The Rev. Dayle Casey
The Chapel of Our Saviour
Colorado Springs, Colorado
April 29, 2007

4 Easter – C
Acts 13:15-39
Revelation 7:9-17
John 10:22-30

Someone once suggested 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. 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.”

This difference or confusion was the basis for the conflict between Jesus and the pharisees. The pharisees were good at theology. They had lots of words about God, good and true and logical words about God, whereas Jesus wanted to open to them the mystery of God.

“Why do you keep us in suspense?” they wanted to know. “If you are the Messiah, why don’t you tell us plainly?” But Jesus answered them mysteriously: “The Father has given me my sheep, and my sheep know my voice. I give them eternal life, and they will never perish. No one will snatch them from my care. The Father and I are one.” So they picked up rocks to stone him.

Some in those days were open to the mystery of the good news in Jesus, and some were not. Like us today. Some today experience the mystery of God in Jesus, and some do not. Some of us today fail to experience in Jesus the good news, the good news that the Good Shepherd, came to raise the dead, not to reward the deserving or promote the successful, because, deep down, we just find it incredible. It’s hard to believe, because, deep down, we human beings want to think that whatever it is that God does, God somehow rewards those who deserve reward and promotes those who do what is right and successfully pull themselves up by their own moral bootstraps. Because, after all, rewarding the deserving is only right and fair. Besides that, it’s the human way, even the American way.

But that’s not the mystery of the Cross. Jesus said that no one can snatch the sheep from the Shepherd’s care. Nothing can destroy God’s love for his sheep. They will never be abandoned, or perish. Which is the good news St. Paul experienced. “The word of encouragement I give you today,” Paul said, ”is that, through Jesus, everyone who trusts God is set right with God from everything he could not be set right with God about by the Law.” Everyone who trusts in Jesus’ assurance is declared good and right and whole before God. The good news is that Jesus did not die to reward the deserving or promote the successful. On the Cross, the Good Shepherd died to raise the dead.

It is hard to believe, isn’t it? Because it that’s true, then what about the Law? After all, what is just is just, what’s fair is fair. But the pharisees were divided, John tells us. Like us.

Robert Capon says that the reason we find the good news of Jesus hard to believe is that we human beings are hard-wired to “the nutra-sweet religion of test-passing,” because “test-passing religion” is something we can measure, unlike the Spirit, who blows wherever he wishes. and does totally off-the-wall things like raise the dead.

So we prefer test-passing to grace. We prefer test-passing to resurrection, because whether or not one passes a test is something we can get our logical heads around, but the only way one can be raised from the dead is to be dead. And we’re alive. Aren’t we?

But the problem with test-passing religion as a way of being set right with God is that it simply doesn’t work. Consider, Capon suggests, the three areas in which religion would require us to pass tests. Consider the three Cs: Creed, Cult, and Conduct.

In order to be set right with God by passing the test of Creed, what grade would you have to get? Is it 51%? Do you have to believe just a little more than half the Creed, a simple majority of the articles of the Creed? Or is it 60%, a D-minus? Is getting 60% of all the truths about God and Jesus right what God requires of us, like a bare pass in school? Or does God demand a standard more like graduate school, at least 80%, a definite if undistinguished B-minus, at least a low-honors belief in the Creed? After all, we’re talking about salvation here!

And what about the second C, Cult, the things we do here in church? What score do we have to make in worship? Again, will 51% attendance suffice, just a little more time in attendance than time absent? Or is it 60% attendance, with, of course, at least 60% attention as well as 60% attendance?

And what about Conduct? What score is passing for behavior? Once again, 51%? Just a little more nice than naughty? Or is it 60%, or 70, or 80 or more? Honors or higher? Do you see the absurdity of it? For what if God requires 80%, and you get only 79.5? Does God cut you out at that point?

It’s like Abraham’s famous argument with God over Sodom and Gomorrah. “Lord, Abraham asked, “what if there are fifty righteous people in the city? If there are fifty righteous people in Sodom, would you sweep away the righteous with the wicked? You wouldn’t? Well, then, what if there are only ten righteous?”

“Well, Lord, we want to know. What if one misbehaves just 20.5% of the time, missing the 80% grade by just .5%? Would you withhold your love from someone for a mere .5%? And if I get a 79.9? Do you round that off to an 80, Lord?”

