Easter IV—Gentle Shepherd

Yesterday was Martha Hill’s birthday party;
she’s 103 years old; and as always,
it’s an inspiration just to be near her.
I usually get the best seat in the house
at birthday events–and yesterday was no exception.
I sat right next to Martha.
It was wonderful to see, the many children, grandchildren,
great-grandchildren gather around her to celebrate.
But my favorite part of being near her on such a day is this:
Martha’s faith is a beautiful thing.

I thought of her in relation to our readings this morning,
especially in relation to the 23rd Psalm:
Martha is someone who has believed
and trusted her Good Shepherd
for 103 years, through all
the profound joys and serious sorrows
that accompany a long life.
Her faith has inspired six generations of her family.
She’s someone who knows and hears the Shepherd’s voice.

This morning Jesus teaches us about himself in relation to
this beloved Good Shepherd image of God.
It’s an image Jesus audience would have known,
and it’s language familiar to us, too.
Many of us learned the 23rd Psalm by heart,
or at least we’ve heard it more than once.
Just hearing “The Lord is my Shepherd”
comforts us as soon the words are spoken.
Even if we haven’t heard or studied much of the Bible,
we can all envision God as a shepherd Lord.
As far removed as we are from biblical times, we can relate to it.

Good Shepherd language speaks of our experience of God,
expressing our sense of being known by God.
“I know my own, and my own know me.”
“I call them by name,” Jesus says.

Good Shepherd language
speaks to our sense of being led safely
to spiritual food and water,
those green pastures and still waters.
It speaks to our sense of being tended by God,
and even to our sense of loss
when we lose sight of the Shepherd,
or when we fear the Good Shepherd loses sight of us.

Shepherd imagery in the bible is often used
to express spiritual realities, spiritual principles.
Good leaders were good shepherds; poor kings or religious leaders
were poor shepherds—and acted like “hired hands”
rather than being invested in the health and life of their flocks.
If your sheep are yours, Jesus implies, you take better care of them.
As the Good Shepherd, Jesus reminds his hearers and us,
each one of us, each person, has been given to him,
to know, and love, and tend.

The relationship between the shepherd and the sheep is built on trust—
in metaphor and in life.
Sheep have to know and trust their shepherd;
they learn to recognize the shepherd’s voice.
The shepherd needs to know the sheep.
Trust isn’t an automatic given between shepherd and sheep.
The sheep have to experience the persistent protecting presence
of the shepherd in order to trust him.
Those are spiritual truths as well, and pertain
to our relationship to God as much as they do
to the relationships of real sheep to real shepherds.
Poor shepherds, shepherds who aren’t trustworthy
or diligent on behalf of the sheep,
poor political and religious leaders, receive scathing judgment in the bible,
especially if they’ve forgotten who God is, and who their people belong to.

Like most powerful metaphors, the shepherd metaphor was shaped
by the material realities of people’s lives in ancient Palestine.
And if you don’t already know the role of sheep in the ancient world,
I’m going to tell you.
[thanks to the aritlce in Harper’s Bible Dictionary, for much of this!].
Sheep were the most important domestic animals
in those ancient communities,
important in every aspect of people’s lives—
They were economic resources,
providing meat, clothing, milk, fat, skins, wool,
even the horns were used.
Almost everyone, from children on up, at some point or another
tended flocks—small ones and large ones, sometimes full-time,
sometimes part-time—if you lived in a village in ancient Palestine,
or even in the wilderness, you knew about sheep.
And they needed tending, those sheep. They needed constant care.

Sheep are peculiarly defenseless; they are not built for violence.
They are not aggressive; they are not predators, but prey.
They are gregarious and friendly; they have short attention spans,
and tend to wander off. They need help in childbirth
and they need protection from danger.
A shepherd’s job, though often boring,
with its long hours of watching the flocks,
required endurance and vigilance,
creative searches for good pasture and water,
that might mean journeys far from home.
Shepherds lived outside most of the time,
in all kinds of weather, using makeshift shelters,
in remote areas, accompanied at times by other wild animals,
lions, bears, and wolves.

Close to nature and nature’s rhythms,
the shepherd was a watcher and a keeper,
a caregiver, a mid-wife, a healer, and
a rescuer, for if one of the sheep wandered off,
it was the shepherd’s duty to go and find the sheep.
Shepherds carried staffs to help guide the movements of a flock,
And they carried rods to ward off predators—
“Thy rod and thy staff they comfort me.”
The rod and staff comforted because they were
the shepherd’s tools of guidance and protection.
Shepherds sometimes carried reed flutes
to calm their flocks with music, and pass the time.

Almost every great leader in scripture
turns out to have been a shepherd at one point or another:
Abraham, Issac, Jacob, Jacob sons, Moses, and David.
You started out watching flocks, and lo, you become a leader of nations.
And we all celebrate those nameless shepherds who were
given the first glimpse of God incarnate in Jesus Christ at the Nativity of our Lord.

