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Easter IV-A Apr 17 2005
H O M I L Y G R I T S
Fourth Sunday of
Easter
April
17, 2005
¶ Book of Common Prayer lectionary:
Acts 6:1-9, 7:2a, 51-60 The diaconate and Stephen the Protomartyr
or Nehemiah 9:6-15 A recital of God's mighty acts
Psalm 23 Dominus regit me.
1 Peter 2:19-25 You were going astray like sheep, but have now returned to
the shepherd and bishop of your souls.
or Acts 6:1-9; 7:2a, 51-60 as above
John 10:1-10 Jesus used this figure of speech which they did not understand
One of our hymns "for children" has a word in it that we don't often hear
any more. It's the word "shepherdess." Remember the ditty? "I sing a song
of the saints of God, patient and brave and true, who toiled and fought and
lived and died for the Lord they loved and knew. . . And one was a doctor
and one was a queen, and one was a shepherdess on the green." Harry
Golden, the Carolina comedian, used to refer to a friend who was an
'Episcopalianess.' And we used to refer to female flight attendants as
'stewardesses." When we finally ordained women, some folks chortled and
choked on the word "priestess", 'though they could say "hostess" and
"deaconess" without convulsions, and Episcopalians of course had no trouble
ever with queens, big Q or little. The late Queen Mother was famous for
having called downstairs to the gay servants at Buckingham Palace for "a
couple of you young queens down there, bring a drink up to this old Queen."
Perhaps it's time to call today, the fourth Sunday of Easter, Good
Shepherdess Sunday. It's been known for a long time as Good Shepherd
Sunday. But since the sex of the sheep herder makes less difference to
sheep than it does to churchmammals, and pastoring calls up as many
maternal charisms as macho ones, we might every couple of years change its
gender. For pastoring has much more to do with leading to still waters and
quiet pastures for nourishment, and to sheepfolds for safety and
protection, than it has to do with masculine styles of aggression and
riding herd on recalcitrant longhorn cattle, like Bushwackers through the
ancient Arab civilizations.
Perhaps this is why Jesus used this lovely image of himself, and of the
care of his disciples. (So he used the imagery of fishing as a gathering
with nets, but never with hooks.) These graceful words have come to us
> from the pastoral traditions of the Syrian shepherd culture of the
East. Pastor, the Latin word for shepherd, and Congregation, from grex,
the Latin word for flock, and which we might use interchangeably with
"synagogue" from time to time for our assemblies; and all our songs about
the Lamb and the Good Shepherd and the verdant pastures green,--all of them
resonate with our Anima, the feminine and caring side of human
personality. 'Though Jesus had used the image of himself as a Mother
(and he did once, a Mother Hen, in fact), he probably wins more of his
male disciples to the ministry of caring by the image of Shepherding than
by those of the Henhouse. Men have often thought they had to avoid the
tender, the patient, the affectionate--too much into avoiding, indeed, for
fear of being thought to be what Louis Farrakhan, the former Episcopalian
lay reader, once called Michael Jackson: A Sissy. "Sissy" in the African
American street talk of Chicago didn't mean someone afraid of his shadow;
it always meant a homosexual. Well, Jesus wouldn't be afraid of Louis
calling him a sissy, for Jesus' favorite image of himself is the tender,
caring shepherd with a lamb in his bosom, usually depicted with long hair
on the shepherd and short hair on the lamb, and twelve of his closest
companions were men who had left home to be with him and a lot of strong,
outdoor women muscular enough to walk their way into history.
One commentary on Good Shepherd Sunday remarks "We are glad to claim the
Lord as our shepherd, but in so doing we must accept that 'his sheep' is an
image of ourselves. There are certainly some pleasing traits in our image
of sheep, but we should not forget the other side of the picture. To be
called 'sheepish' is scant praise. The sheep is generally a follower of
others, it panics easily, it will rush about aimlessly and needs to be
rounded up. Do we and should we have those characteristics?" 1
Metaphors and similes should not be taken so literally, nor expanded into
philosophical systems, as some of the homilies of Church Fathers foundered
in odd ball details, straining at gnats boiled in their porridge and
swallowing camels they had threaded through their needles. It's a good
idea to shift and sift your metaphors from time to time to freshen
them. Thus "Rumi" brings us a Lame Goat to herd us home:
You've seen a herd of goats
going down to the water.
The lame and dreamy goat
brings up the rear.
There are worried faces about that one,
But now they're laughing,
because look, as they return,
that goat is leading!
