April 26, 2015
Text: John 10:11-18
Usually when I think about this passage of scripture, I ponder the nature of the good shepherd and his relationship with the sheep. How comforting it can be to think of my life as safeguarded by a kind and protective shepherd. But this week my thoughts went to another aspect of the story. I found myself thinking mostly about the hired hand, who was brought in to oversee the sheep, and the wolf that attacks, scaring off the hired hand. Who is this hired hand? While we have every right to expect basic competence from a hired hand, we should never expect a hired hand to love the sheep personally, to see each one’s unique personality and traits. It takes something deeper than a hired hand kind of relationship to know and love each other like this. Maybe we are meant to have more than a hired hand relationship with each other.
I suppose we keep hiring stand-ins for the good shepherd because we have such a hard time believing we could be God’s beloved. We “buy” love, in the form of obligations we place on each other, rather than trust that real love will be freely given. We want to believe that each of us is the beloved of God, which means then that ALL of us are the beloved of God, no exceptions. Even you. Even me. But what about my young, loud neighbors on each side of Andrew’s House, acting like they still live in a frat house, partying late into the night? Are they the beloved of God? Or the wealthy folks saturating the neighborhood who carry an air of privileged expectation? Yep, the beloved of God. Whatever our status in life—entrepreneur or CEO of a mass private corporation, firefighter or arsonist, executioner or executed, attacker or attacked . . . ALL of us, God’s beloved.
To move from affirming this as some kind of dreamy theory about love into a practical, lived reality takes a lifetime, but the more we examine it, turn it over and over in our palms like a prayer stone, the more we work with BECOMING a place where this kind of love gets embodied, the more it will become real. We will start giving to and receiving from each other in ways that go beyond our perceived capacities, that go beyond the ways a hired hand relates to sheep. We will begin to learn how to be each other’s good shepherds, how to trust each other, how to lean on each other in ways that calm our fears and help us become who we really are.
This is what I want to talk about this morning: Becoming more of who we really are by growing more attuned to the true shepherd, which is the inner voice of love within us. How “losing myself” into a flock that is seeking to embody love can be a means for me to become my unique self, rather than an obstruction to me.
Do you know the movie Harold and Maude from the 1970’s? Maude is a 70-something free spirit who adores life. Harold is a 20-something young man obsessed with death. Harold rebuilds his sports car into a mini-hearse and repeatedly fakes suicide in the hope that his mother will rush to save him. Maude embraces life by letting go. Harold gives her a precious gift, a piece of jewelry; Maude hugs it close, and then throws it into a lake “so I’ll always know where it is.” These two become soul mates as they navigate what it means to live and to die. In one scene, Maude tells Harold that one of the primary wounds people carry in life is that they think they are only “this”—and she waves her arm across a large meadow of flowers, what looks like an anonymous sea of sameness—when in actuality, they are “this”—and she holds up a single daisy plucked from that meadow, uniquely beautiful. We are BOTH.
To begin to know ourselves as God’s beloved in a sea of belovedness is to deepen our sense of being part of everything God has created and loves . . . AND seeing ourselves as uniquely gifted expressions of that totality. This is one of the primary tasks of a faith community, to help us trust that having an identity with others will not stunt us, hold us back, but will help us grow in our individuality and sense of belovedness. Not belonging anywhere lets us hide out and sort of merge into an anonymous comfort zone. But in committed circles we get to work on the barriers that keep us from believing we are love-worthy. We get to face our limitations and confess our failures. We get to mess up and then show up, again and again. There are too few places in this world where people can experience this kind of failing and forgiving, breaking down and building up kind of love. It’s one of the best gifts we have to give each other.
A woman from Ohio who volunteered at Christ House several years ago wrote to us about how moved she was by a small experience she had there. She had helped make sack lunches for the Kairos men who were going out to jobs, and she marveled at the simple fact that every lunch was different depending on each man’s preferences. She wrote:
One had brown bread, another rye. One had egg filling, another peanut butter and jelly, another ham. One had mustard, another had mayonnaise. When we finished making the lunches, we put each man’s name on the sack. Can you imagine being homeless and coming to the kitchen to pick up a sack with your name on it, and everything in the lunch was exactly as you liked it? Someone cared enough to find out what you liked and went to the trouble to make it just for you. That is creating structures that embody God’s love….
