Ruach: A Mighty Wind

"The eyes of all wait upon thee, O Lord:

and thou givest them their meat in due season.

Thou openest thine hand:

and fillest all things living with plenteousness.

Bless, O Lord, these gifts to our use and us to thy service;

through Jesus Christ our Lord.  Amen."

We sang these words of Psalm 104 every evening before dinner at The General Theological Seminary in NYC. They echo in my soul day after day. And yet, I have always wished this grace before meals would include these other lines of Psalm 104 which long have been my favorite:

Yonder is the great and wide sea

with its living things too many to number, *

creatures both small and great.

There move the ships,

and there is that Leviathan, *

which you have made for the sport of it.

I love it! How wonderful to think that God creates things like whales, fish, and well, us, just “for the sport of it!” At the heart of God’s great joy of creating things is one of the very first words in all the Bible: ruach – Hebrew for breath, wind or spirit. Which the ancients understood as all one thing. They recognized that breath, wind and spirit are what lie at the very heart of the mystery of “life.” It became evident that with ruach there is life – with no ruach, there is no life. We breathe in, literally inspire, breath, wind and spirit, and we return breath, wind and spirit to the world. We are created to givest life to the world!

This same ruach that created Leviathan for the Sport of it, blew the ruach of YHWH into a handful of dust and mud, into the nostrils of the first human being. And it was good! The New Testament Koine Greek calls this ruach, “pneuma” – as in pneumatic tires, tires filled with air. Or, pneumatic drill: a drill powered by compressed air to give it more sustained power. And in Sanskrit there is one word, “prana,” that breath that is considered the life-giving force of all creation – prana which lies at the heart of yoga practice, and at the heart mindfulness or contemplative practice.

We may notice that our readings offer us two opposing yet complimentary interpretations of what happened one day in Jerusalem when the Holy Ruach of YHWH turned a roomful of frightened, downcast and isolated friends of Jesus into a force for good in the world. Very much like many of us, they were hiding behind closed doors in that room where they had shared a last meal with their master, teacher and friend. Hiding from very real and palpable threats outside of that room. It seemed to be a safe place, but there is no-thing that can withstand the mighty Ruach of YHWH from coming from wherever it comes from and taking us we know not where, as Jesus had said that night with Nicodemus while discussing the Spirit-Ruach of YHWH.

This ruach is at the heart of it all. Luke’s depiction in the book of Acts is powerful, dramatic: the rush of a mighty wind, and divided tongues ‘as of fire’ – not fire per se, but something ‘as of fire,’ which explains all this Red we have all over the place this morning. And suddenly a frightened, hiding, cowering room full of people became eloquent public speakers proclaiming the Good News, the Gospel, from the Old English god-spel, story of god, Old English for the Greek ev-angel-ium – literally ‘good angel.’ An angel was a messenger from God, from YHWH, the source of all creation, the source of Ruach that is life, the source of all news worthy of our attention. This YHWH sends a good-angel, a good messenger with good news for all the people everywhere! And the scared ones tell out the good news, and people from all over the world understood what they were saying in their own languages! And then they conclude, ah … they must be drunk! Leave it to people to look at the wrong end of a miracle every time saith Saint Kurt of Vonnegut!

Yet, the scene in John is markedly different. The friends of Jesus are still hiding, scared of what lies beyond that locked door. They had seen what had happened to their master Jesus. Surely, the must have thought, we are next! Then suddenly there he is. He is here. Not a ghost. See the wounds. It is He! He says, “Shalom – my shalom I give to you.” Then he breathes on them. No fire. No wind. Or, is his breath, the breath of all life, powerful enough to knock them down like so many bowling pins; like a powerful bellows that puffs up the dying embers into a roaring blaze once again! Yes! Once blown upon by his mighty Ruach they are transformed – made into living ev-angel-ium, god-spel, good news for all people. And they are no longer afraid. The spirit is strong with them once again! They venture out into the world. And nothing, no-thing, has been the same since.

