"Inter-Sheep Relations"
November 20, 2005: 27th Sunday after Pentecost, Year A
The Rev. John MacIver Gage, co-pastor
United Church on the Green, UCC: New Haven, CT
www.newlights.org
Scripture:
Ezekiel 34:11-22
For thus says the Lord GOD: I myself will search for my sheep, and will seek them out. As shepherds seek out their flocks when they are among their scattered sheep, so I will seek out my sheep. I will rescue them from all the places to which they have been scattered on a day of clouds and thick darkness. I will bring them out from the peoples and gather them from the countries, and will bring them into their own land; and I will feed them on the mountains of Israel, by the watercourses, and in all the inhabited parts of the land. I will feed them with good pasture, and the mountain heights of Israel shall be their pasture; there they shall lie down in good grazing land, and they shall feed on rich pasture on the mountains of Israel. I myself will be the shepherd of my sheep, and I will make them lie down, says the Lord GOD. I will seek the lost, and I will bring back the strayed, and I will bind up the injured, and I will strengthen the weak, but the fat and the strong I will destroy. I will feed them with justice. As for you, my flock, thus says the Lord GOD: I shall judge between sheep and sheep, between rams and goats: Is it not enough for you to feed on the good pasture, but you must tread down with your feet the rest of your pasture? When you drink of clear water, must you foul the rest with your feet? And must my sheep eat what you have trodden with your feet, and drink what you have fouled with your feet? Therefore, thus says the Lord GOD to them: I myself will judge between the fat sheep and the lean sheep. Because you pushed with flank and shoulder, and butted at all the weak animals with your horns until you scattered them far and wide, I will save my flock, and they shall no longer be ravaged; and I will judge between sheep and sheep.
Sermon:
In this congregation, in our preaching and in our teaching, both Louise and I have emphasized how limiting it is to read the Bible literally—limiting, limited, a-historical, and unhelpful. We believe the Bible is not, as many claim, "life's little instruction book," handed down from God to Jesus to King James to us. It is not that simple. The Bible is in fact not a book but a whole library of books, written and compiled over millennia. And written not for us but by a multitude of diverse faith communities for a multitude of diverse faith communities. It is the record of those communities' struggles to live lives in relation to the More they sensed in the universe, the More that entered their lives in such profound, startling ways that they could call it nothing other than God. And since writing down a relationship is like trying to catch a wriggling rainbow trout with your bare hands—blindfolded—the Bible is by its very nature a mixed bag of fact and fiction, poetry and polemic, history and hope. Within these pages and between the lines we find half-grasped truths about our human nature and half-true grasping at God's.
And like our forebears in faith, around the edges of our understanding we sense still More shining through.
Like the book itself, the language of the Bible is not so straightforward. The Bible is not that little set of cartoon instructions included with your latest IKEA purchase, intended to be understood at once, at a glance... heck, at a distance. This is metaphor and myth in the strongest sense. This is poetic language, grounded in ancient historical realities, but free and deep and marvelously twisty, a fund of meaning worth our most active imagination and patient meditation, worth our continued conversation.
But just because the Bible is the poetry of faithful lives doesn't mean you have to have a graduate degree to engage it. Sure, some historical background is helpful—very—but reading the Bible calls for more heart than intellect. And not all Biblical passages are equally obscure. After all, not all literature is James Joyce's Ulysses and not all the Bible is the book of Revelation. Some are more like haiku, some even like William Carlos Williams' famous short poem about the sweetness of plums stolen from the icebox.
This morning's reading from the prophet is one of those passages that is perhaps more readily accessible. So I won't bother with a long historical backstory, except to tell you that Ezekiel was written in the 6th Century before the Common Era, while the Jewish people of the southern kingdom of Judah were in living in captive exile in Babylon. Hence the hopeful vision of God as a shepherd who will bring his scattered flock back to a good and bountiful land of their own. But note that the text doesn't leave it there, with the thwarting of Israel's enemies, whom, we are told, God "will feed with justice." It is concerned also with how the people behave among themselves, no matter where they are, whether in exile or at home. So this morning, listen again for what the Holy Spirit is saying to them, to you, to us, through these words:
As for you, my flock, thus says the Lord GOD: I shall judge between sheep and sheep, between rams and goats: Is it not enough for you to feed on the good pasture, but you must tread down with your feet the rest of your pasture? When you drink of clear water, must you foul the rest with your feet? And must my sheep eat what you have trodden with your feet, and drink what you have fouled with your feet? Therefore, thus says the Lord GOD to them: I myself will judge between the fat sheep and the lean sheep. Because you pushed with flank and shoulder, and butted at all the weak animals with your horns until you scattered them far and wide, I will save my flock, and they shall no longer be ravaged; and I will judge between sheep and sheep.
