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“Baa”
Psalm 23; John 10:1-10
April 17, 2005
My cousin married a Swiss national
and I had the opportunity to visit with them in Berne
in 1973, which some may remember was prime Watergate hearings time.
During one conversation I mentioned that my father used to refer to then
still President Richard Nixon as “a used car salesman.” Peter, who was
a diplomat and fluent in a number of languages, practically rolled on the
floor laughing about that characterization of Nixon - “count on Americans to
come up with a label that really fits.” Peter got the joke.
Clarence Jordan in his Southern
English translation of the New Testament unfortunately died at the end of
John 8. He didn’t make it to chapter 10. Given that Jordan had
founded Koinonia Farm, an interracial agricultural cooperative, he probably
would have stuck with the traditional ovine references here. But if he
wanted to take a risk and translate Jesus’ self-proclamation in truly
contemporary connotations, it should read, “I am the good used car salesman.”
After all, there are good used car
salesmen, and maybe you have met one or worked with one. Maybe he did not
sell you a lemon. But you’ve heard about all those other used car
salesmen; you know their type.
Those are just about the emotions that would have been aroused by saying that
“I am the good shepherd” or even more, “The Lord is my shepherd.” Shepherds
were at the bottom of the most prestigious list of Middle Eastern
occupations. They were considered lazy, unskilled, often drunken, and
whose reputations included bothering young women in the village while their
poor little lambs had lost their way. Baa, baa, baa.
But obviously, a good shepherd is
needed in most societies and by the sheep. It is significant that Jesus
and God allow themselves to be characterized by such an occupation.
They could have been kings or emperors, but that certainly wouldn’t have
helped us. I am glad that the church preferred the pastoral motif for
its ministers and congregations, because as much trouble as I have with
sheep, I would have been a lousy king.
A good shepherd does things
openly, transparently, in full view. He goes through the gatekeeper to
get into the fold, rather than climb over the back section of the gate as only
a thief needed to do. The sheep all know him and his voice. There
is a trust and a relationship
as he leads and follows them. This is not a matter of skill, but of a community
that operates by trust. A strange voice is one nobody trusts.
If there are words that evoke a
voice that we trust, what more can we say than “The Lord is my shepherd, I
shall not want.” No hint of a shady profession. “He makes me
lie down in green pastures, he leads me
beside still waters” - pastures and food, water and drink. This shepherd
“restores my soul and leads me in the paths of righteousness” -- sheep don’t
usually receive that kind of treatment.
“Yea, though I walk through the
valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil, for thou art with me.”
Maybe the most famous verse in the Bible because it describes the infamous
road on which we all have or will travel. Death
Valley, Eugene Peterson translates it in The Message, and
that certainly fits. The “valley of deep darkness” is another
approach. However, I prefer the old stilted King James Version wording.
The King James translators did not understand the idiom as the word for
darkness, so they broke the word down into its
constitutive parts, “the shadow of death.”
Death is not always blunt. Its
shadow blocks out your light and hope. A shadow does not always inhibit
or prevent you, but it does not let you forget that it will be there.
Yet, “We are not alone, we live in God’s
world.” Not the Psalmist this time, but the writers of the New Creed
of the United Church who are emphatic that this is
not death’s world. This is God’s world, not our human construct and
fabrication. When it is God’s world, we are never left alone. The
shepherd has not abandoned us.
That is not the universal
opinion. Some of you have read the article in the February 2005 United
Church Observer regarding “believing outside the box.” A number of
liberal ministers and theologians have
banded together to form the Canadian Centre for Progressive Christianity.
Bishop John Spong of the Episcopal Church and Tom Harpur, an Anglican who
writes religion columns for the Toronto
Star, are supporting the movement. Much of what they say is
admirable and courageous, socially conscious, and searching for the truth in
our lives. They want to free themselves from the old doctrinaire approaches
to Christianity that have dominated the church from time to time and
inhibited our ability to think creatively. We should all be about
nothing less.
There are two basic starting
points that do set their ideas aside. First is that all religion is a
human construct. We make up our religions in order to meet our spiritual
needs, and therefore every religion is relative and limited, as are human
beings.
This may come as a surprise to these
thinkers, but that’s far from a new thought. In fact, it’s a somewhat ‘so
what?’ tired out idea. For half a century and more, many have distinguished
the very particular practices and doctrines of specific religious
denominations as
“religion,” as opposed to the desire for an authentic encounter with God and
everything that might come to entail. We are not limited to one
prescribed path, but can learn from the spirituality of Roman Catholicism and
Eastern Orthodoxy, the submittal of Islam, the
commitments of Judaism, the meditation and non-violence of Buddhism and Hinduism,
the imaginations even of atheist philosophers. If it is true, that’s
what you and I should be examining and experiencing.
The second principle lays bare the
first: that God does not intervene in our lives. This unravels lots of
things about our Christian tradition. The Bible can have no authority,
for it is primarily concerned with recording how God enters human history in
all manner of ways. Jesus remains a most valuable teacher and model for
human living, but cannot be the incarnation of God. Prayer now has real
problems. Christianity is simply a reflection of some human beings’ search
for truth and maybe search for God.
I do not want to discourage this part of
our church from thinking like this. We are a part of that Protestant
Reformation that insists upon an open and free pulpit. We must insist that
all people are allowed to think about faith to the limits and beyond of one’s
imagination. I
would prefer, however, that they keep thinking some more.
It is also not a new direction to
believe that human beings are the centre of our universe. If we start
from that assumption, then truly God does not make sense, or perhaps, does
not matter. Our pride in believing we can solve all of our humanly
created problems is naive.
We have made that mistake all too many times; there is no need to sanctify
our attempts again.
Another part of the United Church has recently published “A Draft
Statement of Faith,” a new articulation of the faith handed down to us. It begins:
“God is Holy Mystery, beyond
complete knowledge, above perfect description. Yet in love, the one
eternal God creates and seeks relationship: within the Divine Being, with
creation, with us. Creating all that is, God provides the very possibility
of our being and relating. Tending all that is, God mends the broken
and reconciles the estranged. Enlivening all that is, God completes
what God began.” This God is a shepherd.
God, you feed me the best food
right in front of my enemies. Not as a taunt or triumphal boast, but as
the absolute assurance that I am provided for, in spite of my enemies and
faults who are right there, but are now helpless to intimidate me.
You anoint my head with oil. In
the ancient world, they did not crown kings; they anointed them with perfumed
and expensive oils. You, God, are treating me like royalty, like someone
superlatively special. Ointments made you smell sweet even when you
hadn’t taken a bath.
“Your beauty and love chase after
me every day of my life” (The Message). God is trying to find
you, even when we have so desperately decided we cannot find God. Human
beings, it is true, build religions to try to pin God down so that you can
consume God. God, however, waits patiently until God can consume you
and me.
“And I shall dwell in the house of
the Lord forever.” Not somewhere else exotic or foreign, but back
home. We are not left alone. We live in God’s world.
Preached by Robert
Kitchen
Knox-Metropolitan United Church
Regina, Saskatchewan
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