For they were filled with the Ruach of YHWH. YHWH, the name of the God of Israel that is never to be spoken. When it appears in Hebrew, one is to read ‘adonai’ or ‘haShem’ instead. No  one knows how to pronounce it. Which has led to much wild speculation. Until recently. It is now thought by some meant to mimic the sound of our breathing. Yah…Wheh,,,Yah…Wheh. In-breath, out-breath. In-breath, out-breath. Which Richard Rohr speculates means that the first word we say at birth when we begin to breathe is the name of God, and the last word we speak as we expire our very last breath is the name of God. That is, we are filled and enlivened by the name of the One who made Leviathan and all of us for the sport of it!

Rohr goes on to suggest that there is no Jewish, Christian, Muslim, Buddhist, orTaoist way of breathing. There is no rich, poor or middle-class way of breathing. There is no American, Latino, Asian, Middle Eastern, African or European way of breathing. This Ruach of YHWH levels the playing field in which we are all One with the One breath, the One life, the One spirit. We are blown upon by the Mighty Wind that takes us to places we would never imagine going! To do and proclaim things that we never imagined we could do or say. You will do the things that I do, he had said. And greater things than these shall you do!

It can happen anywhere, anytime. It can happen as a mighty tsunami of change, or it can happen in a quiet moment of sheer silence when our all too restless mind is stilled and we suddenly become aware of the great depth of the mystery of our very existence and all is made new again. Pentecost means the Fiftieth Day – it was the Fiftieth Day after Passover. It is the Fiftieth Day after Easter. Seven weeks of seven days plus one more. The “one more” is understood as a new beginning, a new creation, a literally inspired reawakening to who we are and whose we are!

And of course, science has now told us that all of this we call creation comes from one spectacular burst of Ruach some 14 billion years ago, and that every molecule we breathe in and breathe out comes from that one burst of energy, so that the very air we breathe is the same air of the cave men and women, and the same air as that astronauts breathe while blasting through the heavens. This means, of course, we all are, literally, all One! One with the very source of life that sustains us with every breath we take. One with one another and all of creation. That mighty wind fills our sails and sens us to places and peoples unknown to bring the god-spel, the Good News, that yes, we are all in this together. And, yes, we are God’s Beloved. And yes, He filleth all things living with plenteousness. And yes, He givest us all good things in due season. And yes, He hath made us and sustains us with his breath, his holy wind, his holy spirit, his mighty Ruach! And yes, yes, yes, He hath made us and Leviathan for the sport of it! And it is good, He says. It is good. It is very very good. And it is always Pentecost every morning that we open our eyes and draw our first breath of the new day. Every morning. Every day. Always we begin again. And again. And all shall be well. All shall be well. All manner of thing shall be well! Amen. Amen! Amen!

One Love, One Heart

One Love, One Heart

...so that the love with which you have loved me may be in them as I in them – John 17:1-26

It’s about us. We. Not you, singular. Not me. You, plural. We. Us. Them. As Jesus is about to walk out the door and be arrested, tried, tortured and executed he prays. He prays for his friends, his followers, the few that stay with him to the end. Which in gospel terms most often means us. Jesus prays for us to be protected as he returns to that place from whence we all come: the home of God’s eternal Love. “Holy Father, protect them in your name that you have given me, so that they may be one, as we are one.” That “we” may be One. It does not get more profound or mystical than this. Be sure, those who first read Storyteller John’s account of the good news have seen not only the departure of Jesus from their midst, but The Temple and all of Jerusalem, and most all of Israel lies in ashes and ruin as Caesar’s Roman Legions have laid waste the entire land of their ancestors. Their world was shattered, broken, completely laid waste. Crisis.

We might all acknowledge that the world today is broken in so many ways. And as the world is broken, so are we. I mean this quite literally: “we” is broken. When “we” is broken, all we are left with is me me me. And when we look out upon this broken world it sometimes oftentimes appears as if it is in danger of breaking up and being completely laid waste.

