A Good Shepherd, A Gracious Host (Easter 4B)

The Good Shepherd, Fr. John Giuliani

A Good Shepherd, A Gracious Host

Easter 4B
22 April 2018; 8:00 a.m. Said Mass and 10:00 a.m. Sung Mass

Homily Delivered by the Rev. Fr. Tony Hutchinson, SCP, Ph.D. 

at Trinity Episcopal Church

Ashland, Oregon
Acts 4:5-12; Psalm 23; 1 John 3:16-24; John 10:11-18 

God, take away our hearts of stone, and give us hearts of flesh.  Amen

Years ago, a friend of ours told us the story of how she grew up as a hearing child of two deaf parents. She was a gifted singer, and regularly sang in one of the state’s best high school choirs. Her parents attended every one of her performances. Once, other parents asked them why they came to all her concerts since they couldn’t hear her. “Oh,” they replied through an interpreter, “we don’t come to hear her sing. We come to see her sing.” This tells me a great deal about love.

Love is all about focusing on the beloved, and seeing to the beloved’s needs and desires, not on our own. 

You can see such a focus in a good host.  Elena’s sister Sally and brother-in-law Phillip live in Sisters Oregon.  They are devout Mormons, and scrupulous in following that faith’s dietary code, eschewing tobacco, alcohol, and coffee and tea.  When we first visited them we were afraid of perhaps being condemned because we had left that faith.  But we knew we were still loved when we found that they had made sure to buy a French coffee press and freshly ground Sisters Roasting Company coffee especially for us to greet each of those wonderful quiet and cold high desert mornings.  They themselves never partook, except for enjoying the aroma.   

Der Gute Hird, Sieger Koeder

Today is Good Shepherd Sunday.  In the Gospel, Jesus says he is the good shepherd, whose flock is larger than we think.   The beloved 23rd Psalm describes God not only as a loving shepherd, but also as a gracious host.  Whether shepherd or host, Jesus is focused on our needs and desires, not on his. 

The Good Shepherd is not an image of an accountant, keeping track on a ledger all the little lambs, who is in the flock and who is out.  It is not a powerful defender of property, some Chuck Norris, Sylvester Stallone he-man armed with incredibly deadly weaponry to fend off all attackers, wolves, and false sheep.

A Good Shepherd.  A Gracious Host.  We are creatures of words and images. We tell stories, draw comparisons. We think and feel in metaphor and simile. We define ourselves in large part by the stories we choose to tell and not to tell, and by the images we choose to describe our world.

The Good Shepherd, Joyce Miller

What images do you use to think of God?

A sovereign monarch, or a gentle parent?

A supernatural being standing apart from the phenomenal universe, or the ground in which we live, and move, and have our being?

An intimate, or some abstract power?

A protector of privilege or a vindicator of the oppressed?

A law-giver and law-enforcer? Or a healer?

Is God for you a redundancy, a useless story that really doesn’t tell us anything about the world as it actually is?

Or does your God have the face of Jesus?

The Bible teaches all sorts of things, often at odds with each other.  There are plenty of passages where God is seen in militant, nasty, and even petty terms.  Should you take these as the heart of the Bible, and understand that when it speaks of God as love that this applies only to a few chosen people?  Or should you take the God as love passages as central, and understand pictures of a mean and nasty God as flawed expressions of how we damaged people at times experience God? 

Jesus gave us a clear example in this.  There are plenty of passages in the Psalter that say “keep away from the wicked,” and “hate and avoid sinners.” But instead of these, Jesus comes upon obscure passages in the Psalms that give glimpses of a gentle and loving God, and uses these to interpret all the other harsher, nastier descriptions of God.   He reads in Psalm 50:  “I will not accept a bull from your house, or goats from your folds. For every wild animal of the forest is mine, the cattle on a thousand hills.  I know all the birds of the air, and all that moves in the field is mine (Psalm 50:9-11).  And he ends up saying things like, “God counts the sparrows, so how could he not care about you?” “God clothes the wild flowers and feeds the birds, how could he not care for you?”  “God has compassion and equanimity, sending the blessing of rain and sunshine on both good and bad alike.”  He ends up thinking that joy, good, and justice are contagious, not impurity and wickedness.  

