This is a love letter to the seminarians entering Boston University School of Theology in September.
What did you go out to the desert to see? A reed swayed by the wind? Then what did you go out to see? Someone dressed in fine clothing? Those who wear fine clothing are in royal palaces. Then why did you go out? To see a prophet?
I don’t know God. I do know I believe in God, and I believe it is possible to know and love God.
I don’t know you. I do believe I ought to know you, and I know it is possible to know and love you.
I believe that somehow knowing and loving God is related to knowing and loving you. That, to be terribly brief, is what makes me Christian.
To know and love God and you better, I chose to study theology; I believe it is something I was destined to do.
That is what brought me to Boston University School of Theology. What did I expect to see when I got here? Knowers of God and knowers of people; lovers of God and lovers of people. Theophiles and philanthropes. People of conviction and people of compassion.
Thanks be to God, I have found them here. Here, we have a name for those who know and love God and all people with a fiery yet gentle spirit: we call them prophets.
And this place has been a special place, such a place that it has been called School of the Prophets. I did not know our school carried that title before I arrived.
This place has been, for a time, the sanctuary of persons who saw their visions of God, humanity, and all that is holy come into focus. This place has not been a refuge from the world—its students and teachers set their faces like flint toward that world.
I knew Martin Luther King Jr. finished his studies here, and I knew his greatness. Before I arrived I knew King as a preacher and a political figure. Then I came here, and they told me King was a prophet, a Christian prophet.
And there have been many more like him here. They came here; they became here. You will learn who they were. God willing, you will become what they were.
I did not fully realize when I came here that I had gone out to see the prophets. The discovery has changed me.
What do you go out to see? Why do you go out?
I wonder what you will see in your fellow seminarians if you come here. Some of them may be reeds swayed in the wind. In this time or that place, that may not be a bad thing—that wind may be the Holy Spirit! Some of them may be dressed in fine clothing or appear to be greatly concerned about such things as fine clothing. That may perk your sense of delight or disdain, according to the way you practice discipleship. Prepare to be surprised by whom you come to befriend. Depend on being shocked to discover who actually manifests the gift of prophecy to you. Be ready to acknowledge the gifts that have been given to some despite your determination never to share a pew with them, and be ready to concede when your best friends simply don’t have the charisms you fervently hoped would become obvious to a benighted world.
I wonder what you will see in your professors. In and out of the classroom and chapel, I wonder how you will look at your professors, the ones you will come to love and hate. Yes, hate. But even hate may be a better thing than cheap like and dislike if you have good cause to despise what they say and do. Nevertheless, as much as you are able, love your professors and pray for them, too … at least promise me you will pray for them as often as you gossip about them.
I wonder what you will see in Marsh Chapel. I wonder if you will ever set foot in Marsh Chapel when not compelled to do so.
Boston is not a desert, but you may feel deserted here at times. I wonder what you will see in Boston. I do not mean all its cultural attractions, though I do not for one moment undervalue them. Do see the sights, smell the smells, taste the tastes, hear the sounds, feel the sensations. When you have begun to enrich yourself—may you never be done—I wonder what you will see when you look past the oasis. A rich, shining city on a hill, a place to play, a place to pray, a place to stay? Will you feel at home or homeless? Will you see the homeless? The ill? The imprisoned? The addicted? Will you find the people of the Beatitudes, or people with snobby attitudes? Will you be a tourist, an observer passing through, or a pilgrim? Or something else and more, if you let the city and its people so shape you?
I wonder what you will see when you behold the School of Theology as a community—its gifts and flaws, its joys and sorrows, its sanctity and its sinfulness. Yes, living in this community is sometimes uncomfortable, even painful. However, one must distinguish between a healthy discomfort and unhealthy threats, between growth-filled pain and death-dealing hate. We must welcome the former things and do everything in our power to destroy the latter things. How do we recognize the difference between these? And how do we recognize difference itself? Maybe, in the final analysis, knowing and loving God and people will depend on how we reckon with difference.
