f faith in the 21st century. I am grateful this week to Douglas John Hall and Dietrich Bonhoeffer for their insights on sin and grace. And also to Kierkegaard who notes that there is comfort in knowing that we are all in this together.One of the most tender and challenging names for Jesus comes from today’s gospel where St. John portrays Jesus as the Good Shepherd. In this he is telling us that Christ is our connection to God’s loving protection:
• He is the source of our hope and inspiration and he is the heart of authentic compassion.
• He gives shape and form to God’s word and invites us to listen carefully to the Lord: my sheep hear my voice – I know them – and they follow me.
Which is an upside down way of saying that because we are all like sheep – who regularly wander away and get lost over and over again – we need a good shepherd who will not only look out for us and love us, but also train us in the ways of staying safe. That is what salvation is all about – being safe, whole and made fully alive in God’s love – from the Latin word salvare for health and safety. Theologian, Douglas John Hall, puts it like this:
Salvation, as presented in the Bible and in the best traditions of the Christian faith, does not mean being saved FROM our mortality, finitude or human nature; nor does it mean being saved FOR an otherworldly state, immortality, heaven or all the rest… this distorts the whole Christian message… (Rather) Jesus’ most basic intention was to enhance life – to save us from death, understood symbolically and not only literally; and to save us for life… by being with us (in our hard and joyous times.) (Why Christian, p. 42)
That’s part of what our Resurrection faith is all about: that Christ is with us – within and among us – just as the great Shepherd’s Psalm proclaims.
• If the Lord is my Shepherd th
en… I shall not want – my needs will be cared for – yes? Because the Lord is my shepherd.• He maketh me to lie down in green pastures; he leadeth me beside still waters so that… what? My soul is restored –healed – and renewed.
And even when I walk through the valley of the shadow of death – the dark and hard places of living – I will fear no evil because…? Thy rod and thy staff they comfort me – and protect me, too. So that I might feast upon the abundance of real and tangible blessings – even in the midst of mine enemies – anointed with sacred oil like ancient royalty – because my cup is full to overflowing with grace.
St. John is ever so careful to help us link the beauty and promise of the Shepherd’s Psalm with the blessed presence of Christ Jesus the Good Shepherd of the resurrection because… we all need help. We need a Good Shepherd – who can call us by name – and walk with us through real dark places. Who can guide and protect us with a sure and strong staff. And point to what goodness and mercy looks like in the realm of relativity so that we might dwell in the house of the Lord for ever.
Now, as I hope you can tell, I love me some spiritual poetry and imagery – and when it comes to evoking God’s truth - St. John is a master. Time and again he rem
inds us that we are like sheep that have gone astray – lambs that must be trained to hear the Shepherd’s voice – even periodically be rescued from trouble.Last week John’s gospel used this same image when Jesus asked Peter: Do you love me?Remember? Three times he asked the one who had betrayed him, “Peter, do you love me?” And three times he replied, “Then feed my sheep – tend my lambs – care for and protect my wandering flock.”
And that’s one way of talking about the spiritual challenge – the way of beauty and gentleness – it is subtle, evocative and inviting. Do you love me – then feed my sheep. But there is another way – it is less poetic and more direct – maybe even blunt. And St. Paul wins this category hands down: while John speaks to us of listening to the voice of the Good Shepherd, Paul tells us that:
There's nobody living right, not even one, nobody who knows the score, nobody alert for God. They've all taken the wrong turn; they've all wandered down blind alleys. No one's living right; I can't find a single one... We race for the honor of sinner-of-the-year, litter the land with heartbreak and ruin and don't know the first thing about living with others because we never give God the time of day. This makes it clear, doesn't it, that whatever is written in these Scriptures is not what God says about others but to us to whom these Scriptures were addressed in the first place! And it's clear enough, isn't it, that we're sinners, every one of us, in the same sinking boat with everybody else? Our involvement with God's revelation doesn't put us rig
ht with God. What it does is force us to face our complicity in everyone else's sin.Are you still with me? Do you see where I’m going with this? Both of our spiritual friends are telling us the same thing – sin is real and touches us all on the spiritual journey – but one voice is tender while the other is rough. One insight is poetic and the other didactic. St. John is inspirational and St. Paul is all about brass tacks. And I’ve come to trust that we need both voices in our inquiry into how we understand sin in the 21st century.
