Keep it simple

Wednesday night I watched my granddaughter praying.

I had dropped off some cookies at my son and daughter-in-law's new apartment, something I could never do when, until two weeks ago, they lived 500 miles away. When I arrived that evening, they were  putting my 17-month-old granddaughter to bed.  Good timing on my part, I would say.  Soon the little one was hugging me tight as we rocked in the chair in her room, keeping the beat as I sang through a long list of songs, lullabies and a hymn or two.   She was very still for a very long time.

Sure that she was asleep, I laid her down in her crib.  Immediately her eyes popped open wide with a betrayed look, and for a minute she did not move, just looked around with her concentrating frown at what was still a strange new room.

Suddenly the arms reached out.  When that had no effect on me, since I was trying to be the responsible adult saying it was time to sleep, she then demonstratively sat up.  And when that did not accomplish what she needed from her grammom, she started to whimper with displeasure.  Now this toddler has no concept of God yet, but she has already learned the first lesson of prayer: trust the one to whom we pray.  She, more than I, trusted that the one who loved her would not leave her alone in a strange dark place.

What’s a grammom to do?

What's God to do for that matter?

Lord, teach us to pray, said Jesus' disciples one day.  They had heard that John the Baptist's followers had received a workshop on prayer from their teacher and now Jesus' disciples wanted to hear Jesus' version. They certainly knew Jesus went off to pray a lot.  How did he pray?

So Jesus told his followers something quite unique: to pray to Abba.  Papa.  Not Creator-of-the-Universe.  Not Ruler of-all-nations.  But to Abba---our good and dear parent.  Father.  The heart of Jesus' prayer is an intimate, trusting, close relationship---like a child in the arms of a loving parent.  In prayer we are children, and in prayer our Abba is not going to leave us alone in a strange dark place.  Prayer is trusting talk (sometimes wordless) with our Abba.

The second thing I notice about Jesus' teaching on prayer is that he kept it simple. (Luke 11:1-4) Hear the simplicity of Jesus' petitions: Give us bread today.  Forgive us as we forgive.  Save us in hard times.  He said it simply.  There is nothing hard or involved about his prayer.  It is as simple, really, as one of us wordlessly reaching up one's arms to the trusted One.

Why do we pastors seem to make prayer much more complicated and fancy?  Ecclesiastically verbose, if you will.  And why do those of us sitting in the pews or chairs think our prayers are not good enough to pray out loud?

Lord, teach us to pray, queried the disciples.

Are my prayers more complex than necessary?  Probably.  While at times I have been told my praying is comforting and people are grateful, maybe it is more about the fact I am praying than what I say in those prayers.  Have in the end my prayers also been intimidating?  Do people in the congregation prefer me to pray rather than risk their own words in comparison?  If for my part I have unwittingly led the congregation to think that prayer, particularly community prayer, takes special training, I have not been a good teacher.

Last Wednesday, standing beside a crib, I was not asking:  Lord,teach me to pray.  But suddenly he was inviting:  Elaine, how would you like me to teach you something about prayer since you are intending to preach on Sunday.  This has been his crib-side teaching: That simply raising my arms to Abba is quite enough.  That the Lord receives my simple wordless plea with his arms open wide as well.

A missed connection

Somehow I missed an important connection.  I've known that "For Whom the Bell Tolls" was a 1940 novel written by Hemingway and that "No Man Is an Island" was a song of the 60's and 70's (with rather sappy lyrics, by the way).  But how did I miss that these two titles, now common phrases, were originally written by a 16th-17th century English poet and priest?  Not only that, but these familiar phrases are part of a collection of meditations or brief sermons?  Here are those two phrases originating in John Donne's Meditation XVII.

No man is an island, entire of itself.  Every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main.  If a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less, as well as if a promontory were, as well as if a manor of thy friend’s or of thine own were.  Any man’s death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind.  And therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls: it tolls for thee.    —John Donne (1572-1631)

You can read the one page meditation here.  And you can read the article that made the connection for me here.

