L. William Countryman Good Shepherd Berkeley

15th SUNDAY AFTER PENTECOST (Proper 17)

September 1, 2024

Proper 16: Song of Solomon 2:8-13; Psalm 45:1-2, 7-10; James 1:17-27; Mark 7:1-8, 14-15, 21-23

Arise, my love, my fair one, 

and come away;

for now the winter is past, 

the rain is over and gone.

The flowers appear on the earth;

the time of singing has come,

and the voice of the turtledove 

is heard in our land.

Well, actually that was all a few months ago. The turtledoves in our backyard haven’t been cooing much lately. But that’s okay. It’s always a good time to return to spring in our imaginations. It takes us back to the most basic of human joys: new life, love, the beauty of the world around us. . . 

The Song of Solomon, in fact, is so sensual that more than one grave and serious person has questioned what it’s doing in the Bible at all. And the answer is: It gives us a key–maybe the best of all keys–to understanding our relationship with God. It may not be the most obvious key. Probably, like our neighbors, we’re apt to think of religion largely in terms of rites, doctrines, and rules. But the Song of Solomon tells us that those are just the skeleton of faith, not its heart, its vital organs. At the heart of Christian faith is a God who loves beauty and the created world and all its inhabitants—even, strangely enough, us, despite all our waywardness and uncertainties and (to be honest) unworthiness. The story is about love, really—about God’s love, which, like all love, is always hoping, sooner or later, for some love in response. Arise, my love, my fair one, and come away. . . ” (Or, more loosely translated: “Let’s just go be by ourselves for a while.”)

But the generosity of God’s love is so broad and inclusive that God doesn’t ask us to love God alone—but to love other people as well. That’s that’s what we heard from the Letter of James this morning: “Every generous act of giving, with every perfect gift, is from above, coming down from the Father of lights.” We don’t have to invent love or force ourselves to love. We have a gift for it. God has built it into our humanity. James writes, “In fulfillment of his own purpose, [God] gave us birth by the word of truth, so that we would become a kind of first fruits of his creatures.” We were created from the start for the sake of love—God’s love for us and our love for one another, which shares in God’s own love.

James is telling us that what we truly believe becomes clear in the way we treat one another, within the church and beyond it. James wants us to think about how we can all grow in love so that our lives reflect the divine love that called us together in the first place. “True religion and undefiled” is a matter of reaching out and welcoming others. It’s how the springtime of our love affair with God shows itself in our ongoing lives.

And, in our reading from Mark’s Gospel this morning, we found Jesus insisting on the same point. The Pharisees and scribes were recognized as the really serious religious people of Jesus’ day. And they’ve noticed that Jesus isn’t really very concerned about religious details—for example, whether his disciples wash their hands before eating. I’m guessing that Jesus himself did wash his hands, since they don’t criticize his own practice. But they’re surprised that Jesus doesn’t seem to care whether his followers are meticulous about the details of religious practice. 

What Jesus does cares about is that they are learning to practice love of their neighbor. The evil that we should fear and avoid is not the violation of rules, but a failure to grasp what is really central—love of God and neighbor. Jesus says, “It is what comes out of a person that defiles.” Such things as “theft, murder, envy, slander, pride, folly.” These things separate us from the people around us and from the God who loves us all alike. And the only antidote for them is the love of God, for ever searching us out, calling to us, inviting us into a life of love—with God and with one another.

Loving one another can be a tall order, of course. Neighbors aren’t always particularly lovable. So what is God really asking of us? I don’t think God is just asking us to be ‘nice’ and to pretend that everyone else is ‘nice,’ too. But I do think God is asking us to keep some open space for one another in our lives and in our relationship with God. We can learn to think of all sorts of people as being more like us than different. We can slow down when we pass judgement. We can understand that, at the deepest level, we are more like one another than we often allow ourselves to imagine. 

The point is not to pretend that every one is exactly the same. That would be stupid, in fact. But we are all in the same spot—learning to live with each other—however well or ill we are dealing with it. If we can begin to practice, with one another, some of the love that God in Christ has extended to us, we may find that there is hope for us all.