And where, just where, could such a line be drawn? And yet, we talk as if that’s exactly what God does, don’t we? Because, deep down, like the pharisees of Jesus’ day, we’re more comfortable with test-passing religion than with grace.

There is a line, of course, and the line is at 100%. The only score God counts at all is 100%. And that’s just why religion as test-passing doesn’t work, because, like the people of Sodom and Gomorrah, no one in God’s Church, either in the Diocese of Colorado or in any diocese in Nigeria, ever scores 100%, and because 99.9% flunks just as flat as a 40 or a 20 or a 10!

As hard as it is to swallow, the truth is that God is not the ultimate Santa Claus who puts fear into us by making a list and checking it twice to see who’s naughty and nice. The truth is that the Good Shepherd came to remove fear from God’s gift of life. The Good Shepherd came to destroy the religion of test-passing so that grace might abound. The Good Shepherd came to assure all of us pharisees that no one can snatch God’s sheep out of God’s hand, because God’s sheep belong to God, and because God loves them, and because, mysteriously, the only test is to trust the mystery, the mystery that the Good Shepherd came not to reward the righteous or to promote the successful, but to raise the dead.

Not just to trust part of it, but to trust it all. Not just to believe that Jesus was God in human form, as we say in the Creed, but to trust that mysteriously, in Jesus, you are held in God’s hand, and that nothing, not even flunking tests and doing what you’re not supposed to do, can remove you from that hand of love.

Sheep, you know, have only one test to take: Don’t get lost.

One of the goofiest things Jesus ever said was that a shepherd who has 100 sheep would leave 99 of them on the open range to go off looking for one stray who got himself lost. Jesus said a lot of goofy things, but this is among the goofiest. It’s absurd. On the face of it, it’s absurd. Because the reason sheep need a shepherd is that one of the things sheep do best is get lost and then hang around in their lostness. And any self-respecting shepherd knows that if he left 99 sheep in open country, when he came back he would have 99 lost sheep and only one found sheep hanging over his shoulder, because a lost sheep is a dead sheep, because, without a shepherd, a sheep is simply prey, dinner.

But the point Jesus is making with this absurd parable is that lost and weak sheep are the only sheep God has any dealings with and that the truth is that any who are saved are saved by the mystery of grace. Jesus ends the story, you’ll remember, with a line about the shepherd’s joy in finding his lost sheep. He says that “there will be more rejoicing in heaven over one sinner who repents than over 99 righteous persons who do not need to repent.” And that’s because the only joy in heaven is over lost sheep who are found, because there aren’t, and never have been, any righteous persons who don’t need to repent.

So if you listen to Jesus’ parable carefully, if you hear it the way he actually told it, you’ll notice that the shepherd’s joy was not over a repentant sheep at all. As Capon points out, neither the lost sheep in this story nor the lost coin in the next story, “does a blessed thing except hang around in its lostness,” while the shepherd looks for him and calls him by name, because he’s the Good Shepherd.

The story is not about repentance. It’s about lostness, and about weakness, and about deadness, and about raising the dead.

So all those stories in Luke – the stories about the lost sheep and the lost coin and the lost son – that story we call the story of the “prodigal” son, even though there are, in fact, two lost sons in the story – these stories are really about the saving determination of the shepherd, the woman, and the father, all of them stand-ins for God. They are stories about the mystery of the saving determination of God to find the lost and raise the dead!

And that, says Capon, puts repentance and confession in a different light. “Confession, for example, turns out to be something other than we thought. Confession is not the admission of a mistake, which, thank God and our better nature, we have finally recognized and corrected. Rather it is the admission that we are dead...” – just as dead as a sheep who is lost, maybe deader – “dead in our sins. [And confession turns out to be the admission] that we have no power of ourselves, either to save ourselves or to convince anyone else that we are worth saving. It is the recognition that our whole life” – like the life of a stray sheep lost in a thicket with the wolf prowling around nearby – “is finally and forever out of our hands, and that if we ever live again, our life will be entirely the gift of some gracious other.” (The Parables of Grace, 1988, p. 39)

The Good Shepherd died to raise the dead, not to reward the deserving or promote the successful. Sometimes “theology, all our study and talk about God, even our talk about good shepherds, can trap us in language about mysteries, rather than open us to the mysteries themselves.” The mystery is that God is a circle whose center is everywhere and whose circumference is nowhere.

