L. Wm. Countryman Good Shepherd Berkeley

LAST SUNDAY AFTER EPIPHANY, 3/2/2025

Year C: Ps. 99; Exodus 34:29-35; 2 Corinthians 3:12-4:2; Luke 9:28-36, (37-43a)

Lent is just a few days away, and today is the Last Sunday after Epiphany—which is rewarding us with not one but two epiphanies in our readings. And that has prompted me to think about religion and what it means for us human beings.

One of the things religion does for us is to put us in touch with God; another, I think, is to protect us from God. That may sound crazy, but it’s not really so hard to understand. God is vast, inexhaustible, and never, ultimately, fully knowable to us. And God is certainly out of our control? God can be daunting. God can be overwhelming. God can be scary. And how do we get our footing back in God’s presence? 

Think about the disciples at Jesus’ Transfiguration—the story we just heard from Luke. They’re being granted a vision of divine reality shining through their teacher Jesus—and through Moses and Elijah, the two greatest names among Old Testament prophets: three people who are downright intimate with God and it shows in their glowing presence. But the vision comes at an awkward moment for the disciples. Jesus had said to them just before this, “If any want to become my followers, let them deny themselves and take up their cross daily and follow me. For those who want to save their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake will save it.” (Luke 9:23-24) That’s unnerving! I can readily imagine that some of them at least are having second thoughts. And they’re apparently so tired and off-balance that they can neither really sleep nor nor fully wake up. Luke was at a loss to describe their state. Even ancient Greek, which had a word for almost everything, didn’t have a word for it. All he can say is that they “were weighed down with sleep; but since they had stayed awake, they saw his glory.” How scary was that?

And how does Peter respond? He has to respond of course, because he’s Peter and that’s what Peter does.So he gets kind of officious: “Master, it’s a good thing we’re here; we’ll just make three shelters, one for you, one for Moses, and one for Elijah.” Three shelters? Why? To protect them from the summer sun? I don’t think so! They’re already brighter than the sun themselves. No, Peter was trying to reassert the disciples’ own importance and usefulness. Somebody has to honor this encounter with God and that’s just what disciples are for! That’s what makes them important! So let’s build three shrines (yes, they’re really shrines, not shelters to preserve the memory this moment for ever. No doubt generations of disciples yet to come would return to the place and revere it. And maybe build a bigger shrine to show that we can outdo Peter. There’s religion for us—religion as shrine, bringing God to us and also protecting us from getting burned. 

Something similar happened to the Israelites while they were encamped at the foot of Mt. Sinai. Their leader Moses was disappearing up the mountain every morning to talk with God. And Moses, it seems, got so much time on God’s calendar that the glow seems to have rubbed off on him. He comes back down the hill with the same glow that would disturb the disciples so much later on. Think about it. How would you, as a typical Israelite, get on with daily life in a camp like that? A glowing Moses could come wandering through the marketplace at any point. What if it happened just as you were finally nailing down a really good price after a long spot of haggling with the green grocer? Or while you were having a little game of dice with your chums? But Moses understood the problem, and he devised a solution. On the mountaintop, he would talk face-to-face with God. But down below, the wore a veil so as not to make his fellow Israelites too skittish and anxious in his presence. Religion as veil—a way of assuring us a safe distance from the absolute, the perfect, the unwavering—from God. 

Now, it could sound as if I’m saying that religion is a bad thing—a sort of barrier to keep God from interfering too directly with our day-to-day world. But it would be a little odd for a priest, duded up in liturgical vestments, standing under our big stained-glass window of the Good Shepherd in the middle of a Sunday church service, to be telling you that religion is a bad thing, wouldn’t it? And in fact, I don’t think it is. It’s the only way we have, in fact, of taking account of God in our limited mortal existence with our limited human minds. Still, religion can be dangerous—when it becomes an end in itself. It serves us as a means toward encountering God, but it is not God itself. And if we begin thinking it is, what we have is not God, but an idol. 

It’s easy for religious people to confuse the incidentals of religion with what really lies at the heart of our faith. Religion is the main way we communicat our encounter with God to one another and from generation to generation. It’s important to find ways of doing that that really do point toward God. But when we confuse religion with God’s own self, we get into trouble. That’s why Christians have been quite ready, at times, to shun or persecute or even get into wars with each other over the exact formulae of belief or the appropriate cut of vestments or the ornamentation of churches or the rules of Christian life. It seems to be a lot easier to make a God out of our religious preferences than to deal with a God who is alive and active among us here and now. 