In a time of human history when there was plenty of war, terrible disease and religious divisions, John Donne speaks of the deep way humankind is connected to one another.  He also speaks in the paragraphs before and after the one quoted above of how we are all connected in the universal Church.  We are all a part of the Church (the body of Christ) and if one dies, a piece of me dies too.  Hence the bell tolls.

How timely is this?  Or is it simply timeless?  Stalled debates in our governments.  Wars around the world.  World economies reacting to each others' news.  Some people starving while others are overfed.  The tense balance between human consumption and the planet's health.  Instant connection to people around the world via the web.

On a smaller scale, in my little playing field, Lutheran congregations are learning that they need each other to do mission together.  And some Christians are realizing that no one can be an effective messenger of the good news of Christ all on their own.  Didn't Jesus send the followers out by twos (Luke 10)?  We truly need one another, whether that happens in a formal or informal way, to grow in faith...a concept that runs counter to the "I'm-spiritual-so-I'll-just-do-my-own-thing" idea.

Donne addressed all this centuries ago.  Except Donne puts it so much more poetically:  that if a clod of dirt were washed into the sea, Europe would be the lesser.  That when I hear a church bell tolling a death, a piece of me dies too.  That no man is an island; we just think and act like we are sometimes.  When are times when you have sensed that profound connection with the whole that Donne is writing about?

Changing Time Zones

Well, it has been a long time since I have written on this blog.  There were confirmations, baptism, graduations.  I attended a synod assembly to elect a bishop and before that there were preparations to get ready for the assembly.  I went on a two week vacation, but only after first tying up all the loose ends in order to get away for vacation.  Frankly, I had just plum run out of the creative energy it takes to write.  I could barely come up with the creativity for preparing sermons in the weeks preceding my departure. (I know, that begs the question of preaching being open to God's inspiration, not our doing.)  But at any rate, blogging had to take a rest.  Like me.

So one of the things I relish about camping vacations is the chance to be more attentive to the outdoors, to allow my activities to be molded, not by my agendas or others' agendas, but by the rhythms of daylight and night, sun and showers, heat and chill, wild wind and dead calm.  Here's an example.  At the faintest hint of dawn, usually about 4:40 a.m., the eastern pewee slowly began his song and by 5:00 a.m. would be belting out a persistent "pee-ah-wee" joined by a variety of calls and songs from other birds stirred up by its noise.  It wasn't just birds either. The dogs would jump on our bed to see if we too were awake like all the other creatures in the woods.  And so over the 12 camping days our bodies began to respond and awaken on "woods" time.  

The outdoor rhythm of rain happens regardless of my vacation plans.  Although it helps to have comfortable rain gear, hiking in a soft rain can be just as stunning as on a clear day.  While in bright sunlight tree leaves reflect back the glare with a white sheen, in the dampness of rain those same leaves suck in and hold onto the most vivid shades of green they possibly can.  Mist curls around the mountains, and the river is swollen with energy. 

Back in the trailer as a thunder shower beats on the aluminum roof, the forcefulness or the lightness of the rain has a number of differing types of sounds that I rarely notice while sitting in a house.  Meanwhile, gusts of wind send twigs flying and branches snapping, and I am alert to what's going, especially with the tornado warnings.  After all, my camping roof is less than substantial and there are a number of substantial trees within falling distance.  The rhythm of the outdoors is not always safe.

There is a rhythm of mystery and surprise in the outdoors.  On several occasions we hiked or biked to locations where we thought we might find a night heron to photograph.  So we went here and there, including the spot where we had seen one last year.  But the mysterious night heron remained elusive.  Meanwhile we were surprised by noticing other things:  tracking a strange (to us) bird call and finding a prothonotary warbler eating a dragonfly, an indigo bunting flying from tree to tree over the bike trail, two snakes sunning on some roots, a mockingbird doing a strange wing display that, when we checked things out on the web, even ornithologists can give no definitive reason for.  The rhythm of the outdoors is to receive with gratitude what one does see and accept what one doesn't...at least for that day.

