4th Sunday of Eastertide
Upon which my motherly efforts bear fruit
....And by fruit I mean chocolate. I was very pleasantly surprised this morning to discover that my family had prepared a small Mother's Day breakfast and gift perfectly in line with my own complicated thoughts on the day. While I do not endorse emphasis on one's worthiness as a human being based upon the happenstance of propagation, nor the commercialization of a holiday intended to sweep motherhood up into a tide of anti-war activism (I'm not making it up--that's the original intent of Mother's Day, read Julia Ward Howe's early slam poetry on it here and why we should still care here), neither am I immune to the idea of a day that acknowledges that Moms try real hard, and you should probably make one breakfast.
I feel like it can be a fine line to walk. Extravagant gifts invite ego inflation, but complete dismissal makes one feel small, then sad, then angry, then sad because you got angry which turns into guilt and more sadness. This year the family nailed it.
While I was getting ready, the eldest kid brought me a breakfast of:
One expired orange (gratefully acknowledged, then 'misplaced')
One piece of bread smothered in jelly (ate it)
One glass of water. (drank it)
Yes, this was perfect, because she did it all herself.
Then they gave me a small heart-shaped cardboard-and-cloth box (super cute! Some lucky person will see this regifted) and a bar of organic fair trade dark chocolate (be still my heart! You DO love me!) Inside the box was a lovely set of fair trade purple Tagua nut earrings and necklace. It's actually pretty cute, and simple enough that it won't fall apart (which is, alas, the great critique of much hand-made artisan-supporting jewelry from Ten Thousand Villages--it is pretty and eco and yay, but it also is often made of tin and bits of trash, so it doesn't exactly wear well. I mean, it's a nice idea that I'm going to keep supporting, but yeah. Wear with care.)
It actually wasn't until after worship services that I realized the real coup of the deal--they'd done it all without any plastic (well, you could count the tray, but that thing was bought from a garage sale anyway, so it is like second hand leather and furs--didn't buy it new, consumer re-used, doesn't count. I think). Ha HA! My dogged and possibly overzealous focus on plastic awareness had rubbed off onto my family's consumer habits! Success!
I, of course, didn't realize that this was intentional on their part until I was reflecting on the miracle that the sermon went better than usual that day (and obviously, this is a completely arbitrary statement. I hope most ministers would agree with me that sometimes the sermons we think we NAIL are actually awful, nails-on-a-chalkboard disasters, and sermons that we despise are actually kinda ok in a wrestling sort of way.) I say the sermon was better than usual, because it had no right to be, as so often is the way of things. One person asked for it to be posted, so I'll do that. It's on the church website now (http://www.firstpreslr.org./sermons) and since you're all lazy, I'll stick it here too.
The thing that got me to realize the awesomeness of my kids was what I thought was a theme of the sermon: it's really hard not to be terrible to each other in relationship (and a good thing about this holiday is that we try to be better at it. Try). However, the black sheep motif of Good Shepherd Sunday (welcome to your annual 4th Sunday of Easter exploration and regurgitation of ancient mid-eastern animal husbandry practices! So relevant to your lives today that we have to spend the entire sermon explaining it!) made me realize something else that was a theme and I didn't know it:
Radical Inclusion makes people uncomfortable, and we should ask why.
And a piece of 'radical inclusion' that I realized ties to Mother's Day, and gracious reception of hospitality, and the gay rights movement, and even the Communion Table, is this: acceptance of The Other. Not approval per say, but acceptance that this person is who they say they are, regardless of whatever mask you think they might be wearing. It's actually REALLY hard to not layer upon people all the disbelief and cynicism of the modern world, because the temptation to NOT believe people is incredible--just look at how we treat politicians and celebrity gossip.
But what if you wore your heart and your trust on your sleeve, and just believed--that this person is as real as they can be right now, and even if that's not "really real", they still deserve the respect and dignity of acceptance at face value. How would that change how you treat those you don't usually trust?
