Sermons
April 26, 2026 (4th Sunday of Easter)
The Church Library
John 21:20-25
When I was little, our church had a library, with a librarian who was there on Sundays to help us find things and check books out.
These days a lot of churches are doing away with their libraries. In some cases, the church feels like its library just duplicates the work of the local public library. Libraries these days, much more so than when I was growing up, use a lot of technology, which many churches can’t really put in place, for a variety of reasons.
But I believe that, even if we give away the books in the rooms we had once set aside for that purpose, every church still has a library.
Many years ago I was at a Regional church gathering where the featured speaker was Amy Gopp, who was at the time the director of Week of Compassion. She based her message at the evening session on the last chapter of the Fourth Gospel. Her focus was on the earlier part of the chapter, what we looked at last week, in which Jesus asks Peter three times, “Do you love me?” and then commands him three times, “Feed my lambs…Tend my sheep…Feed my sheep.”
When she read the scripture passage, she asked us all—leaders within our churches, many of us pastors, all very familiar with the text—to listen to it as though for the first time. She invited us to pay attention to what images, words, or phrases jumped out at us in this fresh reading—just as we might do in a group doing a lectio divina prayer exercise, listening for God speaking to us through the text.
But what jumped out at me that night wasn’t the way Peter and the others decided, after all that had happened over the previous few days, to go back to fishing, as though trying to take refuge in their old lives. The disciples had seen the risen Jesus on Easter evening, and he had sent them out with a task to do—forgiving sins, just as he had been called the “Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world” by John the Baptist clear back in the first chapter of the Gospel—and he had given them new life by breathing the Holy Spirit onto them. But now they had decided to go fishing—not recreational fishing, as we mostly do, but the commercial fishing that had been their livelihood before they met Jesus.
That wasn’t what jumped out at me, nor was it how the fishermen recognized Jesus when, after a long night of catching nothing, he commanded them to throw the net over the other side of the boat, and they came back with a hundred and fifty-three fish. What jumped out at me wasn’t how good old, excited overgrown puppy-dog Peter jumped right into the water when he realized it was Jesus on the shore. It wasn’t how much the description of Jesus giving the disciples the breakfast of bread and fish he had been cooking sounds like Communion.
It wasn’t the conversation between Peter and Jesus that Amy ended up focusing her message on: “Do you love me? …Then feed my sheep.” And it had nothing to do with the stuff that came after that, about the Beloved Disciple and the rumor that arose saying that disciple would not die.
What jumped out at me was the very last two verses.
The commentaries say this last verse is a literary convention we often find int eh works of first-century writers. An example of this is from a Jewish rabbi who wrote at the same time as the author of the Fourth Gospel:
“If all heaven were a parchment, and all the trees produced pens, and all the waters were ink, they would not suffice to inscribe the wisdom I have received from my teachers; and yet from the wisdom of the wise I have enjoyed only so much as the water a fly which plunges into the sea can remove.”
So when the Fourth Evangelist says, “But there are also many other things that Jesus did; if every one of them were written down, I suppose that the world itself could not contain the books that would be written,” what he probably means is simply that he is only one of many who will write about Jesus and interpret all the stories and traditions about Jesus—a process that is still going on today, in books written by Bible scholars, pastors, and regular folks, in Bible studies at churches and in homes, in the daily prayer time of Christians who keep journals describing their own experience with Jesus.
But it set me to thinking in a little bit different direction. There is so much layering in the Fourth Gospel, so many meanings stacked on top of meanings in every single passage; what if this one is no different?
It’s a literary convention, something commonly included in writings that drew on lots of sources, making choices what to include and what to leave out; that’s fine.
And there’s humor in it: picture the world stacked and piled with books. Every church, instead of having one room designated as the library, has bookshelves lining the walls of every single room, including the sanctuary, kitchen, even the restrooms, all crammed with books; every home has shelves in every room, full to overflowing with books and more stacked on the floor and in boxes; books in every public and private building, little free libraries in front, all jammed with books, every person carrying a gigantic backpack full of books.
But here’s what came to my mind that August evening as I listened to Amy Gopp read the chapter.
There’s no ascension scene in John’s Gospel—actually, only Luke speaks of the ascension; all the rest of them leave the story with Jesus risen from the dead, and in every case other than the original ending of Mark, having appeared to the disciples. It’s almost as though the Gospels, with the exception of Luke (and Luke’s sequel, Acts), are saying Jesus, having been raised, is once again loose in the world, alive, still healing, still teaching, still loving.
“There are many other things that Jesus did…” says the Evangelist. He still changes lives, still heals, still reconciles us to God, still reveals God’s nature to us.
And every one of us, in a way, is an open book, telling the story of our own experience with Jesus, listening to his voice, learning from him, following him, acting as a part of his body still alive and working in the world. Each of us, in a way, is a volume in the Church library—a library that contains the stories about what Jesus has done and is still doing. It’s an immense library, which fills the whole world with the open books of every believer, and we are all part of it.
What does your book in the Church library say? How do you tell the story of how Jesus has been at work in your life, and how you’ve been part of his body continuing his work?