“I came that they may have life and have it abundantly.”
Not long after the COVID19 pandemic began to spread across the United States and our lives suddenly became very strange, I heard about a new book on the climate crisis and decided it would be just the thing to read in this anxious time. Sometimes it helps to put a present pain in context and remember it is not the greatest challenge we’re facing. The book I read is called The Story of More by Hope Jahren. It’s a simple but brilliant book that traces the incredible growth of abundance from the time Jahren was born in 1969 until now. That 50-year period has seen a vast rise in population, immense increases in agricultural productivity, and exponential growth in energy use. The reality is that we simply have more stuff and more power and space and food and material resources than any humans that have ever lived, and it is killing our planet. Jahren’s message in the book is straightforward: if more has become the source of our problem, then less is the only solution. We have to learn to embrace simpler lives individually and collectively or the earth will no longer be home to the abundance of all creation. It is a paradoxical message, for sure. If we keep pursuing more in our human economy, we will live in an ever more impoverished world; if we learn to live with less, we will welcome a more abundant life for the whole of this planet. It is that paradox that I hear at the heart of our Gospel reading this morning. John’s Gospel is not the easiest to follow. It lacks the straightforward narratives or simple parables of the synoptics--Matthew, Mark, and Luke. But at its center is the message we hear today--Jesus has come among us to bring abundant life. It is a life of love, a life in which we learn to wash feet and welcome strangers. It is a life through which we become children of God, joining our own lives with the Divine. Yet as we hear in today’s Gospel, not everyone is interested in bringing us into such abundance. In the immediate context of our passage today, Jesus is teaching a group of Pharisees. Though they are often seen in conflict with Jesus we have to remember that their understanding of the scriptures and life with God is close to much of Jesus’s own teaching. Jesus knows that there are many in the group who agree with him and he is calling for them to come and join his movement in the open. Opposed to Jesus and his movement is a group of elite religious leaders in Jerusalem that John calls “The Judeans,” a word often erroneously translated as “The Jews.” These leaders were more interested in a bourgeois, domesticated religion than in truly welcoming God’s abundance. They were supposed to be shepherds of Israel, but in reality these leaders were more interested in exploiting their position to extend their own wealth and power than they were in caring for the people. These are the ones Jesus calls robbers and thieves, those who come only to destroy and to kill. Think of the false shepherds, the robbers and thieves of our own time. Who are those who go about acting as though they are here to bring us into abundant life, but are feeding us only to prepare us for our slaughter? They are the false teachers and false gods, who tell us that the life of more things, more activities, more learning, more doing, more entertainment, more consumer spirituality is what we need. And all along they are taking it to the bank while we are left with diminished lives in a diminished world. What are we to do? Run away, to start. It’s one of the only defenses sheep have and we should use it. When you see a false prophet coming down the road to promise you salvation through a better exercise plan or a kitchen remodel, those who want to draw you into a politics of us and them, those who say you can follow God but keep everything else in your life just as you like it--head the other way. Go toward the one who cares for you, who would die for you, who leads you into abundant pastures and beside still waters, even though you might have to go through the valley of the shadow to death to get there. To follow this path we have to learn to know the shepherd who will lead us along it. We have to spend time learning the shepherd’s voice so that we can run toward him when we are in the dark and the sheep rustlers are coming over the fence. These past several weeks I’ve been spending time running away. I didn’t intend to, but with so many of my normal tasks and routines disrupted it’s given my family a chance to recognize many of the robbers and thieves that were breaking in at the borders of our lives. We thought that so many things were bringing us joy and abundance, were filling our lives with more, but now in their absence we’ve been able to recognize that we are better off with a lot less. There are many good things that we want to return to, that we miss dearly, but the last thing we want is for our lives to just go back to normal. We’ve been learning through this forced retreat of COVID19 to hear the difference between the noise of the thieves and the gentle voice of the good shepherd. Learning the voice of the Good Shepherd is the way of prayer. To learn to listen to the Good Shepherd is to find the path toward true abundant life, even amid our lack and suffering. The monastic teacher Martin