How Wool You Know God?

Come in the front door of our church and one of the first things you’ll see is sheep. A lot of sheep. Of all different shapes and sizes. Cuddly ones, ones big enough to sit on, funny looking ones, cute ones, fluffy ones and shaggy ones, and one which even has a real identification tag on their ear. I should probably also mention that they’re stuffed.

You can’t miss them. They live above the coat rack in the lobby. If you’re an adult, they might not be the first thing you see - that might be the stained glass or the rainbows, but children, they like to grab a sheep as they go by or scope out which one they’ll grab later.

It all started a few Easters back with a couple of big fluffy ones used in a story. They were just the right size for the littlest people to hug and sit on (and occasionally ride around on). Then there were a couple more. And each year after that there were more, different shapes and sizes and styles, all brought by adults in the congregation.

 

Some children have their favourites and some like to pick a different one each time. They hold on to them in church, or lie on the bigger ones. They're great companions for a movie night and a friend to play with when there's not much going on.

Comforter, friend, companion, protector. They’re whatever a creative spirit needs them to be.

The 23rd Psalm is one of the most familiar and most loved passages of scripture. “The Lord is my shepherd,” it begins. God makes sure that I want for nothing that I need and God is with me wherever I find myself in life - green pastures, gentle streams, even the shadowy valley and at table with my enemies. God comforts, cares, accompanies and protects me all the days of my life, just like a shepherd. And when this life is done, I will be at home with God.

I love the 23rd psalm. Like so many others, it’s one of my favourites and a “go to” for comfort, strength and support. God is with me always: what more could I need. I’ll be honest, though, it’s not the shepherd image that does that, it’s everything else.

Since Sunday school as a kid, through many a bible study, sermons and seminary classes, I understand the point of the shepherd image in this context. I also understand that the author wrote from the perspective of a sheep to this shepherd. I also understand that, as intimately meaningful to the author as it might have been then, it isn’t to me now. With all due respect to shepherds, sheep farmers, keepers of sheep and sheep themselves (not to mention 10th century BCE authors of psalms), I don’t have the same personal relationship with shepherds that they did. And isn’t that the point: the intimate relationship of love and care, a presence that brings peace and grace to every step of our life's journey: a comforter, friend, companion and protector.

Perhaps the shepherd and sheep is a meaningful metaphor for you. Perhaps not. If it's not, how about imagining your own 23rd Psalm. What image of relationship brings that meaning to you? Maybe it's a child with a treasured stuffed animal. Or an elderly person in their last days holding a stuffed bear, the gift of a child. Perhaps it's a farmer and their land, a teacher, a mentor, a partner, a lover, a home. How do you imagine your relationship with God?

A Flash of Light

“I was blind, but now I see,” John Newton famously wrote in Amazing Grace. It’s an inspiring story, how Newton had been a slave ship captain but “saw the light” and became a priest, an abolitionist and an ally of William Wilberforce, the British politician who led the movement to abolish the slave trade. Ironically, Newton went physically blind, but was spiritually enlightened.

Saul saw the light, too. Saul was a devout Jew who pursued the earliest followers of Jesus in the years after the first Pentecost. They were called people of The Way, then, and Saul, like many others, saw the new sect as a threat to his faith. He was on his way to Damascus to arrest more and “bring them bound to Jerusalem” (Acts 9:2) when it happened to him.  There was a flash of light “from heaven” that knocked him down and he hears the voice of Jesus asking him why he’s persecuting him (Jesus) and telling him to go into the city where he’ll be told what to do. Saul’s blinded for three days until a disciple named Ananias, told by God to visit him, comes to him and says “Brother Saul, the Lord Jesus, who appeared to you on your way here, has sent me so that you may regain your sight and be filled with the Holy Spirit” (Acts 9:17). His sight returns and he’s a changed man. He later adopts the name Paul and becomes the great builder of the earliest church communities.

The thing is, I think, we often portray these “see the light” moments as just that, a moment. A sudden flash, a light bulb goes on and everything’s changed.

If only it were that simple.

John Newton marks a moment in which he called out to God during a storm at sea in March of 1748 as the beginning of his spiritual conversion. He continued working in the slave trade until a stroke forced him to retire in 1754, though he continued to invest in it for a few more years. He became a priest in 1764. Amazing Grace (and other hymns) appeared in 1779. It wasn’t until 1788 that he began to speak forcefully against the slave trade and he lived to see the Abolition Act passed in 1807, dying shortly afterwards. He would acknowledge, late in life, that it took him many years from that moment at sea to find his way.