I wonder also if you will see the School of the Prophets. Some say we are no longer the School of the Prophets. Without prophecy, there is no community; or, as the King James Version of Proverbs poetically puts it, “Where there is no vision, the people perish.” But there is also a tension between prophecy and community that destabilizes as it constructs. We’ll never be a prophetic people of God if we never risk troubling the safety and security of our worldview or that of others. Unfortunately, one person’s prophet is another person’s persecutor, and the difficulty lies in distinguishing false perception from reality. We need to learn how to discern the Spirit together. I wonder if you will be a part of that discernment at the School of Theology.
Have you come for Jesus Christ? Well, I wonder if you will see the image of Christ in this community of faith(s), or merely a crisis. What does it mean to be in Christ, and how do other identities of race, gender, orientation, and vocation, to name a few, relate to one’s being in Christ? In my experience here, none of us define what it means to be in Christ the same way, nor can we assume that everyone subordinates other facets of their identity to their identity in Christ. In fact, we cannot even take it as a given that being in Christ is the paramount identifying mark for every student and faculty member of the School of Theology. In my experience, though you would earnestly seek the face of Christ Jesus in each member of this body, this community of pastors and scholars, you will not find it unless your image of God is expanded. And that can be a wonderful thing.
This place is neither pure seminary—breeding ground for pastors—nor pure school of theology—an academy of philosopher-theologians. Our university faces the city, but a river runs by it, and it is the river we face when we pray in chapel. Our school plants one foot in the church and one foot in the classroom. Athens meets Jerusalem. Learning and virtue and piety collide. Love and truth meet, although sometimes it’s for binding arbitration; justice and peace kiss, but sometimes it’s because they have to kiss and make up. “In all of this lies the passion” (John Caputo).
And in all of this there lies prophecy. Maybe even the reign of God.
What will you go out to Boston University School of Theology to see?
Showing posts with label Boston University School of Theology. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Boston University School of Theology. Show all posts
Friday, August 3, 2007
Can't We All Just Belong?
The following is a sermon I prepared and delivered for my introductory preaching course, taught by the Rev. Dr. Dale Andrews at Boston University School of Theology.
Note: This sermon was delivered on May 1, 2007. Let me caution you here: This sermon has serious structural and theological difficulties, not to mention rhetorical flaws from a pastoral perspective, that I have been unable to work out, so I present this sermon as it was preached, warts and all the rest of its unsightly blemishes. (I have deleted one and a half sentences, but that is all.) Perhaps the kind reader will offer some constructive feedback.
A reading from the Gospel According to John, Chapter 10.
Jesus said, 27 “My sheep hear my voice; I know them, and they follow me. 28 I give them eternal life, and they shall never perish. No one can take them out of my hand. 29 My Father, who has given them to me, is greater than all, and no one can take them out of the Father’s hand. 30 The Father and I are one.”
These are beautiful words from a beautiful Gospel. But these words are also bittersweet. The community that created this Gospel was at odds with almost everyone—with the Jewish authorities, with the wider world, and even with fellow Christ-believers. Nobody really understood the glory of Jesus Christ except the community of the Beloved Disciple, its members claimed. They were the true sheep; they alone heard Jesus’ voice. Brothers and sisters, when I look at our divided School of Theology community, I see the sad drama of the Johannine community playing itself out again. Students, angry and fearful about the direction of the changing Church, are ready to expel fellow students from their midst over wrong doctrine or wrong practice. Worse, students have fallen victim to violent rhetoric and have been threatened by violent actions from their peers. It grieves me that so many people are hurt, and each new fracture of the body troubles me. We are neither one nor whole.
We must understand why all this is happening. In light of our struggle to be one body in Christ, and in light of this beautiful passage from the Gospel, I will answer two urgent questions. First, what does it mean for God and Jesus to be one? Second, who hears the voice of Jesus, who calls himself the Good Shepherd?