• Because sometimes I know that I need encouragement and motivation and other times I just need a kick in the pants.
• And my hunch is that we are much more alike in this than we are different, don’t you think?
So scripture and tradition gives us both voices – often together – so that we might actually HEAR the voice of the Good Shepherd and follow: most of us don’t need more information about God, we don’t need more facts and rules, we just need to listen and follow. So, on this Sunday dedicated to the Good Shepherd I thought it might be fun to listen to what St. Paul has to say about following because with Paul there is NO ambiguity
In my mind, St. Paul is a lot like my high school gym coach who used to say things like: “Gentlemen, you are all fine men for the shape you’re in – but LOOK at the shape you’re in. Hit the floor and give me 50.” No poetry – no ambiguity – no tissue paper feelings with Coach Bettino because he was NOT a sensitive, new aged guy: he was an athlete who was there to train other athletes.
And when it comes to sin, Coach Paul wants
us to know a few key truths. First, sin is NOT a failure of willpower. It is neither a lapse in morality nor a disease we can be cured of; rather sin is part of the human condition.There's nobody living right, not even one, nobody who knows the score, nobody alert for God. They've all taken the wrong turn; they've all wandered down blind alleys. No one's living right; I can't find a single one... We race for the honor of sinner-of-the-year, litter the land with heartbreak and ruin and don't know the first thing about living with others because we never give God the time of day.
Everybody is included in this definition – no exceptions – which was good news for Paul because it meant that everybody was equal. Kierkegaard said that this was one of the curious comforts of sin – that we were all desperate for God’s grace together – so there is no one better or worse off than anybody else. We are ALL like sheep that have gone astray – every one of us.
• Can you see why this is good news? Blunt and very down to earth, but also liberating, too?
• What do you think?
There are no distinctions in this understanding of sin: we’re all in it together. Dietrich Bonheoffer put it like this:
In the presence of ot
her sinners – other Christians – I no longer need to pretend… I am permitted to be the sinner that I am… honest and alive… And together we can stand before one another as the sign of God’s truth and grace… We can hear and embrace the confession of sin in Christ’s place and offer the forgiveness of sin just as Christ taught.So first, when it comes to sin, we are all in this together: men and women, rich and poor, gay and straight, Republican and Democrat. In other words, we don’t have to fake it. Let’s just be honest and real and alive.
Second, Paul wants us to know that God’s reaction to human sin is NOT a lightning bolt from the sky – or any other form of punishment – but rather God allows us to experience the consequences of our broken behavior. And while this is an insight that is 2,000 years old, we still haven’t quite grasped it – and it could be so liberating.
