My Sheep Hear My Voice (Easter 4C)

 

My Sheep Hear My Voice (Easter 4C)

Homily delivered at St. Mark’s Parish Church, Medford (OR)

Sunday May 8, 2022 8:00 a.m. and 10:00 a.m. sung Mass

The Rev. Anthony Hutchinson, SCP, Ph.D.

 

Acts 9:36-43; Revelation 7:9-17; John 10:22-30; Psalm 23

 

God, take away our hearts of stone
 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.   I was raised Mormon, from a family that had been LDS for 5 generations. When I was about 14, I was about ready to leave faith—any 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 gave me faith.  Within a few years, it 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 Languages and Literature. 

 

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 historic episcopate, and early on came to accept the Apostles’ and Nicene Creeds.  As my knowledge and intellectual rigor developed under the tutelage of Jesuits, my spirituality focused.  Eventually, the tensions were just too great: legalism, anti-intellectualism, wooden structures of authority, and injustice directed at women, and 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 the beauty of holiness, “worship in spirit and in truth.”  Here was a part of Christ’s one, holy, catholic, and apostolic Church that tried to follow the spirit of Christ’s words, and be honest and reasonable while doing so.   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 Rome.” 

 

It took several years.  My wife Elena and I didn’t want to 'change horses midstream' separately, and it took a while before we were both ready at the same time.  As one of my teachers said, “you do not change religions like you are changing a shirt.”   Years passed.  Life went on, with its challenges, joys, and pains, and the need for spiritual support and grounding.  We tried different spiritual paths to help us even as we remained LDS. But the tensions grew, and less and less held us to the church of 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 where I was working.  At that noon eucharist, 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.”  

 

Within a couple of weeks, we had joined the choir at our neighborhood Episcopal Parish, and quit the choir at our Mormon Ward.  We never looked back.   We were able to retain our deepest relationships.  Later, the priest who brought my wife and me into the Episcopal Church officiated when we took Christian vows of marriage for the first time on our 30^th 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, in what they are born with.  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. 

 

Connaturality, recognition of something as our own, tells us as much about ourselves as it does the things we recognize. Remember that Simpsons’ episode where Bart invites his neighborhood friends to watch an age inappropriate television channel he has found?  Little Milhouse, wide eyes fixed on the screen, says, “Gross!”  The boy beside him, also fixated, adds, “Yet strangely compelling!”  What we find compelling is a reflection of who we are. 

 

Whose voice resonates for each of us?  Is it Jesus’ voice?  Or do we show our brokenness by following the strangely compelling voice of those who would make us suspicious, hateful, and fearful?  Of those who would deprive others of rights and privileges we ourselves would use if we needed?   Which voices we find attractive says more about us than about what the voices are saying.  Odysseus found the sirens’ songs irresistibly attractive, but he had to restrain himself from them, because they led to death.  

 

“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 foreign, yet also strangely compelling.   It beckoned from afar, in strange 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 bring 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 in response, “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 change in how we act, in who we are.  And this helps us understand and become who we truly are.  It all starts with reading the Gospels, prayer, and coming to Church to partake of the sacraments.   

 

"My sheep hear my voice." 

 

Thanks be to God.   Amen.