The rhythm of night is honored differently in the woods where we camped.  At dusk the creatures  become quiet and often the air becomes still as well.  We might have a campfire going, but it doesn't last long before my body heads for bed too.  After all, haven't I been awake since 4:40 a.m.?  And so darkness means sleep time instead of another meeting or another job to do or a blog post to write :-)

Now I am back home and, a bit wistfully, am no longer moving on outdoor time. (Thus I am still writing this several hours after night has fallen.)  To remind myself of the outdoor time I just left, one of the first things I did when we arrived home was restock the empty birdfeeders---only to find out that the birds had returned to their own rhythm of finding food in the wild outdoors and have been slow to return.  Each day a few more are back.  I finally saw a woodpecker today. 

But what an irony!  I feed the birds out of the pleasure of watching them.  They are reminders to me in my daily working world to pay attention to creation and its rhythms.  But in drawing these feathered creatures to the feeders, I have actually been pulling them from their natural outdoor rhythms.  Ironic, yes.  But am I going to change?  Heck, no.  They are well fed and raising healthy families.  And I, watching them, am a calmer and more grateful person in my Eastern Daylight Time.

And in addition, I am writing on the blog again.

How's my trust factor?

There are a lot of things going on in my family as well as in the congregation where I am a pastor that require trust---trust in God, that is.  Job situations.  Health situations.  Congregational mission.  Overwhelming change.  Trying new things.  Limited resources.  Listening for God's direction.  Trust.  Trust.  Trust.  What is God up to?

Given all that, I am re-reading (for probably the fourth time in the last three years)  Brennan Manning's book, Ruthless Trust.  I feel like I keep flunking the "trust course,"  and so I keep retaking it, re-reading the book,  hoping it will finally sink in, drawn to something deeper that I can't quite grasp.

In one of my past lives as an early childhood educator, I learned that trust is basic to human development.  In Erik Erikson's stages of psycho-social development, trust vs. mistrust is the  first stage of development that an infant is learning up to about 18 months.  It is not surprising, then, that trust seems to be basic to one's relationship with God as well.  I am in my 7th decade of this spiritual journey, and here I am still learning the trust factor.  Do I trust God to take care of my children's lives?  My congregation's life?  My life?  Yes, I say.  Of course I do, I say...a bit glibly.  And then things start getting sticky and messy, and the trust level  starts sliding down while the anxiety level starts rising.

Here's a quote from the book.  (I've been stuck in the second chapter for three weeks!):

Let's say I interviewed ten people, asking each the same question---"Do you trust God?"---and each answered, "Yes, I trust God," but nine of the ten actually did not trust him.  How would I find out which of the ragamuffins was telling the truth? I would videotape each of the ten lives for a month and then, after watching the videos, pass judgment using this criterion: the person with an abiding spirit of gratitude is the one who trusts God. (Ruthless Trust: The Ragamuffin's Path to God, p.24.)

Many of you read from Acts chapter 16 this Sunday if you use the Revised Common Lectionary.  Paul and Silas were flogged and  thrown into a Philippian  jail for healing a slave girl that was obsessed with a fortune-telling spirit.  Once the spirit was gone, she could no longer work to make money for her owners who then demanded the arrest of the healers.  A flogging ensued.  Bleeding and bruised, sitting in the dark with their feet in stocks, what did Paul and Silas do?  They sang hymns.  Not hymns of lament, but hymns of praise that captured the attention of the other prisoners, certainly captured the heart of God, and eventually brought the jailer to faith. (The exciting story, earthquake and all, is in chapter 16 of Acts.  To see how far their trust in God went, you will just have to read it here. )

Would I be singing joyful hymns to God in a prison cell, or would I be crying my lament? Honestly, it's very likely to be the latter.  Sure, laments are appropriate at times.  But thanking God implies that one TRUSTS that God is going to be bringing good into the dark mess where one finds oneself.  It implies further that God's love and grace are actually with the person in the moment.  Hence Manning's point:  the one with an abiding spirit of gratitude is the one who trusts God.

