My Sheep Hear My
Voice (Easter 4C)
Homily delivered at
Trinity Parish, Ashland (OR)
Sunday May 12, 2019
8:00 a.m. said, 10:00 a.m. sung Mass
The Very Rev. Anthony
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 decided to leave the denomination of my
youth and become an Episcopalian. Both Elena and I were raised
Mormon, and came from families that had been LDS for 5-6 generations. 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. That’s why I received a B.A. and M.A. in Classics
and Hebrew at BYU and then went to Catholic University in Washington DC for a
second M.A. and a Ph.D. in Biblical Studies.
As
I learned more, I saw more and more problems in LDS truth claims, especially
about the Bible and early Church history.
I saw the continuity between the apostles and the Catholicism of the
episcopate, and early on came to accept the Apostles’ and Nicene Creeds. As my knowledge and intellectual rigor
developed under the tutelage of Jesuits, Dominicans, Sulpicians, and
Franciscans, my spirituality focused.
Eventually, the tensions were just too great: legalism, anti-intellectualism,
wooden authority, and injustice for women, racial, and sexual 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.
So
I turned to the Episcopal Church. As
for many of you, when I first came into an Episcopal Church, I felt that I had
come home, found “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 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 weirdness
of Utah or what the early Prayer Book calls the “enormities of the bishop 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 LDS. But the tensions
grew, and less and less held us to 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: “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 Mass at St. Mary’s Episcopal in Foggy Bottom near the State
Department. There, I heard the voice of
Jesus in the cadences and reverence of the Book of Common Prayer.
When
I returned to the office, I talked to a colleague. Damaris had spent much of
her career in Southeast Asia, and was best described as a Buddhist. She always had a listening ear, and gave
support and comfort. So I expressed my
frustration and turmoil.
Damaris
rarely gave advice. But here, she broke from her regular pattern. She stared at me incredulously and said,
“Tony, 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 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 sheep hear [the
Shepherd’s] 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. …
I am the Good Shepherd.” (John 10: 2, 4, 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. It 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, in the context of a loving community and its sacraments, and of a
personal spirituality of having an open heart and mind in listening and
service, matters. In my own faith
journey, those Bible stories that I taught as a teenager gave me the start of a
faith that was my own. The Bible was so
clearly strange. It beckoned from afar, in
foreign images and cadences. The parables of Jesus, and the ways the different
stories about Jesus were told in the different Gospels—these helped me develop
a sense of who Jesus was, what his voice might sound like. Over the years, it grew to the point where I
can say “that’s not Jesus speaking” when something put onto his lips by another
does not ring true. Despite all the differences between the four Gospels, these
stories brings us a coherent, recognizable voice. 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.”
Rachel Held Evans, who died last week at the age of 37, wrote the following about her leaving conservative evangelical Christianity and becoming an Episcopalian. Note how she contrasts learning to hear the voice of Jesus and how many Christians get this process wrong:
“When I left church at age 29, full of doubt and disillusionment, I wasn’t looking for a better-produced Christianity. I was looking for a truer Christianity, a more authentic Christianity: I didn’t like how gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender people were being treated by my evangelical faith community. I had questions about science and faith, biblical interpretation and theology. I felt lonely in my doubts.
“What finally brought me back, after years of running away, wasn’t lattes or skinny jeans; it was the sacraments. Baptism, confession, Communion, preaching the Word, anointing the sick — you know, those strange rituals and traditions Christians have been practicing for the past 2,000 years. The sacraments are what make the church relevant, no matter the culture or era. They don’t need to be repackaged or rebranded; they just need to be practiced, offered and explained in the context of a loving, authentic and inclusive community.
“My search has led me to the Episcopal Church, where every week I find myself, at age 33, kneeling next to a gray-haired lady to my left and a gay couple to my right as I confess my sins and recite the Lord’s Prayer. No one’s trying to sell me anything. No one’s desperately trying to make the Gospel hip or relevant or cool. They’re just joining me in proclaiming the great mystery of the faith — that Christ has died, Christ has risen, and Christ will come again — which, in spite of my persistent doubts and knee-jerk cynicism, I still believe most days."
In the name of God, Amen
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