The Rev. Clare Fischer-Davies
St. Martin’s Church
May 3, 2009
Easter IV B
“Let us not love in word or speech, but in truth and action.”
I don’t know when I started holding hands with people when I prayed with them.
It wasn’t at the beginning of my ministry. I was too shy and self-conscious in those early years to reach out across the divide between our two chairs and take another person’s hands. It felt far too intimate – that chasm between our chairs was there to keep both the person seeking my pastoral care and me feeling safe and comfortable – it felt far to risky to reach out across that chasm and make physical contact. I felt too young and too inexperienced and too insecure to broach the boundaries we all have around ourselves. It felt scary enough to say to another person – “let’s pray together.”
But at some point along the way, as I settled into my self as a priest and a pastor, there came a day when I reached out and took the hands of the person sitting next to me and began to pray. And I learned then how important touch is in the practice of ministry, in fact how vital touch is to human life. It is immediate, concrete and powerful. We all know that touch can be abused and perverted – a way to assert power over someone else – but mostly we know human touch as an expression of connection, of concern, of love. It anchors us as physical beings in a physical universe.
The Christian proclamation is that God’s own self comes into that physical universe – becomes as human, as bound by the limits of biology and physics as we are. The scandal of the resurrection is not that we proclaim some abstract, philosophical assertion about hope and new life – but that we proclaim that Christ has been raised in the flesh and that those physical and biological limits that we know as death, no longer have dominion over us.
But we can only make our Christian proclamation because we stand on a foundation laid by millennia of Jewish proclamation that God participates in the world God has created. We can only hear Jesus say “I am the Good Shepherd” because for a thousand years before Christ, Israel has said “The Lord is my shepherd.”
It’s always hard to hear a familiar passage of scripture in a new way. The 23rd psalm is so well-loved, and so well-known, that it isn’t easy to hear just how radical a proclamation it is. For years, we’ve made this first of all a psalm for children; in Sunday school, we’ve glued cotton balls onto toilet paper rolls to make sheep so that we can assure our children that God loves them as tenderly as a shepherd cares for his little lambs. That is all true, but one thing that can happen when we decide something is meant for children, is that we limit its power to speak directly to us. God surely loves our children as tenderly as a shepherd cares for his little lambs, but it is also true that to say “The Lord is my shepherd” is to make a shocking statement about our dependence and trust in God.
God is no impassive, distant deity here. This is a psalm full of verbs – God makes me lie down. God leads me. God restores my soul. God anoints me. God spreads a banquet table for me in front of my enemies. God is as conscientious, as present and attentive and active as a shepherd is. We are as dependent on God as sheep are dependent on their shepherd. And I think one of the things that binds us together as a Christian community is this acknowledgement that we are not autonomous and self-sufficient – that we do not create our own reality, that we are dependent on God’s grace and strength – that we are sheep in God’s pasture, trusting in our Good Shepherd.
But it’s a funny thing about that dependence and trust. The paradox of the resurrection life, the Christian life, is that as soon as we acknowledge our dependence on God, we are set free from our dependence on everything else. We have all grown up in a culture that says personal autonomy is everything – that our freedom comes from our independence – that we are all masters of our own fate. But that freedom is false – the more we assert our autonomy, the more we are trapped in a Darwinian nightmare of survival of the fittest – imprisoned by our need to compete or die.
If God is our shepherd, we lack nothing.
I think that’s what made the first Christians such a shocking challenge to both the dominant Roman culture and the religious authorities. We come into the middle of the story in the reading from Acts; before Peter and his companion John are hauled before the religious tribunal, they heal a lame man and proclaim to the crowd that they have healed this man in the name of Christ. This annoys the religious authorities, and they arrest Peter and John, probably expecting that a night in prison, with the threat of execution hanging over them, will make them shut up.