On the first question, let us arrive at a basic point of agreement. Jesus says in verse 30 that he and God are one. He says this in the Temple at Hanukkah in response to the Jewish authorities’ demand to know whether or not he is the Messiah. His stunning answer reveals that he is more than a Messiah, more than the political liberator of Israel. He claims a unique relationship with God as the bearer of divine power and the embodiment of the divine will. It is in this sense that Jesus is called the Son of God. Jesus justifies this unparalleled unity by pointing to what he does for his disciples—he gives them eternal life so that they will never perish. This discourse in the Temple follows the discourse of the Good Shepherd, and the evangelist has Jesus employ the language of that metaphor again in this richly theological text. Jesus is the Good Shepherd, the noble guardian of the sheep, the hero who lays down his life so that others may have life. Jesus knows his sheep; he speaks to them the words of life, and they respond to his voice. Jesus models God’s justice through his loyalty to the sheep and models God’s love through his obedience to God. He can do this because the God of Israel is the source of Jesus’ words and actions. It is this God who gives the sheep to Jesus the Good Shepherd, and no one can take them away from Jesus because no one can take them away from God. The words and works of Jesus are nothing less than the words and works of God.
What does this mean? It’s a funny coincidence, but tomorrow is the feast day of St. Athanasius, who sparred with Arius and wound up victorious in the Trinitarian controversies of the 4th century. They fought furiously over the meaning of today’s text, and I can hear Arius shouting, “You see? Jesus says ‘My Father is greater than all!’ ” and old Athanasius roaring, “Don’t you see? Jesus says ‘The Father and I are one!’ ” Now I’m not particularly interested in their argument about persons and essences, and the fact is neither was the evangelist nor his community. John is telling a story, not defining a doctrine. This Gospel is firstly revealing the relationship between God and Jesus. John is teaching us that when Jesus performs mighty works and speaks with authority, we experience the reality of God. This Gospel secondly reveals our relationship to God in Jesus. When we do the works of God and speak the Word of God in Christ’s name, we experience the reality of God and Jesus as one, and we share in that unity.
The believers in the community of the Beloved Disciple did not quarrel about whether the unity between God and Jesus was a metaphysical unity of natures or essences or strictly a moral unity. They experienced this power of this unity firsthand—they were grasped by it, and that’s all that mattered. This leads to my second point, which sits between my two questions. Because Jesus’ words and works are the words and works of God, we can follow Jesus Christ. But even the ability to follow Jesus Christ is itself the work of God. We follow Jesus because we are led to believe in him by the inspiration of God. We did not attain faith through our own efforts! Faith is hearing the voice of the shepherd who speaks first—and then responding. Faith is not asking Jesus if he is the Messiah and then deciding whether or not to go along with him, as the religious authorities did when they confronted him in the Temple at Hanukkah. We do not get to anoint Jesus the shepherd! In fact, we don’t get to make ourselves the sheep. Even Jesus did not make us the sheep. Today’s Scripture is saying that God made Jesus the shepherd, God made us the sheep, and God made both for each other.
So God made us to follow Jesus, and God makes it possible for us to follow Jesus. Let me draw out this theme just a little further. I propose that God made us to believe first and to know second. Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel said of the prophetic office, “The principle to be kept in mind is to know what we see rather than to see what we know.” We follow Jesus in faith. We believe, and then we know what we see. The authorities in the Temple wanted to know first who Jesus was, but they had no interest in believing in him, much less following him. Jesus susses out their true intent—they are looking for a reason to indict him—and so he tells them they do not belong to his sheep. He does not say they do not know him—he claims they do!—but that they do not believe him. On the other hand, the sheep in this text recognize that the works Jesus has performed are a testimony to God. Like Dostoevsky’s Grand Inquisitor, the religious authorities in John have known, but they do not believe. Meanwhile, the sheep believe, therefore they know.