As something as small as one micron endangers the lives of millions. A micron is about .00004 inches. For size comparison, a human red blood cell is about 5 microns across. This micron of a virus has infected 5.24 million worldwide and taken the lives of 340,000. And counting. With the gifts of science and common sense we have been given opportunities for protection of the most vulnerable among us. It is hard to imagine a time, not long ago, when our vocabulary of “social distancing,” “self-isolation,” “stay at home,” “wear a mask,” “flatten the curve,” and the like would have seemed like a foreign language. What are you talking about, we would have said.

Amidst the miasma of information, mis-information, role models and the lack thereof, instead of meeting this public health danger as a unified people, an already polarized population has fragmented even further, seemingly unable to process and separate the facts from the fictions. Instead of working together to save the most lives, we end up in ghettos of like-mindedness looking out for something we call “individual rights,” rather than a deep concern for what we used to call the Common Good. Some are alarmed that any authority would tell us what we can and cannot do, while others are alarmed that there are those who refuse to adopt Best Practices for a pandemic. All sense of community and care for the other, for one another, appears to be disappearing into a Hollywood-like manufactured myth of American Rugged Individualism, a re-emergence of some kind of twisted Manifest Destiny, and a sense that Jesus’s prayer for us must mean ‘I will be protected by God’s will,’ or, ‘If I die, it must be God’s will.’

As we ponder the inscrutable meaning of Jesus’s Farewell Prayer, we cannot seem to see that he is not talking about me. He is praying for us. We. Them. He prays for the common welfare of the community he leaves behind as he returns to the place from whence we all come and will one day all return. We come from Love. We return to Love. And Love is all around. God is Love. Love is of God. So, that the love with which you have loved me, he prays, will be in them. Protect them, he says, so that they may be one, as we are one. Can we even hear these words as we allow ourselves, our community and our own selves, to be so fragmented and not-one? Can we hear these words above the din, the strum and drang, of the present moment?

Love one another as I have loved you and as the Father has loved me. This prayer is a call to set aside our personal fears, desires, wants, rights, and become a community of God’s love for others – God’s love for all of creation and everything and everyone therein. A community truly at one with Jesus and the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob is always more concerned with the needs of others than for its own survival. Attending to the needs of others is what insures our survival, our safety.

Just how does God protect us in times such as this? By giving us those who have been given the skills and knowledge to help us all to navigate the threat of this mighty micron-virus safely. Together. Maintaining safe-distancing and wearing a mask is not about protecting me, it is about protecting the lives of those around me. It is about loving and respecting others. For I have no idea if I am or am not infected, asymptomatic, and capable of infecting others. It says, I take this seriously and care about you and respect you as a valued part of the community in which we all live.

So, this is not about my right to assembly, or to go to church, but rather is it possible to make the church I attend a safe place for others. Because if it is safe for others, it will be safe for me as well. There is no Love in me me me. There is love only in us, in we, in them. It takes time to create a safe place for others. There is no need to rush into it. We remain together through our long-distance online worship. We will return, all in good time. Not our time, but the right time. The safe time for all, especially the most vulnerable among us.  

Note, Jesus does not pray for himself to be protected from what he knows will happen to him as he walks out of that door in the upper room where he has shared a last meal with his friends. Where he has washed all of their feet. Where he has prayed not for himself, but for them. For us. For all those he served and loved as he went about Galilee and Judea feeding people, healing people, listening to others, welcoming strangers, welcoming all manner of man, woman and child. He does not pray for individual rights for each and every one of us. He calls us to be a community of Love for others. All others.

He prays that we become a community of One as an extension of God’s One love in Jesus so that we may be a witness to the world of such love as hath no boundaries, no exclusions, no enemies. Jesus makes visible the living presence of the living God. He prays that we too make visible the living presence of God’s love for all creation – everyone and everything therein.

This, he prays, is eternal life here and now: to know God his Father. To know Jesus. To live a life shaped by our knowledge of God. And here, and throughout the Bible ‘to know’ does not mean to grasp a truth, but rather to be acquainted with someone. To know someone is to be in relationship with that person at a deep place in both of your lives. And to know God and to know Jesus is an invitation to know others – the other, all others, all those who are not us.