And then she asked, “How do we create structures that sing of our belovedness and the belovedness of others?”
Probably the primary thing that keeps us from experiencing our belovedness, and giving the gift of it to others through creating structures for it, is that we don’t give enough time to listening to the voice of the shepherd. We give our inner authority over to one hired hand after another, none of which have our best interests at heart. The good shepherd is the only one to be trusted to really love me and want the best for me, to want something beautiful to happen through me. So why do I keep “hiring” other forces to oversee the operation of my life? Part of the reason might be that the hired hands seem so competent and capable that I’m fooled into believing they can handle things. “Girl, you don’t need to bother God with every little detail of your life. We’ll take it from here.” They are such good liars, so accomplished at convincing me we’ll manage just fine on our own.
And then the wolves attack, and where is that rascally hired hand? I’m on my own to defend against the wolves. We all have wolves to cope with, but maybe you’ll be able to relate to some of mine. There’s the wolf of Judgment, who thinks it knows what’s right and wrong for every person and situation. Why listen to new opinions? We’ve never done it this way before. Let me give you the reasons why your plans are going to fail. Don’t let people take advantage of you. This wolf likes to tell everyone what to think, when to think, how to think.
Then there are the wolves of Criticism and Complaint. Nothing pleases these guys. More churches have been taken down by the incipient, whining voices of complaint than any others. The temperature, the music, the carpet, the rules, the style of worship, too many same old ideas, too many new ideas, it’s too hot, too cold, the worship is too short, too long, the same old people come every week, there are too many new people, on and on it goes. And worst of all, critics tend to be so aggravatingly faithful in their attendance!
The wolves of Competition and Comparison keep me trying to one-up the rest of you. I listen to your joys and prayer concerns in order to compare our troubles and see who wins. Whether you have failed or succeeded, won at something or lost, I will figure out how I have failed or succeeded, gained or lost more than you, or how much worse or better off you are than me. There is only reason to compete for first place, and that is in order to be last. I heard of a teacher who reprimanded a little boy for dashing ahead of his class to be the first one to reach the door. He said, “But teacher, I had to get there first so I could hold the door open for everyone else.” He understood it better than most.
There are so many wolves that we can’t ever expect to tame them all. The wolves of addiction and dependency, false pride and anger, trying to build myself up by tearing you down, the wolves of blame and accusation, over-stimulation and busyness. What a pack of liars and thieves trying to steal our creativity and joy. What feeds these wolves, keeps them on the prowl, is fear and anxiety. We react to the fear of change, the fear of diminishment and meaninglessness and lack of purpose by judging others’ efforts instead of clarifying our own vision and practicing our own gifts. We are afraid of failing at our own calling so we criticize what others are doing.
Gordon Cosby offers this word of encouragement from a sermon:
When I reflect deeply on my life and what I really want, it is not to be afraid. When I am afraid, I am miserable. I play it safe. I restrict myself. I hide the talent of me in the ground. I am not deeply alive—the depths of me are not being expressed…. More than anything else I want to be delivered from fear, for fear is alien to my own best interest. I want to give myself generously, magnanimously, freely—out of love. I want to be able to take risks—to express myself, to welcome and embrace the future. I want to see what it is to be more deeply me.
(Seized by the Power of a Great Affection, p. 78)
Only when we give ourselves freely—out of love—do we begin to see what it is to be ourselves. We are members of a flock AND we are unique individuals with different callings and gifts. When we give the ruling authority of our lives over to a bunch of hired hands, instead of to the shepherd who is truly good at leading and loving the flock, we suffer. As we quiet the false voices and learn to listen to the inner voice of love, we will be able to relax into our own true nature . . . offering our own creative gifts without anxiety. Welcoming the people and experiences that seem alien to us, rather than seeing them as invading forces. Not only will we ENJOY our own lives more, but we will be more ENJOYABLE. We won’t be thought of as those critical folks who seem so displeased with so many things, but as people who listen well and laugh easily and encourage one another to keep on dying, keep on coming alive, keep on expressing what it means to be God’s beloved.