What can we say April 21? Easter 4

    Four, not just three great texts! I’ll touch on Acts and the Epistle, then focus on the Psalm and Gospel – on which I’ll be preaching.

   Acts 4:5-12. Think ministry’s hard today? Jesus’ first leaders wound up in jail and on trial! Willie Jennings, noting how we expect Jesus to provide us a life different from Jesus’ own, namely that we will be liked or at least tolerated… “Jesus ended up in exactly the same kind of place that now his disciples Peter and John stand, the judged. But he got there before them in order to meet them there when they arrived and to guide them precisely from that place of being judged. Jesus never sought to escape the place of judgment. He planned to seize it.” Boom.

   1 John 3:16-24. Such a lovely, harrowing, inviting and challenging text! Raymond Brown speaks of the Greek as “infuriatingly complicated,” and he awards it the “prize in grammatical obscurity.” St. Augustine and John Calvin read the passage as about the severity, the high demands of God; Martin Luther, always the contrarian, sees the text as all about God’s mercy. The ambiguity is pitch-perfect, isn’t it? Scripture is obscure; we keep digging; it’s demand, it’s mercy. Life as a follower of Jesus, and life for the Body of Christ, is just like that, always.

   Easy to moralize on verse 17’s hard rhetorical question, How can God’s love be in someone who has stuff, sees someone in need and refuses to help? Is this a sign God’s love isn’t in or with such a person? Is it aspirational? Not fully there just yet? Aren’t there pagans with means who help those in need? And is it a constant helping of those in need, a genuinely sacrificial helping? Or an occasional spasm so you can check this off the list? I think simply raising such questions in the sermon is a good exercise for the listener, and prevents the preacher from wagging a finger of accusation.

   Luther must be right on the mercy since in the next verse we’re called “little children,” not “you grownup dufuses.” Let us love, not merely talking, but “in truth and action.” We might prefer him to have said “action,” and leave off “truth.” What makes love “in truth” beyond “in action”? I can’t interview the writer… but I will explore stuff we’ve heard in recent years, starting with “toxic charity.” What a relief (I suspect) for many of our people to learn there is such a thing, that doing for others can actually cripple them. Just let them be!

   And yet, in what I’m still regarding as maybe the most important theological book of the decade, A Nazareth Manifesto, Sam Wells reveals how the Christian doesn’t mail in or drop off charity, and we also don’t just ignore others because we fear we’ll damage them by our charity. There is a doing for people that diminishes them. There is mission-as-fixing. You have a problem? I’m the solution? – which is an inch from You are a problem. We can do for others. We might think it nobler to work with others, or to be for them. Sam says God invites us, best of all, to be with them.

   Indeed, the seeds of a community’s redemption lie within the community itself. Jürgen Moltmann: “The opposite of poverty isn’t property; the opposite of both poverty and property is community.” We have coffee with someone, not to save them, but to enjoy friendship. Only in this way are they ennobled; only in this way are we ennobled. Could 1 John imply this is the true way to care for (and really with) those in need? Or do we drift even further to Mother Teresa’s articulation of things: we don’t do what we do for other people. We do it to Jesus. Literally.

   Psalm 23 can be risky preaching, as so much sugary sentimentality has attached itself to this overly familiar text. No need to ding people or jolt them out of their warm fuzzy mood on hearing it; hey, I get warm fuzzy feelings from hearing it – especially when we read it aloud, together as a Body, at funeral services. It’s just a matter of the preacher taking them further into what they were sure they already comprehended well.

     A few points of interest. To speak of the Lord as shepherd isn’t flattering to us – although much like sheep, we are foolish creatures, driven entirely by appetite, easily lost and in peril. I heard a preacher years ago say “Sheep nibble themselves lost.”

   And then, the shepherd. We romanticize them as rural simpletons. But rulers throughout the Ancient Near East were called shepherds. As a business, flocks could number in the tens of thousands, so shepherding required considerable administrative savvy. Travellers to the Holy Land have observed that shepherds are a bit rough in appearance, and are quite rough with their sheep. First shepherd I ever saw was wearing an Elvis t-shirt, big green golashes, swatting sheep on the rear end with his stick, and hollering expletives. The Lord is my shepherd.

   The shepherd’s care can be tender and personal. It was common for shepherds to give sheep names. I was never sure, as a child, by that TV program in which Shari Lewis spoke to her little sheep puppet she called “Lamb Chop” – a name that sounds more like a meal than a pet. If you want to ponder the shepherd’s personal care for the sheep, flit over to Jesus’ great story about the shepherd who had hung onto 99 out of 100 – a super high percentage – but was restless until he found that one. Jealous, protective, resilient, doggedly loyal: shepherds. No wonder the angels chose them for their audience when Jesus was born.

   Most pastors are cognizant that “I shall not want” might be better rendered as “I will lack no good thing.” This opens up some reflection on our wanting, what is genuinely good, etc. The “paths of righteousness” – good roads to take, but what kind of righteous, holy, Torah-filled, disciple living is required of those who can truly claim to walk there?