Today, Jesus uses the image of the Good Shepherd
to help us understand what the call of the shepherd is:
Jesus names it here as the call to lay down one’s life for others.
On the Sundays in Easter, each week unfolds layers of meaning for us,
revealing what the resurrection means to the church,
to us as a community, to us as individuals.
Here Jesus opens the resurrection again for us:
“I lay down my life for the sheep.” I lay down my life for you.
Here again is God’s amazing divine generosity: God gives life,
God’s own life, to those beloved sheep.
Because he lives, we live.
The portion we hear in John this morning
is part of a longer discourse, where Jesus develops this image
of himself as the Good Shepherd.
If you go back and read verse 10,
which immediately precedes this one,
Jesus speaks of the reason
he has come: “I come that they might have life,
and have it more abundantly.”
The Good Shepherd brings abundant life.
Abundant life comes to us though the
Good Shepherd who lays his life down for us.

This generous self-giving doesn’t stop with Jesus,
for we are given an instruction along with it, today.
We hear similar words from the First letter of John,
this morning also.
No one knows who the author of these letters is,
but most commentators accept that the Letters of John,
especially the first letter, accompany this Gospel of John,
offering interpretive guidelines to the Gospel.
We’ve just heard Jesus teaching
on laying down his life for his sheep.
And right next to it, in First John,
we receive a teaching about what Jesus’ action means
now for our lives as believers.
As Jesus did for us, so we do for each other.
As Jesus lay down his life for us, so we lay down our lives for one another.

John speaks to justice here, not only compassion.
Justice means an open-hearted sharing of resources:
how can any one of us who has the world’s goods—
that means riches–
refuse help to those in need?
“Refuse help:” this phrase loses something in translation here.
In the original to refuse help
reads to close off one’s feeling,
literally one’s heart and belly to others—
for the belly is where compassion lives
in the biblical view of the person.
How can we close off our hearts, our compassion, to others?
And compassion, without action, John implies here,
is not compassion at all.
“Let us love, not in word and speech,
but in action and truth.”
Our actions, our lived truth matter, here in John’s letter,
who we are as good shepherds of each other,
each of us matters in our life together.

Life abundant is life lived generously for the sake of others.
When we live that way, in truth and in action,
we know we are God’s people.
And yet, our most profound comfort, here, may come
from the next few lines: John reminds
God’s heart is so very great,
so generous, so formed in love,
so wide and deep.
God knows every part of us.
God knows everything before we know it,
and knows it lovingly:
John assures us,
that even when we fail and accuse ourselves,
we need not fear before God.
God’s heart is our wide open pasture of grace,
the fresh water of forgiveness, our safe shelter.
Believe in God, and love one another,
just as Jesus commanded.
Then, we are his people and the sheep of his pasture,
and we like, the Psalmist, shall dwell in the house of the Lord, forever.
Amen

The celebration started very early on Good Harbor Beach, with a sunrise service around 6:00 a.m. This is an ecumenical service, attended by particpants from several congregations, Methodists, Baptists, Episcopalians, Catholics, Lutherans, Unitarian Universalists, and a couple of the non-denominational churches in our area. This year, some folks from the Buddhist community showed up, too, so it was interfaith, as well. All told we were about 60 people. Though the morning was cloudy, the gray skies lit up with long shafts of beautiful gold and soft red tints when sun rose. And the Methodist pastor, Rev. Lehlohonolo Montjane’s homily energized all of us to spread the good news: she urged us to “run with those women,” as they left Jesus’ tomb, to go out into our lives, running, and live the faith.

Later at church, the energy stayed high; lots of people came to worship, and prayed and sang their hearts out. Our band, The St. Paul Pick-up Band– played for the first time, during the final hymn. Our guest musician, tuba-player Mike Milnarek played compositions written by his wife for our church accompanied by Ted Stoddard, our music director, on the piano and the organ, and their Bach duet at the post-lude kept us all listening. Every note spoke of joy, and everyone there, it seemed, felt the wonder and excitement that comes with Easter morning.

Since then, we’ve managed to stay in Easter, a counter-cultural stance, for sure. And each week, the mystery that is the resurrection unfolds, into deeper mystery, and more profound wonder. Tomorrow is Emmaus, my favorite story, and we’ll tell it from start to finish. It’s also Earth Day, and we asked the Sunday School children to write a prayer for the planet, which they’ll offer during the serivce.
May the Risen Christ meet you on the road, along the highways and byways of your life, this week.
peace, Pastor Anne

It’s a powerful day, no matter what the weather is, interwoven with the pull of life and light out of death and darkness. It seems earth’s gravity moves in an opposite direction to push out, to open a tomb, to open every tomb, to roll away every stone, all the universe holding its breath, or at least I imagine it that way. Last night’s Passover seder spoke of freedom and liberation, the push and pull of God’s mighty hand, deliverance, renewal. And now, following fast on Good Friday, this morning, and into the afternoon, if you stop what you are doing, you can feel the weight of this waiting. The sense of expectation is wilder and more soul-stirring than any other expectation, far more intense than birth pangs, for today’s pangs herald a new creation.

