Biblical Text: John 21:1-14
Full Draft of Sermon
The Epistle readings of the day during Easter this year are from Revelation and we are spending some time in bible class looking at those non-gospel lessons. In class this morning one of the questions that came up was something like “how do people come up with all these weird prophecy readings, you know like Russia and China are attacking on the 14th?” The answer I gave was that so many Christians just have real trouble discerning genre. Genre is something like history, poetry, detective stories, romance, or in the case of Revelation Apocalypse. Each genre has rules or expectations. Good interpretation will respect these rules. Most bad interpretation today first makes a hash of the genre.
Genre is important to the text for the Sermon today. When you understand John 21:1ff as an epilogue, things start to fall into place. This sermon is an entry point for reading the end of John’s gospel. As an epilogue it gives a poetic picture of how the preceding story has changed those remaining (i.e. the disciples). John 21 is John’s answer to how we do this church thing.
And the two big things covered are how the church depends lives and meets her savior in Word and Sacrament.
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