Laird relates a beautiful story of this reality in his book on Christian contemplation, Into the Silent Land. There he writes of a woman named Elizabeth who was an expert on irises. As a botanist she knew the details of their petals, the underground realities of their rhizomes. She studied irises in her lab and presented papers on them at international conferences. But an autoimmune disease brought her career as a botanist to an abrupt end. She could barely manage a walk in her garden and greenhouse. Desperate for relief in the midst of her pain, Elizabeth turned to the practice of contemplative prayer. What had before been an intermittent practice that had been limited to “airports, train journeys, and enduring tedious sermons” became a ritual spread throughout her every day. Lying on her back, focusing her attention on her breath and prayer word, she gradually began to “distinguish pain from the commentary on the pain.” The hurt did not go away, but her focus upon it did. She was able to stop the chatter of her mind and to enter a space of silence where the pain could be held. It was in that silence that she found “a loving solidarity with all humanity.” She was learning the voice of the Good Shepherd and he was bringing her into abundant life, even as her life of more was being was diminished. This abundant life did not rescue her from her pain, like the solution of some snake oil charlatan, but it provided a loving and beautiful sense of God’s real and abiding presence in its midst. Shortly before she died Elizabeth reflected on all that she missed from her work as a botanist, the research that would never be finished, the papers that would remain incomplete. But in the end she learned a new reality. “You know,” she said, “while I’ve been ill I’ve managed to discover something new about irises--I never knew they were beautiful.” Jesus has come to be our shepherd, to care for us and lead us into abundant life. It is not the life of more, the life that eats away at the world and our souls and ultimately brings us toward chaos and death. The abundance Jesus brings is a life where we learn to be still, where we hear in silence the voice of the good shepherd who will lead us toward the nourishing places of our world. If we follow that voice we will find good pasture and still water, we may even stop our frantic movement long enough to see an iris and recognize that it is beautiful. Amen. In 1940, T.S. Eliot published a poem in the New English Weekly called “East Cocker.” This was a year of war, the same year that the German air force began their brutal raids on London, the nightly bombings that sent the citizens of the city into the underground. It was a season when the people of England, and much of the world beyond, were united only in their fear and loss, anxiety and outrage. Hope was hard to see, the future impossible to discern.
“East Cocker” is a poem seeking some light, some hope in the midst of the dark. But where? Eliot goes searching for certainty in the old rhythms of nature, but finds them: Whirled in a vortex that shall bring The world to that destructive fire Which burns before the ice-cap reigns. Prescient of the climatic upheaval to come, Eliot sees nature itself in chaos, no sure guide for the future. Culture, the old wisdom of the ancestors, is no better help. The experience of the past is “At best, only limited value.” “…Do not let me hear Of the wisdom of old men, but rather of their folly,” he writes. Their fear of fear and frenzy, their fear of possession, Of belonging to another, or to others, or to God.” Culture and experience, the patterns that came before us, cannot bring healing, the reconciling love for which the poet longs. In the end the only truth that gives him wisdom is that found by self-emptying, going down, embracing the ground of all life--the soil of humility. “The only wisdom we can hope to acquire,” he writes. “Is the wisdom of humility: humility is endless.” Ours is a time ready for the wisdom of humility for it has been a time of humiliation. Our knowledge, our power, our technologies—as grand as we’ve imagined them, as much trust as we’ve put in them, have proven inadequate to defend us against disease, death, the inevitable limits of creaturely life. Like World War II that put an end to the optimisms of modernity, COVID19 is another warning against our hubris, a reminder of our limits. Most of us among the global few, who live with more than enough, are not well trained in the way of humility. We went to elementary schools with sayings like “knowledge is power” emblazoned across the halls. We entered careers and professions that offered opportunities for advancements and awards and titles. We are among the generation of more who live with more stuff, in more space, using more energy than any people the world has had to bear. How do we, so trained, now learn what Eliot called the “way of ignorance,” how do we accept the wisdom of humility? These lines from the Gospel of Matthew begin to show the way: A very large crowd spread their cloaks on the road, and others cut branches from the trees and spread them on the road. The crowds that went ahead of him and that followed were shouting, "Hosanna to the Son of David! Blessed is the one who comes in the name of the Lord! Hosanna in the highest