This day sits in my throat, a sob not uttered, but felt deep, a shudder. Tomorrow, Mark’s Gospel doesn’t wrap the story up, with a beautiful meeting of the Risen Christ; instead the women are left with terror and amazement, fleeing the scene. They will come back, and though Mark says they told no one, we know they must have, because we will come back, too, in the morning, and sing our praise and awe and wonder.

May God’s grace pour over you in rivers of light.
Pastor Anne

Cape Ann is having an exquisite Maundy Thursday, with sunshine and strong breezes, fragrant warmth rising from the warming earth. Children play on the church’s playground, swinging and climbing; their voices mingle in happy laughter. We’re so far from those days in Jerusalem, as Jesus and the disciples gathered for Passover. Underneath this day, for me at least, the pulse of Holy Week beats strongly and steadily. The beautiful afternoon, with its laughing children and bright forsythia, has a somber edge, like glimpsing a bank of clouds on the far horizon. We know the storm is out there somewhere, and soon it will come in from the sea.

Yet, Maundy Thursday’s service, though somber, is beautiful, too, this Last Supper. The ritual of foot-washing, which we observe at St. Paul, becomes a sacrament, a preaching in action. Small gestures of preparation today take on great significance. Our Paschal Candle was just slightly too large for the holder, even though we ordered the same candle size we ordered in past years. So today, in one of those moments where I think “they didn’t teach this in seminary,” I used an exacto knife, and then a potato peeler, to shave off some of the excess wax. Each time a long curl of wax came off, I could smell the scent of beeswax, and honey, and see the marks in the candle of the wounds of Christ. It took some time to fix the base so the candle would fit, but the time filled in an oasis of deep quiet, strangely soothing, the kind of queit attention that surfaces in Holy Week, a quietness that comes from somewhere else, some other deep lake of stillness. I love this week, and have from childhood on. There’s a quality to it no other week has, and a gentleness to it, underneath the surface, that is palpable to me.

Tonight, we will gather, and wash feet, and eat a Holy Supper. Over the years, the congregants who have helped me wash feet, and who have had their feet washed, have told me that it has changed them. One woman, who had never been in a service of foot-washing before, said it was the first time she really understood what Jesus was doing there. Seeing it happen changed how she experienced her own discipleship.

When I am washing people’s feet, I think sometimes about the woman, Mary of Bethany in some tellings, who so loved the Lord, that she anointed his feet with nard, and washed them with her hair. Her extravagance, Jesus said, will always be remembered. I am grateful for her example of devotion. And I am grateful, too, for Jesus’ kind attention to his disciples feet, the sweetness of cool water washing away the tiredness of the day.

I think of all the feet I have washed, my family’s feet, my daughters’ youthful feet, my granddaughters’ baby feet, my mother’s aged feet, my parishioners’ feet. Two people I washed last year are no longer with us, and I am grateful for my memory of their feet, the intimacy of knowing the shapes of their toes; the memory lends a sweet poignance to the grief of losing them.

Whether you have your feet washed tonight or not, may the knowledge of our Lord’s loving service lift your hearts, and inspire you in service to your neighbor. How lovely are the feet of those who bring the Good News of God.
peace, PA

Here are the readings for this week, plus the prayer of the day, and the Gospel Acclamation. I hope they are a help in your devotions.

Isaiah 42:1-9
Psalm 36:5-11 (7)
Hebrews 9:11-15
John 12:1-11

Prayer of the Day
O God, your Son chose the path that led to pain before joy and to the cross before glory. Plant his cross in our hearts, so that in its power and love we may come at last to joy and glory, through Jesus Christ, our Savior and Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and forever.

Gospel Acclamation
May I never boast of | anything
except the cross of our Lord | Jesus Christ. (Gal. 6:14)

Peace, PA

6:00 a.m. Morning is here, with a hard frost. Our plum blossoms and azaleas seem undaunted, as are the daffodils, used to the sudden cold of March. I thought of the very elder members of our congregation this morning, three of whom have just been admitted to nursing homes. All three resolute in their own way of bearing pain and loss, all three faithful women, like the three Marys at the tomb, tending our Lord. Later today, we’ll bring them palms.

9:02 a.m. The children have arrived for Sunday School, and everyone is excited for the procession around the church. It takes so little to involve them, just a walk around the church waving palms, or singing at the top of their lungs. They know it’s a different day, and their interest, their energetic bounce, and perhaps even their wonder fill their classrooms. The choir is robing in the choir room, the organist is practicing the morning hymns.