Saul’s moment was a beginning, too, and not just three days of blindness. I think it took him a while to really get into that conversion moment. Conversion, by the way, comes form a latin word meaning simply to turn about. He certainly did that. He stopped what he was doing, but he needed to learn things, he needed to experience things, he needed to find his way from being a good Jew to a good follower of Jesus. He needed to understand what was happening. And that was a challenge at first because the very community he wanted to join was afraid of him: they didn’t believe that he had changed (Acts 9:21-30). It took some time.

Conversions begin with a change - a change of heart - but it takes work to live into the change and make transformation happen. We begin to see more clearly and hear more deeply, we learn and experience, we taste life and we live it with all our senses, not just sight. That’s what leads us to what is true.

It takes time and, of course, that means uniquely our own time. Finding love, grace, respect, compassion, truth - these aren’t new things. They’re already in us. This isn’t about religious dogma or tradition or culture, it’s about finding what’s true in each of us and following that path. We are each unique individuals, but we are one in being created in the image of God and God is love. There are many paths to God.

These conversion experiences don’t make something new out of nothing. They make something truly you out of everything you are.

In and Out

Jesus is alive! This is the good news of Easter Day. Each of the four gospels tells their version of the story: the tomb is empty on the day of resurrection, angels announce Jesus is risen (as he said) and Mary meets Jesus. It's a new day, the first day of the week, a day of new life, a day of celebration.

But not that first day, not for the disciples. They didn't believe Mary's story. Even those who saw the empty tomb didn't get it. They were afraid and they hid "behind locked doors" (John 20:19). They didn't believe it until Jesus appeared to them in that locked room.

We've traditionally focused on Thomas as the one who doubted, but they all did. "Jesus came and stood among them and said, 'Peace be with you.' After he said this, he showed them his hands and his side. Then the disciples rejoiced when they saw the Lord" (John 20:19-20).

"Then" the disciples rejoiced. Maybe Thomas is held up as the example of all of them who didn’t believe at first, but he’s also the example that lets us know that doubts and questions are okay and need to be asked and tested. I think he was even the bravest of them all because I think he was already out starting to live the life that Jesus had taught. Perhaps Jesus' death inspired him to greater living.

But let's get back to the other disciples. Things seemed to have come to a sudden and tragic end. They locked themselves away in fear, not knowing what to do next. Surely they would be safe if they just stayed indoors and kept to themselves, with a good stout door between them and the world.

Jesus wasn't having that, though. He appears to them, offers the peace which he had promised, the peace of his presence, and, literally, breathes life into them. "Jesus said to them again, 'Peace be with you. As the Father has sent me, so I send you.' When he had said this, he breathed on them and said to them, 'Receive the Holy Spirit'" (John 20:21-22). It's John's version of the Pentecost story. There's no wind or fire or speaking in tongues, but only the peace of Jesus' presence and the breath of his spirit.

And there’s one more thing: the command to come out. Like Lazarus, they are not dead and this locked room will not be their tomb. There’s living to be done. Jesus sends them to do what God sent Jesus to do: to bring love, grace and life to all.

In the midst of a chaotic, struggling world, I want to suggest that we think about how often in our lives we lock ourselves away, or build walls, thinking that we'll somehow be protected from it. But that doesn't protect, it imprisons.

Or we build structure into our lives that we think is only bringing order and sense and yes, it does, and we appreciate that.  But sometimes, if we don't constantly challenge ourselves with the need to go out into the world, it becomes rigid, restrictive and confining.

Jesus sends us out into the world to love. The peace he offers isn't an absence of conflict, but the assurance of God's presence. The spirit he breathes into us is inspiration, potential and possibility. For individuals, yes, but also for communities, cultures, nations: for a fearful world in need of new life.

Outside the Tomb

It really is unbelievable. With our usual sense of what is and isn’t real, you can certainly see why no one believed that Jesus was alive.

And no one in the story did, not just poor old Thomas who gets saddled with that doubt label, after the fact. The tomb was empty, the body was gone. But no one - no one - believed Jesus was alive until they saw him or touched him or talked to him. 

The women who first came to the tomb and found it empty wondered who had taken the body and where. When they told the other disciples, they didn’t believe it either. Not until they’d seen Jesus in person and touched him and talked to him.