heaven!” No leader alive, no dictator, no president, no prime minister could hope for such a welcome as Jesus had when he entered Jerusalem. The people were ready to make him king, ready to die for him, ready for the revolt that would return their national pride. They saw hope in Jesus, hope in his power, hope in his miracles of healing, his feedings of the masses. Now was the time for these desperate and downtrodden people to reverse their fate and rise to power. But in the few days that followed, Jesus did not capitalize on the chance to be on stage, to gain the power that could have been his. Jesus rejected rank and title in order to be counted as a slave, condemned as a heretic, killed like a common criminal. It was of this path that the ancient Christians sang, in the hymn recorded in our reading from Philippians. Christ who was equal with God became instead a common human, a king who tossed aside his crown to become a servant--one more in the disinherited mass of the poor and powerless. Christ followed the path of humility, obedient to its call all the way to his death. Humility can be our balm, our way into the ground where the seeds of our flourishing can be planted and spring forth with radiant beauty and life. But for that ground to be alive, to give us the renewal we need for resurrection, we must enter into death and surrender even of our hope to God. “I said to my soul, be still, and wait without hope,” writes Eliot. “For hope would be hope for the wrong thing; wait without love For love would be love of the wrong thing; there is yet faith But the faith and love and the hope are all in the waiting.” The path of humility is not easy. It would have been so much clearer, so simple and comforting and safe, if on that day when the palm branches were spread in the streets Jesus took the throne. But Jesus knew that such power would have only kept the kingdoms of coercion alive. He chose, instead, the way of the cross for the only path toward wholeness, the only way into the life of the divine is the way of waiting in defenseless vulnerability before God. Ours is a time of waiting. We do not know what will come today or tomorrow or a year from now. We never did, but before we were at least comfortable in our illusions. To be awakened from them is unsettling and so we may be tempted in this waiting to put our hopes in politics or science or some other solution ready to offer us answers. We may hope that everything will just go back to normal without wondering if normal was ever just or good or loving. Instead, this day, this Holy Week in which we trace the powerless path of Christ toward his glorious resurrection, we are offered another option. When the apostle Paul called the church in Philippi to love and compassion, he told them to cultivate within themselves “the same mind that was in Christ Jesus.” The way into this mind is the way of humble prayer, open and silent and vulnerable. This is the kind of prayer that the Anglican theologian Sarah Coakley calls “the defenseless prayer of silent waiting on God.” It is through this waiting that we can give up our own hopes and loves and agendas and join with Jesus in welcoming whatever God is bringing into the world, whatever God is birthing from death. It is in this silent waiting, this defenseless prayer, that we find the “self’s transformation and expansion into God.” Over these past couple of weeks, I’ve heard from many of you that are experiencing isolation and loneliness. I’ve heard of jobs lost and futures uncertain. I’ve heard of people in hospitals who are denied the comfort of family beside their bed. There is much suffering and there are many deaths in this waiting. But I have also heard from many of you about flowers blooming in your yard, afternoons spent digging in the dirt. I know families who have spent their time at home ripping out their lawns to make gardens. I’ve talked with friends who never cared before about how to begin a compost pile. Seeds are being planted in the soil now warm from sun and wet with rain, and they are sprouting, driving roots down into the dirt and sending shoots up toward the sun. The soil for these seeds is humus, the dead stuff of life once lived, now transformed into the ground for new beginnings. The way of humility is the way of this soil, of going down so that we can rise again, rooted in our truth, grounded in God’s love. The seeds are planted, now we wait. This Holy Week let us embrace the pause, the waiting, the solitude it offers. Wait with Jesus, in the posture of a servant, bending toward the needs of neighbors near and far. Wait with Jesus in the garden in dread of what will come. Wait with Jesus through the agony of the cross where even God seemed distant and all felt lost. Wait with Jesus in the silence of the grave, his tortured body encased in stone. Wait with Jesus because God is doing something new, bringing resurrection and life and love and hope in ways we cannot begin to imagine. Just wait and see. Amen. Of all the terms being thrown around to describe this time, one of the most common has been “apocalyptic.” The Guardian newspaper recently carried a list of post-apocalyptic novels including one of my favorite pandemic reads: Station Eleven. And some of the most streamed movies of recent days have titles such as Contagion.
