single persons, people
of all races and families
of every kind.
Sunday
Service:
Holy Eucharist
at 9:30 am
Child care is available
Church of Our
Saviour
191 Flanagan Way (Rt 153) Secaucus, NJ 07094
Tel: 201-863-1449
Fax: 201-863-1474
Mark A. Lewis,
Vicar
MLewis@secaucus.org
Dorothy Fowlkes
Pastoral Associate
This page revised 22
May 00
http://www.secaucus.org/
oursaviour
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--------------------------------Leave frames-----------------------------------------
We're lost
without
a good shepherd.
Reflections on the lessons for the Fourth Sunday of Eastertide
By The Rev. Mark A. Lewis, Vicar
Ezekiel 34:1-10 / Psalm 23 / I John 3:1-8 / John 10:11-16
One of my favorite things about this church is the windows. Not too representative. Not too literal. Even "Blast-off Jesus" isn't literal, rocket ship toes notwithstanding. Most specifically, one of my favorite things about these windows is the absence of a "Good Shepherd" window. I've grown up around them. Almost every church I've had anything to do with -- ever -- has one. And I have, above all windows, disliked the Good Shepherd ones the most.
Yesterday, I sat near one where I used to work up in Ridgewood, where I attended the installation of a new rector. In that 1890s-era window Jesus is wearing a kind of high-necked white tunic that looks like Julie Andrews' nightgown in the Sound of Music. Over that, a velvety-looking red cloak perfectly draped and arranged. It looks a lot like the stage curtain at an opera house. He is staring sort of up into the sky.
There's a lamb on his shoulder. It's beaming at Jesus with a smitten look on its little face. (The lamb might be especially happy because its hairdresser has done such a great job. It's been freshly permed and given a golden rinse, then blow dried into a cottony, curly, little puff.) Jesus' stylist was equally talented. He looks kind of like Leonardo diCaprio in the face, but his hair is pure Loretta Young. The whole picture is completed with a Bo Peep style staff with a crook on the end. I think it really detracts from worship.
The window isn't about real shepherds, real lambs, or real strength when strength is called for. The window is a lie. And it was a challenge to say anything sensible about Jesus the years I was working there with such a thing silently mocking the very idea of Jesus ... and the very idea of shepherds for that matter.
I don't think of shepherds very often. Usually at Christmastime. And then again when these readings come around every year in Eastertide. But at Christmas, especially, I wonder what those manger scene windows would look like if they got real.
In those, Mary seldom looks like a woman who has just gone through labor and delivery. In a dirty barn. Either in the cold - or maybe in stifling heat if the historians are right when they guess Jesus might have been born in July. But, appearances aside, Mary sure seems patient with that crowd of shepherds and their livestock rooting around in the baby's bed when you know she'd rather be alone to say the very least.
And think about shepherds. These were guys who spent weeks at a time out in the fields. Part of the imagery in the 23rd Psalm talks about "spreading a table" for the sheep. For shepherds, that meant spending all day rooting out nettles and flushing out nests of snakes so the sheep could eat safely.
Shepherds were considered kind of low on the social scale. It was low-paying low-skilled work. Not a way to get ahead. No changes of clothes, no beds to sleep in for weeks on end. Shepherds were used to rough living. Not least of all because they were rough guys themselves. They were virtually homeless, lived on the food they foraged in the wild (and on lambs), ate straight from the campfire with their hands. The most important part of their job came when they had to fight off wolves who were trying to kill the sheep.
Mary might have been a little disgusted to have a bunch of shepherds hanging around her in the stable. But how did Jesus' followers feel when he told them he was like a shepherd himself? Nothing in any stained glass window ever suggests the paradox of a popular rabbi aligning himself with dirty, coarse, hard-hitting shepherds. Or comparing the way God tends to us to the way roughneck shepherds tend their messy sheep.
esus is saying that God's kind of care for us is tough, and powerful, and sometimes scary. Wolves devour sheep if the shepherd is lazy or lets down the guard. Shepherds have to be ready to grab sheep by the legs and jerk them out of the predators' jaws.
Storms come. Sheep scatter. But the sheep get pursued and rescued if possible in all sorts of weather and from all kinds of threats including their own stupidity. They tend to eat themselves sick. They get lost. They walk off cliffs. Sheep aren't really able to look out even for their own safety.
If a sheep has a pretty good shepherd there's a pretty good chance the worst won't happen. With a bad shepherd, the sheep are in serious trouble. A good shepherd stinks, yells, and has no time for social graces. Like Jesus, they would mess up your furniture, break up your parties, and offend your sensibilities. But they do save sheep.
The Jesus in the Bad Shepherd windows is very sleek and mild. He might be happy to come visit you and spend the afternoon having tea and talking about how nice things are. But I don't think he would be the guy to turn to in trouble. A Good Shepherd, though, the Bible says, holds nothing back in honing all kinds of tricks and skills and strengths in the real world with the great aim of saving us from an infinite number of dangers -- real ones -- including ourselves.
It seems to me of life-and-death importance to understand what Jesus meant when he said he was a good shepherd -- and to get around the ways the windows try to pervert that. The teaching of Jesus is that God's presence in our lives is a mighty thing -- and useless if it's any less than that. Strong enough to snatch us out of the wolves' jaws. And determined enough to drag us back from too much sentimentality and niceness, too.
Because, like sheep -- and Jesus knew something about how people are like sheep -- we have an alarming tendency to wander around in some kind of fog fooling ourselves into thinking that there's no need to be watchful. No need to be ready. No need to know what you'll do when disaster strikes. Until it hits hard. And then we're lost without a good shepherd. The guy in the window is long gone then.
I'm not talking about worrying all the time. I'm talking about being real all the time, or at least quite a bit of the time. A sheep's life -- our lives -- are stories about danger and dirt (the gritty kind and the fun kind) and joys and sorrows and thousands of really stunning experiences. Whether a life has a happy ending or not -- whether a life is "saved" or not -- has comparatively little to do with what happens along the way.
But the ending of the story has everything to do with what kind of shepherd we chose to stick with. People whose life stories end up happy are people who know that you can stand anything if you don't have to stand it alone and unprepared. They're people who know the value and the strength of a good flock with a good shepherd.
I have seen people in every church with every kind of windows who can bear this tale out. There are people in our church today who know to their comfort or to their great sorrow that Mr. Nice Guy in the window can lead you into a dream world with a big letdown at the end. But a good shepherd, a real one, can lead you through the valley of the shadow of death.
-- Mark Lewis
Your comments or questions are welcome MLewis@secaucus.org.
Links to additional "Reflections on Lessons" may be found at the bottom of the Sunday web page.
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