The Rev. Clare Fischer-Davies
St. Martin’s Church
May 7, 2006
Easter IV B
I want to tell you a story about my friend Karl.
This is a story about resurrection – about hope – about new life and possibilities – and about our Good Shepherd, and our lives together as the shepherd’s flock.
Karl and his wife Cindy were parishioners in my little church in Tamworth, New Hampshire back in the late 1980s. Karl was as hard core a Granite-stater as you’ll find anywhere – “Live Free or Die” all the way. He’d been in the service for awhile, wrestled with alcoholism, never went to college, and worked, as most people up there do, at several jobs, cobbling a living together out of retail and tourist services.
Karl used to drive by St. Andrew’s every day, and he says he still doesn’t know what impulse made him – one day when he was feeling especially bitter and angry – walk into the parish office and ask to see the pastor. When I replied that I was the pastor, his doubletake was cinematic. Karl had never put the words “pastor” and “woman” together in his mind. But he and Cindy came to church the next Sunday and against all expectations, Karl fell in love with the liturgy.
Something in our worship spoke deeply to Karl’s heart; he loved coming to God’s table and he felt truly nourished by the bread and wine of the Eucharist. He once wrote a very moving reflection on his experience of receiving communion, and that’s when I learned that under Karl’s Grizzly Adams exterior lay the soul of a poet.
Things got hard up in Tamworth toward the end of my time there. There were a few folks in the congregation who had never wanted a woman priest, never approved of me, and who got all hot under the collar when I got pregnant with Andy. It was a parish with a long history of conflict but I was young and stupid in those days and didn’t know how to handle things. As the temperature in the congregation rose, Karl became one of my most vocal supporters, a development that surprised him almost as much as it did me. He would never before have considered himself a feminist advocate.
We left Tamworth when Andy was about ten months old, and Karl and I lost touch with each other. He drifted away from the parish, lost his job and eventually left town altogether.
Ten years later, through the miracle of the internet, Karl appeared back in my life. He googled me and found me down in Virginia, and we began a series of sporadic email and telephone conversations.
That decade had not been kind to Karl. He and Cindy moved out to the Pacific Northwest, I think to be a little closer to their only child, who lives with her family in Alaska. Karl struggled to find work out there, and then he got terribly sick with a tumor on his pituitary gland that required extensive surgery and follow-up treatment and left him blind in one eye and physically impaired. In the middle of his illness, Cindy left him, saying that she was tired of their marriage and essentially abandoning him. When she left, Karl lost his principal household income. The VA covered his medical expenses, but until Karl could navigate the wilderness of applying for disability benefits, he was truly destitute – and he was lonely, and he was heartbroken.
This story does have a happy ending.
Karl and I began to talk more frequently last winter, and he started to think about moving back to New England. His mother lives in Attleboro, he was Yankee to the bone, and his native earth was calling to him. The move seemed impossible at first – but Karl worked away at it, bit by bit, and finally he packed up his few belongings and drove back to New Hampshire – finding refuge in the basement of an old friend’s house, just down the road from the little church in Tamworth.
He was very reluctant to go back to St. Andrew’s, still nursing a grudge from all those years ago – but I encouraged him to try it. They had a new woman rector, about whom I’d heard only good things, and I reminded him how much worship had nourished him before. And so finally, one May morning, Karl walked into the parish office and (this is a verbatim report from the parish secretary last week) announced that he was my friend, that he was back, and that they had better be nice to him.
The congregation, and especially the new rector, opened their hearts to him – and his crusty, gruff shell began to break apart. He found a community again, a place that valued and supported him and he began to put his life back together. And then, he fell in love – yes, with a widowed member of the parish – and soon Karl was practically giggling with delight at his new happiness.
And Saturday, I drove up to Tamworth to be part of Karl’s wedding. I never thought I’d walk into St. Andrew’s again, I never thought I’d ever see Karl again, I never thought that Karl could get his feet solidly under himself again. I thought that he had been so badly wounded by his first wife’s desertion and his terrible medical problems, that he’d never get his life back together.
But this is the power of the resurrection – this is what it means to be a new creation – to live in hope and expectation instead of despair. The hope and the expectation didn’t come easy for Karl – he had to wrestle his demons from coast to coast – and maybe the hardest step for him was the one that led him back into St. Andrew’s in Tamworth.
“I am the Good Shepherd” Jesus says in the Gospel of John, “And I lay down my life for the sheep.” I think we could spend the rest of our lives reflecting on what it means to be members of a flock whose shepherd is so committed to our protection, to our well-being, that he is willing to die for us.
Believe me, when Jesus calls us sheep we are not being flattered. We all know that sheep aren’t the brightest bulbs in the animal world – they are prone to panic, to mindless wandering – they’ll nibble themselves right over a cliff – and they don’t show much affection or appreciation. Who would lay down his life for an animal like that – stubborn, stumbling and stupid?
But Jesus does lay down his life for us – and our Christian faith proclaims that his death saves us from the power of death itself, and makes it possible for us to live in the dominion of the resurrection right now. Being raised with Christ isn’t just about looking forward to heaven when we die, it’s about being a new creation today – about choosing to live in the light of the resurrection instead of the darkness of sin and death.
So Karl’s wedding has been a little parable for me this week. If we are willing to follow, then Christ will lead us through the valley of the shadow of death into glorious new life. And we don’t follow the shepherd alone. That pesky flock, the Church, is woven all through Karl’s story. The flock has been both disappointment and deliverance; he’s seen the Christian community at its worst and at its best, and he allowed that community to embrace him when he’d once sworn never to darken the door again. Healing, forgiveness, redemption. It’s as good as our human story gets.
We are celebrating our own flock, our own church family today with May Breakfast and Mitzvah Day. Our work with Temple Beth-El to serve the wider community today is restoring new life to a once thriving relationship. May Breakfast is both an outpouring of abundance and fellowship, and a source of income for outreach programs around the city. In both of these activities today we are bearing witness to our claim that the Christian life is better lived with others than alone. As frustrating and hard as it can be, we are called to be in community with one another, and to follow Jesus, not as isolated individuals, but as a flock.
May we all indeed hear Christ’s voice when he calls us each by name, and follow where he leads. We are delivered from the bondage of sin and death into the new and lasting freedom of the resurrection.
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