Easter 4 - Good Shepherds

So, we’ve just been through an election.  You may have noticed.  You may also have noticed that, to paraphrase U.S novelist Mark Twain, that reports of the death of the PC party were greatly exaggerated.

Really, if my own prognostications about the direction St. Matt’s was headed in were as accurate as the pollsters who covered our election, you would rightly boot my big bald head right out of this pulpit and make sure I was settled into a profession where I couldn’t do any damage – like, say, provincial politics.

And, having gone through our own democratic process, I can help but turn my attention a little bit to our neighbours to the south, where the Republican nomination process continues with slightly less fanfare.

By ‘slightly less’, I mean that some of the media hype has been toned down a bit.  For a little while, the rhetoric was so exaggerated that I began to think that the second coming of our Lord would get less press than Newt’s campaign.

But I don’t think that the language used was unintentional.  All the campaigners used the language of ‘strong biblical values’ to garner votes.  All of them – some more than others, granted – sought endorsement from prominent church figures in the United States.  And what amazes me (what absolutely confounds me) is that if the delegates could get an endorsement, it came with the assumption that the thousands, if not tens of thousands, of votes from the followers of those people would be theirs.

Because those church leaders would literally – and did – tell their congregations that certain delegates were ‘anointed,’ ‘ordained’, or ‘chosen’ by God, and thus worthy of their support.  And there was no middle ground, either – there was only going to be one flock, and either you were in, or out.

Does that make them shepherds?  Is that what shepherds do – tell the flock where to go, and what to do?

Does that make them ‘good’ shepherds?  Somehow, from a means of describing the Saviour, it has become a competition: the best shepherds have the largest flocks, where the sheep go to be seen.

It’s something to think about.  Because it doesn’t seem to be how scripture describes them.  The image of the shepherd is one of the most powerful metaphors that scripture uses to describe God.  It mixes descriptions of leadership, servanthood, responsibility, and love at the same time – and then holds that up what the world expects, or wants.

Turns out the world falls short.

What the world wants most in a leader is someone who will give them what they want: lower taxes, better wages, free healthcare, free money, free cable TV….the list is endless.

What the shepherd shows us is different: because David can say “the Lord is my shepherd,” he can also say “I shall not be in want.”  Shepherds don’t give the sheep what they want.  In reality, I haven’t the foggiest idea what sheep actually want out of life.  But a shepherd gives the sheep what they need.

On the fourth Sunday of the Easter season, the focus of the readings shifts from accounts of the Saviour’s resurrection and turns more toward focussing on the question of who is Jesus – not a simple question to answer, so our understanding becomes rooted in faith, not a descriptive or biographical tradition.

And that faith starts with the image of the shepherd, but a very unique one: the gospel of John points out that the good shepherd is willing to lay down his life for the sheep.  And there’s something else: when Jesus says to his people “I am the good shepherd,” their first thoughts would have gone to the Psalm, but also the prophet Ezekiel, where God the Father speaks and says “I myself will be the shepherd of my sheep.”

Small wonder, that a few verses later in John’s gospel, the crowd takes up stones and accuses Jesus of blasphemy.

The prophet Ezekiel - long before Jesus walked on the shores of the sea of Galilee - talked about a shepherd, too:

I myself will be the shepherd of my sheep, and I will make them lie down, says the Lord GOD. I will seek the lost, and I will bring back the strayed, and I will bind up the injured, and I will strengthen the weak, but the fat and the strong I will destroy. I will feed them with justice. They shall know that I, the LORD their God, am with them, and that they..are my people, says the Lord GOD. You are my sheep, the sheep of my pasture and I am your God, says the Lord GOD.

The crowds wanted to stone Jesus.  What kind of flock are we to be?

We are meant to be a flock that follows, understands, and tries to be like our shepherd.  There’s one thing that separates us from sheep – we have the capacity to love each other, and to serve each other.  It’s in this very human dynamic that a two-centuries-old metaphor begins to fall apart.  There are many people who claim to be followers of Jesus – even better followers than others – but who also say that they don’t ‘do’ organized religion.

