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I spent the academic year 1985-1986 on the faculty of a Roman Catholic seminary, teaching homiletics. And when it came my turn to preach in the seminary chapel, I began my sermon by saying that it was good to be spending that year among the separated brothers and sisters. They laughed, too, of course, because, from the Roman point of view, we Anglicans are the separated ones. So much depends upon perspective, doesn't it? It's like the sign I saw on television last Monday in a city south of here. "We did not cross the border;" the sign read, "the border crossed us." Spanish-speaking families living for generations in Texas, California, and what is now the southwestern United States have seen the border fly from north to south while they haven't budged an inch. In the nineteenth century most of the border crossing was from north to south, and, viewed from Mexico City, the move of the border from the Red River in Oklahoma and the northern reaches of New Mexico to the Rio Grande in the 1830s and 1840s was the result of northamerican politics and a United States invasion based on a gringo version of "God-is-on-our-side" called Manifest Destiny. History provides a perspective lost to those who don't remember it. And God provides a perspective lost on those who don't remember God, lost on those who don't remember who God is and who God isn't. Someone once said that the nature of God is a circle, of which the center is everywhere and the circumference is nowhere. Which is a way of saying that God is mystery, mystery not to be captured and claimed for partisan human purposes. And sometimes, as Richard Holloway observed, "theology - all our study and talk about God - can trap us in language about mysteries, rather than open us to the mysteries themselves." So let's try to imagine life on earth this morning the way God must see it from God's perch, the center of which is everywhere and the circumference of which is nowhere. "Dear God," a child once wrote to the One whose center is everywhere, "who drew the lines around the countries?" That is a very insightful question, the kind only innocence can ask, because innocence knows no borders. "Red and yellow, black and white, they are precious in God's sight" is the way innocence sees the world. Innocence knows no borders, because the One whose center is everywhere draws no lines around countries. It is we, the fallen, the separated, who draw the lines around ourselves, and who continually redraw them to suit our fearful, sinful, limited human perspectives. What the One whose center is everywhere sees is the Creation he made for love coming apart at the seams - all his children separated from one another, all his children lost from one another and therefore from God himself: rich separated from poor, the powerful from the weak. Black separated from white, Palestinian from Israeli, East from West. A world divided by walls of hostility into inner courts and outer courts, into Jew and Christian and Muslim, Pharisee and Sadducee, Shiite and Sunni, into Anglican and Lutheran and Roman and Baptist, into American and Gentile. Each of us in this wonderful garden called Earth with his own head down, each muscling himself from one tuft of grass to the next, each nibbling himself lost, like sheep without a shepherd. What God sees is all his children oblivious to the kingdom God created us for, each trying desperately to stake out and defend a corner of God's world for himself, each with his own prejudices to proclaim, each fearfully guarding what he claims as his own turf, each dangerously oblivious to God's long-term perspective, each fearfully seeking his own salvation by means that cannot save, like sheep without a shepherd. But there is good news, for "the Lord himself has made us, and we are his," the psalmist reminds us; "we are his people, and the sheep of his pasture." (Ps 100) Then the prophet takes up the Scriptural litany: "This is what the Sovereign Lord says, 'I myself will search for my sheep, and look after them. As a shepherd looks after his scattered flock, so will I look after my sheep, and rescue them, and gather them from all the distant places where they have scattered.'" (Ezekiel 34:11-13) And Jesus, too, joins in: "I am the good shepherd who knows his sheep, and who leads his sheep, and who saves his sheep from the wolf, because the good shepherd lays down his life for his sheep. And there are other other sheep of mine who do not belong to this fold. I must lead them as well, and they too will listen to my voice. There will be one flock, one shepherd." The circumference of God is nowhere. God is on the other side of the lines we draw as well as on this side. But John, the evangelist who tells all this good news, says that those who were listening to Jesus did not understand what he was talking about. Of course not, because, like us and unlike God, the circumference of their world was tightly drawn around their own backyards. What didn't they understand? Perhaps they didn't understand what Jesus meant by "good." "Good" means many things in English. The English word "good" can mean that the shepherd is morally upright, or correct, or orthodox. It can mean that he is good at his job, an efficient shepherd. It can mean that Jesus really knows how to round the sheep up, by hook or by crook if necessary. But a careful look at the text tells us that none of this is what Jesus claims to be. "I am the 'kalos' shepherd," he says when he speaks in the Greek of John's Gospel. "I am the winsome shepherd," he means. "I am the lovely shepherd, the attractive one, the shepherd who knows his sheep and calls them by name, and who does not drive them from behind with hounds, but leads them by attracting them to himself." "I am the shepherd, the beautiful one," is how William Temple translates it, the shepherd the sheep follow because they know and trust him. "He leadeth me beside the still waters; he maketh me to lie down in green pastures. Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil," the psalmist sings, because he knows his shepherd, because he trusts the way the shepherd calls him to follow. What don't we understand? Perhaps we don't understand what Jesus means by "listen." "Akouein," to hear, to listen. Or, if intensified into "hupakouein," to listen intently, to obey, to follow. Winsome, attractive, trustworthy - this is the kind of shepherd Jesus is, the evangelist tells us, because this is the kind of shepherd God is. And this is our vocation - to follow the way of the one who calls us by name. To be winsome the way Jesus is winsome, to be attractive the way Jesus is attractive, to be trustworthy the way Jesus is trustworthy, to walk through the valley of the shadow of death fearing no evil, because the Shepherd has walked through ahead of us and walks beside us still. Three years ago President Bush declared our mission in Iraq accomplished. But we have failed, responded Jeffrey Carlson, the pastor of Good Shepherd Lutheran Church in Glenwood Springs. "The war with Iraq is over," he agreed (perhaps a bit prematurely), "and it is clear now that we failed. I don't mean, of course, the United States armed forces." It is clear that our armed forces "defeated their opponent overwhelmingly.... I mean, rather, we failed," we Christians, we lost sheep who do not hear and follow the call of our Shepherd. We failed. We are still lost, because we do not hear and do not understand. Carlson says that we failed and we continue to fail because we have followed the call of Peter rather than the call of Jesus. We abandoned our commitment to the way of Christ, the way of the Cross. "As is so often the case," Carlson explains, "the alternative to Christ's way - [the way of Peter, the way we have chosen] - was not blatant evil, but rather reasonable desires: to remove a cruel tyrant, to right injustices, to liberate an oppressed people, and to prevent further deaths. "It was precisely these same desires that Simon Peter had in mind: to follow and support [a Messiah who would] remove the cruel tyrant Tiberius Caesar, to right the horrible injustices suffered under the Roman Empire, to liberate God's chosen people from their oppressors, and to prevent further deaths at the hands of the Romans. All quite reasonable, well-intentioned, even biblically-based desires. "Nevertheless, when Simon Peter, motivated by such worldly-wise desires, rebuked Jesus for his contrary intention to conclude his ministry in death and failure rather than in conquest and success, Jesus in return rebuked Simon Peter in the strongest terms: 'Get behind me, Satan! You are a stumbling block to me. For you are setting your mind not on divine things, but on human things.'" Then, after this encounter with Peter, the Good Shepherd called his sheep and said to them, "If anyone wants to become my follower, let him deny himself and take up his cross, and follow me. For whoever wants to save his life will lose it, and whoever loses his life for my sake, and for the sake of the gospel, will save it. For what will it profit a man to gain the whole world, but forfeit his soul? Those who are ashamed of me and of my words in this adulterous and sinful generation, of them the Son of Man will also be ashamed when he comes in the glory of his Father with the holy angels." (Mark 8:33-38) So "those among us who supported this war took Simon Peter's part in opposition to the way of Christ, [in opposition to] the way of the Cross," Pastor Carlson concludes. "And so also, those of us who opposed the war failed. We failed when we failed to make it clear that we opposed the war for the same reason Jesus opposes war, because we are pro-Cross." We who opposed the war failed when we "failed to distinguish our message from all those who opposed the war for a variety of other reasons," when we failed to make it clear that war, even just war, even a war to depose a tyrant, is not part of the coming kingdom of God, but only a tragic accommodation to the reality of our separation from God and each other, only a tragic, failed alternative to our heeding the call of our Shepherd, who calls us to live the Easter life now by taking up our own cross and following him. "Supporters of the war legitimately and reasonably argued, 'What, then, are we to do? Are we merely to say to these murderers and terrorists, "Jesus doesn't want you to do that," while they continue to ignore us and go on causing more and more death and destruction?'" Pastor Carlson adds. This, too, is