A sermon preached at St. Joseph\u2019s Episcopal Church in Durham, N.C., on April 26, 2015.<\/i><\/p>\n
John 10:11-18<\/a><\/cite> I was determined that I was not going to stand up here and talk about sheep, but in thinking about today’s readings I kept being pulled back to the image of them\u2014the shepherd, the flock, the pasture, the sheep. I have to admit I’m just not crazy about that image. It isn’t that I don’t like sheep. I do like sheep. I’ve toyed with the idea of having sheep some day. They’re relatively easy to manage, and they’re good for multiple purposes throughout their life cycles: they give wool, they give meat, some breeds even give milk. They can live off of relatively poor land. They can be integrated fairly easily into a multi-purpose farm and a household economy. And lambing season, if you don’t mind being kept up at night, is a glorious thing. Wendell Berry, one of a dwindling number of literal \u201cgood shepherds\u201d the western world has left in this age of industrialized agriculture who also gives us his own eloquent descriptions of the experience, has this to say about keeping sheep:<\/p>\n The old shepherd comes to another Berry is a Christian, which I think shows through pretty clearly in his poetry\u2014not that he is actively trying to convert anyone, but that he never strays very far from the image of rebirth. The care he takes for his sheep is the sort of care we’d want from our own Good Shepherd, but Berry’s is a very human shepherd\u2014a humble one, who \u201cgives thanks\u201d for a lambing time that he, far from controlling in the manner of an industrial foreman or a software engineer, takes as a holy mystery. <\/p>\n I was determined not to talk about sheep, but, as you can see, I’ve failed. Sheep and shepherds are everywhere in the Bible, and we’re so used to seeing them that most of the time I think we hardly do see them. I read you this poem to point out that being a \u201cgood shepherd\u201d is considerably more complicated than the image most of us have in our minds\u2014which I suspect is more or less the image you see above my head, in stained glass. A white-robed Jesus, blandly kind to the point of looking nearly stoned, cradling a sweet and innocent if fairly vapid lamb in his arms. It’s that image that draws many of us to the 23d psalm: The Lord is my shepherd… he leadeth me beside the still waters, and so on. It’s comforting, in its place. There are times when we’d all like Jesus to pick us up and cradle us in his arms. But the world I know doesn’t look like that [pointing to the post-Raphaelite stained glass scene behind me]. Even Wendell Berry’s ideal shepherd is considerably richer and more complicated than our disconnected, urban, post-pre-Raphaelite visions. <\/p>\n What I really want to talk about is these images of God we have in our heads, and what good they are. But I’m going to have to talk a little more about sheep and shepherds first.<\/p>\n If, like me, you don’t recognize the happy world of the stained glass above my head, I have some good news: That’s not the world Jesus was talking about. It’s not the world that needed his shepherding. Pastures in Palestine don’t look like that, and never did. The Bible (and especially the Old Testament) is so rich in agrarian metaphor because the people by whom and for whom it was written were largely an agrarian people, but most of the land in Israel is not arable; either the terrain is too hilly or the soil too poor for crops. But it will grow grass, and where you have grass, you can graze sheep\u2014though not always very much grass, or of high quality. The line between pasture and wilderness wasn’t always clearly drawn, and sheep often needed the guidance of a good shepherd just to find something to eat. They might stay out for days at a time, moving from one scrubby field to another\u2014hence \u201cwatching their flocks by night.\u201d<\/p>\n And if the line between pasture and wilderness wasn’t clearly drawn, neither was it safely fenced, which meant that the shepherd not only had to worry about sheep wandering off but about wild animals snatching them in the dark\u2014not to mention bandits. He had to be prepared to fight them off\u2014that’s what that staff was for. Today we’re apt to infantilize shepherds as much as sheep, especially at Christmas, when we turn their hooked staves into candy for children. But the shepherd’s staff was a tool and a weapon. It could be used to block a sheep’s path into danger or to prod it to safety; and it could be used to beat off an attacking wolf\u2014or an attacking human. A shepherd had to be continuously alert, always ready both to care kindly for his sheep and to do battle with enemies. \u201cThy rod and thy staff, they comfort me,\u201d not because the shepherd looks so comfortable leaning on them, but because they show that he’s ready to defend us. If he’s leaning on it, it’s because he’s exhausted from the effort.<\/p>\n The Roman poet Virgil, who died a couple of decades before Jesus was born, did as much as anyone to romanticize shepherding\u2014using a form we now call pastoral<\/i>, literally of a pasture, and take to mean idyllic contentment. <\/p>\n When Summer’s West Wind sounds its joyful tones [he wrote,]\nLead all your flocks to glades and pasturelands: Such was his advice for bountiful Italy. But Virgil’s description of the lives of Libyan shepherds gives an antitode to this fantasy, and might have been more familiar to Jesus’ listeners (not to mention Isaiah’s, and Ezekiel’s):<\/p>\n Now, shall my verse pursue the Libyan nomads, If that was the kind of shepherd with which Jesus’ hearers were familiar, then the image of God as shepherd was not, in fact, opposed to the image of God as warrior\u2014there was, in fact, a lot of overlap.