I will now be so bold as to put my finger on the problems facing the School of Theology. We face two crises—an identity crisis and a community crisis, and the first leads into the second. First, the identity crisis. Are we merely a school of theology, discoursing well on God and Jesus and the Holy Spirit and the Church but knowing nothing, or are we more—are we also a seminary, professing our faith in these? Writing in his blog for The New York Times, Stanley Fish said, “True religious knowledge is not something one delivers in precepts but something one performs at every moment, because its lesson and one’s being are indistinguishable.” Is Jesus Christ is being carried away from the altar table to the dissecting table? God forbid it! Let our knowledge of Jesus Christ guide us beyond a mere academic exercise, and let us follow all the way. If we seek the meaning of the Scripture, let us do so in faith. “The Father and I are one” is more than a Trinitarian statement. It is much more than a Christological statement. It is an existential declaration of faith in God, and God’s ways become our ways. God’s way of being becomes our way of being. The Father and I are one. The Mother and I are one. The Holy One of Israel and I are one. We live by our knowledge, and we do not merely study this stuff as disinterested students of the liberal arts. It does shape our world perspective! Ours is a vision to be lived! That is what is at stake, and we must at some point step out on faith! Forgive my radical presumption, but remember what brought you here: your love of God and your desire as a Christian minister to belong in word and deed to God. Verse 27 says, “My sheep hear my voice. I know them, and they follow me.” As important as it is for us to know, we must remember that we are believers first. We can follow Jesus Christ the Son of God because through Christ, in Christ, with Christ, God has known us, making us the faithful sheep of the shepherd. When we follow, we become one with Jesus Christ as Jesus Christ is one with the God of Israel.
I believe I have answered the second question. Who hears the voice of Jesus? Everyone that God has known as Jesus’ sheep. And here is my third point. God has elected us to be sheep, and while we may opt out, that does not change God’s decision for us. Nor does it nullify God’s power to determine who belongs to God in Christ. Now, if it is true that only God gives us to Jesus Christ and enables us to hear Jesus’ voice and believe in Jesus’ works, then who are we to determine who belongs to Christ and the Church that witnesses to the reign of God that Jesus proclaimed? I admire the community of the Beloved Disciple for living deeply into its knowledge of Jesus Christ, but I think it failed to heed the implications of the Good News. Its members had an antagonistic relationship with not only non-believers, but also fellow believers who did not confess the Christ or practice Christ-faith as they did. They broke off communion with many other communities of Christ.
Like the Johannine community, I think we misunderstand our place in the economy of salvation. At the School of Theology, this is where our identity crisis becomes a community crisis. Hear me out. There is a consensus gathering among dissatisfied seminarians that our collective classroom experience is too shallow. It is too academic, I hear—too much “seeing what we know,” not enough “knowing what we see.” We are still asking Jesus to tell us plainly whether he is the Messiah. Our courses are chock full of detached analyses of the truth claims of our kindred Christian traditions, killing the spirit of religion. Seminarians want to be transformed by what they know, not deadened by it. They want to be the School of the Prophets again. Many students are rising to the challenge to rouse our community from its stupor. And this is a good thing. However, some students have taken this mission to an extreme. Like ministering angels, they have come to defend Jesus Christ from blasphemous, belittling, or trivializing assaults. It’s funny, isn’t it, the sheep presuming they must protect the shepherd? Even save the shepherd?
They have also come to purify the Church on the one hand, or reconstitute it on the other. I worry whenever Christ-followers arrogate to themselves the privilege that belongs to God alone—deciding who hears Jesus’ voice and who belongs to the flock. This is not to say that Christ-followers may not call their brothers and sisters to account for their sin, for doing so is part of their prophetic office. However, many of us step beyond our responsibilities. It is one thing to call your brothers and sisters to repentance, but it is another to assert by word and deed that your brothers and sisters are not sheep. It is one thing to say that your brothers and sisters have heard the voice of the shepherd but don’t listen very well; it is another to assert by word and deed that they are deaf to the shepherd’s voice. The first is charity; the second is cruelty. Listen to the Gospel: “My Father, who has given them to me, is greater than all, and no one can take them out of the Father’s hand.” Yet I fear that is precisely what many of us are attempting to do, under the pretense of “making a stand” for the Church or by redefining the Church so as to push out those who are not ready to embrace their superior vision.