Haomushi, Yu Jiade 

 

When you read the Bible, does it lead you to the loving and compassionate God that Jesus called Abba or Papa?  Does it convince you that violence is evil, and that justice and compassion are basic requirements for human life?  Or does it lead to you to a condemning, jealous, vicious, and violent deity, distant and inhuman?  In a very true way, the Bible, in all its diversity, serves as a mirror on our own hearts.   

Though our tradition has been generally to use the metaphors “father” and “son” to speak of God, we mustn’t take this literally.  There are a few passages where God is described in feminine terms: a hen gathering her chicks, a mother nursing her child.  Blessed Julian of Norwich, following Jesus’ example of taking a rare glimpse into the love of God and letting it form all other expression, takes these rare images and boldly writes in one of our beloved canticles:  “God chose to be our mother in all things…  Christ came in our poor flesh to share a mother's care.”

Trusting God is at the heart of it.  And this means accepting our fears and sufferings: embracing them, not being in denial about them or trying to minimize them.  Rabbi Harold Kushner, author of When Bad Things Happen to Good People, says the twenty-third Psalm is the answer to the question, “How do you live in a dangerous, unpredictable, frightening world?” Right after 9/11, many people asked him “How could God have let such a thing happen?” His answer was “God's promise was never that life would be fair. God's promise was, when it's your turn to confront the unfairness of life, no matter how hard it is, you'll be able to handle it, because He'll be on your side. He will give you the strength you need to find your way through. … “Though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil, for Thou art with me.” [does not mean], “I will fear no evil because evil only happens to people who deserve it.” [Rather,] “This is a scary, out-of-control world, but it doesn't scare me, because I know that God is on my side, not on the side of the . . . the terrible thing that [has] happened. And that's enough to give me the confidence.”

Trusting God, especially in times of woe, makes us realize that we all are in God’s hand. We realize the truth of the saying, “there but for the grace of God go I.”  And if we all are the people of God’s pasture and the sheep of God’s hand, then certainly we ourselves must reach out our hands to all.

 Christ as Good Shepherd, mosaic in Galla Placida Mausoleum, Ravenna (early 400s)

So Jesus in today’s Gospel says that the good shepherd cares not only for the sheep already safely fenced in his secure pasture.  This good shepherd has “other sheep, not of this fold.”  He cares for them too.   That means our conceptions of us and them—who’s Christian and who’s pagan, who’s orthodox and who’s a heretic, or who’s righteous and who’s wicked, who’s naughty and who’s nice—must go by the boards.  There are more people in Jesus’ care that we in our tribalism and self-interest can conceive of.   And Jesus loves them, and died for them too.

Some of you may have noticed that in the Eucharistic prayer I make a slight modification to the phrase in the Prayer Book, “this is my Blood of the New Covenant which was shed for you and for many,” I usually say “shed for you and for all.”  This alternate language is authorized by the Episcopal Church:  it is how the phrase shows up in Enriching our Worship.  The language here comes from the Greek of the Last Supper story in Mark’s Gospel, where Jesus says, “this is my blood of the covenant which is poured out for many” (Mark 14:24).   The use of Greek word polloi “many” here is the Gospel writer’s effort to represent an Aramaic word that Jesus would have used, that has the sense of “the many” without necessarily having the limitation of being only part of a whole.  The point is that Jesus died for a multitude, not for a few.  

Jesus’ death was for all of humanity, not just part of it.  Jesus may say, “the Son of Man came to give his life as a ransom for many” Mark 10:45; Matthew 20:28).   But 1 Timothy 2:6 explains that this multitude is not just a few chosen ones:  “Christ Jesus… gave himself as a ransom for all.”   And John 1:29: “Behold, the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world!”  So I use the word “all” in the prayer to avoid the misunderstanding that “many” here implies that others are excluded from Jesus’ grace.  Again, he is a good shepherd, and he has other sheep who are not in this flock.   

The surest way we can demonstrate our trust in this loving shepherd is by loving. The most direct way of showing our gratitude for our gracious host is by being gracious to others, especially those most unlike us.  Go to concerts even if we cannot hear them.  Give coffee even if we cannot drink it. 

May we all so partake of the feast our gracious host offers.  May we share the feast with others.  May we all let our shepherd gently lay us on his shoulder as he carries us home, and may we gently carry others. 

Amen. 

Good Shepherd, calendar image from catholictradition.org