I would have thought that, having spent all that time with Jesus, seen him doing the things he did, knowing him the way they did, they might have been more inclined to believe Jesus when he told them what was going to happen. Even the angel at the tomb reminded the women that he was alive, “as he said.” Weren’t they paying attention? Peter was just “amazed.” John’s gospel even suggests that the other disciple, who followed Peter, believed but didn’t understand.

Maybe that’s just it. We struggle to understand that Jesus is more than flesh and bone, broken on the cross, more than words, more than story or teaching or behaviour. We can say that we follow Jesus by trying to be like Jesus, to model our behaviour after Jesus, even to try and live like Jesus. But that’s not being Jesus. 

Jesus is not confined by a tomb, nor a body or the physicality of this creation. Jesus is about being. Jesus is about being love and grace, showing us how that is possible in this form which, like us, is both divine and human. 

I believe that when the gospel of John tells of Jesus describing himself as “the way, the truth and the life,” it’s not asserting that the way is Jesus, but that Jesus is being the way. To be love and grace is the way which is true and life giving. That “way” can exist in more than Jesus. It has existed in more than Jesus, we just always come back to a comparison to the original and nobody makes that cut. But comparison was never Jesus’ point. Meeting a particular standard that always seems slightly out of our human reach was never Jesus’ point. Connecting with the divine and human that is in all of us, embracing the love that’s there, the life-creating, life-engaging, life-giving love that’s there, and being that in the world, that’s Jesus point. That brings us into relationship with God, with each other and with all that is.

Perhaps that seems unbelievable. It certainly seems like the first to discover Jesus was alive felt that way. At first. But they lived into it and they found the way. They lived outside the tomb and we can, too.

Living Every Day

Well, here we are. Palm Sunday brings us to Holy Week which brings us to Easter.

From our perspective, we know what's going to happen. We know that the same people who welcome Jesus with waving branches and honour him by throwing their coats to the ground in front of him, as they would welcome a king, are likely the same people who turn away from him later the same week. We know that the leaders of the Sanhedrin are watching. We know what they were planning. We know the Romans are watching, too.

But we stand in celebration, still, perhaps waving our own palm branches or something like it, recognizing that Jesus planned this moment of celebration. He sent disciples to bring him a donkey to ride, a sign of peace (warriors rode horses), so that he could arrive as the prophet Zechariah had foretold the Messiah would. And the people celebrated his arrival, just in time for the feast of Passover, as they kept a wary eye on Pilate and his soldiers arriving to keep an eye on things during the festival.

Yes, Pilate was arriving in Jerusalem at the same time. He was on a horse. Nothing like a big event to inspire acts of patriotic rebellion, especially one that reminded the people of the exodus from Egypt.  I wonder if he noticed this extra bit of celebration.

So, in that moment, we celebrate what the people celebrated then: the arrival of the promised messiah.

But we know what has to happen. We know that this is not a moment of triumph, not yet. We knows he is walking to his execution. We know that, the very next day, he gets angry at the money changers and sellers in front of the temple and makes a scene. We know he teaches and foretells the temples destruction and the end times. We know he shares the Passover meal with his closest friends. We know he’s afraid, we know he doubts and prays that there might be another way. We know he’s betrayed and arrested. We know his mocked and judged and beaten and killed. We know his lifeless body’s placed in a tomb. We know that’s not where he stays.

Over time, Christians became a Sunday people, something we're now discovering may no longer be meaningful to people, looking to find God in their lives, but also looking for more time to fill their lives with meaningful things. But it's not just our focus on the time at which we gather, it's become part of how we tell the story. Jesus wasn’t a one day a week wonder. Jesus lives every day.

This moment of celebration on Palm Sunday is followed by a greater moment of celebration the following Sunday, yes, it is. But there's a whole week of days in between, important pieces of the story. It’s a story we know is there, but how often do we still walk it with Jesus?

Here is our opportunity to embrace Jesus and hold him close, close with experiences we might share in our own lives, moments of happiness, anger, fear, pain, shame and grief. It’s not a comfortable journey, no. It takes us to death and emptiness. But it doesn't end there. That's why we need to take the journey with Jesus: it’s the story of life and death. And life. That’s a story for next week.

Do you see what I mean?

If you’re looking for words of hope - and I’m pretty sure we all are these days - there are a lot of places to turn, a lot of people who have things to say. If the words are true, they will not only brighten your day, but inspire you to envision a new day, one which is better, and support you in living into it.

