Good shepherds are good stewards

From Easter 4B, which we celebrated as Creation Sunday. For our later service, I delivered a version of this off-the-cuff, involving children. When I asked about what animals God created, one little boy piped up, "SHRIMP!!" We loved that.

“I don't think it is enough appreciated how much an outdoor book the Bible is. It is a book open to the sky--best read and understood outdoors, and the farther outdoors the better.”  

This being Earth Day, Creation Sunday, I took that and other inspiration from the great poet and environmentalist Wendell Berry, and was inspired to look at today’s lessons as outdoor lessons.  (I love his work so much that I think he deserves his own picture.)

Wendell Berry illustration by Greg Newbold

A lot of the stories Jesus tells use examples from out of doors:  of planting, fishing, harvesting, and herding. The mustard seed, the sower, the vineyard, the hen like a mother to her flock. The people of the Bible, especially the ordinary people whom Jesus cared most about, paid a lot more attention to what was going on outdoors than we do today. They had to. They didn’t have insulated houses and glass windows, or sealed cars to protect them from the elements or keep bugs, or snakes out. They didn’t have air conditioning or fancy electric lighting. If it was hot—they were hot. If it was cold—they were cold. If it was light, they could see—if it was dark, except for a little light from an oil lamp, they couldn’t.  They didn’t eat food from all over the world—they raised and ate the food that came from the plants and animals that were native to their region.

And speaking of animals and plants, there are 93 different animals, birds or insects mentioned in the Bible (I counted). There are donkeys, snakes, leopards, eagles, foxes, camels. Dogs, but not cats—what’s up with that?  But one thing it’s plain to see – there are a LOT of SHEEP.  218 mentions of sheep, 199 of lambs.  When you went outdoors in ancient Palestine, you would see a lot of sheep!!  No wonder there are also 113 references to shepherds.

Sheep were one of the first animals domesticated and they were essential to the people of that day.  They were a source of milk and meat; of wool of course, for clothing and blankets; their hide was used to make vellum for scrolls; lanolin from their wool was used to make soap.

No wonder Jesus reached for the metaphor of the good shepherd.  But what would it mean to be a good shepherd back then?

Shepherds in that time were semi-nomadic. They didn’t own the sheep they tended, but they were responsible for them. They had to know how and where to find the right grazing land. They didn’t own the land, so they had to work with the farmers and nearby villages, and devise systems to guard the land so it wouldn’t become exhausted by over-grazing. They had to know the weather, watching for flash floods or drought. They watched for disease, calculated when to breed, ensured healthy births, protected sheep from predators, knew when to shear them, patched them up if they were injured, even cared for their hooves. Their job was to deliver the herd with more births and fewer losses than when it left the village.

A good shepherd observed, and noticed, and paid attention to his flock, even down to the individual sheep.  Sheep are followers. They stick together, but in every flock there is a hierarchy—and the sheep will usually follow the dominant one.  So one of the shepherd’s jobs would be to discern that particular sheep in the herd; it was called a bellwether—did you know that was the origin of the word? The shepherd placed a bell around that sheep’s neck—and as that sheep went, so went the flock.  Because sheep have this flocking tendency, the good shepherd had to know how to take advantage of that, and choose and guide the bellwether strategically.

In our beautiful Psalm 23, the psalmist praises God for fulfilling all the conditions of a good shepherd.  God faithfully returns season after season. God knows the best places—the right paths--to lead the flock to water and pasture. God knows how to protect the herd from harm, and keeps God’s promises to protect them.  And even though there are dangers, God, the good shepherd, never abandons us, for we are God’s sheep.

The Bible talks a lot about BAD shepherds, too. The prophet Zechariah calls out, “Oh, my worthless shepherd, who deserts the flock!” and the flock are the people of Israel. In Isaiah we hear, the shepherds also have no understanding; they have all turned to their own way.” In the Gospel of Matthew, Jesus is going about the cities and villages, teaching and healing, and it says:  “When he saw the crowds, he had compassion for them, because they were harassed and helpless, like sheep without a shepherd.”

These sheep probably have a good shepherd. Artist Mike Jory painted them in South Devon, England.

God expects us to be shepherds, too. Shepherds lead, and good leaders are important. After all, the people stray, do we not? Oh yes we do. We need good shepherds, and we need to be good shepherds.

Shepherds are also stewards. A steward is someone who handles affairs for someone else. A good shepherd is a good steward.  He knows the value of his flock, and seeks to increase it. And he knows he is accountable to someone else for that flock.   