What does it mean to be One? It means to be all – all in one, and one in all. Our survival in a broken world depends on our being one as Jesus and God are one. This prayer calls us to be united in such love for one another as Jesus and God are One Love. One Love. One heart. Let’s get together and feel alright. Amen.

While Listening to John Coltrane’s Ascension

While Listening to John Coltrane’s Ascension

“What we call the beginning is often the end

And to make an end is to make a beginning.

The end is where we start from….”   T. S. Eliot, Little Gidding, section V

Storyteller Luke offers two views of the Ascension of Jesus at the end of Luke 24: 36-53 and the beginning of Acts 1:1-11. Luke-Acts is his two-volume interpretation of the life, death and resurrection of Jesus the Christ, the anointed One. It is the end of one story and the beginning of the other: the end of the story of the Word that became flesh to dwell among us and the beginning of the story of the community he formed to continue the works he does, “and greater works than these will you do!” after he leaves us on our own to begin again.  It is a hinge moment between two times, two eras, which Eliot reminds us always takes us back to where we begin. “To make an end is to make a beginning. The end is where we start from…”

We begin with Love, we return to Love, and Love is all around as my mentor of some twenty-five years would always remind us. Jesus returns to God’s Household of Eternal Love – Eternity. As Blues legend Willie Dixon reminds us, “You cannot think of eternity/Think of it like time/You try to think, you try to count/You just mess up your mind.” [Willie Dixon – Eternity, 1992]

It is evening of the Day of Resurrection in Luke. After talking with two companions on the way to Emmaus and breaking bread with them; after appearing to all the disciples and asking for a piece of fish! ‘“Have you anything here to eat?” he asks. They gave him a piece of broiled fish, and he took it and ate in their presence,’ to show that he was not a ghost. [Luke 24:41b-43] A kind of Felliniesque detail in a tale that is nothing but pure fabulism, dada and surrealism rolled into one truly momentous historic hinge between there and here.

As he blesses them and ascends up into the sky, he issues the final instruction: “…stay here in the city until you have been clothed with power from on high!” And then he is gone! A sort of ‘wait here for further instructions’ kind of moment. Place all this in the context of Stay At Home. You need to go no further. The power from on high will come to you. It’s not a journey. Here at the end you are at another beginning if you simply stay put. The same Spirit that descended upon Jesus like a dove in the River Jordan he promises will come upon you to empower you to become a new people. Once you were no people, now you are a new people!

IV

The dove descending breaks the air

With flame of incandescent terror

Of which the tongues declare

The one discharge from sin and error.

The only hope, or else despair

Lies in the choice of pyre of pyre-

To be redeemed from fire by fire.  [Eliot, ibid]

And are we astonished that at his leaving there is no hint of despair? We are told “…they returned to Jerusalem with great joy; and they were continually in the temple blessing God.” Rejoice always and pray without ceasing as St. Paul, once Paul of Tarsus and persecutor of these very people watching their Lord ascend, had put it in his Letter to the Thessalonians! BTW the Temple is where the Storyteller Luke begins his tale with all those old folks like Zechariah, Simeon and Anna. The end is where we start from. We come from God’s Household of Eternal Love. The Temple. And as Luke narrates this tale, the Second Temple and all of Jerusalem lies in ashes at the hands of Caesar’s Rome.

Another storyteller, Baruch 2, describes the destruction of the First Temple by Babylon. It’s another fabulist tale of sorts describing angels descending from heaven., emptying the Temple of everything therein and carrying it all back to whence all things come so that when the Babylonians thought they were looting and destroying the Temple – it wasn’t there at all! The angels kept the essence of Israel’s life and hope out of Babylon’s hands.

What if Luke’s Ascensions recall this story in Baruch 2, this memory, and functions to keep Jesus and the Temple out of Roman hands at the destruction of the second temple to come? Rome runs rampant, but the destroyer cannot touch either the messiah, the Christ, the anointed, or the Temple. The heart of Jewish life and hope are now out of Rome’s reach! Has Luke’s community come up with a solution for the crisis and tragedy that had already taken place? That they had already witnessed?  What will be our solution as the present crisis ends? Have the angels already salvaged the essence of what must remain when our ending becomes a new beginning?

