This Is Not About the Sheep

Sermon

It’s never particularly attractive to begin a sermon by whining, so think of this as a simple statement of fact. Today is the fourth Sunday of Easter, and therefore Good Shepherd Sunday. Again. It happens every year. This, despite how very few of us in 21^st century America know any sheep personally, let alone understand what it takes to be a shepherd. I could have picked a non-lectionary text, except that several things have happened since Easter that have led me to wondering about the “shepherd types” now at play in the International Battle of the Shepherds. Step away from that “Red Cross doctor” poster. Yes, it looks exactly like my old Sunday School illustrations, but if Leo the Shepherd of Rome won’t bite, neither will I.

The first thing that happened to me was an essay by David Drury, published online by Spiritual Wanderlust. Drury was talking about Stabat Mater, the mother stays, which re-framed the Good Shepherd in feminine terms for me. The image on the cover of the worship bulletin, “The Good Shepherdess,” is by Kelly Lattimore, who graciously gave us permission to use it today, and it seems a visual depiction of the liturgical purpose of today and Drury’s essay, which begins with his experience of praying for his wife’s healing from a spiritually abusive upbringing. Drury’s vision was of Mother Mary holding her child, while behind her stood a grown-up Jesus, assuring him that his wife was “available” now to be a mother to their child.

Drury, like many of us, had not been raised with a language for the Sacred Feminine. After his vision, Drury has come to recognize that the Sacred Feminine taps into our longing for “wholeness, wisdom, connection, healing, union.” He contrasts our post-Enlightenment thinking which uses the empirical method to organize the world—to observe and measure and categorize and control, teaching us basically “how to do.” Whereas, he says, feminine wisdom “teaches us how to stay.” Spiritual teachers speak of the global Dark Night we’re experiencing and that our tension, uncertainty, and pain might not be signs that something is wrong but in fact that something is real. The prayer time that gave Drury that vision of the Mother showed him a love that could remain present to what is wounded; a vision of holding and staying that can be present to the wounding without a need to manage or fix it. Healing that takes the time it needs to take. A shepherd (or shepherdess) that stays. Stabat Mater. The mother stays.

I discovered this kind of shepherd when I went to Guatemala with a Westminster group. The recently sainted shepherd I discovered was the martyred Oklahoma priest, Stanley Rother. A farm boy who felt a call to the priesthood, he spoke to my pastoral heart. Despite flunking out of one seminary for his inability to learn Latin, he found another seminary with less stringent Latin requirements and was ordained. After his ordination, Stanley’s insistence on a call to Central America got him to Guatemala, where he served the indigenous Mayan people. There he discovered that they were still required to worship in Spanish, not their own language. Father Stanley, this guy who flunked Latin, learned Spanish, learned Mayan, and helped translate scripture into Mayan. During the bloody Guatemalan civil war, his bishop called him home twice, but Stanley insisted on returning to his people. He was martyred in 1981 because he spoke up for the peasant farmers. Despite very real death threats, he would not leave his people. “He had the heart of a shepherd,” they said of him. The kind of shepherd whose care for his sheep cost him his life. When the soldiers came for him, intending to leave a tortured and mutilated body to terrorize the peasants when they discovered it, Stanley resisted that type of death and died in his room. The witness of his death characterized the gospel of Stabat Pater. The father stays.

It was finally the bees teaching me about the Good Shepherd. You might have read my appeal to the hive mind on Facebook. Monday afternoon, one of the facilities guys at Marylhurst buzzed into my office at the center with the cryptic message, “Your car is covered in bees, but don’t worry, they’ll be gone in half an hour.” Say what? I wasn’t worried, but I did go outside to see the swarm covering the back quarter of my car. We’re talking thousands of bees in search of a new hive. It was so beautiful and so mystical—a writhing football-sized mass surrounding the queen, while the rest zipped in and around and off. In two hours, when it was time for me to go home, only a few bees remained, so I felt I was good to go. This is where the story becomes Bees Riding Around in Cars. I drove home, blithely parked outside my garage, in deference to what I thought were a few straggler bees. A neighbor kid interrupted my supper to let me know there was a bee population going in and out of my car’s hatch (a Honda Fit). Lifting the hatch revealed a small mass of bees, so it was time to consult the human hive mind for some perspective. Several hours of texting and conversation ensued, not to mention the buzz of hilarious puns about my bees. The hive and I developed a plan for the morning, only to be foiled by the rain and cold-induced bee lethargy. I became Queen for a Day and removed them from my car with a wooden spoon.

