Following the voice

Acts 9:36-43
Psalm 23
Revelation 7:9-17
John 10:22-30

Thursday night, or Friday morning, depending on how you look at it, I was awakened by the telephone.  I had been fast asleep and for a disoriented moment I thought it was the alarm.  I didn’t get to the phone in time to answer it, and when I did I saw that it was 2:18 A.M.  I was hoping someone had misdialed but then I saw that I had a new voice message.  So I called the voicemail number and entered my password, with a sense of dread about what that message was going to say.

Well, it turned out that the news wasn’t that bad.  A young woman named Samantha, taking her ailing mother home to Oregon from Southern California, had spent all her money on car repairs and couldn’t go any further that night.  She said her mother was an Episcopalian and they had called St. John’s and gotten my number from the recorded greeting.  They had looked all over town for a vacant motel room and had finally found one, and they wanted to know if I could pay for it.  Some of you may not know this, but the members of St. John’s provide a Discretionary Fund for me to use to assist people in need, so I called her back, and agreed to meet her at a motel next to the freeway at the north end of town.

I’d been reading the gospel lesson for today before I went to bed that night, and as I drove up the on-ramp I thought of what Jesus says about his sheep, and how they hear his voice, and follow him.  And it struck me that this is what that looks like.  There are a lot of reasons why we have an institution called St. John’s Episcopal Church, with an office and a telephone and an answering machine.  There are a lot of reasons why we have a pastor, and a discretionary fund.  But one of the reasons is surely so that when somebody is out on the road in the middle of the night far from home, they can know the presence of the Good Shepherd in a concrete, tangible way.    

And maybe it was just because it was the middle of the night and my mind wasn’t functioning normally, but I felt joyful in that moment and grateful for the privilege of being the one to represent you like that.   Not because I was standing in for Jesus, but because I was one of his sheep.  When that call came at 2:18 in the morning it was the Good Shepherd on the other end of the line.  And I was the one chosen, in that moment, to hear his voice and to follow him.   

Jesus talks about a relationship in which the Shepherd is just as vulnerable as the sheep.  The sheep hear the voice of the Shepherd and they respond to it with trust and obedience.  But the Shepherd also lives by trust and obedience in relation to the one he calls Father.  And that is what makes the Shepherd trustworthy and good.  That is why the sheep listen to his voice and follow him, even when it means waking up at 2:18 in the morning.  That is why they follow his voice even when it means rushing toward the site of a bombing, when there has been a second bomb, and might be third.  That is why they follow his voice even into a burning fertilizer factory filled with ammonia. 

The Good Shepherd shows the sheep the goodness of the Father, whose mind no one knows, and whose face no one can see.  And sometimes that doesn’t feel like enough.  Sometimes we are like those who surround Jesus in the temple and ask, “How long will you keep us in suspense? Tell us now!”  Sometimes we don’t want to live in vulnerability.  Sometimes we don’t want a relationship of trust and obedience.  Sometimes we get tired of listening and following.  We want the complete picture, to have the last word, so we can be in control from here on out, so we can be our own shepherds.

But that urgent demand to have everything settled, that unwillingness to wait any longer for one’s own truth to be vindicated, is what leads to political violence.  When people start to say things like, “The time for talk is past.  We don’t want to hear the other side of the issue,” and “We can’t wait any longer, and will do whatever it takes to get our point across,” then watch out, because you know what’s coming—the missiles are about to fly; the death squads are putting on their hoods; the torturers are getting out their tools; someone is packing nails and ball-bearings into a pressure-cooker.

 But when people are willing to kill innocents, it’s because the cause they are fighting for is already marked for death.  Even if it is a power that stands astride the world, if you know where to look, you can already see the cracks in the foundation.  If you listen closely you can hear the wailing of the mourners, and catch the faint whiff of decay.  The setting of today’s gospel story is the Jerusalem temple, at the annual feast of the Dedication of the temple itself.  The temple was the cornerstone of political and economic, as well as religious, order in the Palestine of Jesus’ day.  And as near as we can tell, challenging the legitimacy of the temple was Jesus’ capital crime.  His enemies had him killed in order to protect the temple.   But by the time the Gospel of John was written, the temple was a blackened pile of fallen stones.

