My Sheep Hear
My Voice (Easter 4C)
Homily
delivered at Trinity Parish, Ashland (OR)
Sunday April 17,
2016 8:00 a.m. said, 10:00 a.m. sung Holy Eucharist
The Rev. Fr.
Tony Hutchinson, SCP, Ph.D.
God, take away
our hearts of stone
and give us hearts of flesh. Amen.
and give us hearts of flesh. Amen.
I
remember very vividly the moment when I knew I needed to leave the denomination
of my youth and become an Episcopalian. I had been raised Mormon;
both Elena and I came from families with many generations in that faith. When I
was about 14, I was about ready to leave faith altogether, but an inspired
local leader asked me to teach Sunday School to 7 year olds: a course on Old
Testament stories. The next year, I
taught stories about Jesus from the Gospels.
These stories spoke deeply to me, and I had a spiritual experience at
the age of 16 that led me to go on a Mormon mission to France and marry in the
Mormon Temple. The truth be told,
though, my true passion was always these Bible stories; my interest in purely
Mormon scriptures and history was always derivative from this. That’s why I studied Classics and Hebrew at
BYU as an undergraduate and then went to Catholic University in Washington DC
for a Ph.D. in Biblical Studies.
As I
learned more, I found traditional LDS ways of understanding scripture and
history more problematic. I saw the
continuity within the early church between the apostles and the ante-Nicene fathers,
and came to accept the Apostles’ and Nicene Creeds while I was still at BYU. As my knowledge and intellectual rigor
developed and grew under the tutelage of Jesuits, Dominicans, Sulpicians, and
Franciscans, my spirituality focused as well. Eventually, the tensions were just too great: legalism,
suspicion of intellectuals, rigid authority, and injustice for women and
various minorities. But I also saw that Roman
Catholicism, as it began to draw back from the openness of Vatican II, suffered
from many of these same problems.
I
turned to the Episcopal Church. As for
many of you, when I first came to an Episcopal Church, I felt that I had come home. I recognized what the Gospel of John calls
“worship in spirit and in truth.” Here
was a part of Christ’s one, holy, catholic, and apostolic Church that tried to follow
both to the spirit and the letter of Christ’s words, was honest and reasonable,
and sought to be open to the spirit. For me, Anglicanism had the strengths of both
Mormonism and Roman Catholicism without what I saw as the craziness of Utah or what
the Prayer Book calls the “enormities of Rome.”
It
took several years. As one of my
Franciscan teachers said, “you do not change religions like you are changing a
shirt.” Sometimes when I was ready to
leave, Elena was not; and then when she was ready to leave, I was not. Years passed.
Life went on, with its challenges, joys, and pains, and the need for spiritual
support and grounding. I tried different
spiritual paths to help me even as I remained a practicing Mormon. But the tensions grew as time went on, and
finally, there was little to hold us in the church of our families and our
youth.
One
day, I read in Thomas Merton’s book Zen and the Birds of Appetite a
passage that said something like this: “Any God that needs to be kept alive
through constant effort of mind and acts of will is an idol." The
next day, I read in Merton's Meditation and Spiritual Direction,
"God does not expect us to be a robot army of victim souls.” With my
heart in turmoil, I attended a Wednesday noon Eucharist at St. Mary’s Foggy
Bottom near the State Department. I heard
scriptures preached that day that spoke to my heart and gave me the spiritual
sustenance that I had been missing.
When I
return to the office at State, I talked to a friend and office mate. Damaris had
spent much of her career in Southeast Asia, and was probably best described as
a Buddhist. She always had a great
listening ear, and gave support and comfort.
So I expressed my frustration and turmoil.
Damaris
rarely gave advice. She usually just
listened and asked questions to help me recognize what I was thinking or
feeling. But here, she broke from her
regular pattern. She stared at me
incredulously and said, “Tony, what’s the matter with you? Are you crazy? It’s obvious you are a very unhappy Mormon. Life is short. Why do you waste your time beating your head
against the wall? Accept the facts. You can’t go on like this just to please
family or friends! You find joy in the
Episcopal Church. If your Mormon family and friends love you, they’ll see that
and come to accept it. If not, don’t
worry about them.”