A person doesn’t get this close to wild animals without an overpowering sense of awe at the sacredness of life. Whether those bees had died in a mass or were simply in the stupor of cold, they clung together. The mass didn’t separate or fall apart as I spooned them out. Splitting is a normal part of the hive life cycle. As things get crowded, worker bees fatten up on honey and starve the queen down to flying weight. Then they fly off together in search of a new home. The hive only goes as far as the queen can manage before she needs to rest. While she rests, the scouts look for a new place. Which is how that small swarm ended up in my car’s hatch.

What is so beautiful about this on Good Shepherd Sunday is that this behavior is not about the queen. The queen bee is not the insect equivalent of the Good Shepherd. If she were, that would make the bee colony a cult, and hives most definitely are not cults. The worker bees are loyal to the hive. Even the splitting swarm is about the hive as a viable community. We are not bees, but we can learn from them. I think you can see how this affirms the role of community in a very Presbyterian way. If I were speaking to Franciscans, they would have figured out that the swarming bees in my car were docile because they had nothing to protect. The queen had already left. This is the rationale for gospel poverty, on which Francis of Assisi based his life of preaching. When one has nothing to protect (holy poverty, I believe it’s called), one’s purpose is the focus. For bees, their purpose is producing honey. At some point that means leaving the filled hive to establish a new place to produce honey. Bees are so committed to the hive as a whole that if the queen dies, the workers raise a new one from the larvae they have stockpiled.

Last Sunday in adult ed, Richard Rohrbaugh said something that knocked my socks off (and incidentally enlightened my understanding of the Good Shepherd). Faith, Richard said, is about WHO we trust, not WHAT. The Shepherd we trust is the One whom we promise at our baptisms to “try to be like.” Since I’ve asserted in this sermon title that today’s text is not about the sheep, it’s worth remembering whom we promise to try to be like in our baptismal promises. The implied question is, what are you doing to try to be like Jesus? How do you show WHO you trust? There’s a sense in which “trying to be like Jesus” means we are supposed to try to become like a shepherd.

It’s what Father Gregory Boyle calls, “sustained by God to sustain others.” This week in OPB’s “People at Work” series, there was an interview with a young woman living into that “sustained to sustain others.” Her story takes place in a food pantry near Hillsboro called Centro Mercado. The area is a predominantly Hispanic population, so care is taken to offer culturally appropriate food selections because there is an essential dignity in offering food-insecure people something both appealing and familiar to them. Other than the food selections, this pantry tries to be a typical grocery store in as many respects as possible—you know, where people come in to pick out their own food—with the exception that these customers don’t pay for it. The young woman interviewed for the article was working at Centro Mercado because she remembered a time when her family had relied on food pantries. She’d been fed, so now she was feeding others. It’s a form of Stabat Mater, the mother who stays, who has been “sustained by God to sustain others.” Pass it on.

That Stabat Pater, Gregory Boyle, writes a lot of books about his work with gang members in the L.A. area through an organization called Homeboy Industries. Stabat Pater is a whole lot of Boyle’s ministry: healing others by just staying put with love. The underlying assumption at Homeboy is that people are not evil; they need to be healed. The former gang members who come to Homeboy are literally loved into healing and a second chance or third or fourth. Boyle’s organizational vision for Homeboy works to be less outcome-focused and more faith-focused. The first time I heard that on my audio book, I had to stop the car, because that’s what Richard Rohrbaugh said. This is not about being successful, this following Jesus. It’s about being faithful. It’s about WHO we follow, who we trust, not WHAT we trust.

What it makes me wonder is what we can do, for Christ’s sake, if we don’t have to protect anything or be successful. It makes me wonder if these strange times in which we’re living are maybe like that swarm. Time to split, time to leave the old honey to someone else, time to establish a something new, based on the premise that we can trust in the One who trusts us.