April 8, 2018 - Second Sunday of Easter - Worship at Cascade Church Portland - The Miraculous and Mundane

This week I attended worship at Cascade Church Portland on SE Woodstock.

The congregation starts by socializing with a coffee and fellowship time. Turned out this can be helpful for someone attending for the first time like me. I talked and was able to worship with someone who showed me the ropes and shared what worship at Cascade was like for her. Plenty of meaningful testimony about this church.

Worship started with a band - cello, guitar, drums and vocals - leading the praise music. The contemporary songs intentionally evoked strong emotions and lyrics that adeptly mixed personal perspective (I and my) and references to the larger community (we and our).

The worship structure basically moved from music to prayer then back again. Communion was included (although I understand this does not necessarily happen weekly). The communion balanced being both individual and part of a community, like the music did. We were invited to take bread individually and then saved the wine we received to share together after the communion music was complete. Structurally, for the congregation, the importance of the message seemed to be highlighted.

Leroy Barber presented the Sunday message. His passion and insights regarding the Gospel John 21:1-14 lesson were apparent in this Sunday's teaching. This was the last of Cascade's Word Made Flesh series which the church focused on during Lent. After making people aware of the speculation that this was likely addendum material in John, he grounded the importance of the Miraculous Catch of Fish in a number of ways. I will choose three:

• The context of the church year - Emphasizing this is a story about us and the temptations that come to us after the high holy days. He connected this scene to the days between Resurrection and Pentecost where there is a pull to go back to our old lives and trusting our own ideas of what is sensible, rather than acknowledging that our lives are transformed and waiting to know what Jesus wants us to do and where God wants us to be.
  
• The context of leadership.- Peter does not necessarily want to be the leader of the other disciples. He has made some mistakes so he doesn't necessarily feel worthy but they follow him to fish, just like they did before. This may be practical and reasoned but it is not the path that Jesus chooses for Peter and the disciples to serve the world.
  
• The context of other Gospel lessons - Particularly Luke 5:1-11 when Jesus first calls Peter and Matthew 4:18-22. The disciples have gone through a similar experience when Jesus first called them and yet there is something new. He also talks about this coming just before Jesus reinstates Peter with the repeating the question Do you love me? three times.
  

Leroy's comparisons to Luke 5:1-11 Jesus Calls His First Disciples were particularly helpful. The Miraculous Catch of Fish echoes the call of the first disciples with the instructive similarities and differences. When Jesus calls his first disciples they start at the shore doing a mundane task, When they follow the command of Jesus to fish once more the experience of excitement and the miraculous is palpable in the description:

When they had done so, they caught such a large number of fish that their nets began to break. So they signaled their partners in the other boat to come and help them, and they came and filled both boats so full that they began to sink.. 

Nets are breaking and the boats are sinking because of all the fish that have been caught. The disciples were astonished. None of this happen in the John's Miraculous Catch of Fish. They are now more experienced in answering the commands of Jesus and are changed from when they were initially called. The disciples found it hard to wait for what God would have them do and, instead, involved themselves in the more sensible and mundane work they were doing before they followed Jesus.

I also appreciated the emphasis on important details in John 21 that don't immediately catch the readers attention. A detail that Leroy stressed was their shared breakfast:

Then, as soon as they had come to land, they saw a fire of coals there, and fish laid on it, and bread. Jesus said to them, “Bring some of the fish which you have just caught.”

Leroy asked us who caught the fish Jesus had already laid on the coals. Those fish did not come from the disciples own effort, but rather from the Lord who cares for the disciples. Next Leroy pointed out that Jesus wants to combine the fish they had just caught with the fish the Lord had provided. There is a benevolence, gratitude in his gesture that stresses their efforts are important and are to be combined with what God has given.

I cherished how this stressed the importance of God's grace together with, and not apart from, our response to that grace.