Are we willing to believe in a God so great and so mysterious as to grant that God speaks to our fellow brothers and sisters even when they wrongly impugn our faith and practice? And are we humble in the knowledge that God still speaks to us even when we wrongly impugn our brothers’ and sisters’ faith and practice? Can’t we all just belong? The Johannine community was unwilling to believe this, and so, apparently, are many of us in the School of Theology community. This is unfortunate. Have not all of us heard the Word of God and seen the works of the Lord and believed?
It is not for us to separate the so-called goats from the sheep, nor is it for us to usher the stray sheep back into the pen. I am surprised that some of our most enthusiastic brothers and sisters from the theological left and the right would not trust God enough to let Christ take ownership of all the so-called wayward souls in our midst. The Church does not need any more Holden Caulfields; it needs more leaders like John Mott, Pope John XXIII, and Bernice Powell Jackson. It needs models of koinonia like the Taize Community and the Community of Sant’Egidio.
Christ belongs to God, and we who believe belong to Christ. Only God knows who truly belongs to Christ. It is not for us to decide. Rather than play shepherd, let us be the sheep. Amen.
Note: This sermon was delivered on May 1, 2007. Let me caution you here: This sermon has serious structural and theological difficulties, not to mention rhetorical flaws from a pastoral perspective, that I have been unable to work out, so I present this sermon as it was preached, warts and all the rest of its unsightly blemishes. (I have deleted one and a half sentences, but that is all.) Perhaps the kind reader will offer some constructive feedback.
A reading from the Gospel According to John, Chapter 10.
Jesus said, 27 “My sheep hear my voice; I know them, and they follow me. 28 I give them eternal life, and they shall never perish. No one can take them out of my hand. 29 My Father, who has given them to me, is greater than all, and no one can take them out of the Father’s hand. 30 The Father and I are one.”
These are beautiful words from a beautiful Gospel. But these words are also bittersweet. The community that created this Gospel was at odds with almost everyone—with the Jewish authorities, with the wider world, and even with fellow Christ-believers. Nobody really understood the glory of Jesus Christ except the community of the Beloved Disciple, its members claimed. They were the true sheep; they alone heard Jesus’ voice. Brothers and sisters, when I look at our divided School of Theology community, I see the sad drama of the Johannine community playing itself out again. Students, angry and fearful about the direction of the changing Church, are ready to expel fellow students from their midst over wrong doctrine or wrong practice. Worse, students have fallen victim to violent rhetoric and have been threatened by violent actions from their peers. It grieves me that so many people are hurt, and each new fracture of the body troubles me. We are neither one nor whole.
We must understand why all this is happening. In light of our struggle to be one body in Christ, and in light of this beautiful passage from the Gospel, I will answer two urgent questions. First, what does it mean for God and Jesus to be one? Second, who hears the voice of Jesus, who calls himself the Good Shepherd?
On the first question, let us arrive at a basic point of agreement. Jesus says in verse 30 that he and God are one. He says this in the Temple at Hanukkah in response to the Jewish authorities’ demand to know whether or not he is the Messiah. His stunning answer reveals that he is more than a Messiah, more than the political liberator of Israel. He claims a unique relationship with God as the bearer of divine power and the embodiment of the divine will. It is in this sense that Jesus is called the Son of God. Jesus justifies this unparalleled unity by pointing to what he does for his disciples—he gives them eternal life so that they will never perish. This discourse in the Temple follows the discourse of the Good Shepherd, and the evangelist has Jesus employ the language of that metaphor again in this richly theological text. Jesus is the Good Shepherd, the noble guardian of the sheep, the hero who lays down his life so that others may have life. Jesus knows his sheep; he speaks to them the words of life, and they respond to his voice. Jesus models God’s justice through his loyalty to the sheep and models God’s love through his obedience to God. He can do this because the God of Israel is the source of Jesus’ words and actions. It is this God who gives the sheep to Jesus the Good Shepherd, and no one can take them away from Jesus because no one can take them away from God. The words and works of Jesus are nothing less than the words and works of God.