a good question, an important question. But Pastor Carlson wonders, and I wonder: "Was there not murder, terror, and injustice aplenty when Jesus walked the earth? Yet God chose, in God's own wisdom, not to raise an army to defeat the powers of evil, but rather to be raised himself on a cross, and to call his followers (including you and me) to pour out our lives in loving service to others, even to enemies, in order to defeat the powers of evil, [called us] to trust in the power and promise of Easter." So even those of us who opposed this war, and who oppose other wars as well, fail when we fail to make it clear that we are pro-Cross and pro-Easter. So where is the good news in all this? The good news, I am convinced, lies in honesty and perspective. The good news lies in seeing ourselves as we are, in seeing ourselves as God sees us. Is it not more accurate, more honest, to acknowledge that God is not a player in our conflicts with each other, except to scatter the proud in the imagination of their hearts, to bring down the mighty from their thrones, and to lift up the lowly? Isn't it more accurate to confess that the lines around countries, including walls along borders - walls between Israel and Palestine, and between East and West Berlin, even the proposed wall between us and Mexico - are drawn by us for our own fearful purposes, not by God for God's purpose? Is it not more accurate, more honest, to concede that war, even a just war, has nothing to do with following the way of Christ, that human conflict has nothing at all to do with the defeat of evil, nothing at all to do with the coming kingdom of God, the center of which is everywhere and the circumference of which is nowhere? Is it not more accurate to admit that the Shepherd who calls us each by name knew that evil cannot be defeated with legions or walls, but only by love, that the wolf can be defeated only by the Shepherd's laying down his life for the sheep? Or are the Scriptures wrong when they remind us that they call in vain who call upon horse and chariot and sword to save? The Good Shepherd comes to us as an Easter Gospel, as an encounter with the risen Christ. And is it not more accurate and honest to confess that we simply are terrified by the risen Christ, terrified by the fold toward which the risen Shepherd would lead us, terrified by "one fold, one shepherd," because we are terrified by the path we must walk to get there, terrified by the way of the Cross? Terrified as the disciples themselves were terrified, terrified that the Shepherd whom God raised on the third day is the same Shepherd who walked the earth before the Resurrection - the Good Shepherd, the beautiful one, the winsome, attractive Shepherd who has sheep other than those in this particular fold, the Shepherd who lays down his life for all God's sheep, and who calls us to follow him in the way of sacrifice and forgiveness and reconciliation. Is it not more honest, and therefore more powerful and more healing, to confess that we are just as terrified by the Good Shepherd's vocation today as we were when Peter had his encounter with the Good Shepherd on the road to Calvary? Is it not more accurate to say, more honest, that "the argument of those [of us] Christians who supported the war went something like this: 'I believe in the way of Jesus Christ, the way of the Cross, as an ideal. But when it comes to living practically in this world, there are times when we must set aside that ideal path and follow [instead] the advice of Simon Peter. To do otherwise is unwise and dangerous."? "Lord, Lord, we're on your side," we cry, even as Jesus tells us that not everyone who cries, "Lord, Lord," will enter the kingdom of God. And we do not hear, not really hear. And we do not understand that in marching to Baghdad or anywhere else we have marched no closer to the kingdom of God than the Roman legions marched when they invaded Judea in the name of Caesar or than the Crusaders marched when they marched to Jerusalem in the name of Christ in the Middle Ages. So what is the good news in all this? It is this: such a confession has at least one virtue. Such a confession at least has the virtue of taking advantage of God's long-term perspective, the virtue of providing us Christians with the freedom to see ourselves as we are - as lost sheep, sheep just as separated from God as all the others Jesus came to save, sheep who are lost, save for the mercy and grace of the Good Shepherd who lays down his life for us, that we, together with all the others, might be saved. Such a confession at least has the virtue of providing us Christians with the freedom to know that evil is defeated, and the kingdom comes, only on the Cross of love to which the Shepherd leads us, the virtue of providing us with the freedom to know that we are saved by grace, not by ourselves. And not by our fearfully drawn lines. Not by national security or national anthems or national borders, not even by justice, but by the mercy of God. Such a confession at least provides us with the freedom to hear Jesus' final word from his perch: "Father, forgive them, for they do not see, and do not hear, and do not know what they are doing." In the Name of God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Amen. |