Sermon Church of the Holy Communion Tom Momberg 5-2-04

SUNDAY SERMON

May 2, 2004
"Good Shepherd" Sunday

TO KNOW AS WE ARE KNOWN

When I was a boy, growing up outside Cincinnati, Ohio, I had a wonderful time playing outdoors. I climbed trees. I built secret underground tunnels. I picked blackberries and sold them door-to-door.

And when it was time for supper, I heard my mother's voice in the distance, singsong, sounding something like: TAAAHHHMMMEE! COME HOME NOW!

Sometimes I hated to hear her voice, because I wasn't ready. Most of the time, though, I must confess that I loved it. It was such a familiar voice. It was the voice of one who knew me, one who called me by name, one who loved me more than I knew.

About twenty-five years later, when I was a seminarian, I read many books. Theology, liturgy, pastoral care. I had, and I still have, more reading than I can ever do.

A book that fascinated me, one not on any of my class reading lists, was about children. It was written by a Bible scholar and Montessori-trained educator. Sophia Cavaletti is her name, and her book: The Religious Potential of the Child.

Cavaletti's book is now "must" reading if you want to know the Catechesis of the Good Shepherd, our children's spiritual formation program here at Holy Communion. It offers a glimpse into the atrium - a specially prepared place, a sacred space for children. In the atrium, children teach adults how to come closer to God, all by themselves.

This confirms my own experience as a parent: children do not need adults in order to find God. Their original vision of the divine shines through, if we let it. Yet we mature and we forget, allowing our God images to become tarnished over time.

While growing up, every child and adult finds it harder to hold onto that childlike quality Jesus said we must retain, if we are to enter the kingdom, to find the reign of God. And yet, if we are honest, we pray there is still some childhood left in us. As one writer put it, "when we are no longer children, we are already dead" (Constantin Brancusi).

Another educator, Edward Robinson, once gathered more than 4,000 first-person accounts of childhood religious experience, recollected by adults in later life. Here is what he found: "children can and do have profound, mature religious experiences, which can only in later life be named, described, explained or comprehended." In short, "we hear God speak before we can express what God says" (The Original Vision: A Study of the Religious Experience of Childhood, p. xiii).

In the Catechesis of the Good Shepherd there are four major themes presented to our youngest children. They include the kingdom of God, the Eucharist and the light of Christ. By the way, did you see those pictures of the Liturgy of the Light in our latest Communicator newsletter?

But there is one signature theme. It is the image of God from which the catechesis gets its name. It is the Good Shepherd, who protects and defends us. It is the Good Shepherd, lost sheep wrapped around his shoulders. It is the Good Shepherd, with whom "everything is fine."

Here are the things our children and children all over the world learn about Christ the Good Shepherd: The Good Shepherd knows all the sheep. The Good Shepherd calls each sheep by name. The Good Shepherd loves the sheep more than they will ever know.

And today and every fourth Sunday of the Easter season each year, all over the world, children and adults everywhere are hearing the same story. We are hearing about Christ the Good Shepherd, who knows the sheep, who calls the sheep by name, who loves the sheep more than they will ever know. Christ the Good Shepherd is in the gospel and in the collect, the prayer that collects up all our prayers on this Good Shepherd Sunday.

Look with me one more time at that collect at the top of the second panel of your bulletin. Would you pray it with me one more time?

Notice that the scripture says, "My sheep hear my voice. I know them, and they follow me." Notice the collect: "…grant that when we hear his voice, we may know him, who calls us each by name and follow where he leads…." Do you hear the difference?

Jesus says, "I know them." The collect prays that "we may know him…" In other words, we pray that we might know the Good Shepherd as the Good Shepherd knows us. You might say we long to know God and to love God in the way God knows and loves us.

Some questions that come to mind here, some existential questions, some lifetime questions are these: Whom do I really know? Who really knows me? How willing am I to be known? Whom do I love? Who loves me? How willing am I to be loved?

From the beginning, God loves us. And from our earliest childhood, before cognitive development, before the age of reason, before we can explain or comprehend it, we desire to love God.

As children, as infants, even before we are born, we hear God speak. We hear God speak even before we can talk about God. God speaks to us of love, and we love it.

That image of the Good Shepherd, the pastoral image, is a powerful one for us Christians. It has influenced the church's images of her leaders, her pastors who, with their fellow ministers, lay and ordained, offer the collaborative ministry of pastoral care. Behind that image is the image of Jesus as a shepherd leader.
But those images emerged over time, as the church grew and had to grow up. In John's gospel account, Jesus describes himself as the one, true Good Shepherd. This reminds all of us, clergy and lay ministers alike, that while we are shepherds one to another, we are NOT the Good Shepherd. The Good Shepherd alone tends and loves the sheep with an everlasting love, a love we seek to find, a love we seek to share.

Yes, the tender love of Jesus is like no other. "Not even my brother knows everything about me," said one seven-year-old in Catechesis. "But the Good Shepherd knows me," she said, "by my name" (Religious Potential, p.72). Just like my mother.

Over the years Sofia Cavaletti and her catechists have asked various groups of children "who amongst the persons closest to them most resembled the Good Shepherd? The majority of the children," not surprisingly, "identified the mother; a smaller number said the mother and father…" and so forth. Cavaletti wonders if it is the very fact that the Good Shepherd image does not correspond to any precise figure in the child's life that makes it so rich."

She goes on to say:

"Any particular reference can be limiting; if we speak of God as Father, the connection (for a child) will be made with the human father exclusively, and the paternal image is probably not the one that relates most fully to the young child's needs….However, since the (image of the) Good Shepherd is open to an enormously vast…range (of possibilities), the child will always find a loved person in whom he (or she) sees the reflection of the Good Shepherd's love" (pp. 73-74).

Let me put it more simply and quite categorically. In my experience, women make great shepherds. So many of the finest pastors I have ever had the privilege to minister alongside and to be shepherded by are women. As a man, I can't tell for sure, but they seem to have learned as sisters and partners and mothers and grandmothers how to love and shepherd the flocks God has given them and to do it well, in the name of Christ the Good Shepherd. Sometimes I wonder what the church and the world would be like today if ordained women had been pastors as long as men have.

Great shepherds help me, a pastor, remember that I, too, am a sheep. Like the children in Catechesis, I need to learn for myself how sheeplike I really am. By the way, the catechists never tell the children that THEY are the sheep. It is up to them to figure it out, to learn it for themselves, all by themselves.

And so, on this Good Shepherd Sunday, this is my prayer, for myself and for you:
Jesus, help us to remember that we are sheep. We are the sheep of your pasture. We hear your voice, Good Shepherd. You are calling us, each of us, by name. You, Good Shepherd, call us and we know your voice of love. Help us to know you as we are known by you, help us to love you and each other as you love us, help us to trust and to follow you wherever, you, our Good Shepherd, want us to go. This day, and always. Amen.

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