What does this mean? It’s a funny coincidence, but tomorrow is the feast day of St. Athanasius, who sparred with Arius and wound up victorious in the Trinitarian controversies of the 4th century. They fought furiously over the meaning of today’s text, and I can hear Arius shouting, “You see? Jesus says ‘My Father is greater than all!’ ” and old Athanasius roaring, “Don’t you see? Jesus says ‘The Father and I are one!’ ” Now I’m not particularly interested in their argument about persons and essences, and the fact is neither was the evangelist nor his community. John is telling a story, not defining a doctrine. This Gospel is firstly revealing the relationship between God and Jesus. John is teaching us that when Jesus performs mighty works and speaks with authority, we experience the reality of God. This Gospel secondly reveals our relationship to God in Jesus. When we do the works of God and speak the Word of God in Christ’s name, we experience the reality of God and Jesus as one, and we share in that unity.
The believers in the community of the Beloved Disciple did not quarrel about whether the unity between God and Jesus was a metaphysical unity of natures or essences or strictly a moral unity. They experienced this power of this unity firsthand—they were grasped by it, and that’s all that mattered. This leads to my second point, which sits between my two questions. Because Jesus’ words and works are the words and works of God, we can follow Jesus Christ. But even the ability to follow Jesus Christ is itself the work of God. We follow Jesus because we are led to believe in him by the inspiration of God. We did not attain faith through our own efforts! Faith is hearing the voice of the shepherd who speaks first—and then responding. Faith is not asking Jesus if he is the Messiah and then deciding whether or not to go along with him, as the religious authorities did when they confronted him in the Temple at Hanukkah. We do not get to anoint Jesus the shepherd! In fact, we don’t get to make ourselves the sheep. Even Jesus did not make us the sheep. Today’s Scripture is saying that God made Jesus the shepherd, God made us the sheep, and God made both for each other.
So God made us to follow Jesus, and God makes it possible for us to follow Jesus. Let me draw out this theme just a little further. I propose that God made us to believe first and to know second. Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel said of the prophetic office, “The principle to be kept in mind is to know what we see rather than to see what we know.” We follow Jesus in faith. We believe, and then we know what we see. The authorities in the Temple wanted to know first who Jesus was, but they had no interest in believing in him, much less following him. Jesus susses out their true intent—they are looking for a reason to indict him—and so he tells them they do not belong to his sheep. He does not say they do not know him—he claims they do!—but that they do not believe him. On the other hand, the sheep in this text recognize that the works Jesus has performed are a testimony to God. Like Dostoevsky’s Grand Inquisitor, the religious authorities in John have known, but they do not believe. Meanwhile, the sheep believe, therefore they know.
I will now be so bold as to put my finger on the problems facing the School of Theology. We face two crises—an identity crisis and a community crisis, and the first leads into the second. First, the identity crisis. Are we merely a school of theology, discoursing well on God and Jesus and the Holy Spirit and the Church but knowing nothing, or are we more—are we also a seminary, professing our faith in these? Writing in his blog for The New York Times, Stanley Fish said, “True religious knowledge is not something one delivers in precepts but something one performs at every moment, because its lesson and one’s being are indistinguishable.” Is Jesus Christ is being carried away from the altar table to the dissecting table? God forbid it! Let our knowledge of Jesus Christ guide us beyond a mere academic exercise, and let us follow all the way. If we seek the meaning of the Scripture, let us do so in faith. “The Father and I are one” is more than a Trinitarian statement. It is much more than a Christological statement. It is an existential declaration of faith in God, and God’s ways become our ways. God’s way of being becomes our way of being. The Father and I are one. The Mother and I are one. The Holy One of Israel and I are one. We live by our knowledge, and we do not merely study this stuff as disinterested students of the liberal arts. It does shape our world perspective! Ours is a vision to be lived! That is what is at stake, and we must at some point step out on faith! Forgive my radical presumption, but remember what brought you here: your love of God and your desire as a Christian minister to belong in word and deed to God. Verse 27 says, “My sheep hear my voice. I know them, and they follow me.” As important as it is for us to know, we must remember that we are believers first. We can follow Jesus Christ the Son of God because through Christ, in Christ, with Christ, God has known us, making us the faithful sheep of the shepherd. When we follow, we become one with Jesus Christ as Jesus Christ is one with the God of Israel.