To them, I say: come to St. Matt’s.  We don’t do ‘organized’ religion, either.  But at some point, to profess faith in Christ is to realize that you are in need of a shepherd; and a shepherd is going to bring you to a flock.  That flock won’t be what you want; it may be, though, just what you need.  There will be black sheep, white sheep, brown sheep, fluffy sheep, shorn sheep; sheep that are wounded and broken; sheep that are weak, and sheep that are strong.

But they are all members of one flock: they all have one shepherd.

You are that flock; you serve the shepherd and there is salvation in no one else.  Abide with Christ: serve each other.  Love each other, and God will abide in you.

Let the people of God say ‘amen.’

Easter 3 - Resurrection People

Have you ever stood on the losing side?  All the way back to elementary school – on the playground or in phys.ed class, do you remember that crushing feeling of defeat that twisted your stomach, made a knot of your anger, and just made all of life feel drastically unfair?

Or maybe you still know that feeling.  You’re  at the bottom of the totem pole at work, given the worst assignments that are unachievable while others sail past you on the promotion scale.  Your relationships are in tatters.  Your bank account is getting increasingly slim while your bills are getting larger.  You’re a…loser.

The apostles could commiserate with you.  In spades.

The gospel lesson for today is the conclusion of Jesus’ appearance to some believers on the road to Emmaus.  But it starts a bit earlier.

It starts right after the Resurrection, on that same day. Luke notes that Jesus has risen and appeared to Mary Magdalene, Joanna, Mary the mother of James, the other women who went with them to the tomb, and last of all to Peter.

But the other disciples thought the women’s proclamation to be (and I quote from Luke 24:11) ‘an idle tale, and they did not believe them.”  In the face of a bitter, crushing defeat the disciples simply chose not to believe, to consider the women as too dumb to know the truth – they were losers.  Jesus was dead, they’d watched him die – heard his cries and his screams of anguish, heard the taunts of those who crucified him and of those who died beside him.  Dead is dead.

That’s what the apostles said: “you’re wrong.  You’re hallucinating.  Jesus hasn’t risen – he’s still as dead as he was before.  We have nothing to be hopeful for.”

There was no sun to peek through the clouds of their grief and hopelessness.

And two of them get on the road to continue on their journey, to the city of Emmaus which is about 7 miles outside of Jerusalem.  While they’re walking they’re idly chatting with each other.  You know the kind of conversation: “what if we’d done something different?  What if we’d tried harder?  What if we’d fought back instead of being meek?”

And while they’re walking a stranger joins them, and quietly listens to their conversation.  After a while, he asks: “what are you discussing?”

And those two people (identified only as Cleopas, and one other) look at the stranger like he needs his head examined: “are you the only stranger in Jerusalem who does not know the things that have taken place there in these days?”

And the stranger said, “tell me,” to which they replied: “the things about Jesus of Nazareth, who was a prophet mighty in deed and word before God and all the people, who was condemned and crucified, even when all our hope and trust for the future rested with him.  And even more – this was three days ago, but today some women of our group astonished us! They went to e tomb this morning, and when they did not find the body there they came back and told us that they had seen an angel who said that he was alive.  Some of us went with them back to the tomb and they were at least partly right – no body, but no angel, either.”

Now consider those two travellers – they’re followers of Jesus, certainly.  They know that Jesus was tried, condemned, and executed.  They’re close enough to the apostles to be with the group that morning.  But other than that, they’re nameless.  They’re like everyone else who hovered on the fringes of the movement – aware of Jesus, putting hope and trust for the improvement of their lives on him – and now bitterly disappointed that their hope was (they think) unfounded.  For them, at that moment, there is no resurrection.

But that stranger keeps walking with them, and tells them, “how thickheaded can you be?” and he begins to tell to them all the things written about the Saviour in the Scriptures.  They wanted a messiah; they got a saviouri.  But even in the face of this, they are still slow to understand until the evening when they finally encourage the stranger to stay with them, to share a meal with them.  As the stranger breaks the bread at the table, their eyes are opened and they recognise that the stranger sitting with them is, in fact, their Lord Jesus.