My life flows on in endless song above earth's lamentation,
I catch the sweet though far off hymn that hails a new creation....
What though my joys and comforts die?  The Lord my Savior liveth.
What though the darkness gather round?  Songs in the night he giveth...
No storm can shake my inmost calm when to that rock I'm clinging.
Since Christ is Lord of heaven and earth, how can I keep from singing?

                                             (Robert Lowry 1826-1899) 

And so I was once again mulling over trust and what it looks like in our lives as I hiked over yet another mountain, Blue Mountain this time, on the Appalachian Trail.  The trail is good and there is plenty to be grateful for on a spring day with wildflowers blooming.

And  as for gratitude, I am deeply grateful for a day off to walk.  But there is a big difference from being grateful to God while climbing the rocks up the mountain and being grateful to God when things are bleak.  Apparently the difference is trust.

Back to Basics

Last week on a gorgeous spring day the hike on the American Discovery Trail was decidedly unsuccessful.  It started off beautiful as I walked the bridge crossing the river to Annapolis.  But less than two hours into the walk I was stuck on a road with no shoulder, nowhere to step off the road, and was facing into a blind curve with cars speeding around at 50 m.p.h.  This was a walking trail?  I did not want to die for this, so I retraced my steps, took a detour (thanks to a Google Map) but only ended up at a multi-highway intersection with no pedestrian crossing.  Traffic was intense.  Perhaps bicyclists could have managed more safely, but the Annapolis area simply does not expect pedestrians to be walking on roads.  Given the fact that Rick and I had driven two hours just to get to the starting point for the day, I have come to the conclusion that this adventure might not be worth it in time or cost of gas---at least not in the Annapolis-Washington area.

So this morning, with another stunning spring day on a Friday off, I suddenly decided to go back to basics.   The Appalachian Trail is practically in my backyard...well, maybe eight miles away.  All of a sudden it seemed rather silly not to take it on again.  Around twenty years ago I hiked much of the local AT with my children on Sunday afternoons.  It's not  a "new" adventure, but I haven't done much of the trail for awhile.  There certainly is no traffic.  It will save me adding much carbon to the planet's atmosphere in order to get to the trail---at least until I cover all the AT miles nearest my home.

So today I started at Boiling Springs (mile 1112) and walked north across the Cumberland Valley for 10.3 miles.  I was surprised by how well maintained the trail is through this area, and it really is quite beautiful.  What a great walk and a good workout!  Here are a few cell phone photos:

Leaving Boiling Springs and discovering a Jack-in-the-pulpit on a break.

A farm in the Cumberland Valley and a healthy patch of swamp cabbage

A robin's egg and dandelions look better at the edge of a farm field.

A sprouting crop of some kind of grain and a cluster of Virginia bluebells.

A contented cow and the Conodoguinet Creek.

Not bad for a back-to-basics 10.3 mile day in the Cumberland Valley.

Sunday morning with a little holy imagination

It’s been a hard week at St. Paul.  We’ve lost 2 friends---at least in this old creation:  brother with a wry sense of humor born in Scotland and a gentle, always encouraging sister.

It helps when we’re missing them to see the bigger picture.  Walter Brueggeman, a Lutheran theologian and biblical scholar, writes the following:

The Bible is an act of faithful imagination. It is not a package of certitudes. It is an act of imagination that invites our faithful imagination that makes it possible to live faithfully. The Bible is an act of imagination that is rooted in memory but that presses always toward new possibility that is in front of us.  

Maybe that’s what we need: a dose of faithful imagination.