But instead, Peter is filled with the Holy Spirit and keeps proclaiming the resurrection. After our passage ends, the story goes on – the council decides to release the men, but warns them to go home and quit preaching that Christ is risen. And once again, Peter tells them “We cannot keep from speaking what we have seen and heard.” No human threat can silence him. Death has no dominion over him – his dependence on God has set him free.
It is really tempting for us to dismiss these stories from the book of Acts, as fairy tales set in a kind of early Christian Disneyland, a place where the rules of ordinary daily life don’t apply. We don’t really believe that what Peter and his companions experienced can ever be available to us – it’s make believe – a nice story to hear on a Sunday morning, but really, nothing to do with us.
It is a terrible mistake to dismiss the stories from the book of Acts as fables from a bygone era. Peter and John are not some kind of New Testament super-heroes, triumphing over villains because God has given them special powers.
Peter – once so terrified of death that he denied even knowing Jesus – is transformed into a man so free of the fear of death, that he can stand up to anything the power and principalities throw at him. He is still mortal, but he is simply no longer afraid of anything mortals can do to him. It is a freedom and an independence that mocks our puny post-Enlightenment autonomy.
The Lord is my shepherd. I lack nothing. You set a table before me right in front of my enemies. Even when I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, you are with me.
We are dependent on God, our good shepherd, and that dependence is not some abstract, spiritual construction. It is as concrete and tangible as existence itself.
The first letter of John says “We know love by this, that he laid down his life for us—and we ought to lay down our lives for one another. How does God’s love abide in anyone who has the world’s goods and sees a brother or sister in need and yet refuses help? Little children, let us love, not in word or speech, but in truth and action.”
These short epistles attributed to John, the beloved disciple, are tucked into the back of our bibles – much briefer and more transparent than the long and dense letters of Paul. They are so short, that they are easy to skip over, and we don’t hear from them very often in worship – but in the Easter season, we linger over them a little because they tell us something about living the resurrection life, about acknowledging our dependence on God – and even more unfashionably, acknowledging our dependence on each other.
“We ought to lay down our lives for one another.” That’s pretty strong stuff. That’s a pretty strong statement about what it means to be part of the Christian community. Our common faith in Christ, our common dependence on our Good Shepherd lead us to deep responsibility for each other. And our deep responsibility doesn’t end there. As Mary Hollinshead said to me a few weeks ago, “we care for each other so that we can care for the world.” We love, not in word and speech, but in truth and action.
And so, I come back to touch.
Annie LaMotte says there are really only two prayers – “Help me. Help me. Help me.” And “thank you. Thank you. Thank you.”
Anytime we pray – whether it’s “Help me” or “Thank you”, we are acknowledging that we are sheep – that we are dependent on our Good Shepherd – that we do not have the power to save ourselves. And because we are dependent on our Shepherd, we are connected to each other. And that connection is concrete – lived out in specific actions, specific choices that we make.
In the end, I don’t think we are defined as Christians by what we think, or even by what we believe nearly as much as by what we do. We worship together, and that worship is itself an affirmation of faith. We pray and sing together, we are working together at May Breakfast this morning, we learn together, we care for the vulnerable, we celebrate and we mourn together. Our new Gifts Freely Given ministry gives us another way to share our life together by celebrating the gifts we have received and offering them again for the building up of the body of Christ. We love, however imperfectly, however incompletely – in truth and in action.
I hold hands with people when I pray with them because I don’t know any other way to live the Christian life other than in the flesh. I don’t know any other way to help people grow spiritually than to encourage them to love in faith and action – to worship every week, to pray every day, to do some concrete act of love for someone else. I don’t know any other way to grow in the knowledge and love of God than to acknowledge that I am a sheep – dependent on my shepherd and trusting in that shepherd’s life-giving love.
If you are hungry for some of what Peter and John have – if you long to hear the voice of your Shepherd calling your name and – well – come talk to me. We’ll hold hands and we’ll pray together and we’ll listen for the voice of the One who has laid down his life for us. We’ll say “God is my shepherd – there is nothing else I need.”
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