Bill Countryman Good Shepherd Berkeley

Trinity Sunday, May 26, 2024

Year B: Isaiah 6:1-8; Psalm 29; Romans 8:12-17; John 3:1-17

Today, we’re at the midpoint of the church year. The first half, starting back in December, on Advent Sunday, took us through the great events of Jesus’ birth, ministry, death, and resurrection and on to the descent of the Holy Spirit on Pentecost. Next Sunday, we’ll plunge into the long green season we call “Ordinary Time.” And, today, for some reason, we observe the Feast of the Holy Trinity, the only day in the whole church calendar that celebrates, not an event, but a dogma. 

And I’d guess that most of us, if we think about the Holy Trinity at all, wind up shaking our heads and saying, “I can’t make much of it” or, maybe even, “It doesn’t make any sense.” And what I want to say this morning is just, “That’s right.” It was never intended to make logical sense out of God. Why would we even expect that we could do that. The nature of God is always going to be a mystery to us human beings. God isn’t something we can measure or weigh or take photographs of—not something we can pin down and do comparative studies on—not something we can even form absolutely reliable statements about. All talk about God is fundamentally metaphorical. We gesture toward what we can barely glimpse. We try to give at least a hint of what draws us in God’s direction.

There’s an old Latin creed that showed up in old versions of the Book of Common Prayer, called the Athanasian Creed. We don’t use it anymore because, for one thing, it’s far too long to be used in a service and, more importantly, it’s got a slew of anathemas at the beginning and end—and those just don’t have any business in a creed. But a lot of it is devoted to the Holy Trinity, and that part is beautiful in its own strange way. It doesn’t explain anything. It just turns it into a kind of incantation. Here’s just a fragment of it:

. . . we worship one god in Trinity, and Trinity in unity;

Neither confounding the persons : nor dividing the substance.

For there is one person of the Father, another of the Son : and another of the Holy Ghost.

But the godhead of the Father, of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost is all one : the glory equal, the majesty co-eternal.

Such as the Father is, such is the Son : and such is the Holy Ghost.

The Father uncreated, the Son uncreated : and the Holy Ghost uncreated.

The Father incomprehensible, the Son incomprehensible : and the Holy Ghost incomprehensible.

The Father eternal, the Son eternal : and the Holy Ghost eternal.

And yet they are not three eternals : but one eternal.

As also there be not three incomprehensibles, nor three uncreated, but one uncreated, and one incomprehensible.

Some modern wag is reported to have summed it up this way: “The Father is incomprehensible, the Son is incomprehensible, the Holy Ghost is incomprehensible : and the whole Athanasian Creed is incomprehensible.” But that’s kind of a riddle in itself, because it uses the word “incomprehensible” in two different senses. (If you’re curious about that, ask me after church. I’ve probably gone too far already toward turning this sermon into a lecture.)

But the real point of this feast day, I think, comes through in our first reading this morning—Isaiah’s great vision in the Temple—God is always beyond our human grasp.. Isaiah’s vision is a bit like in impressionist painting: there’s the suggestion of a vast figure, vaguely human-like but vastly greater, leaving almost no room in the temple for the observer. There are other supernatural figures, too, the Seraphim—far above us, though infinitely less than like God’s own self. Even as they sing “Holy, holy, holy,” they have to cover their nakedness with one pair of wings and their eyes with another, leaving them only two wings to fly. And the one thing Isaiah is quite clear about is that he’s completely out of place. He doesn’t belong here at all: “Woe is me! I am lost, for I am a man of unclean lips, and I live among a people of unclean lips; yet my eyes have seen the King, the Lord of hosts!”

Has anyone ever tried painting that scene? I can’t recall ever seeing such a painting. And if the artist tried to be too literal, the scene would lose its power. Better just to have Isaiah’s account. You can almost hear him stammering as he tells us the story. Such is his shock that he can barely catch his breath. What he knows for sure about God is that God is completely Other, immeasurably greater than us. 

