My Sheep Hear My Voice (Easter 4C)

 

My Sheep Hear My Voice (Easter 4C)

Homily delivered at the Mission Church of the Holy Spirit

Sutherlin, Oregon

Sunday May 11, 2025 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 had been raised Mormon, from a famiy 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, my wife Elena, God rest her soul, 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, including a month as a Zen Buddhist monk, and a stint as a cantor for a whole Holy Week at the Episcopal cathedral in Taipei  The tensions with the church of my youth continued to grow, and less and less held us to it, especially as we returned for a states-side assignment in Washington DC. 

 

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 n Chevy Chase Maryland, and quit the choir at the Mormon Ward.  And we 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 30^th anniversary.  Our Mormon friends and family came, as they did years later at Elena’s Episcopal funeral.  Many of them came to my wedding to Will at St. Mark’s Medford several years after that.       

 

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.”

 

And in this there is joy.  And, as Teillard de Chardin wrote, “Joy is the infallible sign of the presence of God.” 

 

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 understand who we truly are.  It all starts with reading the Gospels, prayer, and coming to Church to partake of the sacraments.   

Rachel Held Evans, who in died in 2019 at the age of 37, was a great voice for progressive Christianity.  She 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."

 

Dear siblings in Christ:  Jesus says, “My sheep hear my voice.” We recognize his voice by the joy it gives us, even as it challenges us and changes us.  And the joy is contagious and brings us into closer relationship with others.  

 

Thanks be to God.   Amen

Good is All We Got! (Easter 3C)

 

“Good is All We Got”
Easter 3C
4 May 2025 9:00 a.m. Sung Eucharist

The Rev. Dr. Anthony Hutchinson, homilist

Parish Church of St. Luke, Grants Pass (Oregon)

Acts 9:1-6, (7-20) ; Psalm 30; Revelation 5:11-14; John 21:1-19

Dear God, let us not accept that judgment, that this is all we are. 

Enlighten our minds; inflame our hearts

with the desire to change—with the hope and faith that we all can change.

Take away our hearts of stone and give us hearts of flesh. Amen.

(Dorothy Day)

 

The story is told of an early Zen Buddhist master in China:  seeking enlightenment, he fled to solitude in the mountains, where he sat in silence for years, meditating, cultivating his Buddha nature, and waiting for the moment of wu, the moment of emptying one’s mind and achieving bliss, what the Japanese would call satori.   After years of disappointment, he finally decides he has had enough and gives up.   He comes back down into society, into the local village.   It is a market day, a raucous and lively scene of people haggling over prices, and trying to get the advantage of each other.  A butcher (not a particularly praiseworthy figure in Buddhist ethical systems) is having problems keeping up with the demands of the crowd.  One woman calls out “the trotters, I want the trotters!’  Another, “the pork loin for me.”  Another, “the ribs, the ribs!”  The monk notices that one woman stands silent, watching the butcher intently as he occasionally discreetly palms bits of less attractive flesh into the masses he weighs and passes to the consumers. 

 

Suddenly she calls out, “The good bits.  I want the good bits.” 

 

The crowd falls silent at the implied accusation the woman has rudely made:  he is selling bad stuff as if it were good. 

 

The butcher, without missing a beat, chimes up, with an affable shrug to his accuser as if she were an old friend, “Hey lady, all we got here is good.” 

 

The crowd, including the accuser, breaks into laughter.  The monk laughs heartily with them all.  And at that moment, the story says, the monk finds enlightenment. 

 

The point of the story is this: the monk finds a sudden release of control in laughter, embracing the absurd idea that, indeed, what we see before us is all good, no matter how bad—that this is as good as it gets—and that’s okay.  And this is how in an instant he reaches Nirvana.

 

“Is this as good as it gets?”  Usually for us in the West, the question is a complaint, an expression of dissatisfaction.  The idea is that things ought to be better than this, and we ought to be enjoying things more than we are.  Not accepting how things are, not being reconciled to the status quo, is here understood as a necessary prelude to needed change, reform, or improvement. 

 

Many of the spiritualities of Asia believe that acceptance is a core character trait, something you need for serenity and peace in yourself and in society.  

 

Some Western wags criticize the Asian values that cultivate acceptance and detachment by pointing to the endemic poverty, injustice, corruption, and abuse of political authority in many of those societies and saying a culture needs some dissatisfaction, because “when it comes to societies, you get as much bad as you are willing to accept.” 

 

But many Western spiritualties also teach that we must cultivate acceptance to have serenity and peace.  Reinhold Niebuhr, the great progressive American Protestant theologian of the mid-20^th century, wrote the original prayer that sought to reconcile these differences, which in shortened form has become a classic in 12-step recovery spirituality: “God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, Courage to change the things I can, and the Wisdom to know the difference.” 