Be honest. How you treat that panhandler on the off ramp. Or the kid with hair just a shade too perfectly odd; are those piercings all real? The hipster who always annoyingly knows the cool new thing before it was cool? The black sheep of the family?
What if you just decided to trust that they simply ARE who they say they are?
To put that another way, Jesus doesn't care about the color of the sheep.
Yeah, so anyway, here's the sermon, if you want to read that sort of thing. It'll make a whole lot more sense if you read the scripture it's based on first: you can read it here or you can listen to the readings for the day here. Happy Mother's Day! I'm glad you exist.
Black Sheep in the
Family
A minister was doing the children’s sermon and
brought all the kids up to the front during the service to talk about the
23rd Psalm. “The Lord is my Shepherd,” he began, and started to tell the
children all about sheep: that they weren't very smart and need lots of
guidance, and that a shepherd's job was to stay close to the sheep, to protect
them from wild animals and keep them from wandering off and doing dumb things
that would get them hurt or killed. He did not appear to have high regard
for the sheep.
Then he pointed to the children and said that they
were the sheep who needed lots of protection and guidance. Then he put
his hands out and dramatically said, "If you are the sheep, then who is the
shepherd?" After a moment, a little child said,
"Jesus. Jesus is the shepherd."
Surprised, the minister said, "Well then, who am I?" The
child shrugged and said, "I dunno, guess you must be the sheep dog."
Yes, today is the 4th Sunday after
Easter, when we always get Psalm 23 and a reading from the 10th
chapter of John, and thus we come to our yearly examination of ancient
Palestinian shepherding practices.
One problem though: “I am the Good Shepherd" isn’t actually in the text for today. No, today’s reading focuses on Jesus’ odd
declaration: "I am the gate.” Jesus
as “gate” is not the most popular metaphor; most artists prefer Strong Young
Man Jesus with a sheep slung across his shoulders, or Action-Figure Jesus, rescuing
a baby lamb from a ledge. Jesus as
stable-door isn’t nearly as picturesque.
Yet today the gate is important—more important
perhaps than whoever is the Shepherd, for apparently it is the gate that
defines the Shepherd: “The one who enters by the gate is the shepherd
of the sheep. The gatekeeper opens the gate for him, and the
sheep hear his voice…(and when they didn’t understand that, Jesus clarified:)... .Very
truly, I tell you, I am the gate for the sheep. All who came before me
are thieves and bandits; but the sheep did not listen to them. I am the gate. Whoever
enters by me will be saved, and will come in and go out and find pasture. The thief comes only
to steal and kill and destroy. I came that they may have life, and have it
abundantly.”
This is, frankly, a
little confusing. Who is the thief and the bandit? And if Jesus is the gate, who is the
gatekeeper? It doesn’t help that modern
city-folk lack a basic understanding of this shepherd-sheep-gate-sheep-pen
relationship. Why is Jesus even talking about this?
It does help to remember that these Gospels
are not meant to be broken into tidbits for Sunday preaching. In John 10, Jesus explains what he just did
in John 9—the healing of the man born blind. In short:
The disciples asked Jesus, “Who sinned, this
man or his parents, that he was born blind?” Given options A or B, Jesus chose C: “Neither
this man nor his parents sinned; he was born blind so that God’s works might be
revealed in him.” Then Jesus made a
paste of mud and spit, put it on the man’s eyes and told him to go wash in the
pool of the Siloam—which means Sent—and lo, the man came back, able to see.
And then the people react to what Jesus did: the neighbors of the formerly blind man can’t
agree—is this the guy who used to be a beggar or someone who just looks like
him? The Pharisees can’t agree either, so
the Pharisees get smart and ask the formerly blind beggar’s parents, “Is this your son, who you say was
born blind? How then does he now see?” and his parents replied, “We know that
this is our son, and that he was born blind; but we do not know
how it is that now he sees, nor do we know who opened his eyes. Ask him; he is
of age. He will speak for himself.”
