The 4th Sunday of Easter
Scripture Readings:
Hebrew Scriptures – Ezekiel 34: 11-161
11For thus says the Lord GOD: I myself will search for my sheep, and will seek them out. 12As shepherds seek out their flocks when they are among their scattered sheep, so I will seek out my sheep. I will rescue them from all the places to which they have been scattered on a day of clouds and thick darkness. 13I will bring them out from the peoples and gather them from the countries, and will bring them into their own land; and I will feed them on the mountains of Israel, by the watercourses, and in all the inhabited parts of the land. 14I will feed them with good pasture, and the mountain heights of Israel shall be their pasture; there they shall lie down in good grazing land, and they shall feed on rich pasture on the mountains of Israel. 15I myself will be the shepherd of my sheep, and I will make them lie down, says the Lord GOD. 16I will seek the lost, and I will bring back the strayed, and I will bind up the injured, and I will strengthen the weak, but the fat and the strong I will destroy. I will feed them with justice.
Gospel – John 10: 22-302
22At that time the festival of the Dedication took place in Jerusalem. It was winter, 23and Jesus was walking in the temple, in the portico of Solomon. 24So the Jews gathered around him and said to him, “How long will you keep us in suspense? If you are the Messiah, tell us plainly.” 25Jesus answered, “I have told you, and you do not believe. The works that I do in my Father’s name testify to me; 26but you do not believe, because you do not belong to my sheep. 27My sheep hear my voice. I know them, and they follow me. 28I give them eternal life, and they will never perish. No one will snatch them out of my hand. 29What my Father has given me is greater than all else, and no one can snatch it out of the Father’s hand. 30The Father and I are one.”
“The Fire May Have Diminished,
but We’re Still Spending the Power!”
Of all the ancient texts the Gospel According to John has done the most to present Jesus as “the good shepherd.” But it also proclaims, without a doubt, that he is the long-awaited messiah. For us 21st century Christians that juxtaposition isn’t as shocking as it must have been for those 1st century followers of Jesus. Before him and even long after him, those who claimed to be the messiah more commonly put themselves forward as militaristic saviors. They were “modern-day Joshuas” who would restore the sovereignty of God to the land of Israel at the head of an advancing army. This is what’s behind that question put to Jesus at the beginning of today’s gospel reading: “How long will you keep us in suspense? If you are the messiah, tell us plainly.”3 Underneath this question lay all of the concerns of a subjugated people. “Tell us what you’re going to do! How are you going to get rid of the Romans for us?” His answer is that he’s the kind of messiah who tends and shepherds his flock. What’s more he claims an extraordinary unity with God. So either he’s uttering blasphemy for making himself an equal to God or he’s telling the truth. If God lives among you in person, why have a temple? It’s not surprising that right after this incident John reports that some of the religious leaders around Jesus began looking for stones to stone him to death.
The thing is, John’s gospel is saying, God loves us first. In the very ongoing process of creation we are immensely and immeasurably blessed – amazing: no hoops, no strings, no catch, just a joyous and stupendous outpouring of creative energy. And it just keeps coming. There’s nothing we can do about it. Well, we can give some of it back…or not, which is such a waste. The way that we do give it back, mostly, is by passing it on. As far as the church is concerned – as far as our world is concerned – we must ask ourselves: are we here simply to be consumers of it all, or are we here for a greater purpose…something like communion?
That very word, “communion,” speaks of the union that we all hold in common as creatures of the stars. When any one of us is diminished we are all diminished. That reminds me of a truly remarkable young woman, a brilliant photographer, who died of a brain tumor some years ago. Her name was Mev Puleo. She took photographs of ordinary people, poor people, suffering people – people like Salome Costa – and complemented her pictures with interviews of her subjects. Salome longed to study theology in Brazil and, curiously enough, wanted to become a priest. But she not only struggled with tuberculosis, she had only one lung. Mev asked her once, “If you could say anything to privileged people, what would you say to them?” Salome responded:
I think you have to be committed to the poorest class, those who don’t even have the opportunity to study. You should be open to help the people who are most poor – who are searching for the right to life. Find those people who don’t even have a voice! Be the voice for the voiceless! 4
She went on to say to her photographer/interviewer:
If you look at the Gospel, you’ll discover that God is always on the side of the smallest. So we never feel alone. We’re always in the presence of God. I am a home of God! God is present in each of us! God comes to us, and uses us to serve others. Yes, we must allow God to work through us to serve others. I pray that we always feel this presence of God in our lives.5
Once you and I become willing to hear our Inner Shepherd we’ll never turn back again. As we change, our understanding of family and of community expands – much like the universe is continuing to expand as an evolving dispersion of creative energy. We’re always able, then, to return to green pastures and still waters as we call up our Inner Shepherd as often as we need to. Navigating the expanse of our lives becomes a joyful adventure and we’re no longer separated from God.