The mystery is that “though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil. For God is with me, his rod and staff, they comfort me,” even in the valley of the shadow of death.

This mystery is what the priest in Florida experienced several years ago. His story is the story of Sodom and Gomorrah in Florida. It is our story, and God’s, the story of God’s response to the lost and the dead. It’s the story of a man in Key Biscayne who walked in the valley of the shadow of death.

A civic leader, well-known in Key Biscayne and married to a young woman from a prominent family in town, had strangled his wife to death.

“It was all over the front page of the morning paper,” said the priest. “The crime had occurred in the early afternoon when the accused had returned home unexpectedly. The accused had phoned the police within minutes of his wife’s death. Attempts at resuscitation had failed. The victim was pronounced dead-on-arrival at the hospital. The accused was in the county jail. When the children returned from school, they were taken into temporary custody by juvenile authorities. The victim’s parents were flying in from London, where they had been located at the first stop of a European holiday tour.

“I drank my second cup of coffee,” said the priest, “and turned to the editorial page. The phone rang. It was the senior warden of a neighboring parish. Their rector was out of town and couldn’t be reached. He had left word that, in case of emergency, I should be called. Had I read the morning paper?

“‘As far as the editorial page,’ I replied.

“‘Did you see the headlines about Ben and Sylvia Smith? They are members here, you know.’ Would it be possible for me to go see Ben?

“A county jail is a cold and matter-of-fact place. There is a routine and a procedure for everything. Yes, I could see the prisoner; the senior warden could not. I took my turn being processed. I signed in. They checked me over. Metal clanged against metal. Doors opened and shut. Keys turned. Knuckles clutched thick bars. Lonely eyes searched the corridors for a familiar face.

“I came to Ben’s cell. He did not know me, but my clerical collar established an immediate relationship. He was filled with grief and remorse for Sylvia.

“He expressed the desire to attend her funeral. This request was denied by the sheriff.... [So] I offered to be with Ben at the time of Sylvia’s funeral and to conduct a Requiem Eucharist. Ben wanted this very much.

“I returned on the appointed day and hour.... We improvised an altar on the edge of the bed. The Prayer Book, as always, rose to the occasion: ‘We acknowledge and bewail our manifold sins and wickedness.... The remembrance of them is grievous unto us; the burden of them is intolerable.... Have mercy, Lord, have mercy.... For Thy Son our Lord Jesus Christ’s sake, forgive us all that is past.... This is a true saying, and worthy of all men to be received, that Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners.... If any man sin, we have an Advocate with the Father, Jesus Christ the righteous, and He is the propitiation for our sins.... We are not worthy so much as to gather up the crumbs under Thy table....’

“When Ben lifted his hands to receive communion, I hesitated for a moment,” the priest confessed. “Those hands were the murder weapon. It takes a fraction of a second to pull a trigger or plunge a knife, but it had taken three to five minutes of sustained anger pressing those hands against Sylvia’s throat to remove her life. Now those same hands were reaching out for Christ, the Good Shepherd, reaching out to receive the one whose property is always to have mercy.

“How the Gospel of Jesus Christ became real at that moment!” said the priest – “that our sinful bodies are made clean by His body, and our souls washed through his most precious blood!” (“The Man in the County Jail,” The Anglican Digest, Easter, 1992)

Jesus came to raise us from the dead, not to reward or promote us. “The Lord is my Shepherd.... Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil. For Thou art with me. Thy rod and thy staff, they comfort me. Thou preparest a table before me.... Thou anointest my head with oil; my cup runneth over. Surely goodness and mercy shall follow me all the days of my life, and I will dwell in the house of the Lord for ever.”

Life out of death. Grace. Mystery. Oh, the Creed is true, all right! But salvation and life are not found in the Creed, and certainly not in our own conduct, not even in church. Salvation happens, life happens, because in Jesus the mystery of God is given a face and, in him, Love comes looking for us wherever we are lost – in a prison cell, on the road to Damascus, by the seashore in Galilee, in the Diocese of Colorado and in a diocese in Nigeria, wherever we walk in the valley of the shadow of death, even in hell itself – because Love is One whose center is everywhere and whose circumference is nowhere.

In the Name of God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Amen.