 

Today’s scripture readings all touch on acceptance and desire for change in some way, and do so with rich, rich images.  They all in some way reflect on the point made by St. Paul again and again in his letters:  the death and resurrection of Jesus changes everything in the world, and should change what we expect out of life.   This is because, with Christ raised from the dead, “All we got is good!” The feelings we have absent a risen Christ that life is hopeless and pointless, that we have to struggle and strive, and do hard, even horrible things to please God, well, that’s just wrong! 

In the Acts passage, we hear Jesus’ question, “Why do you persecute me?” Saul’s reply, “and who, sir, are you?” receives the shocking and surprising answer that turns Saul’s world upside down, “”I am Jesus of Nazareth whom you persecute.”  With Saul, we hear the call to retire in our blindness to a “Street Called Straight” where new friends can direct us, help heal us, and clue us into just how the world has so deeply changed.   

The Gospel story, an add-on after the end of John’s Gospel, tells of Peter fleeing the scene after Jesus’ death and reappearance.   “I’m going fishing,” he says, apparently seeking as we all do at times refuge from things we don’t want to think or feel by losing ourselves in habit and the details of work.  He wants to get away from the shame of encountering the man he has betrayed three times but now has come back from the dead in a surprising and unprecedented form.  Jesus seeks him out all the same. 

The resurrected Jesus’ question, “Peter, do you love me?” repeated three times, seems to “undo” the threefold denial of Jesus by Peter during the Passion story.  Jesus makes Peter his disciple again by giving him as many chances to reaffirm his love and friendship as he had denied it.

Most translations of the story miss a major element in the drama of how it is told in Greek.  Jesus, pointing to the abandoned fishing tackle, asks, “Peter, do you love me more than these things?”  But Peter replies with another verb for love, a word that is primarily about the affection of friendship rather than the usual word for love itself that Jesus has used.  “Of course I like you.”  Jesus replies: “Then feed my sheep.”  Jesus asks a second time, “Peter, do you love me?” Again, Peter replies, “I like you, Jesus.”  Jesus says again, “Then tend my sheep.”  And then, as if Jesus has gotten tired of Peter misunderstanding Jesus’ question and the nature of their relationship, Jesus softens his question, adopting Peter’s verb for love: “Well then, Peter, do you like me?”  Peter:  “I really do like you,” is the reply.  And again, “Feed my sheep.” 

Jesus here accepts Peter for who he is and where he is.  Even if Peter’s love is not quite what Jesus has in mind, it is enough.  And this acceptance is what brings Peter back into the circle of love and fellowship, undoing the harm of his betrayal and denial. 

Are there ways that we, like Saul, persecute Jesus?  Do we scapegoat others, label them as insufficient, decline to seriously take to heart what they are saying, but rather transfer our hurts, guilts and fears onto them and try to make ourselves feel better about ourselves by labeling them, isolating them, gossiping about them, working them harm, and or outright persecuting them?  And do we do this, like Saul, for what we think as the best of reasons, the noblest of causes? 

Are there ways that we, like Peter, deny even knowing Jesus even as we proclaim that we will never forsake him?  Do we say we believe in Jesus, but then not act as if he lives and reigns?  Have we failed to live up to the values we profess: openness, hospitality, diversity, welcome, and reverence”?  Are we negligent in prayer and worship, and fail to commend the faith that is in us?  Are we deaf to Christ’s call to serve others as Christ served us?  Have we instead sought to comfort ourselves and reduce or cloak our guilt by avoiding Jesus, burying ourselves in tasks, returning to routine and habit, and not letting ourselves be challenged and changed by the new situations and people that God has put in our lives? 

Sisters and brothers here at St. Luke’s: we all fall short of the mark, and in some ways we are all Saul or Peter.  But know that it is okay.  Jesus loves us regardless.  He accepts us and the way we are.  He expects us to accept our weakness and brokenness, the way we are, even as he accepts this.  But he also promises to heal us and change us.  He regularly seeks us out and lets us know in startling and shocking ways, like he let Saul know, how we have gotten things wrong.  And then he calls us to go to our sisters and brothers who live on a Street Called Straight so they can help us heal and be better.

When Jesus asks us, “do you love me,” and we reply “I like you,” he keeps asking us the question.  When we persist in a multitude of ways to say “love is maybe way too much for me right now, how about ‘like’,” he keeps at it, but ultimately says, “Like is good enough for now, my friend. Love will come tomorrow.” 

Let me conclude with the words of the full original prayer of Reinhold Niebuhr for Serenity, Courage, and Wisdom: 

God, give us grace to accept with serenity
the things that cannot be changed,
Courage to change the things
which should be changed,
and the Wisdom to distinguish
the one from the other.

Living one day at a time,
Enjoying one moment at a time,
Accepting hardship as a pathway to peace,
Taking, as Jesus did,
This sinful world as it is,
Not as I would have it,
Trusting that You will make all things right,
If I surrender to Your will,
So that I may be reasonably happy in this life,
And supremely happy with You forever in the next.  Amen.