<\/p>\n But now consider this: For all a shepherd’s vigilance and care, for all that he might have to take on the role of warrior, his job was not well respected. True, shepherds enjoy an exalted place in the Bible\u2014God, kings, priests, and Jesus are all metaphorically shepherds, and David was a real one before took his sheep-defending skills to war and slew Goliath. But as much as we all enjoy rooting for an underdog, we’d rather not be one. Shepherds\u2014we do learn this much from the Christmas story\u2014were more or less at the bottom of the social ladder, perhaps not least because after days in the field they smelled rather much like their sheep. The job of tending flocks was typically given to a youngest son or to another who was considered too weak to do more strenuous farmwork. Shepherding was thus easy to disdain\u2014not real work. Much as we hate being compared to sheep, it wasn’t actually all that much more flattering to be compared to a shepherd. When Virgil starts talking about shepherding he says \u201cI know full well how hard a task it is \/ To crown with honor such a crabbed theme,\u201d but he commits to doing it anyway. <\/p>\n All of which is to say that, when Isaiah and Jesus and others talked about shepherds and sheep, the metaphors were richer for them and their hearers than they are for us. To call God a shepherd may have been a little jarring: it suggested stooping to a role respectable people wouldn’t want to play. To call earthly rulers shepherds was surely a little jarring, and served to put them in their place and remind them of their duty. Lacking the context, we have only fantasies. <\/p>\n That’s one danger of relying on metaphor to talk about God. If the metaphor doesn’t speak to our experience, if we don’t share or understand its shades of meaning… Well, \u201cAs a thorn goeth up into the hand of a drunkard, so is a parable in the mouth of fools.\u201d (Prov. 26:9) We’re apt to miss the point.<\/p>\n Here’s another danger of the Good Shepherd metaphor. If the Lord is my shepherd, what am I? Well, a sheep, obviously, which is why I’d have preferred to avoid the whole topic. I read a lot of \u201cgood shepherd\u201d sermons over the past couple weeks and about the best anyone can find to say about sheep is that they’re useful animals. The best that I could say about them is that they’re useful animals. But truth be told, I rather thought that being made in God’s image made me more than just a \u201cuseful animal.\u201d We all resemble sheep sometimes\u2014we like<\/em> sheep have gone astray. But while it might be instructive to think of the good shepherd as a model for one’s own leadership, thinking of the people under one’s care as sheep seems a pretty easy shortcut for an earthly shepherd to become a wolf. To think of human beings as dumb animals who spend their days mindlessly, endlessly consuming, occasionally being shorn, our babies being eaten, and when we grow too old to be productive being slaughtered for dog food\u2014well, it starts to sound more like a model for global industrial capitalism than for the kingdom of God.<\/p>\n In any case, speaking frankly and personally, I’m not a sheep. I’m a goat. I know Jesus said the sheep will be separated from the goats, but all I can say is there better be a place in the kingdom for goats, too.<\/p>\n The good news\u2014at least, I think it’s good news\u2014is that the Lord is not, actually, a shepherd. As we know from Psalm 17, God is actually a mother hen, hiding us under the shadow of her wings. (Ps. 17:8) Except that, as we know from Isaiah, God is actually a woman in labor, shrieking, panting and gasping for air. (Is. 42:14) God is also\u2014in addition to the usual king, judge, father, rock, and fortress\u2014a friend, potter, builder, midwife, farmer, bride-groom, and old woman; a lion, a wild dog, and possibly a sea monster; a vine, a fountain, and a gate; wind, breath, light, bread, and both water and fire. He is further (in my favorite metaphor, or actually simile if we’re being precise) like the brightness after rain that brings grass from the earth. Not to mention that the Good Shepherd, in laying down his life for his sheep, will become the Lamb!<\/p>\n But of course God is not actually any of these things. And that’s the point of metaphor. Metaphor takes two things that are palpably not the same, puts them together, and jars us into seeing a similarity and a relationship that we otherwise would miss\u2014a deeper truth, you might say, beneath the level of fact, that skips away from us when we try to examine it too closely. It’s a way of expressing mystery and depth. But it only works if the juxtaposition is, in fact, jarring\u2014if we haven’t already heard it a thousand times, and if we know enough about the things being compared to understand the comparison being made.<\/p>\n To say that God is our father or that we are children of God (for example) is useful only inasmuch as it expresses a closeness, a direct relationship, and shocks us with the news that we, mere mortals, are as direct offspring of the creator of the universe. But God is also not like our father, and certainly not literally<\/em> our father\u2014which ought to be a comfort to anyone who had, or has, a troubled relationship with their own literal father.