That’s why I’ve come to find such an astonishing correlation between the stories of the Bible and the scientific discoveries of the new cosmology – represented by that photograph on our bulletin cover of the remnants of a supernova taken from the Hubble telescope.6 As that quote from Brian Swimme in our bulletin this morning points out:
Human generosity is possible only because at the center of the solar system a magnificent stellar generosity pours forth free energy day and night without stop and without complaint and without the slightest hesitation. This is the way of the universe. This is the way of life. And this is the way in which each of us joins this cosmological lineage when we accept the Sun’s gift of energy and transform it into creative action that will enable the community to flourish.7
Swimme indicated that his aim wasn’t just to hand over such astounding cosmological information that he’d learned as a scientist as if he were simply handing over his notes from a research project. He says, in fact:
My aim is to present the birthplace of the universe in a way that invites you to participate in an inner transformation. … We study the story primarily in order to live the story. … We are six billion humans, and we need to learn to live with one another and with all the other ten million species of life in a mutually enhancing way.8
One of the truly wondrous things about the sun – that nearest star of ours that warms our faces and nurtures into being new life every springtime – is that its light is reflected in so many, many things, even at night. And so gazing up at the moon on a cloudless night we can know that the sun is still shining. It’s the same way that certainty and uncertainty, faith and doubt, can coexist. It’s enough just to be open to it, to ask it in. It’s led one poet to put it this way:
I want to write about faith
about the way the moon rises over cold snow
night after night,
faithful even as it fades from fullness,
….
But I have no faith myself
I refuse it the smallest entry.
Let this then, my small poem…
like a new moon, slender and barely open,
be the first prayer that opens me to faith.9
Annie Dillard spoke of this same kind of light – light that exists at the center of creation – and she was transformed by it. This is the way that she remembers it:
When her doctor took her bandages off and led her into the garden, the girl who was no longer blind saw “the tree with…lights in it.” It was for this tree I search through the peach orchards of summer, in the forest of fall and down winter and spring for years. Then one day I was walking along Tinker Creek thinking of nothing at all and I saw the tree with the lights in it. I saw the backyard cedar where the mourning doves roost charged and transfigured, each cell buzzing with flame. I stood on the grass with the lights in it, grass that was wholly fire, utterly focused and utterly dreamed. It was less like seeing than like being for the first time seen, knocked breathless by a powerful glance. The flood of fire abated, but I’m still spending the power.10
In the midst of the darkness of death and destruction that happened two weeks ago at Virginia Tech, in the midst of the darkness of death and destruction that was the Shoah – the Holocaust – leading to the extermination of six million human beings,11 in the midst of the darkness of death and destruction that haunts the battlefields of war, in the midst of all such darkness that threatens to obliterate our hope, Jesus appears, filled with the Holy Spirit. It is the same Spirit that exploded into being at the very moment of creation and that still makes this life a valley of light.
* * *
1 The thirty-fourth chapter of Ezekiel sets out a clear example of the biblical imagery of the shepherd. When he used this image – of both good and bad shepherds – he had political leaders in mind, though, not religious ones. A grazing image would’ve been as familiar to his hearers as teachers or politicians are to us. Any leader who’s misused and scattered their people are denounced as having preyed on their flock.
Apparently we are not invincible after all – beyond need, with supreme physical, intellectual, or spiritual strength. We are none of these things. Before we attempt to tell others about our understanding of ultimate truth, we need to accept the truth of our own vulnerability, our own need for guidance, communion…community. To become a lamb, then (in the biblical sense) is to become not only free, but honest, direct, mortal – yes – but whole and real at last. We are grazers, then, and children of God.
2 Today’s gospel reading is the one that follows the “good shepherd” passages in John. The setting is in the Jerusalem temple at the feast of the Dedication (Hanukkah). As the Christ, Jesus of Nazareth was understood by the early church to replace these feasts by embodying the full depth of their meaning. The vision is of God’s word and reassurance to a church doubting its own survival in the face of terrible persecution. What they understood was that the ultimate reward for all faithful followers is knowing that the one whose voice they recognize, listen to, and follow, the one who shed his blood for them, will prove in the end still to be the shepherd who leads them to the water of life.
3 John 10: 24.
4 Mev Puleo, The Struggle Is One: Voices and Visions of Liberation (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1994), p. 29.
5 Ibid.
6 Browse the website at http://hubblesite.org/gallery/ -- the views are stunning!
7 Brian Swimme, The Hidden Heart of the Cosmos (Orbis Books: Maryknoll, New York, 1996), p. 44.
8 Ibid, pp. 25-26.
9 David Whyte, The Heart Aroused: Poetry and the Preservation of the Soul in Corporate America (New York: Doubleday & Co., 1994), p. 287.
10 Annie Dillard, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek (Toronto: Bantam Books, 1974), p. 35.
11 The “Holocaust” ought to be, more appropriately, referred to as Yom ha-Shoah – a day of senseless destruction (not unlike what happened in microcosm on the campus of Virginia Tech almost two weeks ago – Monday, April 16). Shoah is a Hebrew word for “calamity” or a “whirlwind of complete destruction.” The word “holocaust,” on the other hand, literally means a “completely burnt offering” (from the Greek holokauston) and could imply that that event was a sacrifice ordained by God. It wasn’t. It was a systematic, bureaucratic annihilation of six million Jews by the Nazi regime and its collaborators, as an act of state, during World War II.
In 1933 approximately nine million Jews lived in the 21 countries of Europe that would be occupied by Germany during the war. By 1945 two out of every three European Jews had been killed. Although Jews were the primary victims, up to one half million Gypsies and at least 250,000 mentally or physically disabled persons were also victims of genocide. As Nazi tyranny spread across Europe from 1933 to 1945, millions of other innocent people were persecuted and murdered. More than three million Soviet prisoners of war were killed simply because of their nationality. Poles, as well as other Slavs, were targeted for slave labor and, as a result of the Nazi terror, almost two million perished. Gay and lesbian people, along with others deemed “anti-social” deviants, were also persecuted and many were murdered. In addition thousands of political and religious dissidents such as communists, socialists, trade unionists, and Jehovah’s Witnesses were persecuted for their beliefs and behavior and many of these individuals died as a result.
The real horror, to me now, is that such genocide continues.