And we have inherited a religious tradition that can, in fact, point us toward God—the God who creates and whose love for the created order is so great that God even decided to come down from the throne and become a part of it. I’m very grateful for all the resources it has provided us with— the scriptures, the liturgy, our sacred buildings and images, the words that help us talk about things that are, in themselves, beyond expressing. At the same time, I think we also have to remind ourselves over and over that God is always above and beyond, never simply a “thing” that we can grasp and control, but a reality that offers life. As long as our religion stays focused on that, it serves a purpose of great importance for the world. 

The problem arises when we let our religion become our God. We think we have the perfect formulas and we start to absolutize them and impose them, if we can, on everybody else, and excommunicate the uncooperative. And, if we have an opportunity, we might even want to make our religion mandatory and punish the people who resist. I’m afraid we’re seeing some of that in our American political sphere at present. But God comes closest to us not in doctrines and shrines and miraculous glowing in the dark God comes to us as love, enough love that we can afford to give some of it back to God and find that we still have quite a lot left over for the people around us. By all means, let’s use the gifts of religion to learn and reflect. But true faith makes itself known in a much broader way: by loving others as well as we love ourselves, Oh, Jesus said that, too, didn’t he?

L. Wm. Countryman Grace Cathedral, SF

SERMON FOR THE ORDINATION OF BILL TREGO TO THE PRIESTHOOD

February 12, 2025

Readings: Isaiah 6:1-8; Psalm 132:8-19; Ephesians 4:7, 11-16; John 10:11-18

What are priests for? Well, think about that story we just heard about Isaiah meeting God in the Temple. God’s presence has been made visible to him. He is looking straight at God. Even the Seraphim don’t do that. Yet, somehow, by the grace of God, he survives the experience intact—body, mind, and spirit. And he doesn’t just survive. He still has the ability to think and understand and respond. 

All the same, I amine that Isaiah was wishing that there was another human being present, one who had been there vored, so to speak, one who could take hold of his arm and whisper some encouragement and advice in his ear. I would bet he was wishing for some really venerable, experienced, probably old priest to come to his aid. 

Because that’s what priests are for. A priest is a person who’s been in the presence of God and come out of it with a deeper knowledge of God and human life—someone who can help the rest of us understand our experience of God. As long as human beings have been aware of the Divine, we have looked for people like that, whether we called them “priests” or by some other title. People who have “been there” and come out more whole and more human than they went in. People you can talk to about your own confusions and uncertainties. 

And where do we go to find such people? We look around us—for people who seem to have some wisdom about being human, some understanding of human limits and possibilities, some reverence for the holiness of the world we live in, and a lot of empathy for our human uncertainties and failings. They don’t have to be ordained. They don’t need to have a title. The priests who have nourished my faith over my eight decades were not all ordained persons, though some of them were. They were just faithful people who had encountered God. They weren’t all living in my time, either. Some of them I met in books. And they weren’t all Christians. Take Isaiah, for example. He’s still with us through the story of his life and through his prophetic preaching. Priests come to light among us because the rest of us sense that they know something worth hearing. 

The greatest of such priests is a certain Jesus of Nazareth, son of Mary, a person completely open to God and completely identified with us mortals. Christians have always recognized Jesus as the one perfect priest, and we have known also that we share in Jesus’s priesthood. Since Christ is our priest, the Church, as Christ’s Body, is priestly, too. And each of us is part of that priesthood. I think of the great window over the altar in Good Shepherd Church: Jesus carrying a lamb—the least of the flock—on his arm, neglecting no one, gathering us all together in the presence of God—a good image of the Christian priesthood

In saying all this, I don’t mean to diminish the value of what we’re doing here today in ordaining Bill Trego with the title “priest.” The life of faith is always a priestly life. But we are human and therefore forgetful. We need to be reminded and strengthened in this priesthood all through our lives. It’s way too easy to drift away and embrace some other image of human existence, one interested only in myself— my life, my well-being, my importance—and neglectful of the priestly life we share with one another. And so the church gives us models, reminders, signs. It chooses a few people, people who have shown that they are already serving as priests in the fundamental sense—and ordains them with the title “priest” to be a sacramentof our shared priesthood. These people will minister at the altar, offer the eucharistic sacrifice, the sacramental rite of our communion with God and with one another—the bread and wine of Christ’s body and blood. Through sharing in this sacrament, we are all renewed, over and over, in our priestly ministries—strengthened by the sacramental rite of our communion with God and with one another—the bread and wine of Christ’s body and blood.We are all strengthened to live as priests to one another and to the world around us.

We live, right now, in a world that needs priests as much as it ever has in its long history. And we say to Bill Trego, “You have long served as a priest alongside and with us. Be for us now also a sacrament, a sign, a reminder, so that we as the Christian community may deepen our priesthood and work together to proclaim the mystery and wonder of God’s love in this confusing world.”

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.