The vision of prophets set their holy imaginations going so they could be faithful to what God was calling them to do.  Take Isaiah, for example: he thought he was way too unworthy to be God’s messenger and not so politely tried to decline.  Enter a vision: an angel bringing a hot coal from God’s throne to purify Isaiah’s lips (ouch) and words!  With that holy imagining, Isaiah was faithful, and his words still and and encourage us.

Dishonest Jacob was on the run from his brother who wanted to kill him, some would say justifiably.  Jacob spent that first of many nights away from home sleeping on the hard ground where he had a vision of a stairway to heaven and God saying: I will be with you and will bring you home again. Jacob never lost hope.

Ezekiel knew that imminent slaughter and exile of God’s people by a ruthless foreign nation was near; but in a vision God showed him a desert with scattered bones, bones that started coming together and taking on flesh and become living people again.  Ezekiel could be confident that God would bring his people back together again one day, and Ezekiel could imagine his work wasn’t in vain.

Peter, resting after lunch, saw a blanket being lowered from the sky holding animals unclean for a Jew to eat. Peter heard a voice telling him to eat anyway.  Was it the tempter’s voice?  Or God’s? Or indigestion?  But then "unclean gentiles" came knocking on the door and invited Peter to an unclean home, to eat unclean food and to tell non-Jewish people the good news of Jesus.  Thanks to that earlier vision Peter’s holy imagination kicked in and he was faithful to go preach the gospel to strangers.

But I need to pay attention for a few minutes to the vision of John of Patmos, the writer of Revelation.  He wrote during a time of terrible persecution of the early Church: Christians were imprisoned, thrown to the lions, set on fire as torches to light the city of the emperor.  His vision, the writing of Revelation, is full of violence and threat of evil.  (We wouldn't read some of it to our children.)  His holy imagination and vision is shrouded in coded words (so that if it fell into the wrong hands people wouldn’t be identified).  In the end, his visions---like the imagination of good poetry, powerful art, creative music---help us see God’s  bigger picture, in this case a time when God will make all things right,  bringing an end to death, evil and pain.

Listen.  This is Rev 21:1-6 from The Message.  See if this holy imagination can help us be faithful even when we grieve:

I saw heaven and earth new-created.  Gone the first heaven, gone the first earth, gone the sea.  I saw the Holy Jerusalem, new-created, descending resplendent out of Heaven, as ready for God as a bride for her husband.  I heard a voice thunder from the throne:  “Look!  Look!  God has moved into the neighborhood, making his home with men and women!  They’re his people! he’s their God.  He’ll wipe away every tear from their eyes.  Death is gone for good—tears gone, crying gone, pain gone—all the first order of things gone!” 
The enthroned continued: “Look!  I am making everything new!  Write it all down—each word dependable and accurate.”  Then he said: “It’s happened.  I am A to Z.  I’m the beginning and the conclusion.  From the Well of the Water of Life I give freely to the thirsty....I’ll be God to them, and they’ll be sons and daughters to me.”

While hearts are aching for a brother and sister in the Lord,  we can’t help but notice that in John’s beautiful vision there is no more death, pain, evil, sickness, grief.  It’s all gone!   While John of Patmos’ persecuted Christians saw a bloodthirsty Rome and a Jerusalem burned to the ground, John’s holy imagination inspired them to also see God’s presence filling a new holy city.

We use this passage of scripture often at funerals to encourage one another what heaven is like, what it is like to live in God’s presence—for Marge, for Andy, for ourselves. But wait!  Did you notice something?  We don’t go to this city.  It is not a place we travel to.  It comes to us.

It seems John of Patmos is saying we do not go to heaven; God’s heavenly presence and rule comes to us.
Someone has written that it is one thing to think that God is preparing a place for us, out there where things are great.  It is an entirely other thing to look around at the very place in which we live, the injustices, improprieties, and problems, the evils and get ready for God to come here, transforming all of it into something new.