I believe I have answered the second question. Who hears the voice of Jesus? Everyone that God has known as Jesus’ sheep. And here is my third point. God has elected us to be sheep, and while we may opt out, that does not change God’s decision for us. Nor does it nullify God’s power to determine who belongs to God in Christ. Now, if it is true that only God gives us to Jesus Christ and enables us to hear Jesus’ voice and believe in Jesus’ works, then who are we to determine who belongs to Christ and the Church that witnesses to the reign of God that Jesus proclaimed? I admire the community of the Beloved Disciple for living deeply into its knowledge of Jesus Christ, but I think it failed to heed the implications of the Good News. Its members had an antagonistic relationship with not only non-believers, but also fellow believers who did not confess the Christ or practice Christ-faith as they did. They broke off communion with many other communities of Christ.
Like the Johannine community, I think we misunderstand our place in the economy of salvation. At the School of Theology, this is where our identity crisis becomes a community crisis. Hear me out. There is a consensus gathering among dissatisfied seminarians that our collective classroom experience is too shallow. It is too academic, I hear—too much “seeing what we know,” not enough “knowing what we see.” We are still asking Jesus to tell us plainly whether he is the Messiah. Our courses are chock full of detached analyses of the truth claims of our kindred Christian traditions, killing the spirit of religion. Seminarians want to be transformed by what they know, not deadened by it. They want to be the School of the Prophets again. Many students are rising to the challenge to rouse our community from its stupor. And this is a good thing. However, some students have taken this mission to an extreme. Like ministering angels, they have come to defend Jesus Christ from blasphemous, belittling, or trivializing assaults. It’s funny, isn’t it, the sheep presuming they must protect the shepherd? Even save the shepherd?
They have also come to purify the Church on the one hand, or reconstitute it on the other. I worry whenever Christ-followers arrogate to themselves the privilege that belongs to God alone—deciding who hears Jesus’ voice and who belongs to the flock. This is not to say that Christ-followers may not call their brothers and sisters to account for their sin, for doing so is part of their prophetic office. However, many of us step beyond our responsibilities. It is one thing to call your brothers and sisters to repentance, but it is another to assert by word and deed that your brothers and sisters are not sheep. It is one thing to say that your brothers and sisters have heard the voice of the shepherd but don’t listen very well; it is another to assert by word and deed that they are deaf to the shepherd’s voice. The first is charity; the second is cruelty. Listen to the Gospel: “My Father, who has given them to me, is greater than all, and no one can take them out of the Father’s hand.” Yet I fear that is precisely what many of us are attempting to do, under the pretense of “making a stand” for the Church or by redefining the Church so as to push out those who are not ready to embrace their superior vision.
Are we willing to believe in a God so great and so mysterious as to grant that God speaks to our fellow brothers and sisters even when they wrongly impugn our faith and practice? And are we humble in the knowledge that God still speaks to us even when we wrongly impugn our brothers’ and sisters’ faith and practice? Can’t we all just belong? The Johannine community was unwilling to believe this, and so, apparently, are many of us in the School of Theology community. This is unfortunate. Have not all of us heard the Word of God and seen the works of the Lord and believed?
It is not for us to separate the so-called goats from the sheep, nor is it for us to usher the stray sheep back into the pen. I am surprised that some of our most enthusiastic brothers and sisters from the theological left and the right would not trust God enough to let Christ take ownership of all the so-called wayward souls in our midst. The Church does not need any more Holden Caulfields; it needs more leaders like John Mott, Pope John XXIII, and Bernice Powell Jackson. It needs models of koinonia like the Taize Community and the Community of Sant’Egidio.
Christ belongs to God, and we who believe belong to Christ. Only God knows who truly belongs to Christ. It is not for us to decide. Rather than play shepherd, let us be the sheep. Amen.
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