The truth that is so urgent that people are willing to kill for it is a hollow truth.  It bears the mark of death on its heart.  But the Good Shepherd speaks with a different kind of urgency, the urgent love of life.  It is the urgency of Peter rushing off to Joppa to pray for the life of the widow Tabitha.  It doesn’t need to know the final answer, or to force events to a final crisis.  It only seeks to hear the trusted voice, the one that knows who we are, telling us what to do next.  Even amidst the pressing demands of the moment, the sheep of the Good Shepherd walks in peace.  It is the peace of knowing that it is enough to hear his voice and to follow, because the Good Shepherd is one with the Father, who is the indestructible Lord of Life. 

Sometimes we might wish the voice had led us on a different path.  There are times when our pasture doesn’t feel particularly important, or glamorous or rewarding.  Maybe it’s kind of scrubby, and a little dry.  Maybe we have to walk a long way to get to the place where the cool water flows.  Maybe the howls of the wolves at night sound a little too close for comfort.  But if we learn to listen for the voice of the shepherd, I think we’ll discover that even our sheepish lives have about them a certain kind of urgency. 

We may not be called to help the victims of a terrorist bombing, but the world is not short of victims.  We may not be sent to apprehend a pair of armed and dangerous fugitives, but there are angry people everywhere.  We may not be summoned to raise someone from the dead, but there are people all around us who need a prayer and a touch and an invitation to rise.  And none of the people who did those heroic things thought they would have to do them until the moment came and the voice spoke that said “follow.”

And they did follow, and in some cases in cost them everything.  But if we were to say they were mistaken, we would be drawing the wrong conclusion.  Because in a world marked for death only one thing is certain.  Only one thing is guaranteed.  It is that God knows us and loves us and holds us in the hand of indestructible life.  That is all the Good Shepherd needed to know.  He placed himself completely in the power of that hand, and it led him to lay down his life for his friends.  But it also gave him the power to take it up again, a power that he gives to us moment by moment, day by day.  Do you hear his voice?

Satan up close and personal

1 Samuel 8:4-20, 11:14-15
Psalm 138
 2 Corinthians 4:13-5:1
Mark 3:20-35

Yesterday I decided not to help someone.  It was nobody I knew—a man who had called the church and gotten a number for pastoral emergencies from our recorded telephone greeting.  He told me that he’d called fifty churches and that I was the first person to call him back.  He was asking for more than I usually give, two nights in a motel, and it would have been more than usually inconvenient for me personally to do it.  That was a factor, I admit.  But he was single male.  From the way he described his situation, it sounded like he’d survive.  And you can’t say “yes” to everyone, not if there’s going to be money in the discretionary fund when an even more pressing need arises.   I didn’t judge him as unworthy of help.  I didn’t feel justified in what I did.  But I did tell him that I had decided not to help him, and that I was sorry, which I was.  A few minutes later I got a text message calling me a “false prophet” and a “dog.”

Dom Helder Cámara, a Roman Catholic bishop in Brazil in the 1960s and ‘70s, famously said, "When I give food to the poor, they call me a saint. When I ask why they are poor, they call me a communist."  This is what happens in unjust social systems.  People turn against each other.  I’m not suggesting a moral equivalence between the lonely man in need of shelter and the Brazilian ruling class.  I’m not putting myself in the same league as Helder Cámara, equating courageous obedience to God’s commands concerning the poor with lame rationalizations for shirking them.  I’m just noticing something common in our experience, that place where inequalities of wealth and power, and the work of being present to them, gets us called names. 

In the Gospel of Mark, Jesus has been going around Galilee, preaching in the synagogues about the kingdom of God, about how close it is, about the shift in consciousness that brings people into it.  He has been healing and casting out demons on his own charismatic authority.  And he has been making provocative connections between the sicknesses he cures and the social and religious conditions in Galilee, between paralysis and debt, between hunger and Sabbath laws, between leprosy and priestly codes of purity.  The tension between Jesus and the established authorities is mounting and they send some scribes down from Jerusalem, Public Information Officers, to issue grave warnings that Jesus is a black magician.  He may have authority over the unclean spirits, but don’t be fooled.  He is in league with Beelzebul, the prince of demons.   This is the secret source of his power.