If death and pain and evil will be gone; what takes its place?  First John sees  a new creation.  Second he envisions God actually coming to make his home among men and women.  Third a well of the water of life is given freely to the thirsty...those thirsty for life, I presume.

But are we really waiting for this vision to happen?  Haven’t those things already started happening?  Hasn’t the heaven, God’s kingdom already started breaking into the cracks of this broken world?  Paul writes to the Corinthians: So if anyone is in Christ, there is a new creation: everything old has passed away; see everything has become new.  (2 Cor.5:17)   Jesus himself pointed the Samaritan woman to the well and said: Everyone who drinks of this water will be thirsty again, but those who drink of the water that I will give them will never be thirsty.  The water that I will give will become in the a spring of water gushing up to eternal life.  And at our baptism hasn’t God already proclaimed that God is our God and announced us sons and daughters of God?  And in the Gospel of John, the writer says that the Word became flesh and lived among us!  God in Christ has already been dwelling with us and we  have seen his glory.

So today, holy and hallowed imagination proclaims that we don’t have to go anywhere to live with God; God is living within each one of us who believes in Jesus.  We know the truth of John of Patmos’s vision.  The gathering of Christians is already God’s home.  How’s that for holy imagination?  The life and love of the heavenly presence of God has already been set loose in us. Yes, it’s been a hard week, but God’s new, resurrected creeation is just that much closer to being completed.   We are called to be faithful, and keep on sharing the life and love of Christ, scattering it like seeds into the debris of the old creation around us.  We are the new creation so far, and God will do the rest and finish it completely into something new, something even our holy imaginations can’t fathom.

But the hope of that new creation, the almost unimaginable possibility of God making all things new, feeds our faithfulness to follow the Lord even through the grieving.  Thanks be to God.

Sunday morning musings

This past week began on a lovely spring day with evil exploding in Boston.  In our shock we scrambled to ask questions:  Who set off the bombs at the finish line?  Why, why did they do it? When will they be caught?  Who are the victims?  We wanted answers; we had to know.  On our behalf reporters surrounded the spokespersons who were sources of information.

It was a winter day at a different event, Hanukkah to be exact, and Jesus was surrounded by religious leaders in Jerusalem.  In this case it was not an anxious crowd asking questions.  This group encircling Jesus was not far from taking justice into their own hands.  In fact, Jesus was their suspect, although they could not sufficiently prove anything yet to the Roman authorities who could do something about it.  Some of the group had been saying Jesus had a demon.  Others had been offended when Jesus had suggested the religious leaders were blind.  A few had picked up stones to throw at him when he said their father was a devil (not Abraham) and a liar and murderer from the beginning because that's what they were doing.  They had been grossed out when he said he was the bread of life.  They had been outraged when he broke their version of religious law by healing a sick, lame man on the Sabbath.

So now on that winter day they surrounded him on the temple portico and asked:  “How long will you keep us in suspense: if you are the Messiah, tell us plainly?”

This was NOT a friendly question. The question implied a threat; it could have been a trap...like a bomb.  For most of those religious leaders, they sensed an evil in their midst, and they were targeting Jesus.  The problem was that they themselves were the problem.  They were not really listening to Jesus' teachings, but listening to their own agendas, protecting their own turf, setting themselves up as the all-knowing sources of information, filled inside and out with judgment, engrossed in plotting,  and therein lay the evil.

In so doing,  they missed hearing Jesus’ invitation to them---even though it was plain as day that winter morning as they walked the temple porch.  Here was the royal Shepherd of God’s people standing on the remnant stones of what wise King Solomon had built, looking at them and saying:  "My sheep hear my voice.  I know them and they follow me.  I give them eternal life and they will never perish.  No one will snatch them out of my hand."  (John 10:27-28)  Any one of them could have started listening, really listening to him at that moment and started following.  It was his open invitation.  Instead they picked up rocks to stone him; somehow he managed to escape.