Listening to Coltrane reminds me of sitting in Trinity Church, Wall Street, on Ascension morning like this one, and hearing the music of Larry King the organist and his choirs and recorded sounds in quadraphonic swirl around the sanctuary depicting Larry’s interpretation of these events and feeling lifted, ascended to a new place, a new beginning as we returned if only for a moment to that place from whence we all come – the Household of God’s Eternal Love! It was a Close Encounters kind of experience!

In Storyteller Luke’s second account in Acts the boys stand there, looking up into the heavens as companion Jesus, with whom they had shared so much bread and wine and healing and teaching and wonders and marvelous tales of farmers and pearls and sheep and goats and so so much more, disappears from sight. So much more. Suddenly two men in white appear. The same two men in dazzling clothes who earlier that morning stood with the women at the empty tomb. Or, was itforty mornings ago? Or, has it all been one long moment, one long agonizing and at the same time astonishing moment? Those two men looking as if they just stepped out of a scene in Saturday Night Fever dressed in white to announce, “Why do you look for the living among the dead? He is not here. He has been raised!”

Here they are again as the boys just stand there looking up, gazing into the clouds as he was now out of sight. But they just continue to stand there like statues gazing and gazing until interrupted by these two men in dazzling clothes who ask, “…why do you stand looking up toward heaven? This Jesus, who has been taken up from you into heaven, will come in the same way as you saw him go into heaven." As much as to say, “Remember what he said? Get into the city and stay there until…” And, ‘Get your heads out of the clouds to care for the world he cared so much about.’ And then: “The dove descending breaks the air/With flame of incandescent terror

Of which the tongues declare/The one discharge from sin and error./ The only hope, or else despair/Lies in the choice of pyre of pyre-/To be redeemed from fire by fire.”

Back they went. The wind blew. The fire descended from on high. The house shook. Their hearts and souls shook. It was the hurricane force of God’s mighty enlivening and life sustaining Ruach! Breath! Wind! Spirit! The end became a new beginning! The dove that had landed on God’s Beloved in the River Jordan was landing, and the landing was filled with power from on high! Redeemed from the fire of the city’s destruction by fire, by wind, by breath. And they began to speak as never before they had spoken! O, the stories they could tell! But then, that’s another story. We will get to it. For now it is enough to remember: Stay where we are. Get our heads out of the clouds and out of heaven. Stay focused on the mission here and now. For now, it is enough to remember: “What we call the beginning is often the end/And to make an end is to make a beginning. The end is where we start from….”  So, this is what happens as one ponders these tales while listening to John Coltrane’s Ascension. Try it. I promise you will never be the same again! And in fact, we never are! Amen. It is so. Amen.

Now Is The Time For You

Amen. So be it. It is true. Amen.

Barbara Hall taught me Biblical Greek and New Testament. When looking at a text like John chapter fourteen she would always say, “Ask yourself, what time is it?”

For Jesus, the Word of God, and his disciples,

 it is the Last Supper after he has washed their feet and given them a new commandment: to love one another as he has loved them and as the father loves him. For Jesus it is time to leave – his departure is imminent. For the disciples it is a time of anxiety – the one they have been following for several years is leaving them. For us it is time to finally understand what is really going on in this all too familiar and over-domesticated portion of Jesus’s Farewell Address which we hear most often at funerals. Which makes it difficult for us to see it is about living here and now, not later.