<\/p>\n To say that Jesus is the Good Shepherd is useful inasmuch as it reminds us that we, like sheep, can safely follow where he leads\u2014even through the valley of the shadow of death\u2014when he calls us each by name. But Jesus is also not like<\/em> a shepherd, which frees us to be also not entirely like sheep.<\/p>\n Every metaphor is as much about what is not<\/em> as about what is<\/em>, and that’s precisely what metaphor offers to someone trying to explain God. \u201cThe \u2018is not,\u2019\u201d writes Sarah Rebecca Freeman, \u201cacknowledges that we live in a fragmented world where every word, phrase, name, and image for God is incomplete. It is the \u2018is\u2019 and the \u2018is not\u2019 that lets us speak about God without claiming too much, without normalizing our experience, and without confining God to the incompleteness, brokenness and restricted nature of the human experience.\u201d 4<\/a><\/sup><\/p>\n Metaphors constantly shift, evolve, and elude our grasp. And that makes a lot of us uncomfortable. We are a very literal culture, more prone to take offense at the is not<\/em> than to laugh or learn or merely appreciate the beauty of it. We like doctrines and data because they’re clear, and clean, and safe. But they’re also impersonal, and excluding. Hence the poet Kathleen Norris says of the metaphors she hears in scripture: \u201cI encounter there not a God who rejects me because I can’t pass some dogmatic litmus test but one who invites me to become part of a process, the continuing revelation of holy word.\u201d 5<\/a><\/sup> Metaphors ought to be inviting. It’s when we start taking them as literal that we get into trouble\u2014permitting our own understanding to be limited, claiming a sort of power over others’ understanding, and indeed claiming a kind of power over God. <\/p>\n R.S. Thomas, a 20th-century Welsh priest and poet who well understood how impossible it is to pin God down, often found it most helpful to describe God in terms of what he is not rather than what he is. And so in closing, I’ll read you his poem \u201cVia Negativa\u201d:<\/p>\n Why no! I never thought other than It can seem a bleak image, of a God who always manages to elude our grasp. But the Good News, paradoxically, is that God will always slip away from our attempts to pin him down\u2014which means that he will always be able to return to be as great as we need him to be. God will be, after all, what God will be.<\/p>\n Amen.<\/p>\n A sermon preached at St. Joseph\u2019s Episcopal Church in Durham, N.C., on April 26, 2015. John 10:11-18 Psalm 23 I was determined that I was not going to stand up here and talk about sheep, but in thinking about today’s readings I kept being pulled back to the image of them\u2014the shepherd, the flock, the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"spay_email":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false,"jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true},"categories":[23],"tags":[145,232,265,276,331,332],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p8I1ci-18V","_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.davidwalbert.com\/dw\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4397"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.davidwalbert.com\/dw\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.davidwalbert.com\/dw\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.davidwalbert.com\/dw\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.davidwalbert.com\/dw\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4397"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.davidwalbert.com\/dw\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4397\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.davidwalbert.com\/dw\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4397"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.davidwalbert.com\/dw\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4397"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.davidwalbert.com\/dw\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4397"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
\nPsalm 23<\/a><\/cite><\/p>\n
\nlambing time, and he gives thanks.
\nHe has longed ever more strongly
\nas the weeks and months went by
\nfor the new lives the ewes have carried
\nin their bellies through the winter cold.
\nNow in the gray mornings of barely
\nspring he goes to see at last
\nwhat the night has revealed. 1<\/a><\/sup><\/p><\/blockquote>\n
\n
\n
\nCatch the country frost with the morning star,
\nWhen day is new, the grass still white, the dew
\nA sweet delight to herds. 2<\/a><\/sup><\/p><\/blockquote>\n
\nTheir pastures, huts, their scattered settlements?
\nTheir flocks will often, day and night for a month,
\nRoam and graze the empty tracts and find
\nNo shelter in the vast expanse of land.
\nThis African shepherd takes his world along,
\nHis household, weapons, dog, his bow and arrows,
\nMuch like the Roman soldier fierce in arms
\nWho marches forth, unfairly burdened down
\nBy all his field equipment, and arrives
\nAhead of time, to catch the foe off guard. 3<\/a><\/sup><\/p><\/blockquote>\n
\n
\n
\nThat God is that great absence
\nIn our lives, the empty silence
\nWithin, the place where we go
\nSeeking, not in hope to
\nArrive or find. He keeps the interstices
\nIn our knowledge, the darkness
\nBetween stars. His are the echoes
\nWe follow, the footprints he has just
\nLeft. We put our hands in
\nHis side hoping to find
\nIt warm. We look at people
\nAnd places as though he had looked
\nAt them, too; but miss the reflection.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n