Sheep, huh? Well, let's spend a moment reflecting on the nature of sheep. Not exactly fierce creatures, it's true, but most of us are likely operating with an overly Sunday Schooled image of sheep as fluffy little cotton balls drifting lazily about a verdant field, bleating occasionally, perhaps gamboling a bit, while Debussy plays in the background. <hum theme from Prelude to the Afternoon of a Faun>
What, are you kidding? Have you ever been around sheep? As a younger man, I spent a couple of long, long afternoons working the sheep on a friend's farm, worming them, in fact, and I am here to join the prophet Ezekiel in telling you that though sheep may be domesticated animals, they are hardly pets and far from pleasant. They are indeed wild and wooly—and smelly... you never want to be around wet ones— with no more sense than the good Lord gave... well, sheep. They are prone to wander off and often find themselves in need of the shepherd's intervention to bring them back. They will jostle and butt and push to get to the best food. And yet they are skittish in the extreme, turning tail and bolting at the slightest provocation, with a tendency to trample one another as they do.
So how's that for a poem: the people of God are like a big, smelly, wild-eyed flock of sheep! How... lovely, thank you. But oh, how appropriate, don't you think, honestly? There's a reason the people of ancient Israel and the early Christian communities held onto and repeated and even expanded this image for the community of faith: it's accurate. Without God, the metaphor goes, we in the church are like sheep without a shepherd... and with God, we are sheep with a shepherd, getting better, but not much better, not yet. We still don't tend to treat one another much better than do those sheep out in the mud and muck of the sheepfold.
That's what Ezekiel is writing to critique in this passage, the inter-sheep relations of the people of Israel. Here he imagines a frustrated God asking, "Why, why do you ruin the good things I give you? Why do you insist on mucking things up for one another. Why do you keep pushing and shoving and trying to run one another off? Get it through your thick little skulls: you are all my sheep, all—fat and lean, weak and strong alike. I and I alone will judge between one sheep and another."
But still the Christian community remains a divided flock, and getting more contentious by the day, it seems. Still we haven't figured out that God has plenty good pasture to feed all God's people; that God cares not just for the majority of the sheep but for all of them, and will seek out the lost, the strayed, the injured, and the weak in order to care for them; that only God can rightly judge between sheep and sheep; and that we would do well to relax into the shepherd's care. When it comes to relating as God's flock, we've a lot to learn.
This week, our congregation received a particularly egregious example of poor inter-sheep relations. We received a letter from the Bishop of the Calvin Synod of the United Church of Christ, that is, the old Hungarian Reformed church that came together with our own Congregational tradition and others to form the UCC back in 1957. And in this letter, they attack the resolution adopted at General Synod this past summer urging full civil and spiritual equality in marriage for same-sex couples and does so in the most rapid and hurtful and, frankly, inaccurate, sort of language. They claim, wrongly, that local congregations did not have opportunity to comment on the proposed resolution. They claim, erroneously, that the Judeo-Christian understanding marriage has remain unchanged for three thousand years. They claim, fearfully, that expanding our understanding of marriage to include same-sex couples will destroy families, not build them up. He claims, confusingly, that the polity of the United Church of Christ in allowing for a diversity of opinion on this and every issue, is thus both ineffectual and destructive. And they claim, hurtfully, that "if WE" i.e., the good and right people like them, "do NOT take back our churches and begin to preach the Gospel of Jesus Christ, we are consigning all future generations to a twisted, warped understanding of God, and of life."
Gee, and here I was thinking that I was preaching the Gospel of Jesus Christ...? But honestly, all of that is okay with me. I remain firm in my belief that they are entitled to they opinions and they are entitled to express them fully, though I may—and do—disagree, though I may find their opinions to be full of fear, ignorance, and hate. I am not their shepherd, as they are not mine. God alone is the good shepherd.
But my tolerance ends when, at the end of this lengthy letter, which was sent to every single congregation in the entire United Church of Christ, they urge us to break the slender covenant that binds us together in all our diversity by withholding any and all monetary support from our associations, our conferences, and from the church in the national setting until this policy of full inclusion is abandoned.
"Is it not good enough for you to feed on the good pasture, but you must tread down with your feet the rest of your pasture? When you drink of clear water, must you foul the rest with your feet? And must my sheep eat what you have trodden down with your feet, and drink what you have fouled with your feet?"
This is not how the church of Jesus Christ is called to act toward one another. This is pushing with flank and shoulder, this is butting at all the weak animals with one's horns until they are scattered far and wide. But we do have a good shepherd, who will save God's flock, all God's flock, and this is the message of the gospel of Jesus Christ in which we can take comfort and from which we can receive strength. God will not let the fat sheep bully the lean for ever. God alone is the good shepherd, and God alone will judge between sheep and sheep. But perhaps as God is working out God's justice, slowly, I know, but with exquisite care, we can learn from this negative example what kind of sheep we want to be.