   Someone counted all the Hebrew words in Psalm 23, and it turns out that the word smack dab in the middle is “with.” The center of the Psalm, the center of the life of faith, is “thou art with me.” This bears homiletical reflection. Wells’s A Nazareth Manifesto again: God isn’t primarily a fixer or protector or guarantor of this or that we think we must have. God’s identity and purpose: simply to be with us. Jesus is Emmanuel, God with us, not God fixing us or doing favors for us. This then redefines our mission. We don’t do for others or fix others; we are called to be with them – as explicated now in Sam’s companion volume on the nature and mission of the church, Incarnational Ministry.

    “You prepare a table for me in the presence of my enemies” bears some thought. It’s not a taunt (as a scholar I’ll leave unnamed has insisted). From a Christian theological perspective, the Lord’s table is the place where reconciliation begins and ends. When you have a dinner party, do not invite those who can invite you in return (Luke 14). We are to make peace, at table, not with our pals but with those where relationships are broken or nonexistent.

   I had a strange compulsion a while back when preaching on Psalm 23. The Lord is my shepherd – but what is the antecedent of “my”? Sheep, surely? I tried my hand at putting these words into the mouth of another creature in the pastoral scene: the sheepdog (catch it on YouTube). It’s his shepherd too. I latched onto this because of a lovely quotation from Evelyn Underhill I’ve long treasured: “You want to be one among the sheepdogs employed by the Good Shepherd.  Now have you ever watched a good sheepdog at his work?  He is not at all an emotional animal.  He just goes on with his job quite steadily, takes no notice of bad weather, rough ground, or his own comfort.  He seldom or never comes back to be stroked.  Yet his faithfulness, his intimate understanding with his master, is one of the loveliest things in the world.  Now and then he just looks at the shepherd.  When the time comes for rest they can generally be found together.” I love Underhill, always spot on, always wise, always full of clarity and insight.

     The Lord is the shepherd of us, the Body of Christ. This is more evident in John 10:11-18 – where the emphasis is on the courage, the stick-to-it-iveness of the shepherd. Wolves go on the prowl, but this shepherd doesn’t duck behind a rock. He “gives his life for the sheep.” 

    I am increasingly drawn toward preaching to the Body as the Body, not to each individual sitting there individually. If we are Christ now, if we are his body, then we have shepherding to do.

   The Greek kalos isn’t simply “good,” but may well mean “beautiful,” or even the “model” shepherd. Bonhoeffer was onto something when he showed us how our goodness can be a block to doing God’s will. We want to be good, to keep our hands clean; but God asks us to get our hands dirty for God. Shepherding is dirty work. Out of doors, exposed to the elements, trudging through mud and overgrown fields. That’s Jesus’ beauty, right? And ours, when we are the Church in this world.

   And costly work. Ben Witherington points out that in John’s plot, at this point they are in Jerusalem for the Feast of Dedication,” which celebrated the military victory of the Maccabees: “True leadership does indeed mean laying down one's life for the sheep, as some of the Maccabees had in fact done.” Yet Jesus isn’t fighting the enemy with weapons, but with vulnerability, his own body, the instrument of love.

   What does this text say to us as pastors? Pope Francis reflected on bishops who “supervise/oversee” versus those who “keep watch,” like a shepherd: “Overseeing refers more to a concern for doctrine and habits, whereas keeping watch is more about making sure that there be salt and light in people’s hearts… To watch over it is enough to be awake, sharp, quick. To keep watch you need also to be meek, patient, and constant in proven charity. Overseeing and watching over suggest a certain degree of control. Keeping watch, on the other hand, suggests hope, the hope of the merciful Father who keeps watch over the processes in the hearts of his children.”

   And Jean Vanier (before we learned about his problematical behaviors...) pointed out how false shepherds “are more concerned about their salary, their reputation, structures, administration and the success of the group. They use people… They are closed up in their own needs.” And then – what can we say? – Jean Vanier turned out to be Jean Vanier, a user of women. Lord, have mercy.

    Back to the Pope: “To become a good shepherd is to come out of the shell of selfishness to be attentive to those for whom we are responsible, to reveal to them their fundamental beauty and value and help them grow and become fully alive. It is not easy really to listen. It is not easy to touch our own fears. It is a challenge to help others gradually accept responsibility, to trust themselves. When people are weak or lost, they need a shepherd close to them. Little by little, however, as they discover who they are, the shepherd becomes more of a friend and companion.”

   Of course, John gives us that mysterious “I have other sheep not of this fold.” Does he mean other religions? Or as one friend of mine believes, Jesus has people on other planets in other galaxies! Jesus is thinking Gentiles of course – but here we see his abiding, deep desire for unity among God’s people, which is the reality in God’s heart, even if our hearts are divided from one another.

    How to preach all this? Be sure that it looks, when delivered, like this thought from Jason Byassee: “In John 10, an odd text is read in an odd way by an exceedingly odd Savior and dished up for an odd people becoming odder. That is, holier.” A superb goal all of us might keep in mind as we study, prepare, write, practice, deliver, and reflect on what unfolded...