Within
a couple of weeks, Elena and I had joined the choir at our neighborhood
Episcopal Parish, and quit the choir at the Mormon Ward. We have never looked back. And we were able to retain our deepest
relationships. Later, the priest who
brought us into the Episcopal Church officiated when we took Christian vows of
marriage for our 30th anniversary.
Our Mormon friends and family came.
In
today’s Gospel, Jesus says, “My sheep hear my voice.” The phrase echoes lines from earlier in the
chapter: “The shepherd is the one who enters through
the gate of the sheepfold. … The sheep
hear his voice. He calls his own sheep by name and leads them out. … He goes ahead of them, and the sheep follow
him because they recognize his voice.
They will not follow a stranger, because they do not recognize his
voice. Rather they flee from him. … I am the Gate … I am the Good
Shepherd. …” (John 10: 2, 4, 9,
11).
How do we recognize the
voice of Jesus?
Modern theologians like
David Tracy, Karl Rahner, or Hans Urs von Balthasar say we come to faith and
recognize the voice of God by intuition. It is not an external process of hearing and
merely submitting or accepting. It is a
process that involves our memory, our desires, and hopes, and happens in
community. This is based on a central idea in the
theology of St. Thomas Aquinas: that true
knowledge of things or people involves sharing in their nature. Connaturality
is the technical term for this, the word behind the French word for intimate or
experiential knowledge, connaître.
It’s like recognizing a
taste, a flavor, or a scent. It cannot
be put into words,: a flavor might be
described as bitter, salty, or sweet, like chocolate, apples, or chicken. It helps a little, but does not sum up
recognition. A scent might have floral
overtones, spiciness, or musk. But
hearing these words does not give you the ability to recognize the smell.
“My sheep hear my
voice. They truly know it. They recognize it.”
Saying that you can tell
Jesus’ voice by whether it is in accordance with scripture misses the
point. The fact is, there are many
voices in scripture; some of them are not good.
They are included, I think, by way of example, to help us recognize what
is not the voice of Jesus.
But Scripture
matters. Here is where my story comes
in. It was those Bible stories that I
taught as a teenager that gave me the start of a faith that was my own. The Bible was so clearly strange. It beckoned from afar, and not always in a
warm or positive sense at all. But hearing
the parables of Jesus, and the ways the different stories about Jesus were told
in the different Gospels helped me have a sense of what Jesus might be like,
what his voice might be like, amid all the competing claims. Simply being intentional about reading the
stories, and study, and prayer, and reflection and discussion with others who
had faith in Jesus—this helped me get a sense of what Jesus sounds like. Over the years, it grew to the point where I
can say “that’s not Jesus speaking” when a claimed teaching of Jesus does not ring
true. Despite all the differences between the various Gospels, reading these
stories brings us a coherent voice that is recognizable. Today when I hear something, even something
very hard and challenging for me, that rings true to what I have heard of
Jesus’ voice up till now I can say, “that’s him.”
And in this there is
joy. When we hear Jesus’ voice, he
challenges us and we are changed, at least in our perceptions and desires. And that leads to gradual change in how we
act, in who we are. And this helps us
find who we truly are, what God intended when God made each of us. But it all
starts with reading the Gospels and prayer.
After our clergy conference this week, Bishop Michael wrote this:
We read a lot of scripture here at Trinity: for some of us it is in Daily Morning and Evening Prayer, for some of us, our Bible study group, for some of us, private devotions. But we need to do better. In the coming months, we will be looking for ways to better connect all of us to these stories.
After our clergy conference this week, Bishop Michael wrote this:
[The Rev. Scott A. Gunn, director of the Forward Movement and presenter at our conference,] focused … on getting people to simply read the bible… He suggested several potential ways to invite Episcopal congregations to take up the challenge of learning the biblical narrative and gave a few examples of ways he had engaged congregations in the past to do this work. I know that if the clergy and congregational leaders take up this challenge, it will be life giving. The intentional reading of Holy Scripture for personal growth and the daily practice of prayer are keys to personal and congregational vitality. I hope you are inspired to consider how you might move closer to God through these practices.
We read a lot of scripture here at Trinity: for some of us it is in Daily Morning and Evening Prayer, for some of us, our Bible study group, for some of us, private devotions. But we need to do better. In the coming months, we will be looking for ways to better connect all of us to these stories.
In the name of God, Amen
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