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The Fourth Sunday Of Easter (Good Shepherd Sunday)
O God, whose Son Jesus is the good shepherd of thy people; Grant that when we hear his voice we may know him who calleth us each by name, and follow where he doth lead; who, with thee and the Holy Spirit, liveth and reigneth, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.
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Scripture citation(s): I John 3:16-24; John 10:11-18
A Sermon by
The Rt. Rev. Martin Shaw, Retired Bishop of Argyll and the Isles, the Scottish Episcopal Church
on
I John 3:16-24; John 10:11-18
✛
We know that he abides in us.
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“The furthest you can get from God is the end of your nose.”
That was the cheap two-bit illustration I used in a confirmation class for choristers at King’s College, Cambridge: “The furthest that you can get from God is the end of your nose”. One chorister comedian asked: “If the furthest I get from God, sir, is the end of my nose, what happens to God when I blow my nose?” Another chorister comic smirked his reply: “Then you’ll have God in your pocket!”
******
That ridiculous story does, however, expose a deeply uncomfortable paradox within Christianity: Yes, of course, the Word of God abides in me, [as the 1st letter of John suggests]. And yet there is that burning sense of the infinite distance between God and me. A sense of the ‘Real absence of God’. The tension, the paradox rather is between presence and absence.
******
That tension reveals a flaw in me, which I suspect some of you will share. I find myself resisting that I can experience of God ‘here’, ‘now’ – where I am. The significant experience, for me, is never here. It’s somewhere else, perhaps, in someone else, but not here, not in me. This resistance has been described as ‘the Disease of Misplaced Significance’.
******
My Mother’s grave is in a huge cemetery in Paisley, a town in the south-west of Scotland. On my last visit, I noticed that one or two graves had bedraggled-looking flowers uncared for in little metal pots. But most of the graves seemed unvisited: rows of regimented gravestones, along those untended terraces of insignificance. What of all these lives? What had they been or given? Had they experienced God at the ends of their noses? What did I miss among those graves? What did I resist seeing?
The Choir of St Thomas’s, along with other great choirs, sings the setting of the Mass: ‘Missa Papae Marcelli’.
Palestrina dedicated it to Pope Marcellus II who only survived for a few weeks after being elected Pope, dying after a severe illness. Little, if anything is known about him. Perhaps another insignificant life, only rescued by magnificent a ground-breaking music.
******
And those disciples of Jesus with their sense of the real absence; huddled together in some pokey room; terrified – deserters you might even be tempted to call them; their arrest probably imminent, guilty by association as followers of that strange crucified slave: Jesus the King of the Jews.
And yet came Jesus’ searing words in St John’s Gospel chapter 10: ‘I lay down my life. Believe in my Name.’
******
However, W.H.Auden is in his poem ‘The Twelve’ about those insignificant apostles, wrote: “When they heard the Word, some demurred, some mocked, some were shocked: but many were stirred and the Word spread. Lives long dead were quickened to life; the sick were healed by the Truth revealed; released into peace from the gin [trap] of old sin, men forgot themselves in the glory of the story told by the Twelve.’
Insignificant souls indeed – become Saints of Glory!
******
So, it’s precisely in insignificance that God discloses himself.
Ian Ramsey, Philosopher and one-time Bishop of Durham, and his wife, Margretta, celebrated their 25th wedding anniversary by going on a walk they hadn’t made since their honeymoon in the Yorkshire Dales. They approached a particular stretch of a dry stone wall. They both giggled as they ran towards a style. Margretta put her hand between two moss covered stones, and took out an old penny. They fell into each other’s arms with a renewed intimacy – over an old penny!
All those 25 years before, they had placed the penny between these same stones, an insignificant sign of their love. Ian Ramsey described this wistful moment of the old penny as a ‘disclosure situation’. An intensification of intimacy – perhaps. In this insignificance – perhaps Christ abiding in them.
******
But! Genocide is precisely about consigning a whole people to insignificance. How, in the face of that incomprehensible destructiveness, do I assent, with any confidence, to that claim in Acts chapter 4: ‘The Name of Jesus, by which humankind is saved’?
*****
In July 1945, the composer Benjamin Britten travelled to the Nazi Concentration Camp of Bergen-Belsen to accompany the violinist Yehudi Menuhin in a concert. For years afterwards, Britten was accused of saying nothing about the Holocaust. And yet, as a consequence of what he witnessed, Britten’s music was permeated by his desire to expose through art the uselessness of violence. I dare to suggest that Belsen was a ‘disclosure situation’ for Britten – Christ abiding in the middle of – that.
******
An historian has commented that as a consequence of the Holocaust, we have, surely, had enough of preaching. He adds: “Now we must live beyond the preaching”. It’s at least arguable that some preaching has lead to division and even hatred that in turn has set in chain civil war and what Hannah Arendt calls ‘The Banality of Evil’. Maybe it’s time not only to live beyond the preaching, but to live beyond the believing.
*****
Yes, the disciples saw and came to believe in Jesus being raised. But so what? It was how they lived then that spoke loudly and beautifully of the resurrection. Jesus describes this ‘living beyond’ with such blatant simplicity in John’s Gospel: “I lay down my life”. Christ’s life is for the other now, whoever that other may be. Your life, Christ’s life in you, is for the other now, whoever that other maybe. After all, the point of Jesus laying down his life is that we are asked to imitate that laying down.
Perhaps then, God will be even closer than the end of your nose!
*****
And that ‘living beyond…’ will for most of us, I suspect, go unobserved.
There is, as Emily Dickinson the American poet, put it: ‘a heroism in the unobserved life’.
******
Arguably, the greatest ending to any novel in the English Language is that of George Eliot’s ‘Middlemarch’. She writes of Dorothea Brooke, who in her insignificance, touches with love the insignificant characters of that insignificant little ‘middle’ town in England.
Eliot writes: “….the growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts; and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs.”
Yes, Christ abides in you. So, check your pockets!
A.M.D.G.