And in that moment, Jesus disappears, leaving the disciples astounded, amazed, and kicking themselves for being so hard of heart that they even failed to recognise joy and healing when it was offered.  Right at that moment, they get up and run back  to Jerusalem in that same hour; and they find the eleven and their companions still gathered together.  And then they make their own incredible proclamation: “The Lord is Risen!” and they tell of their incredible afternoon.

And it’s from here that our gospel lesson picks up.  But in reality, as they almost always are – the gospel lesson for today is a mirror of ourselves, how we act, how we think, and how we too try to ignore Christ in our lives.

Think back to the last time you found yourself without hope, hurt and angry, disgusted with yourself and too tired (or so you thought) to care anymore.  Now, consider what those two travellers did:

-         they withdrew from their community, as we often want to do when under stress.

-         They left the place where their troubles had started, and tried to get as far away from it as possible

-         They endlessly rehashed the possibilities – the should’ve/could’ve/would’ves

-         They reacted sarcastically – you must be the only stranger…-- when someone asked about their trouble.

That’s human nature.  We want to turn into ourselves when we’re hurt and sad; we don’t want reminders of that sadness around us and we often want to get away from it.

And you know what?  Sometimes we need to, because sometimes Jesus appears to us on the road, bringing us a resurrection of a different sort.  The disciples didn’t need bodily resurrection at that moment – they needed a resurrection of hope, of their spirits, of their future.  So do we.

Think of your own life.  You’ve found yourself in the pit before – facing nothing but a long and high dark wall.  Take a moment, and reflect on this:  who, for you in that moment, was Jesus, to you?  Who embodied the resurrection for you in that moment?

          Who walked with you and listened as you told your story?

          Who appeared in your life and gave you hope?

What community showed to you their own scars, and welcomed you into their midst?

Those people proclaimed the resurrection.  They proclaimed hope to the hopeless, rest for the weary, love for the brokenhearted.  That is what it means to be Christ, to witness of the unbelievable grace and mercy of Christ.

We are no different, no better, have no greater potential that the apostles who gathered in that room.  God calls each and every one of us to proclaim the Gospel of Jesus Christ as certainly as the apostles were sent out into the world.

Shout the good news!  But, remember: preach Christ.  Don’t read the bible to people.  Don’t quote bible verses at people, helpfully prefaced by “the bible says…”.  I can quote scripture at you until I’m blue in the face and your ears are bleeding.  If I’m not preaching Christ – if I’m not feeding you the Living Word of God – then you’re dying of spiritual malnutrition.

Live as resurrection people – live as people who are aware of their own times of trial and depression, and despair, but who still form a community of hope, who are fed and nourished by the Word of God, broken and shared.

Be conscious, not only of how people help you in your life, and of how those people embody Christ to you – seek to embody Christ to them.  Proclaim to them – in word, in deed – the liberty of those in bondage to death and its many faces through the grace of Christ.

You have, each and every one of you, your own story you can tell of resurrection.  We rest in hope knowing that for us death is not the end but everlasting life – and in that same way all for all those times when we walk through the valley of the shadow of death we need fear no evil, for Christ is with us – in community, in relationship, in life.

Your minds are as open to understanding the scriptures as were those of the apostles, the message of forgiveness and mercy, love and understanding, repentance and change.  Go out and be witnesses of these things.  Let your lives be witnesses for your.  If you want to speak but don’t know what to say, just make one thing certain:  In all that you do, in all that you say, let those to whom you speak understand one clear and simple message: Christ is Risen!

You are the resurrection people -- we proclaim new life…in community…in abundance…in hope…in Christ.  Christ is among us.  You are witnesses of these things.

Amen.

Easter Day

It’s quite the day, isn’t it?  Finally, Easter is here; the highest holy day of the Christian tradition has arrived.

Kinda, though, it doesn’t feel any different.  Easter isn’t like Christmas; it doesn’t have the cultural approval.  Christmas is easy to get behind: peace, goodwill, joy…You can buy ‘Happy Holidays’ cards and not offend anyone. 