I just want to stop the story there for a moment. Maybe because it’s Mother’s Day, but suddenly
I realized that the blind man HAD parents, had a mom and dad and yet he was
still a beggar. What’s more, his parents
don’t really even seem to understand what happened either; they hardly acknowledge their relationship and toss the question back on their son—“ask
him, he’s of age.”
I realized that the question “Who sinned, the man
or his parents,” was a real and serious one for this family, because surely somebody
had taken the blame. No one sinned before his birth, but someone had surely
sinned since then. All parents sin, we
know it, and perhaps today of all days we should admit that. All children sin too; it is terribly hard to be in a family without
hurting each other. That’s something we should also acknowledge on
Mothers’ Day—these relationships are hard.
There’s a huge story hidden here in John 10: a son born
blind, a mother and father feeling guilt and shame, unsure perhaps of how to
raise such a child. A man unable to
work, forced to beg. This is a family
with issues, and this is only some of
‘who’ Jesus is talking about when he talks about being the gate and a shepherd.
Do you have a black sheep in your family? Someone who everyone agrees is just a little
off, someone everyone else can talk about—not talk to, but talk about? This is the person that everyone can label as
“the bad boy” or “the mental one”, the one who can’t get their act
together. The presence of this person,
the ‘black sheep’ can help the rest of the family feel more cohesive, like they are ok because that one isn't ok. It’s
called scapegoating…or maybe scape-sheeping.
You might be the black sheep, might even relish the
title. I saw a postcard that proudly
read, “I like being the black sheep. The
color is slimming and hides the dirt better.”
I think the formerly blind man was
the black sheep of the family. How did he
end up a beggar when he still had family to care for him? What had broken in their relationships that
they had left him on the street to beg?
Why didn’t they know how he had been healed?
The fact that Jesus had healed him of his blindness wasn’t
just going to change his life—it changed how everyone interacted with him. He’d gone from being the black sheep outside
the gate, to being welcomed as just another sheep inside the gate. Jesus radically goes and includes someone,
ushers somebody IN, without asking permission from anyone—but it required that
everyone else change too. People don’t like change. People resist it. People would rather know that some are out in
order to affirm who they know are in.
Do you remember the song, “one of these things is not like
the other, one of these things doesn’t belong.” This is how in-groups, how cliques
happen everywhere; in middle school (where they belong), in society, and even in church, and they always need
at least two parties to say “we’re similar, but that one is different—they
don’t belong.” It’s a triangle. Here Jesus saw a man born blind, and over here
he saw his family and society at large; two agree that the third doesn’t belong. Jesus used mud and spit and bathwater to say
“nope, all of these things can belong. I
am the gate, all that pass through me will be saved."
It’s taken a lot of mud and spit, but a big change happened
this weekend, on Friday, when Judge Piazza declared the Arkansas gay-marriage
ban unconstitutional. And while there is
still a lot of legal road to travel, and our own church has to make some big
decisions—for a few days at least a lot of people have been included where they
were once excluded. Black sheep who have
been told for years that they did not belong have suddenly been told that the
gate is open. Radical inclusion makes
people uncomfortable—we need to ask why.
The question is not 'who is the shepherd here', or 'who is the gate'—but 'who
needs to be in the sheepfold with us'?
Who needs to enter the gate? The
questions of who belongs in the church and who can get married are not
unrelated.
Please don’t misunderstand, I am not equating marriage with salvation, far from it. But I want you to know, very clearly, that
hundreds of other churches will be using this same text today to
preach exclusion and condemnation—to continue to cast out the black sheep, to
say that some are in and some are out.
If Jesus is the gate, who does he want in? Who does he count in his flock? These are the issues with which we as the
church must wrestle if we are to help the Good Shepherd get more sheep in the
gate. We have to ask, who would Jesus
radically include—who would make us uncomfortable to see in this fold? The black sheep of our family? The black sheep of society? I don't mind being a sheepdog for Jesus. And I don’t think Jesus cares too
much about the color of his sheep. He
includes them all.
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