And so today—on Creation Sunday, I want to take that concept of stewardship outdoors. For our Creation story tells us that God made all, and ALL of it is very good—not just the humans, and not just that which is useful to us.  And it tells us that we are made in God’s image, with the ability to discern God’s purpose, and so the earth is entrusted to our care. God expects us to be good stewards of the created world--and not just of the sheep!!  So I wonder, how do we steward the earth as a good shepherds?

Jesus said, “I know my sheep and my sheep know me.”  So first, we need to get to know the natural world around us, just as that shepherd knew his terrain. How well do we know the land we are in?  How well do we know the ecosystem, the interdependencies of plants and animals, birds and insects, water and watershed, what is native and what is non-native? I flunked a 15-question quiz on environmental literacy in seminary, and I have been working to redeem myself.  It asked things like, where does the water from your tap come from?  Where does your garbage go? Who are the original peoples of the land you live on today?  Name three edible plants, three species of trees, three animals, and three resident birds native to your region.  Name three common species around you that are NOT native and how they impact local wildlife.  (Did you know that house sparrows, possums, and fox squirrels are not native to our region?) 

This is a very local process, this kind of knowing. In fact, I who live in West Linn, might answer some of those questions differently from those of you who live in Bethany. Closer to the river, for instance, I see white oaks, which I don’t see out here here. So we have to look closely. An African environmentalist named Baba Dioum put it:  "In the end we will conserve only what we love, we will love only what we understand, and we will understand only what we have learned.”  To be good stewards, we must first go outdoors. We must first learn.  

And when we take stewardship outdoors, we are humbled.  We discover, as Wendell Berry said, “that God made not only the parts of Creation that we humans understand and approve, but all of it.  We discover what God found in the world, as God made it, to be good; we remember that God made it for God’s pleasure; and that God continues to love it and to find it worthy, despite its reduction and corruption by us. We are reminded that Creation is not a single creative act long over and done with, but is the continuous, constant participation of all creatures in the being of God. We discover that, for these reasons, our destruction of nature is not just bad stewardship, or bad economics, or a betrayal of our responsibility; but a kind of blasphemy.”

Jesus said, “I am the good shepherd. I know my own and my own know me, just as the Father knows me and I know the Father.” I pray that today we recommit ourselves to taking our Bible outdoors, to getting to know and love the world that God made as deeply and intimately as the shepherd knows and loves his flock. In so doing, we are following our own Good Shepherd, who came to renew the very creation on which we depend.

And we remember that God needs us to be good shepherds, too.

Preached April 22, 2018, St Gabriel Episcopal Church, Portland, OR.  

Readings:  Acts 4:5-12, 1 John 3:16-24, John 10:11-18, Psalm 23 

Crossing into freedom: Christ, our Passover

Continuing my 2018 catch-up, my Easter Vigil sermon. Some of you may know that my brother is an Orthodox Rabbi. I love to explore the Jewish roots of our own Christian story, and our liturgy. And because I knew "He is risen!!!" and the literal resurrection of Jesus would be the theme of our Easter morning service, I wanted to look at our resurrection story in light of the Passover time in which it occurred, and how we might look at the resurrection as our own deliverance from bondage.

Happy Easter to you!!! Or, as you would hear in France, Italy, or Mexico:  Joyeuses Pâques!  Buona Pasqua!  Felices Pascuas!   

Do you notice anything in common in the way these other languages express what we call Easter?  More than in the word we use, Easter (which has pagan roots), you can hear the Hebrew root, pesach, in their word for Easter--the same root from which we derive the word Passover, and “Paschal,” as in, the paschal lamb. 

You see, Easter is the Christian Passover.

I’ve been thinking about this because yesterday began the 8 days of Jewish Passover, and we don’t coincide so closely every year. (Orthodox Christians do, having to do with the Western church’s adoption of the Gregorian calendar. Another post.)  But also because this ancient Easter Vigil service—with some elements dating from the second century—is closer to its Jewish roots, and has so much Passover imagery in it.

“This is the night,” we hear in the Exsultet. A Jewish Passover celebration begins with the youngest at the table asking, “Why is this night different from any other night?” All over the world, Jews re-tell the stories that answer the question--stories of their liberation from slavery, including the story of the Red Sea we heard tonight. Passover is sometimes called, “the season of our freedom,” and it celebrates spiritual as well as physical redemption. The Passover meal is both a commandment and a story, as is our Eucharist, where taking food symbolic of aspects of the journey— including the traditional eating of a sacrificial lamb, and unleavened bread to symbolize the haste of the flight from Egypt--is a way of participating in the experience, of making the journey again. The meal includes the psalm we said today--likely one that Jesus said at the Last Supper--about a joy so great that the mountains skipped like lambs and the little hills like lost sheep.  