I have been reading a book, a 500 page book!  My brother had given it to my father for his November birthday, so when I was down there a few weeks ago, I picked it up and started reading it.  Written by Eric Metaxas, it is called Bonhoeffer: Pastor, Martyr, Prophet, Spy.  You may know a bit about Dietrich Bonhoeffer.  He was a German Lutheran theologian and pastor during the rise of the Nazis and their National Socialist Party in the 1930's.  At that crucial time, one of the problems with much of the German Church and its religious leaders was that the whole focus of a pastor’s education was on critical knowledge and analysis of scripture texts as historical documents.  They knew about Jesus. They knew about what Jesus said, or what was said that he said, but from a distance. They studied scriptures with their own agendas.  Bonhoeffer noticed that there was little of reading scripture devotionally, no real listening to Jesus teachings with hearts and minds, no understanding that God speaks to God’s people through scriptures (Hebrew and Christian), no sense of following Jesus in a living relationship.  In that vacuum, it was easy for much of the German Church to be swept up in the rise of Nazi Nationalism, into the rhetoric of blaming Jews for their problems, into excising the scriptures they didn't like (especially the Hebrew parts), into giving oaths of allegiance to a demented dictator promising to restore impressive national power.  They listened and followed something else besides a savior Jesus who spoke about humility, forgiveness, caring for the poor, protecting the weak and loving the neighbor.

Bonhoeffer and others recognized what was happening in the Church, and raised objections.  Only God in Christ could be absolute Lord, no human fuhrer, they said.  The Confessing church movement was formed.  Bonhoeffer worked hard at teaching underground seminarians in his care and any others who would listen how to hear scripture, pray, meditate and to trust it as the very message of the Lord,  the words of a Shepherd to his flock.

"My sheep recognize my voice," said Jesus.  "I know them, and they follow me."  (John 10:27)

It was hard for the Confessing church to follow Jesus.  As the decade progressed, as evil, murder and genocide grew, as the main German church sided with Nazis out of fear or brainwashing, the Confessing church experienced a  time of persecution.  But ironically, it was also a time of renewal. Faith became stronger for those pastors and Confessing Church members who often found themselves imprisoned by Nazis on trumped up charges.  Some were even martyred.  And Bonhoeffer?  He was hanged shortly before the war ended....but that is another story for another time.

Here is the point for now.  Whatever the century, wherever the location in the world, at the core of the Church is not knowledge about God or Jesus based on one’s own agenda or preconceived notions or academic ideas (although study and intellectual discourse is important).  At the core of the Church is the kind of listening that friends or lovers have for one another.  It is open and deep, accepting and honoring.  At the heart of the Church is the kind of listening that needy sheep have for the voice of the shepherd.  If a sheep can’t trust the shepherd’s direction and follow the shepherd closely, it will get lost going its own way.

"My sheep recognize my voice," Jesus says.   "I know them," he says.  And then Jesus gave two promises to those who are listening.  He gives the sheep eternal life (10:28) which, by the way, is less about what happens when you physically die, but is totally about a  life lived out right now in abundance---full of love and service and forgiveness.  (Not exactly the culture's idea of abundance, however.)  And yes, we are promised this life continues on into and after our deaths.  We will always be living and following Jesus.

The second promise Jesus makes is that no one can snatch a sheep out of the Lord’s hand. (10:28)  No hangman in a concentration camp, no hell creating dictator, no misguided religious leader, no marathon bomber—no one can snatch us out of the Lord’s hand.  They may kill us, but no one can make our lives or our work in following the Lord null, void and worthless.

That is a word that our world needs to hear this week.  And you and I need to hear it when we find ourselves afraid.  In this time of testing, hardship and challenge for the Church, we listen together to what the Shepherd has to say and trustingly hope to recognize his voice---not because we are particularly good at hearing, but simply because our Shepherd, who knows us well , is particularly good and gracious about communicating invitations for us to follow in his way.