Monthly Archives: June 2017

Feed My Sheep

Posted on by
Reply

AndrewPreaching1In the final chapter of John’s Gospel, Jesus asks Peter three times: “Simon son of John, do you love me?” Peter has to answer three times that he loves Jesus and then listen to Jesus tell him three times: “Feed my sheep.” (Jn. 21: 15-17) This three-fold question and response is commonly interpreted as Peter undoing his three-fold betrayal of Jesus in the court of the high priest. I agree, but with the caveat that Peter’s betrayal goes further back. At Gethsemane, when Jesus had been seized by the temple police, Peter drew a sword and cut off the right ear of one of the high priest’s servants. This may look like loyalty to most people, but not to Jesus, who said: “Put your sword back into its sheath. Am I not to drink the cup that the Father has given me?” (Jn. 18: 11) That is, Peter had betrayed what Jesus really lived for and was about to die for. As he had at Caesarea Philippi, Peter had acted as a “satan,” a stumbling block to Jesus’ commitment to non-violence, even at the cost of his life. In declaring his love for Jesus three times, Peter declared his love for what Jesus lived for and died for. It is with this love that Peter was told to feed his sheep.

Paul, whom we also celebrate today, is famous for his conversion experience. Like Peter, Paul had to repent of the violence he had committed in what he thought was in the service of God. The voice from Heaven on the road to Damascus told Paul that he was actually persecuting God by persecuting the followers of Jesus. After hearing this voice, Paul realized that, like his fellow Pharisees denounced by Jesus, he had been committing the social violence of heaping burdens on people and not lifting a finger to lift them. With Paul, this social violence had exploded into physical violence against those very people on whom these burdens had been imposed. (Mt. 23: 4) The voice of Heaven converted Paul into being a lifter of heavy burdens from others so that he and those he preached to could embrace the gift of forgiveness Jesus bestowed on him when he drank the cup given by his heavenly Abba and allowed his Abba to raise him from the dead.

Peter and Paul are often posed as opposites, even antagonists, but they are united in one most important thing: both ministered out of their conversion from violence to living by the free gift of God’s mercy grounded in the cross. Out of their conversions, they preached whether “the time [was] favorable or unfavorable.” (2 Tim 4: 2) In doing so, both of their lives were “poured out as a libation” (2 Tim. 4: 6) as they tended the heavenly Abba’s sheep with special care for the sick and the wounded. In the end, both were led away to where they did not wish to go (Jn. 21: 18) but ended up winning “the crown of righteousness.” (2 Tim. 4: 8) If we are to follow these two great saints, we, too, must hear the voice of Jesus warning us of the violence we commit or benefit from and be converted so that we, too, can feed Jesus’ sheep.

Living the Mystery of the Trinity

Posted on by
Reply

lakeGray1The Trinity is often presented as a puzzle: How can one be three and three be one? Mathematicians haven’t come up with any answers to that, so let’s treat the Trinity as a mystery to live, not a puzzle to solve. After all, it was through living the Mystery that the apostles preached a Triune God.

The mystery begins at Creation. The Breath of God breathes on the primordial waters and the Word of God calls the world into being. Then, God breathes God’s own life into the first human made out of wet clay.

Think about it a moment. Having been made out of the clay of the earth, we are each called to life by a silent voice that resonates deeply within us with God’s Desire, and the Breath of the same God enlivens us with that same Desire.

Of course, we don’t remember either the Call or the Breath. We emerge into life with forgetfulness, quickly falling prey to anger and anxiety, even though the Call and the Breath continue without ceasing. In daily life, we use memory to refer to remembering things such as appointments, how to do things, and what books we’ve read. But the great mystical writers in Christianity such as St. Augustine and St. John of the Cross use the word “memory” to refer to recollecting ourselves in the Memory of God who Calls us and Breathes in us. That is, memory, this deeper memory, is recollection in the Trinity. If we stop and think, we might hear the still small voice of this inner memory calling us and breathing in us. If we are fortunate enough to have people in our lives who take time to remember deeply, our own deeper memory is quickened.

At the end of Matthew’s Gospel, Jesus commands his disciples to “go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit” (Mt. 28: 19) In itself, this admonition sounds abstract but, as St. Paul explains, the baptism of which Jesus speaks is a baptism into Jesus’ death and Resurrection. (Rom. 6) That is, we are baptized into the death of the Word that Calls us into being when the Word was killed by angry and anxious people like us and brought back to life by the quickening Breath that inspires us to understand, in the depths of our own desires, the Desire that lead the Word that calls us to do such a thing for our sakes.

Most of us don’t remember being baptized any more than we remember being created. I don’t, having been baptized as an infant. But even for those whose baptism is a memory in the lesser sense, we have to remember in the deeper sense, the mystery of our redemption in the same way that we must remember the mystery of our creation. Again, the deeper memory is grounded in the work of the Trinity in our lives. For St. Augustine, Psalm 42 points to this mystery: “Deep calls to deep at the thunder of your cataracts;.” (Ps. 42: 7)

If we puzzle over the numbers, we miss the adventure of the mystery of living deeply in the memory of the Trinity calling us and breathing through us out of the depth of the Godhead. This is a mystery we need to live each day as we live in a world where so much anger and anxiety pull us towards forgetfulness. But if “the grace of the Lord Jesus Christ, the love of God, and the communion of the Holy Spirit” is with all of us as St. Paul affirms in his closing words to the Corinthians, then we will “agree with one another [and] live in peace.” (2 Cor. 13: 11-13) And, we will preach this deeper memory to others by the way we live our lives.