There are many different kinds of knowing.
The lame goat's kind is a branch
that traces back to the roots of presence.
Learn from the lame goat,
And lead the herd home. 2
At Casa Ave Maria in Managua we have a patio menagerie which now includes,
besides the current normal dog and three cats, two lovebirds and three
parrots, but has also included in the past a Leghorn hen, a tom turkey and
his spouse, eight rabbits a baby crocodile, a chicken hawk, and some
unknown species, all of them bought from urgent street vendors who call
> from the gate, and they all daily taught us parables of the Kingdom. And
we hosted a she-goat, and found her an adoptive home that would not eat
her. And Matthew Arnold undoes centuries of metaphorical damnation for
goats in his sonnet "The Good Shepherd with the Kid."
. " 'He saves the sheep, the goats he doth not save,'
So rang Tertullian's sentence, on the side
Of that unpitying Phrygian sect which cried;
'Him can no fount of fresh forgiveness lave,
'Who sins, once wash'd by the baptismal wave."--
So spake the fierce Tertullian. But she sigh'd,
The infant Church! of love he felt the tide
Stream over her from her Lord's yet recent grave.
And then she smiled; and in the Catacombs,
With eye suffused but heart inspired true,
On those walls subterranean, where she hid
Her head 'mid ignominy, death, and tombs,
She her Good Shepherd's hasty image drew--
And on his shoulders, not a lamb, a kid. 3
A church which is forgiven learns forgiveness.
Our favorite ikons in the Christian community are those of Mother Mary
with the Child Jesus in her bosom, and the Good Shepherd, with a lamb in
his arms. The traditions teach us that caring and mothering and
nourishment, protection and intimacy, are the calling of all
people. Motherhood is a vocation for the human race, not just for the
female gender. The 14th century anchorite (anchoress?) Julian
(Juliana? Julienne?) of Norwich had a vision in which she saw indeed that
Christ is our Mother.
Julian wrote:
"I saw that God rejoices to be both Father and Mother to us; He delights
to be our true Spouse, and to take our soul as His beloved bride. And
Christ Jesus rejoices to be both our Brother and our Saviour. These are
five exalted joys which He desires us to share, praising Hm, thanking Him,
loving Him, and blessing Him for ever."
"I could see no distinction between the substance of God and of ourselves,
for God was in all things, and all things in God. I understood nonetheless
that our substance exists in God; that is to say, that God is God, and our
substance is created by God. For the almighty Truth of the Trinity is our
Father; He made us, and keeps us in Himself; And the deep Wisdom of the
Trinity is our Mother, in whom we all abide. The high goodness of the
Trinity is our Lord,
and we abide in Him, and He in us."4
That image, that ikon of tenderness and concern shows us that motherhood
is more than giving birth to babies, but is the Sophia, the Wisdom of the
Eternal God. Just as fatherhood is more than siring offspring. At Casa
Ave Maria, our patio mural of the Visitation shows Mary and Elizabeth
embracing at the Visitation, rejoicing over the Victory of God, but it
also shows Mary kneeling in a birthing position at the Cross, 'giving
light' as we say in Spanish, to the Adult Jesus on the Cross--mothering
more than his natal day. Jesus couldn't very well have taught males how to
be good at mothering with a better image than that of the good shepherd/ess.
Jesus used as well the image of the Gatekeeper, the one who stays at the
sheepfold and makes the decisions about pasturing the sheep, and to whom
they will be entrusted. In our time, the ghastly and unbelievable
epidemic of child abuse--both sexual and disciplinary abuse--has drawn our
shocked attention week after week to the vacuum of caring, the failure of
attention that permits it, the collapse of the episcopé -- the shepherd's
oversight -- that should have safeguarded the weakest of the flock from the
wolves of danger and abuse. Too much has become anonymous in our
capitalist consumerist society, where the episcopé proper to parents and
grandparents and godparents and true friends is peddled away to
strangers. "The thief comes only to steal and kill and destroy. . . I came
that they may have life, and have it abundantly."
The image of the life-giver is itself a maternal image, an image not only
of birth, in the gift of life, but of maturation and growth and the
blossoming into maturity and ripeness, which Jesus calls
"perfection", which is the Abundant Life. The ever-flowering life. Not a
stingy, narrow, fearful, timid life, but one that is full and happy and
lavish. All mature believers are called to pastoral ministry, to shepherd
the lambs of God to abundant, not stingy pasture and to living, not
stagnant water.