Isaiah had just these kind of words for the Hebrew people exiled from Jerusalem to Babylon in the 6th century BCE. Conquered and far from home, grieving the life they had lost, Isaiah told them to listen to God, who says “do not remember the former things, or consider the things of old. I am about to do a new thing; now it springs forth, do you not perceive it?” (Is. 43:18-19) I brought you out of Egypt, God says, through the wilderness and to the promised land, remember that? Well, now I’m going to bring you home again and this exodus will be even greater.

But, hang on, this seems confusing. You say forget the past. But you also say remember what God did in the past. How do we do both?

Hope is about what’s ahead, not behind. I think God means to say don’t live in the past and don’t mourn what’s past as if it’s lost, as if it’s something to go back to. You can’t. Those things bring you to here, they help make you who you are, but they don’t confine you. Instead, learn from them, grow from them and use them to propel yourself - and your world - forward into a new day.

The exodus from Egypt and the time in the wilderness were formative for the Hebrew people, a core piece of their identity, central to who they are and who they can become. And now, after a crushing defeat, lost in the wilderness of exile and surrounded by an inhospitable culture, Isaiah reminds them, not of better days in the past, but of what takes them to better days in the future: God.

This is not a return to the exodus from Egypt, but a new thing. They won’t return to the Jerusalem that was, nor will they be able to rebuild it exactly as it was. The people they return to will not be the same, either, they, too, will have changed. The new thing isn’t built in the past but on the foundation of the past, as every new moment is.

The spirit of God - the spirit of life - moves in each of us, and we have a part to play. Hope inspires action. God moved through Moses in Egypt and, in Isaiah’s day, Cyrus and the Persians, but also through community leaders who’s name we don’t know, through individuals who worked together, and people who followed.

The ground might still look cold and wet and bare, but underneath new life is getting ready to appear. If we look around, we might see and hear Isaiah calling to us from the earth. Listen, a new day is coming; do you not perceive it?

Prodigal Life, Radical Grace

I bet that Jesus often encountered people who were not happy with the company he kept. Pharisees and religious leaders, mostly, but others, too, I suspect, who felt that Jesus, as a godly person, should be spending his time with those they judged to be equally as godly. Certainly not “those people,” sinners, “tax collectors” and the like. It seems like “tax collector” was a catch all for just the worst or the worst people.

But Jesus would try to point out that those are precisely the people he came for: the ones in need of love and grace, the marginalized, the de-humanized, and most certainly people who were judged by others to be “those people.” We’re all children of God, all in need of grace and love.

In the gospel of Luke, he responds to this criticism by taking the time to tell three stories about being lost and found, three stories about the radical, expansive, life-giving power of grace.

All are pretty familiar, I think: the story of the shepherd who leaves all his sheep to look for a single one that is lost and then celebrates its return; a woman who loses one of ten coins and won’t rest till she finds it, celebrating when she does; and a story of a parent with a problem child.

That last one we’ve traditionally referred to it as the parable of the Prodigal Son. But it's not just about the one son. It's also about the father and it’s also about his other son. It could also be about the mother we don't hear about, possibly the rest of the family, if there is more, and certainly about the community in which they live, who witnessed the story, but Jesus keeps it focused on the four main characters.

It's also not just about the "prodigal" behaviour of the youngest son. Prodigal simply means to be rash and recklessly extravagant. The young son was certainly that. His brother - and others - might argue that the father behaved in a similar way by giving him his inheritance when he did. It certainly violated the common code of the day.

One could make a good case for saying the older brother was "prodigal" too, in that he gave his entire life over to being a "slave" for his father. Or so he says. His anger certainly suggests that he thinks he's wasted his life and is now envious of his brother.

But the prodigal nature of their behaviour isn't even the heart of the story. Each of them has been lost, in their own way. The young son lost in the life he thought he could have by himself. The father sadly lost in a life without his son. The older brother bitterly lost in the life he got which was not the one he wanted.

I think the heart of the story is something so big, so alive, so life-giving, that it’s become a character itself in the story, a larger than life one, even. It’s grace. 

The young son finds grace for himself enough to return home where his father offers him grace in welcome. They are found. But, rather than a happy-ever-after for all, Jesus leaves us with the father's explanation to the older son, without indicating that the son accepts it. I can imagine the father continuing on from "this brother of yours was dead and has come to life" with "and I, too, have found new life and you also can find new life in grace. Will you embrace it and live it?" Maybe that question’s for us, too.