Book Review-Desire of the Everlasting Hills

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Trinity Episcopal Church
44 East Market St.
Bethlehem PA 18018-5989
610-867-4741

"My sheep hear my voice, and I know them, and they follow me..." - John 10:27
Bishop Paul V. Marshall
Easter IVC - Trinity, Bethlehem

In 1951 when I was a four-year-old, my curiosity about things was as they say age-appropriate, and while my mother and grandmother were buying shoes, I wandered - not willfully but naturally - wandered away. Fascinated by my surroundings I wandered about half a block down Steinway Street in Long Island City, until it began to dawn on me that I didn't know where I was and that there were an awful lot of strange people around me. Even at four I was male enough not to ask for directions back to the shoe store, and my memory picture is of just standing there frozen in confusion and growing terror.

Well, you heard the gospel and the collect, so you know that what brought me back to life was the sound of a voice, my grandmother's voice, calling me a grandmotherly variant on my first name. I couldn't see her yet, but when I heard her voice I knew it would be all right. There is nothing worse than having a conversation with someone who doesn't know your name. Well, there is - having a conversation with someone whose name you can't remember, but you get the idea. It's why Jesus says that people who hear him call their name come to life. It would be a pretty big deal if the President knew your name and recognized you in a crowd. When the Son of God does it, you're not just important, you're alive. It worked for Lazarus. For each of us, especially on a day when we celebrate baptism and confirmation, a day when a wonderful priest named Laura Howell does us the honor of joining our church, hearing the Good Shepherd's voice brings great personal joy and peace.

But there is much more going on here, and it introduces a tension. Peter lets it slip in the Acts reading that everyone who responds to Jesus' voice receives his gifts. Revelation is not a book of future history, but an explosion of first-century special effects written to encourage persecuted Christians to hang in there. One of the ways it describes Christ's victory, and it does this repeatedly, is in the image of a heavenly throng made up of every tribe, nation, and family.

You can say then, from Day One, the religion of Jesus has been about breaking down the walls humans create to keep people in their places, to keep people away from the money and the power, to keep people away because they are different and frighten us.

That struggle has been inside the Church since day one, too, unfortunately. It's increasingly evident that the early Christians had women leaders, and as the church became more like the state, a stop was put to that. It is beyond argument that the first Christian community was split by ethnic jealousies - whose widows were getting the best deal - so the Apostles appointed deacons to make sure that the Church was just as well as compassionate. And so on. Even Saint Paul, who is self-contradictory on the relationship between the sexes, uttered the famous words that in Christ the differences between people disappear.

So the struggle the Church has had over the years is the struggle we have as individuals and communities. The self-preservation instinct runs amuck, and the commitment to inviting everyone to the kingdom of heaven has been accepted with the proviso that they should always keep in their places on earth.

There have been great disruptions in that notion that religion shouldn't interfere with keeping people in their places. Not many, but powerful. We are all familiar with the Reformation. The problem is that its revolutionary principles now reinforce a dogmatic conservatism that does not set lots of people free. Our society signed on to the Abolition of slavery, but we still have a long way to go in building a society that honors racial and ethnic diversity. In the last 120 years people with power have cut themselves enormous slack in terms sex, birth control, and divorce/re-marriage, while still managing to marginalize and disable gays and lesbians with the familiar tool of demonizing what frightens us.

John was a bit of a radical among New Testament writers. He saw the tendency to put things or structure between people and God, and so with the sheep hearing the voice, and the branches being directly attached to the vine, tried to get Christians to take direct responsibility for their relationship to God and for their place in the Church and the world.

Some of us have more mundane oppression and limitation to deal with, of course, but this Sunday is about hearing Jesus call you by name and knowing that his calling you to life in all its richness. It's about knowing it's ok to live life.

I don't know if this still happens anymore, but when I was young we knew people who got a little too concerned about protecting their living room carpet and furniture. Kids grew up hearing a parental voice in their head threatening all kinds of violence if they were caught in the living room. Not a lot of living was done in those living rooms.

The problem is that when you are a child, you not only obey parental instructions, especially if they are a little threatening - you will generalize from them. How many adults walk around thinking that it is basically ok for people to tell them not go into the best parts of life? Thinking it's basically ok for spouses to control each other by verbal abuse or worse, thinking it is ok to live in the shadows. Every time we treat rich people or famous people with more respect than we treat street people, we dig our own graves. And we don't know it. The idea here is not to find a rich person and be rude…

When the Good Shepherd calls your name, especially in baptism, confirmation and at each eucharist, that's permission to come into the living room. Encouragement to enjoy all that you have maybe put off because you didn't think you deserved to sit in the living room. As long as you say in the rec room, the family room, the closet or the kitchen, there is an extent to which life will pass you by.

The Good Shepherd's voice is about mission, too. Along with encouraging us to take all that life has to offer, Christ's voice calls us to share all that life has. That vision of all nations standing as equals at the heavenly throne challenges each of us to make sure that what we do and say will communicate to other people their value in God's sight and ours - and invite them into the living room of life. We will have a chance to renew that commitment in our baptismal covenant in just a few minutes.

We hear so many voices in our heads. Commercial jingles, the voices of parents, teachers, and lots of others - some of those voices belittle and defeat us. The single most important thing we can do in regard to today's lessons is to make room for one more voice, the voice that with love and great authority calls us by name - just the way we would want to hear it.

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Trinity Episcopal Church
44 East Market St.
Bethlehem PA 18018-5989
610-867-4741