In 1984, at a clergy luncheon in Chicago to honor retiring Bishop Quintin
Primo, an African-American, I sat next a priest who was on the nominating
committee for the bishop's successor. I asked him quite bluntly (knowing I
wouldn't get the facts) if any women had been nominated for the
office. Well, fifteen years before that, there had been no Black
bishops, and the shocking question would have been 'have any African
Americans been nominated?' Well, it was like asking, "Have any Martians
been interviewed? Anybody from the Moon?" "Have you heard from E-T or is
there a nomination from elsewhere in the Galaxy?" The Committee Member
said he couldn't say, for the proceedings were secret, like the conclave
meeting in Rome, without the participation of the People of God. I then
asked Bishop Primo, and he said that a woman could be nominated, but could
not be elected until the canons were changed. In time, women were elected,
and then the canons were changed, and the Church too was changed forever.
Now we face another hurdle to full inclusion, in the Church's rampant
homophobia. But Gene Robinson has been elected by the People of God, and
consecrated by God's gift to the Church, our Good Shepherd and Presiding
Bishop Frank Griswold.
As our first reading today we had a story of the Church changing its
constitution to fit the times. "New occasions teach new duties, time makes
ancient good uncouth." When the apostolic college back there found the
Greek speaking widows weren't getting tended to, there was dissension in
the ekklesia. The Greeks weren't getting their social security from the
church, as the Jewish widows were, and so the apostles had to create a
whole new order of ministry to tend to these tasks, and they found seven
Greek lads (and maybe some lasses) who were already familiar with the
problem. And they ordained them, and so profoundly changed the way the
Church itself was to be shaped, and how it would grow, and they designed a
diakonia of style for functioning as Servant to the church and the
world. In our time, in Philadelphia, eleven women and some apostles
decided a similar occasion had presented itself and the Church changed by
acting itself into new ways of thinking.
In our time, the issue of "aborto" has become a strife-torn issue for the
nation and for the churches. In China, which has over a billion
people--one of every three of us is Chinese--abortions are performed up
through the seventh month. It's a volatile issue in the U.S., and yet not
many mothers, not many pregnant women, are getting to have a voice in the
Church on the matter. While I was a priest in Chicago for 30 years, the
bishop (Jim Montgomery) wrote one pastoral letter, and it was on the matter
of abortion. The Popes talk about it a lot, yet no bishop I know of nor
Pope I've read about has been in a situation where they might have to
choose to have or not have an abortion, or arrange one for a wife, girl
friend, sister, or daughter. Articles by celibate clergy appear in the
church press, theologizing about sexuality, marriage, birth control, and
abortion, with never a nod to those who must make such searing choices in
their lives.
In a society where mothering is not valued by all, children will be
abused. In a society where mothering is not valued, abortion becomes a
method of birth control. Voices are now raised decrying the notion of the
Church as the Family of God (or even of the human race as an
extended Family) because 'family' is, they say, a patriarchal
institution. But 'mother,' 'father', 'sister' and 'brother' are all
familial terms, as well as wife, husband, and wife/wife, and
husband/husband, and no one can act in any of them alone and apart from
relationships. Apart from these strong relationships, the Church becomes a
social agency, with care provider/clergy and client/customers replacing
Shepherd/esses and their Flocks.
A questionnaire on the episcopacy circulated in Chicago in the eighties
found that the laity put administration ahead of pastoral care in their
job description for a bishop, and 'pastoring' was limited to the
bishop's care for the clergy. The failure of the whole Church to do
shepherding and mothering goes beyond our failures in daily life to care
for children, to include the maturing life of the unborn in the womb
within our purview of care. Shepherding is not a sentimental
business--it's serious, dangerous, and challenging. It's pointedly
political, and Jesus says it's the task of the shepherds to present their
lives as sureties for the safety of the sheep. To commit one's own being
to the safety and welfare of the flock. It looks to me that the Church is
moving away from these images towards images drawn from business and
industry, from sales campaigns and propaganda techniques, to replace the
Biblical images for ministry and priesthood, which were drawn from the life
of flocks and farms, of fisherfolk and shepherdesses. Too
bad. Machinery and computers have not given us loving metaphors for the
future.