In the ways it is used in the popular culture and media, apocalyptic means the end of the world or at least of civilization, but that is far from the biblical sense. Apocalypse, in scripture, means an unveiling or uncovering. It is a way of moving into a different perspective—a heavenly view. Apocalypse isn’t the time when the world ends suddenly, but instead is the moment when the reality of what is lasting, what is really good and valuable, is set in stark contrast to all of the illusions of the moment. Our scriptures for today might not be considered “apocalyptic” in the proper sense, but on a closer look all of them are working in the apocalyptic mode. In each we are offered a heavenly view of the realities among people. In each we are invited into a shift of perspective from the earthly to the heavenly. But of all the scriptures this morning, the one whose apocalyptic message is most critical for us today is the 23rd Psalm. Most of us wouldn’t think of the 23rd Psalm as an apocalyptic passage. It is our most familiar psalm, one of the most known and cherished parts of scripture, and for good reason. Its words are deeply comforting, its images deep and life giving. But at the Psalm’s heart is a message meant to bring perspective, God’s revelation, to a people in crisis. This ancient song is meant to bring a message so profound and powerful that when fully encountered it will change the very way we live. Of course, too often people do not accept the psalm in all of its radical implications. Like much of scripture, we are glad to take the comfort it offers but unwilling to embrace the change it calls for. As the philosopher Dallas Willard once quipped, “’The Lord is my shepherd,’ is a sentiment carved on tombstones more often than a reality written in lives.” And yet it is in times like these, times of great uncertainty and danger, that we are invited to see with the Psalmist that God is with us, that God is our abiding caretaker in the midst of our trouble and we should live as though that is true. Our task is to let God be our shepherd, to move our wills into alignment with God’s will. The whole of psalm 23 is a working out of what a life lived in submission to the care of the Good Shepherd looks like. There is much to say about this Psalm and many books have been written exploring its depths. It is one of those texts to memorize and recite and ponder with time. But today I would like to offer you a way of living into the reality of the Good Shepherd that I learned from my wife Emily. As we were having our morning coffee recently, we talked about the scriptures for this Sunday and Emily shared a prayer that she offers for our family daily. She calls it the three Ps. The first is for God’s perspective. She prays that we would come to see from God’s perspective rather than the fleeting concerns of this moment. This is what it means to say the “Lord is my shepherd.” The Shepherd is the one who sees the whole, who understands the right paths, and how to best navigate the dangers of the world. It is important, as we live as his sheep, that we learn to see as he sees, value as he values, live as he would live if he were us. The second P of Emily’s prayer is for God’s presence. It is not only important to see as the Shepherd sees, but also to experience the Shepherd’s presence. As we know from our own experience, it is possible to feel that someone is with us even if we do not see them. It is critical for us as people of faith to be present to God and to learn to recognize his abiding presence with us, even in the darkest valleys we travel through—the uncertain places where the future looks dangerous, where suffering and loss seem inevitable. God our Good Shepherd is with us no matter what. The third and final P is peace. This is the reality we experience when we live with God’s perspective and presence. To lie down in green pastures means, as the poet Wendell Berry has put it, that we can “be joyful though [we] have considered all the facts.” In God’s peace, we can lie down and sleep well because we trust that God will take care of us. This does not mean that we won’t suffer, that we won’t experience loss. As finite creatures, this is part of our reality. What God’s abiding goodness means is that whatever comes our way God will be there to wrap us in his peace and love—a love that can transcend any fear, a love that can reach even into the depths of the grave. Perspective, presence, and peace--this should become our prayer in this time. May we enter this apocalyptic moment, learning to see as God sees with the perspective of the Good Shepherd who is full of love and mercy. So seeing, let us experience God’s presence and embrace this time of stillness, silence, and solitude, so that we can be with God in return. From all of this, may we experience God’s full and abiding shalom—the peace that surpasses all understanding. This peace is the fullness of abundance and wellbeing, not the sort that comes from knowing what tomorrow holds and the assurance of full bank accounts, but instead an abiding trust in a person full of goodness and power in whose loving care we put our faith. We are now in a time of unveiling. All of our illusions of control have been brought up short. The institutions we thought were so solid have suddenly proven shaky. The future we imagined for ourselves has become a long wait and see. This is an opportunity to see that nothing was ever certain, none of it would last forever. The end of our civilization may not be now, but it will be someday, sometime. So what will last, what is the truth that is eternal beneath the noise of our worry and distraction, the frenetic news that cannot answer the questions that really burn in our hearts? “Surely your goodness and mercy shall follow me all the days of my life, and I will dwell in the house of the Lord for ever,” says the Psalmist. God’s goodness and mercy, God’s presence and peace and all the abundant life that spills from them--that is what lasts, that is what is eternal. So why waste our time in worry? Why spend our hours reading the prognostications of a future no one can know? We have the chance right now to begin to live with God as our shepherd. We have the chance right now to discover what it means to not be in want. That, to me, sounds like an adventure worth having, an apocalypse to embrace. Amen. |