we never noticed.
Take me back up the hill to my grave.
But first, wait, one more look.
Goodbye, world.
Goodbye, Grover’s Corners, Mama and Papa.
Goodbye to clocks ticking, Mama’s sunflowers, food and coffee
and new ironed dresses and hot baths and sleeping and waking up.
Oh, Earth, you are too wonderful for anybody to realize you!”
She looks toward the Stage Manager and asks abruptly through her tears,
“Do any human beings ever realize life while they live it, every, every minute?”
The Stage Manager replies, “No. The saints and poets, maybe; they do, some.”
“So that was all going on,” Emily said, “and we never noticed.”
We have just celebrated the resurrection,
and part of what that is about is that the Kingdom of God is now,
the Risen Christ is here,
our God is a living God.
We don’t have to go somewhere to know the presence of God,
to be embraced by the Holy.
We just have to wake up.
In my family, when we think of breakfast, we think of Christmas morning.
Our traditional Christmas breakfast of creamed eggs on toast and bacon or sausage and grape juice
has been the tradition for at least six generations.
We all cook it together,
and the presents wait until we’ve finished.
It’s a holy moment for us,
and the tradition and the anticipation and the excitement make us wake up,
make us realize the preciousness of one another.
It’s hard to learn to wake up to the beauty and the holiness and the giftedness,
the grace of life.
At least it is hard for me some days.
We get so busy staring into the empty tombs of our lives
that we fail to see that the Risen Christ is in the garden.
There was a man who suffered every kind of misfortune.
His family rejected him.
His church called him names.
His lover died.
He lost his job, then his house.
He ran out of money before he ran out of bills.
Nevertheless, through it all he remained quietly at peace,
always returning good for evil.
Eventually, he died.
Word of his imminent arrival at heaven’s gate caused the angels to gather.
Even God came to the gate to greet him.
When he arrived and stood humbly,
the Prosecuting Angel arose and for the first time in the memory of Heaven, said
“There are no charges.”
God said to the new arrival,
“Rarely do we see a life like yours. Thank you. You have earned your reward.
You may have anything you want in Heaven or on earth.
Ask, and it shall be given to you.”
The man looked up, smiled and said,
“It I could start every day with a hot buttered roll….”
And God and all the angels of Heaven wept. 1
It’s not just the modesty of the request.
That man was awake. He knew what was precious.
He recognized the Sacred in his midst, the giftedness of life,
a giftedness that did not depend on whether things were going his way.
The glory of God is everywhere:
in the sunshine,
in hot buttered rolls
and green breaking through the earth at last,
in fighting and making up,
in finding treasures in cereal boxes,
in watching baby lambs on the hillside
and in the touch of a child’s soft cheek,
in the feel of your lover’s arms,
in sipping coffee and growing up,
in being forgiven
and in laughter
and daffodills.
Some think that Jesus is about sin and rules and behavior.
I don’t.
I think he was trying to get us to see life in a different way,
to wake up to what surrounds us,
to deepen our awareness,
to live consciously instead of unconsciously.
It’s in that state that we have the greatest capacity to love, to forgive, to serve.
Many of our spiritual practices are about helping us to live with more awareness.
because it is so easy for us to miss the Risen Christ,
the cereal box treasures, the grace that surrounds us.
We’re like the disciples who cry because the Teacher is dead,
while the Teacher is on the beach cooking their breakfast .
We talk of community, disappointed that ours is imperfect.
We dream of a better one somewhere else.
Community is here, now. This is it.
We are sure the next lover in line will be the one to love us as we deserve.
The love we yearn for is here, now. It’s this one.
We’re on a perpetual hunt for happiness.
We think we can only be happy when everything is finally the way we want it.
In fact, happiness does not depend on circumstances. It is a choice.
Salvation is not something we earn after we die.
It is something we choose to participate in.
Resurrection is not something we wait for.
It’s something we wake up to…or don’t.
When we talk, in the language of faith, about heaven,
we are not talking about a place elsewhere, later.
We are talking about the present moment.
That is eternity: the Eternal Now.
And we live in the Kingdom of Heaven when we are fully awake,
when we practice the present moment mindfulness,
experiencing abundant life.
The Resurrected Christ is an alarm clock in our routine,
our frantic busyness, our sleepiness.
He wakes us up so we don’t miss breakfast.
So we don’t miss life.
So we don’t miss the Holy One who dwells among us.
©2009 Janice Jean Springer
This story is told by William Sloan Coffin at Riverside Church, May, 1987.
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