Our Psalm this morning gave us another way of talking about encountering God—it’s an encounter with sheer power: thunder, earthquake, lightning, tornado winds, even as God sits serenely “enthroned above the flood,” while in the temple “all are crying, ‘Glory!'” It’s not just a physical storm the Psalmist is talking about. It’s the upheaval of encountering what we can’t possibly control. 

Then, in our reading from Romans, Paul takes a completely different tack. Paul says that we know we have been visited by God because of the gift we receive. We let go of the spirit of slavery, the fear that we are mere objects in this world, beaten and shoved around by the various forces around us—and receive the spirit of adoption, the sense that we are actually God’s beloved children, even when the world around us may try to convince us otherwise.

And Jesus, in our gospel reading, tells Nathanael something similar: that the Spirit of God is prepared to visit him with a gift of rebirth, of new life that has meaning even beyond death. Nathanael is as perplexed as Isaiah was. But he knows he is in the presence of the divine.

None of this suggests a God who can be reduced to simple, testable, logical categories. Just the opposite, we come to know God through the awe, the astonishment, the new freedom, the new sense of life that visit us in God’s presence. And, you know something? that’s very difficult to talk about clearly or definitively. 

So, is there anything left that I can say about the Mystery of the Trinity? If God is one, why three at the same time? What I find myself falling back on is a passage from another book of scripture, the First Letter of John: God is love, and those who abide in love abide in God, and God abides in them (4:16b). If God is truly love, then God is a Lover. And if God is complete in Godself, then God is also a Beloved. And the power that makes the two one is the Love that unites them. The idea is not mine. It comes from St. Augustine’s ancient treatise on the doctrine of the Trinity. And it’s the source of the phrase we so often use here at Good Shepherd: God the Lover, the Beloved, and the Love Overflowing—”overflowing” because this love not only unites the divine Three, but spills eternally over in the creation of the world and God’s continuing care for all God’s creatures. 

And that, I dare say, is the mystery that we’re celebrating on this Feast of the Holy Trinity.

[And the problem about the word “incomprehensible” is that the old, theological meaning is “incapable of being contained” (i.e. “infinite”), vs. the modern meaning of “iimpossible to understand.”]

Bill Countryman Good Shepherd Berkeley

Fourth Sunday of Easter, April 21, 2024

Year B: Acts 4:5-12; Psalm 23; 1 John 3:16-24; John 10:11-18

OUR GOOD SHEPHERD

I am the good shepherd. The good shepherd lays down his life for the sheep. (John 10:11)

The Good Shepherd is a central image for us in this congregation. He’s kind of built into our church, with his name on the sign out front and his image in the window we all look at Sunday after Sunday. It’s a strong image. Some years ago, when church-in-the-round was in fashion, we tried it out in Good Shepherd. But it meant that some of us were sittingwith this window behind us—and, to me at least, that just never felt right. 

So we look at the window. And— just to be sure we don’t miss the point—there’s our text for today, written up right beside it in elegant Victorian script. It would be hard not to be shaped in some way by all this. But there’s a problem that goes along with it: for most of us, it’s a bit of an empty metaphor. What do we know about sheep? What do we know about shepherds? As a child, I did spend some time on my grandfather’s farm, but that was a wheat farm in the Oklahoma Panhandle. I don’t think anybody raised sheep in Beaver County. And I pity the poor animals, if they did, because it’s really hot in the summer. So I don’t know much about sheep. And I’m not sure I’ve ever seen a real shepherd at work, except from the window of a car a couple of times in England. 

So “sheep” and “shepherd” can be rather vague notions for many of us. We may call ourselves “the sheep of the Good Shepherd.” But, by and large, when we call a group of people “sheep,” it’s not a compliment. Sheep are herd animals. They stick with the group. If they wander too far off, they may get lost and panic. They don’t cultivate individual perspectives on the world or respect dissenting opinions. That doesn’t sound much like this crowd!