The disciples are asking all sorts of questions: we don’t know the way; we have not seen the father. They see Jesus and see what he does, but seeing is not enough. They need to understand who he is in a deeper sense. Richard Swanson in Provoking the Gospel of John alerts us to the automotive repair metaphor in the word understand. To understand who Jesus is and what he is saying you need to stand under the text the way a mechanic stands under a car on a lift, looking at everything with a practiced eye. “It is all in the practice, and it’s all in the angle of vision.” [Swanson, p 309]

This is where Barabara Hall’s training in Greek reveals to us that American translations of one word has been heavily freighted with American Evangelical Fundamental meaning, hiding the root meaning of the word πιστεύω - pisteuo. To translate it as “believe” is to assume we know that believe means to place one’s trust in someone, rather than as assent to an idea, or existence of someone or something. Whereas the word pisteuo’s primary meaning is faith or faithfulness – rendering, “You are faithful in God, also toward me be faithful.” And as that deep theological treatise Hebrews reminds us, “Faith is the assurance of things hoped for, and the conviction of things not seen.” That is, faith is based not just in seeing, as in “Seeing is believing,” but in understanding and looking at everything with a practiced eye. It’s all in the practice and the angle of vision with which stand under the text.

When we do stand under the text and look at everything with a practiced eye we begin to understand: It speaks to the mystery of human relationships to God. And to the Centrality of Inclusive Love in this relationship. Jesus does many things to reveal who he is: he turns water into wine, the blind can see, many hungry people are fed with limited resources, and most of all everyone is invited to be with him without qualification. Now when Philip asks to show us the father, Jesus points to himself. In fact, he just had when he says, I Am: Way, Truth and Life. “I am” is the name of the voice in the burning bush – the Oneness Jesus knows as Father.

But Philip misses the reference – and so do we, so preoccupied are we with thinking this “I Am” saying has to do with us and our religion versus other religions. How self-centered we easily become to think that the one person who came to dwell among us with the sole mission to gather all people together without qualification would suddenly be claiming that to follow him puts one in some sort of exclusive club rather than an invitation not to put one foot in, but to be all in in accepting his invitation to be part of his radically inclusive community of God’s Love.

We come from love, we return to love and love is all around. W.H. Auden in his poem For the Time Being: Xmas Oratorio, riffs on this very passage in the following excerpt:

He is the Way.

Follow him through the Land of Unlikeness;

You will see rare beasts, and have unique adventures.

He is the Truth.

Seek him in the Kingdom of Anxiety;

You will come to a great city that has expected your return for years.

He is the Life.

Love Him in the world of the Flesh;

And at your marriage all its occasions shall dance for joy.

That is, the Father is to be seen in the Land of Unlikeness, the Kingdom of Anxiety and the World of the Flesh. Which is right where we find ourselves here and now. This is not about some future, although it is. This is not about the past, although it is. It is about dwelling in the household of God’s Eternal Love Here and Now.

What time is it? Time to dwell in the house of the lord – which is a long-standing metaphor for having a relationship with God in God’s house – the oiko of God. And God’s oiko is God’s Torah, God’s commands, God’s law. How ironic it is that the root of the word economy, oiko- nomos, means law of the household, and the root of ecology, oiko-logos, means study of the household. Which is The Household – the Household of God! We are to be Economists who dwell in and meditate on God’s Word, and Ecologists who study what it means to dwell in harmony with and in the household of God!

It has been said that Torah is the incarnation of God, and the rabbi is the incarnation of Torah. And rabbi Jesus speaks of the works, the mitzvot of Torah, that he embodies, the very basis of all the things that he does, that he practices. It is all in the practice of the mitzvot that God the father is revealed. This is the Way. And greater mitzvot, greater works than these will you do if you understand you are to be faithful unto me and the father. And if you understand what time it is: time for me to go. And if you understand you are to pray: pray for the will and the desire and strength and courage to embody the mitzvot, the works, the things that I do. This is the practice. This is the Way. This is to be the angle of our vison!

That is, Jesus living out his pattern of Torah observance amounts to seeing the incarnate father, not just in Jesus but in his pattern of living and observance. This pattern of living is the Way, which is the Way of Truth and Life – Life for all living things and all of creation – the kosmos, which is one of Storyteller John’s favorite words.

Note, Jesus is not pointing to himself, nor is he pointing to any kind of exclusive religion, but rather he points to this pattern of Torah observance, the mitzvot, the works themselves, for it is the works that reveal the father. All Jews recognize that any call to focus on a single human being rather than family or community diverts God’s people from proper Torah practice. We can trust the disciples know this much even if they are confused on all the rest.