In the first chapter of Paul’s letter to the church in Rome, he says that there are clearly times when women and men want to be selfish. We want to live like animals – lost in our sensations – so God lets us live like animals until we wake up one day to find that we have become bestial. Listen carefully now because what Paul is describing is God’s wrath – which isn’t overt punishment, but rather a stepping back or withdrawal of God’s loving presence so that we might begin to feel and experience the consequences of our actions. It is relational – like a loving parent:
The basic reality of God is plain enough. Open your eyes and there it is! By taking a long and loving look at what God
has created, people have always been able to see what their eyes as such can't see: eternal power, for instance, and the mystery of his divine being. So nobody has a good excuse. And what happened was this: People knew God perfectly well, but when they didn't treat him like God, refusing to worship him, they trivialized themselves into silliness and confusion so that there was neither sense nor direction left in their lives. They pretended to know it all, but were illiterate regarding life. They traded the glory of God who holds the whole world in his hands for cheap figurines you can buy at any roadside stand.So God said, in effect, "If that's what you want, that's what you get." And it wasn't long before they were living in a pigpen, smeared with filth, filthy inside and out. And all this because they traded the true God for a fake god, and worshiped the god they made instead of the God who made them—the God we bless, the God who blesses us… Worse followed: Refusing to know God, they soon didn't know how to be human either…
And then just like my high school coach – not my English teacher poet – but my down to earth coach, Paul gives it to us no holds barred:
Sexually confused, they abused and defiled one another… all lust, no love. And then they paid for it, oh, how they paid for it—emptied of God and love… God quit bothering them and let them run loose. And then all hell broke loose: rampant evil, grabbing and grasping, vicious backstabbing. They made life hell on earth with their envy, wanton killing, bickering, and cheating. Look at them: mean-spirited, venomous, fork-tongued God-bashers. Bullies, swaggerers, insufferable windbags! They keep inventing new ways of wrecking lives. They ditch their parents when they get in the way. Stupid, sli
my, cruel, cold-blooded. And it's not as if they don't know better. They know perfectly well they're spitting in God's face. And they don't care—worse, they hand out prizes to those who do the worst things best!This is the tough love approach to grace – blunt and in-your-face – for Paul wants us to know that the REASON God steps back and lets us feel and experience the consequences of our actions is so that we’ll want to come home. Our feelings can be one of the ways we can listen for God’s presence – or absence – in our lives. For we trust that God really is still speaking.
First, we’re all in this together. Second, God lets us really have it our own way so that we’ll feel what God’s absence means. And then third, when we’re ready – and we really have to be ready over and over again just like sheep – when we’re ready to let the Good Shepherd name our sin honestly and forgive us inside and out, then we are cleansed. We trust by faith that Christ Jesus truly comes to us and makes us whole – releasing us from guilt and shame – and renewing us from the inside out – indeed saving us in the truest sense of the word – for abundant life. Here’s how Coach Paul puts it one more time:
With the arrival of Jesus, the Messiah, our fateful dil
emma is resolved. Those who enter into Christ's being-here-for-us no longer have to live under a continuous, low-lying black cloud. A new power is in operation. The Spirit of life in Christ, like a strong wind, has magnificently cleared the air, freeing you from a fated lifetime of brutal tyranny at the hands of sin and death. Those who think they can do it on their own end up obsessed with measuring their own moral muscle but never get around to exercising it in real life. But those who trust God's action in them find that God's Spirit is in them—living and breathing God – from the inside out.We can’t figure this out all by ourselves, my friends. We need a Good Shepherd. We can neither force God’s hand by bargaining with the Lord in our brokenness nor get clean and whole by obsessing on our guilt and shame. Left to ourselves, all we can find are the dead-ends – and if we stay all by ourselves dead-ends are all we will know.
And that is St. Paul’s last insight: we need each other – the body of Christ – to listen and weep and pray for one another when we are weary – and to laugh, too, so that we know that somebody else understands us – somebody else has been through this and made it to the other side.
• More than anything else the church has been invited by the Good Shepherd to be a witness to the grace that can set us free.
• To live as people of faith in community so that there is a light in the darkness when some of us have no room for faith or trust or even light in our hearts or minds.
A healthy and holy notion of sin binds us together in grace and liberates us from guilt and shame. And so we gather every week in the presence of the Good Shepherd who invites us now to open our hearts in prayer to share this song as witnesses…
credits:
1) http://www.church-windows.com/dalle_de_verre_faceted_glass.htm
2) jane laddick @ http://athirstformore.blogspot.com/2008/04/this-image-was-shown-at-park-cities.html
3) lee hodges, ibid
4) john boer @ www.socialtheology.com/art.asp
5) margo schopf @ www.southafricanartists.com/showartist.asp?WorkID=51940
6)http://www.stillwaters-artgallery.co.uk/0intro2.htm
7) confusion @ http://morningbounce.wordpress.com/2009/04/
8) serrano @http://cruciality.wordpress.com/2009/06/25/rethinking-serranos-piss-christ/
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