And yet, there’s another side to this, isn’t there? It’s a great gift to belong to the right sort of human group–a group that’s not quick to impose conformity or limit creativity, a group that listens and shares thoughts and experiences and gives encouragement. We human beings are herd animals of a kind, too. After all, it takes a more than a decade of a human life just to get us to the point of being able to take reasonable care of ourselves. (Some of us take more than two decades just to get the education we need.) 

And the great majority of us find that we need and want to stay in touch with family: our families of origin, when that’s possible, our families of choice, and the less definable “families” made up of friends and other people who form the context for our individual lives. Good Shepherd has some of the qualities of an extended family—something I may be particularly conscious of just because I’ve been here for more than forty years and I’m aware of how much I have received from others all that time.

So, yes, being a sheep in the Good Shepherd’s fold has been a very good thing for the herd animal in me. And I’m happy to express my gratitude for all of you who are a part of it as well for all those no longer physically with us here.

But what about shepherds? Do we know them any better than their sheep? Some years ago, I was at the Diocese of Nevada’s diocesan camp on Lake Tahoe, where they had invited me to give some talks. And, walking in the mountains up above the camp, you saw plenty of evidence of shepherds in their messages carved into tree trunks. But we never saw the shepherds themselves. (I understand they’re mostly Basque. Maybe the most visible evidence of their presence, for the visitor, is the number of good Basque restaurants in northern Nevada.

But the life of a shepherd tends to be isolated. The sheep have to be kept on the move or they’ll destroy their pastures by eating the plants right down to the roots. So shepherds see, at most, just a few human companions on a day to day basis. And they can expect some less desirable company—wild dogs, wolves, coyotes, perhaps even a cougar, looking for an easy meal. Young David, as you remember, shepherded his father Jesse’s sheep and got so good with his slingshot that he could fell a heavily armed giant with a single well-placed stone. So when Jesus calls himself a shepherd, he’s saying that he was willing to live a dangerous, lonely existence in order to protect others from ill. Putting that as bluntly as possible, he says, “The good shepherd lays down his life for the sheep.” 

And that, of course, is exactly what will happen as the gospel story progresses. The wolves don’t like what he’s doing, and they gang up on him. If he were just a hired hand, he could run away. But he isn’t, and he won’t. We are his sheep and he will die to protect us. But to start with, he lived to protect us—lived a life of giving to our needy humanity—giving health, giving food, giving hope, giving us new understanding of God and of ourselves. 

And that’s exactly what got him killed. Why? Because people in power got jealous of him. Priests saw him as a threat to their authority. Pharisees (we would call them “devout lay people”) saw him as a rival for their influence. Scribes (think “theologians”) saw him as undermining their monopoly on religious information. Now, the Roman governor wasn’t feeling too threatened. Jesus wan’t trying to turn his disciples into warriors or Roman soldiers into pacifists. But Pilate knew little about local religious affairs and cared about them even less. And he certainly didn’t care enough to rescue Jesus from those he had offended. 

Yes, Jesus did lay down his life for his flock. 

And we, still members of that flock after all these centuries, continue to be blessed by all we receive from him. We remember how he embodied the love of God for God’s creation. One of the things I’ve been particularly grateful for as part of this community is that I’ve been hearing, for so many years, the good news of God’s love proclaimed from this pulpit. Being a person of faith isn’t primarily a matter of getting the rules right or of being able to explain obscure doctrines. It’s a matter of opening up to the love of God as it comes to us and of sharing it with others—receiving God’s gifts with thanksgiving and sharing them. 

Our second reading this morning, from 1 John, sums it up nicely: “Little children, let us love, not in word or speech, but in truth and action. And by this we will know that we are from the truth. . . . ” We learn to embody something of the good news into our own lives. And Jesus, the Good Shepherd, shows us the way. The wonderful thing, you see, is that sheep can actually be shepherds, too, both receiving and sharing gifts with one another. 

Now there’s something for all of us sheep to think about on this Good Shepherd Sunday.