But Easter….Easter is more difficult.  After all, this is the celebration of the central event of Christianity: yes, Jesus was born; but it was his resurrection from the dead that started this whole enterprise.  If Jesus had lived out to a ripe old age and died surrounded by grandchildren, he would have become just another moral example.

Then again, we like moral examples.  We like to have people to look up, but who are a safe enough distance away that they can’t judge us or our lives.  That’s part of the reason why there’s so much collective anger among people when we read news stories of pastors or teachers who have fallen short of an ideal that is set for them: we don’t want to be them; but we know what we want them to do: whatever we don’t have to.

But Easter…Do you know why it’s called Easter?  In a nutshell: in the early medieval times, after the city of Rome had been invaded, the focus of Christianity’s teaching and culture shifted from Rome to west-central Europe.  Since this was a time when every culture used a different calendar, the month equivalent to April in that part of the world at the time was, in old-English, “oestre-month”; a name that traced its own origins back to a long-dead pagan celebration.  But, since the focus of Christianity settled on this particular geography for a few hundred years, in English people came to say that the feast of the resurrection was celebrated “in Easter”.  A few hundred years of grammatical changes later, and “Easter Day” was born. 

And, just so you know: Easter eggs stem from Christian tradition.  I honestly don’t have a clue where the Easter bunny comes from.  I’ve heard some cleverly manufactured reasons for him; but none that make any sense.

Now, making sense is probably the difficulty with Easter.  Do you ever chat with neighbours and friends about your holiday plans?  Again, at Christmas it’s easy: you say you’re going to Christmas Eve service, and they can be all “ah, celebrating the birth of Jesus”.  Try talking to them about Easter: “what are you doing for the long weekend?” “Oh, you know, going to church.”  “Why do you go to church on Easter?” “to celebrate that Jesus rose from the dead.”

That’s what they call a ‘show-stopper,’ folks.  You’ve either just opened yourself up for a discussion that you’d really rather not have, or your neighbour is going to start hoarding canned food and shotguns, preparing for the zombie apocalypse.

“It makes Mom and Dad happy,” seems a much, much easier response.

But yes, on Easter, Christians do celebrate that Jesus rose from the dead.  It’s an integral part of our story; no matter how hard we might try to ignore it.  The problem with Easter is that you can’t Sunday school your way out of it, like you can with Christmas.  In Sunday school you learn the basics: resurrection, new life, hope…all the good things.  But it takes a lifetime to understand what Easter means.

Inspirational speaker Marianne Williamson wrote, think of everything you've ever experienced that was painful; that's the meaning of Good Friday. Think of all the ways that love ultimately healed your heart; that's the meaning of Easter. 

Easter is something you can only understand when you’ve been through Good Friday; when you’ve had your heart broken in ways too terrible to contemplate, and still found that God is there, has wept with you, and given you love as healing.

If you were to condense the whole concept of Christianity into one week, it would look like this: Jesus was born on Monday, ministered on Thursday, suffered and died on Friday, and rose on Sunday.

If you were to condense the whole of our modern lives into one week, beloved, it would look similar:  born on Monday, worked on Thursday, suffered Friday, woke up Saturday.

You see, we don’t make it to Sunday.  But we know Friday.  Lord, we know Good Friday; it is a metaphor for our lives:

Friday is our broken lives.

Friday is our broken relationships.

Friday is the bottle of alcohol in which we look for relief.

Friday is the shame of losing our job, of not providing for our families.

Friday is the pain of losing our spouse, after too short a time.

Friday is our divorce.

Friday is the babies we will only hold in heaven.

Friday is the day for our tears and for our fears.

We are stuck on Friday; stuck at death; stuck and sorrow.

But there’s good news, beloved: Sunday’s coming.

The dawn of Sunday is the return of hope.

Sunday’s dawn is the return of joy.

Sunday’s dawn is the promise of God that not even death is final.

Sunday’s dawn is the promise of God that those who have died will be raised to eternal life.

Sunday’s promise is that God is with us on Friday and will see us to the end.

God doesn’t get stuck on Friday.  On Good Friday, God damned death and on Sunday he cast it out utterly.