What time is it? The Time of Apprenticeship is over. It is time for me to go. It is time for you to begin to Be the Way! You will always have me, the Way and the community of the Way. It is now Time for you to embody my Father, to embody the practice and the works, embody the Spirit-Breath of the Living God. Become one with my father and make all of this greater, expand it, extend it to serve all people everywhere all the time. Seek and serve the Word in all persons; loving your neighbors as yourselves. This is truth. This is life. Amen. So be it. It is true. Amen.

The Beautiful Shepherd

“The Gospel is firmly rooted in a story of that which once happened. The story is familiar. But we should observe that the situation into which Jesus Christ came was genuinely typical (the outcome of much previous history) and too long to tell here. The forces with which he came into contact were such as are permanent factors in history: - government, institutional religion, nationalism, social unrest…” So wrote C.H. Dodd in “The Kingdom of God and the Present Situation”, on May 29, 1940, in the Christian News-Letter, supplement No. 31.

Monday through Friday and on Sundays a number of us have been praying together online. It has emerged as a meaningful way to pause in the midst of the multiple crises that surround us on all sides and reflect on just what our focus needs to be. We  look upon the life, death and resurrection of Jesus the Christ for that which might not merely sustain us in our present circumstance of exile from our familiar habits and forms of gathering at his table, but to see some glimpses of where we may be headed in the days, months and years ahead as participants in what our Presiding Bishop Michael Curry likes to call The Jesus Movement.

While we delve deeper into the life of Jesus the Christ, it becomes evident from episode to episode that the one we call Christ chooses obedience over strategies, and messy and even risky acts of love over the kinds of effective and efficient strategies and rituals enshrined among those “in charge” in Jerusalem and it’s highly efficient Temple driven economy – and which remain enshrined in the church and in the world to this very day.

Christ itself means “one anointed to rule,” and as such expresses that “his ministry among men was inseparable from the political concerns then related most intimately to fulfilling the hopes of his people in their oppression.” [John Yoder, The Politics of Jesus, p 240] Although he might have aligned with groups like the Zealots who advocated violent revolt against Rome, or the religious authorities in Jerusalem who advocated strict adherence to the rules of sacrifice and purity regulations, Jesus instead chose a simple path of obedience – obedience not to keeping “verbally enshrined rules,” but rather reflecting the character of the Love of God. [Ibid 245]

It is hard to tell, but this metaphor about shepherds and gates is a continuation of the disturbance Jesus caused in the ninth chapter of John by restoring the vision of a man born blind – on the Sabbath. As Kurt Vonnegut once preached, leave it to a crowd to focus on the wrong end of a miracle every time! The man’s neighbors, and the gatekeepers of Sabbath do’s and don’ts, have no time to rejoice in the young man’s new found vision, but rather accuse Jesus of demon possession for seeming to break the “thou shalt do no work on the Sabbath” regulation. We may recall that chapter 9 ends with him assuring the young man that “I came into the world so that those who do not see may see, and those who do see may become blind.” To which the authorities reply, “Surely you do not mean us! We are not blind!” Jesus said to them, “If you were blind, you would not have sin. But now that you say, ‘We see,’ your sin remains.”

