Fed with Justice
Jesus as the Good Shepherd, mosaic, 5th c. Galla Placidia Mausoleum, Ravenna, Italy.
There’s a truth you tell yourself every day that you might not be aware of. This truth could take many forms: the first thing you think of when waking up, a pattern of thought you keep repeating, but you don’t know why, a desire that isn’t satisfied no matter what you buy, or a sense of purpose that always eludes you. At the heart of your daily life is a truth you are telling yourself. You might have learned this truth from the ones who are closest to you, or it might be something you’ve come to believe about yourself: I am not wanted, I am stupid, I am inconvenient, I am replaceable, I exist for their benefit, I am not loved. This truth echoes down the halls of your memory, and in your daily life, it’s almost become a light by which you see things, or more accurately, it’s a shadow that keeps you from seeing things clearly. Because this “truth” is, in fact, a lie.
Today is Christ the King Sunday, and frankly, it’s a weird day. I mean “weird” in two senses. First, it is uncanny and somewhat alienating, especially for those of us not currently living in monarchies–that would be all of us. Kings are fundamentally weird: we think we don’t need them, we don’t think they do much for us, and historically, all they’ve been good for is starting wars and marrying their cousins.
But it’s weird in another sense: Christ the King Sunday proclaims a destiny, a commitment to the fate of the world. At the consummation of time, and today at the end of liturgical time, Christ will restore all things in himself and set right all that has been wrong. There will be one light by which people will see and be judged, and that light of God will be our life.
Christ the King Sunday only began in 1925. It is both a judgment and a continuing warning. As theologian Krostopher Phan Coffmann writes, “Christ the King Sunday is not an assertion of how Jesus Christ stands above the cosmos, as though Jesus were just another earthly ruler, content on selfish gain. Christ the King Sunday is a negation of all earthly rulers. It is the assertion that faith in Jesus and love toward all the saints triumphs over the naked power of government...Christ the King Sunday is the proclamation that local acts of faith and love are rooted in cosmic certainty.” In a century where more people have died at the hands of both Christian and secular states, the church needed to remind its people, and itself, that Jesus is the king that brings all other kings to nothing.
Jesus is not a king like other kings because, as scripture presents him to us in our readings tonight, he is a shepherd.
There is a truth that the liturgy tells us every day: we are God’s sheep. In Psalm 95, the morning Psalm most Christians in the world say, it says, “For he is our God; we are the people of his pasture and the sheep of his hand; oh that you would harken to his voice.” And Psalm 100 says, “Know this: the Lord himself is God; he himself has made us, and we are his; we are his people and the sheep of his pasture.” This is the truth scripture tells us every morning: we belong to God, and he is our good shepherd.
Holy Scripture, for all its symbolism and ultimate claims, is a very realistic book. It proclaims God as the Good Shepherd and also recognizes that people do not experience good shepherds in their lives. In Ezekiel 34, once again, where the lectionary cuts out, God has come out against the shepherds of Israel: they have not taken care of the sheep. They wear the wool, eat the curds, and slaughter the best of the flock. They use the sheep. And God says to Ezekiel, “Mortal, prophesy against them.”
God judges bad shepherds. “You have not strengthened the weak or healed the sick or bound up the injured. You have not brought back the strays or searched for the lost. You have ruled them harshly and brutally. So they were scattered because there was no shepherd, and when they were scattered, they became food for all the wild animals. My sheep wandered over all the mountains and on every high hill. They were scattered over the whole earth, and no one searched or looked for them” (Ezk. 34:4-6).
Have you experienced bad shepherding? I have. They are not so much shepherds as tyrannous, evil men. I’ve also known what it looks like when a good shepherd is in my life. I hope you do too, or if not, you are open to finding out.
Are you scattered? I don’t mean backslidden, I don’t mean deconstructed, I don’t mean unfaithful. I mean scattered. Someone pushed you away from God because they preyed on you in the name of God. Are you wandering? Not that sin is enticing you, not that you don’t like the church’s teaching, not that you just have an aversion to “strong leadership.” Are you wandering because you are so desperately hungry for anything good to feed your soul when all the shepherds could do was feed themselves? Is anyone looking for you? Not trying to evangelize you, not getting you to join, not training you to be a disciple that makes other disciples. Is anyone looking for you because they love you? Because you are God’s sheep, his very own.
In Jesus Christ, God is the shepherd who seeks out the lost, strengthens the weak, heals the sick, brings them home, and judges those who destroy the nourishment of others. Again and again, we hear it: I will. I will. I will. God himself will do this.
There was a point in my life where I didn’t have the energy to keep myself a Christian any longer. It slowly dawned on me that I had been “copying others’ homework,” so to speak, when it came to God. When I talked about God, which I liked to do, I was airbrushing over the pieces of books I’d read or talks I’d heard from other people. And it took a lot of energy to keep up the facade. So sometime after college, when I’d reached a point of depression, I admitted something to myself: I am lost, and I don’t have a clue if God is real or if he loves me or if I believe in anything Christianity teaches. I had one prayer I said only once: if you’re real, come and find me. You make the next move because I’m so tired of holding myself together with thread and other people’s words.
Maybe that is a prayer for you to pray tonight. “Find me.” And if what the song says is true, that God is a place you will wait for the rest of your life, what does it matter? If God is really the Good Shepherd, he will find you. If you can’t pray but want to want to pray, pray this: “find me.”