And there’s even better news, beloved: Sunday’s here.

Today, the stone is rolled away from the tomb.

Today, hope has wings.

Today in all unexpected grace, Jesus comes through and stands beside us.

Today, Christ is risen – and we are risen with him. 

Thanks be to God – and let God’s people say amen.

Good Friday Message

In the beginning, we say, God spoke the world into being.

It’s Friday, and Jesus is still speaking.  The great earthly ministry which began in Cana of Galilee is ending on the hill of Calvary.  But still, he speaks.

“I thirst,” “Father, forgive them,” “here is your mother,” “here is your son,” “my God, my God.”  The different accounts of the crucifixion record different words, but the same message: the teacher still teaches.

What the teacher teaches, exactly, confounds and confuses us.  In the face of a completely avoidable and – by all practical considerations – unnecessary torture and execution, Jesus instead insists on doing the very things that will get him killed.

Jesus’ actions are so….so…foreign, so mind-boggling, that nobody understands them.  The disciples don’t; his mother does not; the ruler of his country does not; certainly, two thousand years after the fact, we don’t. 

We know this, because our words don’t change: “for the love of God, save yourself!” “why are you doing this?” “you’re doing this the hardest way possible” “why are you trying to be a martyr?”

When we see others apparently hell-bent on self-destruction, after a certain point we release our own consciences, choosing instead to stand aloof, part of the “I-told-you-so” crowd.

When Jesus has cried out, “my God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” we take it to mean that God has left him, hurt, bleeding, and dying: punishment for our guilt.  We take it to mean, in fact, that God acts the same way that we would.

After all, that the great stern Father that so many people grew up with: you were so bad, so sinful, that you made God so angry that he had to kill someone to make himself feel better.  Jesus stepped in, and died instead of you.  We know that somebody has to take the blame when something goes wrong.

Feeling powerless to stop a tragedy without involving ourselves, we stand alongside the assembled throng and watch, stunned, as the hope and promise of our own lives is crucified on a barren hill outside Jerusalem.  We are stunned as we realize that only hours ago we stood in the courtyard and called for his death, desperately afraid that at any moment we would be unmasked as his followers.  We are breathless at the scope of our own denial of Christ – the realization that our trust has rested not upon God, but upon the power that sought and aspired to in our world.  We are aghast that we have expected and even demanded to see God act like us.

We are shamed to find that, in fact, our “belief in the bible” is false, and empty.  Jesus acts and speaks to fulfill the Scriptures, and we find that we don’t just fall short; we deny entirely that we even know how to act.  W lack the courage to act as God demands, and would rather blindly ignore the Saviour in our midst, rather than follow: if we truly did ‘believe’ in the bible, our days would be spent in prayer, washing each others’ feet, and sharing in God’s meal – not messing about in politics, finger-pointing, or judgement.

But what if, in fact, it is not God who demands the death of Christ, but us?  What if, for once, we cannot stand safely behind the mask we project that says God is angry and vengeful; and have instead to rend our own hearts and accept that Christ didn’t die because God wanted it; but because we did.

Maybe, when Jesus prayed in the garden of Gethsemane that the cup would pass from him, he did not mean that God would relent in demanding his death; but instead that he would not have to submit to the violence, insults, torture, and death that waited for him at the hands of the people who had before so readily listened to him. 

God does not act like we do.  God used the cross that Friday – not to show that someone had to die – but that that death itself was damned on that Friday.

It is Friday, but Sunday is coming: that scripture, too, will be fulfilled; and we will see of God’s great covenant become our reality.

Jesus continues to teach, even as he hangs on the cross: speaking to us, admonishing, loving us to end; remembering indeed the 22^nd psalm: “my God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” but ends with “the Lord has acted!”

The Lord has acted: the Lord has hung on the cross, and breathed his last.

Because the Lord has acted, your life is not futile: as the cross has fulfilled its purpose, you will, too.

Because the Lord has acted, your failures are not final: you are loved, and you are forgiven.

Because the Lord has acted, your death is not final: on Friday, God damned death, for you.

The Lord has acted: blessed be the name of the Lord.

Amen.