And the task of the gatekeeper is to keep out thieves and robbers and
wolves. Wolves are rare in our acquaintance, but thieves and robbers
common to us all. On the one hand, the Churches have discouraged openly
gay men and women from entering into solid, lifelong committed
relationships, and instead expelled gay men from seminaries, (They
attempted to expel me from both college and seminary, but I fought like a
she-wolf and they didn't succeed.) and on the other hand tortured the
sexuality of young men into celibate circumstances to which few of them, if
any, had vocations from the whisperings of the Spirit of
God. Gatekeepers should have better sense, for such arrangements forced
generations into double standards of sexuality: hypocritically teaching
puritanical rigidity to the laity and overlooking the inevitable
libertinism of the sex-suppressed silly butt celibate. Gatekeeping should
not be about setting up hurdles, labyrinths and barriers, but about
assuring access, entry, and safety.
Our failure to have true shepherds over the peoples of the earth, the flock
of God hat inhabits this planet, means that we are dispersed and divided as
a human race, and the globalization of business and industry is hard at
keeping us that way and dividing us even more. To them, we must be kept
> from becoming conscious and aware of ourselves as One People, sharing this
fragile earth, our island home, and be told instead that we are customers,
consumers, competing for limited capital funds, scarce resources, and that
we must set religion against religion, and race against race to assure our
own advantage. Our planet, the only pasture any of us has got, is
pockmarked with pitfalls for us all now so early in the century. Our
human species has forgotten our role as passengers on spaceship Earth. Our
liturgical language likes to speak of us as "rulers of creation" --
language that needs to be balanced, for we are "stewards" and "shepherds"
and "shepherdesses", we are all "vicars" here, and not "rectors" of
creation. We need to think of ourselves as the eyes, the ears, the nose,
the planet's sense of touch, intimately a part of creation, along with
the bats, the butterflies and bunnies. We cannot go on treating some of
the planet as a favorite house pet and the rest of it as a junkyard
dog. We are intimately bound to earth and all its passengers, and cannot
throw them overboard or out the garbage chute.
Jesus says I am the Door, I am the good Shepherdess. I am the Gatekeeper.
Francis of Assisi (1181-1226) expressed the ministry of Mother Earth in
this way:
"By mother earth my Lord be praised;
Governed by thee she hath upraised
What for our life is needful.
Sustained by thee through every hour
She bringeth forth fruit, herb, and flower
Most high, omnipotent, good Lord,
To thee be ceaseless praise out poured,
And blessing without measure.
Let creatures all give thanks to thee,
And serve in great humility. Amen." 5
GRANT GALLUP
Apartado RP-10
CASA AVE MARIA
Managua, Nicaragua C.A.
Tel. 011-505-2662165
gallup@tmx.com.ni
GRITS 4th series now on-line: http://newark.rutgers.edu/~lcrew/homilygrits
1--(an afterthought from #28; the Shepherd and Bishop of Your Souls,
p. 136, Sacred and Secular, a Companion. Compiled by Adam Fox and Gareth
and Georgina Keene. Grand Rapids, Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co. 1975.
2"The Lame Goat," Jelaluddin Rumi [born in Balkh, Afghanistan, September
30, 1207, fled to Roman Anatolia (Turkey), whence the name "Rumi".] In
"The Essential Rumi", translations by Coleman Barks with John Moyne,
Harper's San Francisco 1995.
3 Matthew Arnold, "The Good Shepherd with the Kid", from the Mentor Book of
Religious Verse, edited by Horace Gregory and Marya Zaturenska, New York:
Mentor Books, 1957. The editors add this footnote to the poem: "Of
Tertullian and 'that unpitying Phrygian sect' whole volumes have been
written. The sect here referred to was that known as Montanism because of
its founder Montanus, but it was kept alive by the energy and violence of
Tertullian: Monsignor [Ronald] Knox in his study of the early Christian
heresies in his book 'Enthusiasm' writes of the Montanists, 'All we hear of
them seems to suggest that their votaries would have felt more at home in a
Methodist 'camp meeting' than in a Spanish Cathedral.' It is true that the
cult which originated in Phrygia retained some of that violent ritual of
the earlier mystery cults of that region, which resembled their ancient
worship of the goddess Cybele. In many of their tenets the Montanists seem
to resemble the most severe of the evangelical sects that came up
later. The Montanists flourished in the First Century A.D."
4 Lent with Mother Julian: Readings from her 'Revelations of Divine Love',
edited by Leo Sherley-Price. London: A. R. Mowbray & Co. 1962.
5 Hymnal 1940. #307. Tr. Howard Chandler Robbins.
©copyright 2002, 2005 by Grant Gallup