Christ our Advocate exists to be a place where The Good Shepherd can find you again and do all the things he’s promised to do himself. A year ago today, we started weekly worship services in this place. I was thinking about everything that has happened in the past year and perhaps what will happen in the next year, and I realized that in doing that, I was changing the subject from Christ to us. And if there’s anything that I’ve seen in our experience together of reading scripture, it’s that there is a living presence in the Word that is accomplishing an agenda that is not of our making.
Paul talks about this work in his letter to the Ephesians. Paul prayed for the Ephesians–and still prays for us–that God may give us a spirit of wisdom and revelation. This spirit will enlighten our hearts and make us know the hope to which we’ve been called. I think each of us walk into this room with a hope, whether we realize it or not, whether we can face it or not. Let me share a bit of my hope.
A few years ago I was ready to quit being a priest. Most of my hopes for what God was calling me to in ordination were gone. I wasn’t serving in a church in any capacity, I wasn’t teaching, I didn’t even have the energy to seek out somewhere to serve. I prayed, with the sincerity of desperation, “God, either give me something to do or give me an exit.” A few months later, when I was suddenly placed into the middle of advocacy for those abused in the church, in my denomination, it very much looked like God had given me both.
In the midst of one of the most intense months of my life, July-August 2021, when news of abuse was breaking and people were speaking up, and lots of would later become ACNAtoo was being formed–and some bad shepherds were trying to cover things up and stamp out any grassroots organizing–I felt like I had an encounter with Jesus. Not a conversation, not any words exchanged. Rather, the opposite. I had the growing awareness of the presence, the nearness, of the dead body of Jesus. The weight of it, the objectness of it, the way a body hangs limp and unnaturally falls. It was the dead body of Christ coming down from the cross, helped by his friends who stood watch, but were now touching the embodiment of their dead hope. And in some way, I was now ministering to this form of the body of Christ in advocating for those who the shepherds had failed and scattered.
I still don’t understand the meaning of all that encounter entailed. But I did understand that Christ is near, in his death, to those whose faith in him has died; and to those who have been cast out of the church, his body, as he was cast out of his own body in his death. That there is a work of love to be done for the dead body of Jesus that is not done out of hope nor out of expectation or out of obligation. It is simply done from love. Jesus is the Good Shepherd who lays down his life for the sheep, because in his death he has gathered all who have died–spiritually and physically–to himself.
What is the hope that I have when I walk in these doors?
That the same power that God put to work when he raised Christ from the dead will be at work here among us. Us. That God feeds us, strengthens our weakness, gathers our scattered, and binds up the brokenhearted. He will. He will. He himself will. He will feed us with justice.
Here are some of the ways I’ve seen that power at work here at Christ our Advocate:
52 meals we’ve shared together that folks have cooked and contributed to
52 sermons where we’ve heard true and comforting words
52 Godly Play lessons from Ms. Audrey where kids can ask questions and encounter Jesus
52 times our young people have set up chairs, worked the sound booth, and helped set the altar
52+ weeks of beautiful music, where we could sing together, some hesitantly at first, but we lifted our voices, Harry and Annie, thank you!
Pastoral meetings, prayer requests, money given to real and direct needs, housing, cars, groceries, prayer for new jobs, prayer for lost jobs, prayer for guidance, mourning over violence, and commending ourselves and all our life to God.
Local acts of love that have cosmic significance, without diminishing their reality, because the Lord of Lords has said, “These are my sheep.”
What do the next 52 weeks hold? I am honestly not sure. And it’s also not my job to know. But I know what I want. I want God to be the Good Shepherd and us to be his sheep. And to that end, I think this year we will see:
God will seek out his sheep, both within these walls and outside them.
God will give us rest. I don’t know how exactly, but God will provide this rest.
God will strengthen the weak. We need to be a place where it is safe and not shameful to be weak. Our weaknesses and our strengths are not in competition in God’s sight.
God will bring back those who have been scattered. They might not be who we expect or would think they need it. We must be ready to receive them.
God will bind up the injured. We don’t need to be afraid of those whose language is primarily pain; we need to listen to them more closely.
God will destroy the strong, who took what was not theirs. We cannot be the kind of sheep that trample the grass or muddy the water for others. If you’ve found a home here at Advocate, you must keep it as a home for others too.
God will feed us with justice. For some of us, that food will feel strange, upending, and uncomfortable; for others it will satisfy a long-felt hunger. We must commit to eating what God provides together.
With this hope in our hearts, that this is a place where The King of Love my Shepherd is–his goodness faileth never. Nothing I lack when I am his, and he is mine forever–what shall we say?
Who hath directed the Spirit of the Lord,
or being his counselor hath taught him?
With whom took he counsel,
and who instructed him,
and taught him in the path of judgment,
and taught him knowledge,
and shewed to him the way of understanding?
Behold, the nations are as a drop of a bucket,
and are counted as the small dust of the balance:
All nations before him are as nothing;
and they are counted to him less than nothing, and vanity.
Hast thou not known? hast thou not heard,
that the everlasting God, the Lord,
the Creator of the ends of the earth,
fainteth not, neither is weary?
He giveth power to the faint;
and to them that have no might he increaseth strength.
Even the youths shall faint and be weary,
and the young men shall utterly fall:
but they that wait upon the Lord shall renew their strength;
they shall mount up with wings as eagles;
they shall run, and not be weary;
and they shall walk, and not faint.
[Isaiah 40]
Amen.
