Sermons
April 19, 2026
“Gone Fishin’”
John 21:1-19
One time there was a King had three girls. He was getting very old, so he called his daughters one day and told them, says, “There’s a question I want answered and I want the truth.” Looked at the oldest, says, “How much do you love me?”
The oldest she spoke right up, says, “I love you more than all the gold and silver in the world.”
Then he asked the second one and she put-on even more than the first.
“Why,” she says, “I love you more than all the gold and silver and diamonds and fine jewelry there is in the world.” That’s what she had on her mind.
Now the youngest, she was his baby and his pet, and she really thought the world of her old father, so she made up her mind she’d try to tell the truth the best way she could. So when the old King turned to her and asked her that, she looked at him right straight, says, “I love you, father, like bread loves salt.”
The old man reared back, and threw up his head. “Is that all you can answer?”—Talked hateful.
“Yes,” she says. “I love you but I know that someday there’ll be a young man I’m bound to love better. I love you all my duty can allow me, and that’s the dyin’ truth.”
So he turned his back on her and the two oldest girls took the old King’s arms and off they went. He settled a lot of land on them and they married rich.
So begins the old folk tale called “Rush Cape”—which bears more than a passing resemblance to King Lear as well as Cinderella—only this folk tale comes from the southern United States.[1] A father decides to test his three daughters with a question quite similar to the question Jesus asks Peter in our Scripture reading for today: “Do you love me more than these?” Of course, this old king was asking for a completely different reason.
A lot of folks who’ve studied this last part of the Fourth Gospel believe the writer was making a point: by having Jesus ask Peter three times, “Do you love me?” and three times give him a job to do, “Feed my sheep…tend my sheep…feed my lambs,” he was indicating Peter’s full restoration by Jesus after having denied him three times. That’s an interesting point, and it says something to us about the grace of God: if someone like Peter could be forgiven and put back to work as a minister of the Gospel, then there’s hope for all of us, no matter what we may have done, not done, or thought about doing. There might even have been hope for Judas to be restored to full membership in Jesus’ closest circle of disciples, if he hadn’t resorted to a permanent solution to what we discover here might have been a temporary problem.[2]
But while that’s an interesting point, it isn’t what I want us to think about today.
Now I know there is often a tension in the life of faith between adoration and action, between worship and service. It’s what the story of Mary and Martha[3] is all about. And that story was not meant to say, “Jesus wants us all to be like Mary and not like Martha.” It wasn’t meant to say, “Mary loved Jesus more than Martha did.” I think both of them loved Jesus, and were trying to do the best they could at expressing their love for him.
And in this story, after asking Peter, “Do you love me?” Jesus tells him what he wants him to do to demonstrate that love. “Feed my lambs…Tend my sheep…Feed my sheep.” In other words, the best way to show how much you love me is by loving and caring for my people.
The problem is, we church folks don’t always get what it means to feed Jesus’ sheep.
In the movie Bound for Glory, which is based on Woody Guthrie’s life during the Depression, there’s a scene where he goes to a little church. Now he’s hungry, and hoped that someone there might give him a little work to do, so he could earn a meal. But the preacher comes out and makes some pious speech about “God helps those who help themselves,”[4] or some such, offers to pray for him, and then sends him on his way, still hungry.
I daresay that preacher may have missed the point. I suspect if someone had asked him what “Feed my lambs” means, he probably would have said, “Spiritual food”—Bible study, prayer, preaching, singing good hymns on Sunday morning.
Jesus ends this conversation with Peter by giving him another commandment. “Follow me.”
Where it shows up in the conversation, it seems on one level to mean, “Follow me even to martyrdom.” Jesus seems to foretell Peter’s death, and so he’s calling him to be prepared to die just as Jesus had died. And there is tradition that says Peter was eventually crucified.
But I think he’s asking for something more.
This chapter begins with Peter and the other disciples going fishing, and then when they come back in, Jesus fixes them breakfast. Then he tells Peter, “Feed my sheep.” And then he says, “Follow me.”
Is it out of line to think that he might have been saying—to Peter and to us— “Just as I have fed you when you were hungry, now go and demonstrate your love for me by feeding others when they are hungry”?
[1] This version of “Rush Cape” comes from American Folk Tales and Songs, compiled by Richard Chase (Dover Publications reprint, 1971). The story ends up with a twist; the two older daughters, unsurprisingly, love their father’s wealth more than they love him. “As bread loves salt” is something familiar to anyone who’s ever baked bread; bread without salt is rather inedible.
[2] Neither Mark nor John tell us about Judas’ suicide as Matthew and Luke/Acts do, and there’s no indication at the end of John whether or not Judas is still among the disciples.
[3] Luke 10:38-42
[4] …which, as we learned last summer, is not in the Bible.