Sunday, April 17, 2016

My Sheep Hear My Voice (Easter 4C)




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.

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: 

[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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