But Jews also recall God’s dream for their future, where they are free from the burdens of oppressors, free from slavery, taken as God’s people, with God as their very own God. This is a continuing promise of covenant, of God still with them.   

Crossing the Red Sea, by Cheryl Rose

Tonight, we celebrate the new covenant of God in Christ.  And in our Easter Vigil, we too hear the question, what makes this night different? And we add our own answers. “This is the night,” we say, “when all who believe in Christ are delivered from the gloom of sin, and are restored to grace and holiness of life. How wonderful and beyond knowing, O God, is your mercy and loving-kindness to us, that to redeem a slave, you gave a son.”

It was the apostle Paul who first made the connection to the sacrifice of the lamb at the Jewish Passover with Christ’s sacrifice for us. He wrote, “Clean out the old yeast so that you may be a new batch, as you really are:  unleavened. For our paschal lamb, Christ, has been sacrificed.” Paul saw that in the Last Supper, Jesus’ offering was not an ordinary lamb, it was Jesus himself. Jesus became the Lamb of God, and so we call his suffering, death, and resurrection our own Passover-- “the Paschal mystery.” It is the same mystery hidden in Israel’s deliverance from Egypt. As Jews renew their covenant through the Passover sacrifice, so Christians renew our “new covenant” in celebrating the Paschal mystery. We celebrate this at Easter, but also every Sunday in our Eucharist, just as Christ commanded us to do.

Since the earliest days of the Vigil, Christians have listened to the stories of our ancestors, as we have tonight. From the first story, Genesis, we remember the dream of God for God’s people to be at home in the beautiful and harmonious world God created. We remember that we are made in God’s image, and that God graciously shared some of God’s freedom with us.  We do not have God’s freedom—for we are not God.  But we alone of all creatures have the freedom to choose to follow God’s way, or to make our own way, and as our stories tonight remind us, this complicates our relationship with God. For often, when we make our own way, we find ourselves enslaved again. And Passover, ultimately, is about freedom.

We don’t know what brought the people into Egypt, or how the people that Jesus healed became blind, or lost their hearing or speech. We do know that enslavement is surely not of God, but comes from the abuse of freedom given us. Walter Brueggeman talks about slavery as whatever keeps us from being joyous. We are so often bound up in systems of our own making. We may be literally enslaved or imprisoned, or made less free by discriminatory systems, or oppressive belief systems taught by our culture or family of origin. And we internalize these systems and impose slavery upon ourselves:  we may be captive to our mortgage; or our fears; to phony loyalties, frantic ambitions, or belief in limitations in ourselves which do not exist.  

God sees our enslavement, and weeps. For God has dreamed about us from our creation, and yearned for our joy. From God’s love, God sent Jesus into the world, to participate in our human systems with us—systems which caught him up, tortured him, and crucified him. We crucified God.

Yet because God is perfect freedom, and power, and mystery, God made possible the resurrection for our sake--that we might reclaim our freedom and be reconciled to God. Christ our Passover, crossed over from death into new life, so that we ourselves could too. As Paul writes, “we celebrate that our old self was crucified with him so that the body of sin might be destroyed, and we might no longer be enslaved to sin.”

This Easter, our Passover, let us consider what enslaves us, and ask for God’s help to release those bonds. Throw out the old yeast and be the precious unleavened selves God created us to be!  Celebrate today God’s new covenant of liberating love. And when we renew our baptismal vows, seize our opportunity to participate with Christ in the resurrection, allowing our old selves to die, and choosing, in freedom, a new life in Christ.

Passover, by Tim Nyberg 

For in the Resurrection, God has announced to us we do not need to live coerced lives. The God of Exodus is the one who freed God’s people and brought them to Godself. Jesus is the one who is free and united within us. Jesus is free from all the claims and expectations of the world. Jesus defies the world’s limitations. In Jesus’ resurrection is our freedom. And so we say: 

Allelulia. Christ our Passover is Sacrificed for us!!

Therefore let us keep the feast. Alleluia!

Sermon delivered Easter Vigil, March 31, 2018, St Gabriel Episcopal Church, Portland OR