(The scripture portions cited here are Acts 2:42-47, I Peter 2:19-25, and John 10:1-10)
At our monthly eucharist at Williamstown Commons Nursing Home Wednesday, I read this Gospel. We use a large-print song book at that service, but nothing else in print. I noticed Psalm 23 and thought, “We can do that—they’ll know those words.” I knew my little flock there well enough that I’d already decided to use the King James Version. Give me that old time religion…
Sure enough, they knew it. I’ll bet a lot of you do, too. Perhaps you don’t know that that old version was not printed in any edition of The Book of Common Prayer until 1979, the famous “new Prayer Book” that irritated many who thought they were losing the baby with the bathwater. We who have patiently lived with this book for 29 years, and I believe most of us have learned to love it, we’ve learned that its chief characteristic is not what it left out, but what it added, providing many more options than we had before.
Among them, the old language for Psalm 23. I mean the one that many people of a certain age know so well. Let’s find out if we do. To help your synapses fire, close your eyes. Now, let’s make a deal. If you don’t know these words, relax and enjoy hearing them…
“The LORD is my shepherd; I shall not want. He maketh me to lie down in green pastures; he leadeth me beside the still waters. He restoreth my soul; he leadeth me in the paths of righteousness for his Name’s sake. Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil; for thou art with me; thy rod and thy staff, they comfort me. Thou preparest a table before me in the presence of mine enemies; thou anointest my head with oil; my cup runneth over. Surely goodness and mercy shall follow me all the days of my life, and I will dwell in the house of the LORD for ever.”
That was impressive! I wonder what else lives in there, in your memory. “I will lift up mine eyes unto the hills…” No, that’s a sermon for another time.
If you want to get better acquainted with that old language of Psalm 23, you’ll find it in the Prayer Book on page 476, in the Burial Office. Not the one at the top of the page. That’s the really old version, found in the Book of Common Prayer of 1549, a translation by Miles Coverdale in 1535. What we’re so sure is old was in fact the new version of 1611, a result of King James’s bright idea that a new fresh translation of the Bible was needed. (Can’t you imagine, during those early decades when the King James Version was a novelty on the shelf, devout Anglicans grumbling at the new wording, “That trippeth not off the tongue the way the old one doth, now doth it?”)
Ah, well. No one ever said evolution would be easy.
The images of sheep and shepherd have a lasting place in Christian faith. It’s not just that newborn lambs are so darned cute. Do you remember the parable of the lost sheep? Archbishop Desmond Tutu tells how that story shapes our theology, showing us how God has a particular soft spot for those who stray from the fold. Tutu writes, “The Good Shepherd in the parable Jesus told had been quite ready to leave ninety-nine perfectly well-behaved sheep in the wilderness to look for, not an attractive, fluffy little lamb—fluffy little lambs do not usually stray from their mummies—but for the troublesome, obstreperous old ram. This was the one on which the Good Shepherd expended so much energy.”
And that would be because the nature of God, the nature we bear is the capacity for freedom. The Bible teaches that human beings are made in the image of God, and that likeness is shown in freedom. So the Book of Genesis starts in the garden of Eden, a safe contained space for man and woman and all the species to cohabit in freedom within limits. And it takes little time for our race to test and push and transgress those limits. The Bible sees this as our signature sin, disobedience: hearing God but not listening, doing as we like (or being sold on the idea of what we might like), finding it just too hard to accept limitations on our freedom.
But freedom remains the gold standard of our experience, our nature, and our calling. Go to the second book of the Bible and there is the Exodus, God freeing an enslaved tribe whose calling is to become a free nation, free within limits. The setting of those limits is the long story of young Israel learning to love God by obeying, fulfilling, God’s covenant expectations so as to grow into mature Israel shaped by covenant love.
The next 36 books of the Hebrew Bible (and aren’t you glad I’m not taking you to each of them?) reinforce, story upon story, that signature sin of our race: hearing God but not listening, knowing the covenant but not keeping it, sensing the spirit of the law but finding it more intriguing to get around the letter of it, disobedience.
You could say that the prophets are the schoolteachers, the faculty of the Bible, their seventeen or so books recording all those educable moments, all those fiery lectures and fierce arguments, brilliant visions, stormy scoldings, constant pleadings meant to train our race to what is required of us: “…to do justice, and to love kindness, and to walk humbly with our God.” These are the very terms of our limits and of our freedom, simultaneously.
And in the fullness of time, God resolved Word into flesh. Having had enough of talk, God acted in perfect freedom, emptying the divine self, taking the form of a slave. Go figure. Freedom, God’s quintessential state, embracing servitude and sin, mankind’s primary plight, breaking the grip of death by a life so truly fulfilling covenant love that the early Church would learn to sing, with the apostle Peter, “He himself bore our sins in his body on the cross, so that, free from sins, we might live for righteousness.”
With that long preamble, think with me now about sheep and shepherd.
What limits do we need to safeguard our freedom? Three. First, a sheepfold, just enough structure around us to hold us together for facing the darkness. For freedom, just enough structure.
And, second, movement-- out of the sheepfold and out unto the hills to seek and find, feed and fertilize and, well, evolve. For freedom, rhythms of rising to work and folding to rest, patterns of movement and growth.
And, third, guidance, direction. Sheep may not be the brightest bulbs in the barnyard, but they have a reputation for responding to their own shepherd’s voice. At least on a good day, that’s all it takes to move a flock, to restore the strays. For freedom, recognizing God’s voice when we hear it, listening unafraid and trusting, following where it leads.
We have a case study of this in the Book of the Acts of the Apostles. There’s the Bible, in its New Testament, showing what freedom looks like when human beings trust and follow the Good Shepherd. Power is found for the devoting of one’s own life to the life of the community. Private possession is cashed in for common wealth, the good of all. The table fellowship of mealtime and worship feeds the gladness and generosity of everyone. Day by day their numbers grew—the apostles had found perfect freedom, and the world wanted it.
And here we are. Heading into a recession. Even the cheeriest glass-half-full’ers of us may be having to ask what it means when the glass looks half empty.
“The LORD is my shepherd; I shall not want. He maketh me to lie down in green pastures; he leadeth me beside the still waters. He restoreth my soul; he leadeth me in the paths of righteousness for his Name’s sake. Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil; for thou art with me; thy rod and thy staff, they comfort me. Thou preparest a table before me in the presence of mine enemies; thou anointest my head with oil; my cup runneth over. Surely goodness and mercy shall follow me all the days of my life, and I will dwell in the house of the LORD for ever.”
Hear the shepherd constant in his rhythm of calling us into the structure and shelter of renewing faith experienced in the apostles’ community and fellowship, and calling us to move out into the world to seek and find, feed and nurture, evolve. Structure, movement, guidance—gifts that are at the same time our limit and our freedom.
Hear how these dynamics of freedom mark the evolution of our race. Men and women devoted to the common good have their passions and principles renewed within the fold of their covenant community where their call originates—the call to freedom, to lead movements that confront tyranny, defeat prejudice, build justice.
The Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr…. Archbishop Desmond Tutu… President Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf of Liberia… The Dalai Lama… Aung Sun Suu Kyi, champion of freedom in Burma, under house arrest since 1990 (like Nelson Mandela, locked-up and powerful).
And think of their counterparts emerging in Sudan, Kenya, Tibet, Zimbabwe, Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan, the Middle East.
Let’s think of them as we wonder how full or empty our glasses are. And let’s vow not to lose our freedom to anxieties that could make slaves of us, that could distract us from listening to the one whose voice we know, and who knows us by name.