Jesus responds to this accusation in a remarkable way.  He doesn’t deny the charges.  He doesn’t accuse his accuser in return.  Instead he joins with the premise and plays with it.  “If I am using the power of evil to drive out evil,” he says, “then that’s really a good thing, is it not?  Because if the devil is divided against himself, he is like a kingdom at war with itself, or a house divided.  And that means that his power is at an end.”  Speaking this way, Jesus not only disarms the fear and hatred which the scribe’s words were meant to arouse against him.  At the same time, he turns the attention of his listeners away from the imaginary bogeyman Beelzebub, and toward the real danger that hangs over their lives.  For, even though he is having fun with the silliness of the scribes’ slander, he is not making light of evil.  Jesus, in his teasing way, directs our attention toward the real spirit of evil in the world, the one who works by making accusations, demonizing enemies, dividing kingdoms and houses and people against themselves, and bringing all down to ruin together.

Jesus then goes on to say something even more surprising.  “But no one can enter a strong man's house and plunder his property without first tying up the strong man; then indeed the house can be plundered.” I think it is safe to say that Jesus is not advocating burglary.  The strong man must be Satan, and the property that should be plundered from his house is us, the human beings on every side of a divided kingdom.  It is all of us who are captive to the spirit of inequality, and division, and insult, and Jesus seriously intends to set us all free. 

But to do that you need to get your hands dirty.  You need to lay yourself open to the charge of being a criminal, to take the place of a robber, as Jesus will do on the cross.  You can’t bind the strong man without getting very close to him, “up close and personal” as the saying goes.  The other day in traffic with my family we saw a bumper sticker that read, “God bless our troops, especially our snipers.”  Well, that approach doesn’t work with Satan.  You can’t snipe at him from a distance.  You can’t blow him up from 7,000 miles away with a pilotless drone.

In the last year or so I have been approached at one time or another by organizers for four different groups who are trying to bring together faith communities to build grassroots power for social change.  Of course they want me to get involved, or more precisely, to get me to get you to get involved, and I have to explain to them that we are still in this start-up situation and have our hands full just getting our own fallen house in order.  But it is intriguing to me that at a time when churches and synagogues are shrinking and closing their doors, and younger people are staying away in droves, and nobody in the society at large seems very interested in what we have to say, someone should be knocking on our doors looking to us for leadership to save the day.   Maybe these organizers didn’t get the memo about the decline of the church.  Or maybe there’s something else going on.

At the end of today’s gospel lesson Jesus’ mother and brothers and sisters come to the door looking for him.  They’ve become uncomfortable with all the attention he’s been getting, and the signs of trouble brewing.  They’re worried about him, and are trying to get him to come back home and return to his senses.  But when Jesus hears that they are outside, he looks around at the people who are sitting with him and says "Here are my mother and my brothers!  Whoever does the will of God is my brother and sister and mother.”  Here is an alternative to the society in which inequality sets people to blaming and cursing each other.  Here is a vision of a single human family in which all are united in the freedom of obedience to no one but God.  Maybe the organizers want to talk to us because, however imperfectly our communities of faith realize this vision, as segregated as we may still be by divisions of class and language and ethnicity, as haltingly as we may practice the ethical obligations that are the natural working out of this vision, at least we keep the vision alive.  At least we know that this is what our life together is supposed to be like, and that we are in need of repentance and forgiveness when it is not. 

And if binding the strong man, the spirit of inequality and bigotry and hatred, really demands that we get personally involved, maybe the organizers understand that only the power of the Spirit can give people the courage, and the stamina, and the capacity for bearing the truth, to stick with the work of liberation all the way to the end.  Only people who know that the key to the new age that the world is literally dying to enter is a complete change of heart will steer clear of grandiose fantasies of power, and the seductions of self-righteousness.  Maybe the new politics that the world needs really do start here, where we can take the risks, and make the mistakes, and learn the lessons of loving one another across our divisions, because we have been loved and because we have been forgiven.