Today, during the service I will read a lovely small poem by Mary Oliver as a way of inviting us into Holy Week. Here it is:

The Poet Thinks About the Donkey

On the outskirts of Jerusalem
the donkey waited.
Not especially brave, or filled with understanding,
he stood and waited.

How horses, turned out into the meadow,
leap with delight!
How doves, released from their cages,
clatter away, splashed with sunlight.

But the donkey, tied to a tree as usual, waited.
Then he let himself be led away.
Then he let the stranger mount.

Never had he seen such crowds!
And I wonder if he at all imagined what was to happen.
Still, he was what he had always been: small, dark, obedient.

I hope, finally, he felt brave.
I hope, finally, he loved the man who rode so lightly upon him,
as he lifted one dusty hoof and stepped, as he had to, forward.

As it turns out, pastors all over the web have used this poem in their blogs about Holy Week. Perhaps we love the donkey’s sense of obedience, the slow placing of one foot after another, which, in the end, might be called faith.

A blessed Holy Week to you,
Pastor Anne

This season, I’ve been reading Trauma and Grace, by Serene Jones, and The Promise of Despair by Andrew Root, not to mention bits from Luther, Forde, and Bonhoeffer, and other hard-core theologians of the cross. Both Jones and Root explore suffering with the rigorous dedication of scholars, but also with the rigorous hope of resurrection life. These are both worth reading, and spending time with, in pondering the cross. Root speaks of “the way of the cross as the way of the church”: “The church has no power in itself to bring forth possibility (it is God who brings forth possibility); the church has only the call to enter despair with the promise that in so doing it will encounter the living crucified God who, through God’s own beaten body, is working life and possibility out of death” (77). Bracing, reality-based reading. Not for the optimist, but for the disciple.

Somehow this strange weather brings the strangeness of the Lent story closer, the painful trek to the cross, the distant rumbles of thunder sending a frisson of anxiety up the spine, an animal reaction to danger. And I think of those days, when Jesus travelled toward his death, and what he experienced. Always when I visualize him in prayer, I see an implacable commitment, or dedication, but perhaps that’s not the way it happened. Perhaps there was a storm wind that impelled him toward the cross, just as the Holy Spirit drove him, threw him into the desert, or a series of dramatic events with unavoidable political consequences leading to the cross: teaching openly, turning over tables in the Temple, preaching on the streets, entering Jerusalem on a donkey, all illustrating a mastery of brilliant street theatrics modelled on prophetic utterances.

Thunder rumbles, and we’re nearly halfway there. The storm winds pick up, and the sea stirs, under a sky with no stars.

The first reading comes from Earth Prayers in an excerpt written by a Committee, but surprisingly succinct.
We who have lost our sense and our senses–our touch, our smell, our vision of who we are; we who frantically force and press all things, without rest for body or spirit, hurting our earth, and injuring ourselves: we call a halt.

We declare a Sabbath, a space of quiet: for simply being and letting be; for recovering the great, forgotten truths; for learning how to live again.U. N Environmental Sabbath Program

The second reading comes from Hearts on Fire: Praying with the Jesuits, and is written by Pedro Arrupe, S.J.
More than ever I find myself in the hands of God.
This is what I have wanted all my life from my youth.

It is indeed a profound spiritual experience
to know and feel myself so totally in God’s hands.

I’m glad that someone asked me to reproduce them. I found them both helpful in expressing this strange season of evaluation, of turning, and reaching toward Jesus.
Peace, Pastor Anne

The snow is about 10 inches deep, heavy on the pines, and the sky looks as if it might snow again. We spent the entire day yesterday putting on the last stages of the icon. It was another day of exercising patience as paint dried, and then, the sizing for gold dried. But the wait was worth it. We watched the snow fall. All day the chickadees and finches darted in and out of the woods coming to the birdfeeders stationed near the windows. When it was time to lay down gold leaf, the room felt magical. I had the wonderful job of helping students put the halos on the icons, and then watching as their faces changed to warm delight at what they saw. It was like Christmas, a day of fellowship and gift-giving; intangible and tangible, the gifts came directly from the hands of the Holy Spirit. A little bit of gold leaf goes a long way, and we save every speck of gold dust we can whisk up afterwards.

After varnishing them this morning, we’ll have a worship service, then, turn our faces homewards, and disperse.

The Camp staff tells us it was a successful retreat, and we’re already looking for a good time to teach next year. Last night we shared a little of our experience during this week. One retreatant said she felt the icon had come alive for her. Someone else said that icons are “portals of prayer” with hats off to the publication of the same name. Traditional names for icons are “doors of perception,” or “windows of prayer.” That has been the case for this retreat–we felt the spirit of prayer accompany us along every stage of the way.

Peace, PA