Of course, that was way back in the Fourth Sunday in Lent and it’s now the Fourth Sunday of Easter! Yet, we are meant to remember this so that we can see that all this business about sheep, shepherds and gates is a continuation of that conversation. We best lay aside the implications that we are the sheep – sheep who are not as cuddly as the smiling little character in Christ’s arms in this magnificent Good Shepherd window behind me, but rather are smelly, rude, brutish and apt to wander off at the slightest distraction. It also helps us to know that Jesus is looking back further than the Fourth Sunday in Lent, but rather to the time of Ezekiel who lived in the Babylonian Captivity six centuries before Christ. Specifically the 34^th chapter of his prophecies railing against the kings and political leaders of Israel as bad, evil shepherds: “The word of the Lord came to me: 2 Mortal, prophesy against the shepherds of Israel: prophesy, and say to them—to the shepherds: Thus says the Lord God: Ah, you shepherds of Israel who have been feeding yourselves! Should not shepherds feed the sheep? 3 You eat the fat, you clothe yourselves with the wool, you slaughter the fatlings; but you do not feed the sheep. 4 You have not strengthened the weak, you have not healed the sick, you have not bound up the injured, you have not brought back the strayed, you have not sought the lost, but with force and harshness you have ruled them. 5 So they were scattered, because there was no shepherd; and scattered, they became food for all the wild animals.” The Lord goes on to say, “I myself will search for my sheep, and will seek them out. 12 As shepherds seek out their flocks when they are among their scattered sheep, so I will seek out my sheep. I will rescue them from all the places to which they have been scattered on a day of clouds and thick darkness.”

Surely, Jesus may be thinking, you remember this – and now look, we are right back where we were six hundred years ago! Not exactly how to win friends and influence people since he is accusing the very people accusing him of demon possession, of continuing to sacrifice the very people they have been charged to care for. He goes on to say, “I am the shepherd, the beautiful one. The beautiful shepherd stakes his very being for the sheep – lays down his life – loves them and cares for them unto death.” After he says this the Judeans were divided: a demon has he – he is raving – why listen to him! While others said, These matters are not coming from a demonized person. A demon is not able to open the eyes of a blind person, is he?” The scene ends there – with the people sorting themselves out. Either you remain in the camp of the bad shepherds who collaborate with Caesar’s Empire, or you consider the love of God prevails over all despite the risks involved.

To be clear: the Bad, Evil, Thieving Shepherd is in it for power, personal gain, and for the money. While the Good, Beautiful Shepherd is willing to risk even death for the sake of his sheep. Two thousand years later it appears to some that not much has changed in this metaphor that extends throughout the whole Bible. And we do well to note, that Jesus says there are other sheep not in his flock, but who also are to be cared for as Ezekiel depicts a God who gathers those in need to heal them, feed them, care for them, bind up their wounds and lift them up and out of the present darkness into the light.

And those of us who are familiar with Storyteller John’s account know to look forward, to after Jesus is raised from the dead, after a nearly disastrous but strangely successful fishing expedition, he cooks up some bread and fish for the disciples and then takes Peter aside. Peter who had denied Jesus three times. He asks Peter, Do you love me? Peter says yes, Lord, I love you. Then feed my lambs! Jesus asks a second time, Do you love me? Yes, Lord, I love you. Tend my sheep! And a third time he asks, Peter says yes, and Jesus says, Feed my sheep. That is, my community of God’s Eternal Love is to be a community of good shepherds. Rescue people from danger and oppression. Feed hungry people. Strengthen the weak. Bind up their wounds.

And so we read: Awe came upon everyone, because many wonders and signs were being done by the apostles. All who believed were together and had all things in common; they would sell their possessions and goods and distribute the proceeds to all, as any had need. Day by day, as they spent much time together in the temple, they broke bread at home and ate their food with glad and generous hearts, praising God and having the goodwill of all the people. And day by day the Lord added to their number those who were being saved. [Acts 2:42-47]

And also: He himself bore our sins in his body on the cross, so that, free from sins, we might live for righteousness; by his wounds you have been healed. For you were going astray like sheep, but now you have returned to the shepherd and guardian of your souls. [I Peter 2:24-25]

This is why we gather day by day, even if it must be from afar, we gather online so that we might remain with the guardian of our souls, come through this present darkness and one day gather again around this table, before this image of the Good Shepherd, praising God and having the good will of all the people.

It is in obedience to the character of the Love of God that we all shall be saved. As we heard from Dorothy Day this week, “Love is indeed a harsh and dreadful thing to ask of us, of each of us, but it is the only answer.”   [Meditations: Dorothy Day, Paulist Press, p 84, January 1967]

What Jesus was asking then, and asks us today is: Where do we see such love? Where do we see the community of the Beautiful Shepherd?