May 11, 2025
Fourth Sunday of Easter – Year C – Bill Harkins
The Collect of the Day
O God, whose Son Jesus is the good shepherd of your people: Grant that when we hear his voice we may know him who calls us each by name, and follow where he leads; who, with you and the Holy Spirit, lives and reigns, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.
The Gospel: John 10:22-30
At that time the festival of the Dedication took place in Jerusalem. It was winter, and Jesus was walking in the temple, in the portico of Solomon. So the Jews gathered around him and said to him, “How long will you keep us in suspense? If you are the Messiah, tell us plainly.” Jesus answered, “I have told you, and you do not believe. The works that I do in my Father’s name testify to me; but you do not believe, because you do not belong to my sheep. My sheep hear my voice. I know them, and they follow me. I give them eternal life, and they will never perish. No one will snatch them out of my hand. What my Father has given me is greater than all else, and no one can snatch it out of the Father’s hand. The Father and I are one.”
In the name of the God of Creation who loves us all. Amen. Good morning, and welcome to Holy Family on this 4th Sunday of Easter and, of course, today we also celebrate Mother’s Day. The texts for today are full of rich images of green pastures, sheep and their shepherds, and deep, still waters. They are comforting images, for the most part. Sheepfolds, for example which form the context for this section of John’s Gospel, were located just inside or barely outside the village. Each evening all the sheep of the village would be herded into the common area, and their shepherds would take turns guarding the gate. When night fell and all was quiet and secure, the shepherd would lie down to rest at the opening of the sheepfold, becoming, as it were, the human gate for the sheep. Getting to the sheep required getting past the Shepherd. For all its limitations the metaphor of the Good Shepherd works in this sense. For like the shepherd, parents, grandparents, godparents, teachers, mentors, priests, and friends have “tended” us. Indeed, the word tend comes from the same Latin root—attendere—that gives us the word attend, and it means to pay attention, to care for, to minister, to “stretch out.” Think for a moment of those along the way who have “stretched out”—a wonderful term—to and for you. We all have such people in our lives. They have loved and taught and led and comforted and mentored us. They have tended to us by paying attention to us, by implication telling us that we matter. They have sought to prepare us for life. They demonstrated what Carl Jung would call maternal or feminine archetypes, though not all of them have been our biological mothers. And since this Sunday is also Mother’s Day, which we use as occasion to give thanks to God for all the women in our church, all those who have mothered and parented us. Understood metaphorically, not all of them have even been women. But all of them have provided for us what my colleagues in my clinical work call a “holding environment” out of which our true selves—the Divine spark given to each of us—can emerge. And in this safe context—not unlike a sheepfold—we internalize this care in such a way as to make it part of our narrative—our story. Teachers and professors, friends, coaches, colleagues …my maternal grandmother, my wife and sons, all have shepherded me, and all have helped me see the compassion and love at the heart of faith. In this context of care we discover, as Gerard Manley Hopkins said, our true voice “acting in God’s eye who in God’s eye we are.”
This is a life-long journey, one we share with the people of Israel who, after all, struggled for a home that they were always trying to find and get to, hold onto or get back to. They struggled for peace, for food, and for their faith in God. Psalm 23 was a cherished hymn for the Hebrews precisely because of the highs and lows of Israel’s history, their insatiable thirst on long desert journey’s, and their frequent rush down more manageable paths towards more manageable gods, which always led them into unmanageable trouble and lamentation. Then they would return to worship, and the story—the narrative—of their true selves as a people, would be told and retold. In a sense then, context is everything in relation both to the 23rd Psalm and the Gospel text for today. Many people I see in my clinical practice have no trouble finding green pastures. The problem is that next the pasture over so often seems so much greener, and they are scared of missing it. We are drawn to overflowing waters in our culture of abundance, yet we so often wander thirsty, as one country music writer put it, in all this rain. It is not surprising that so many of the psalms describe the disruptive experience of being lost and found, judged and forgiven, sent away, and brought back. It is all part of the pathos of a people who got scared and lost their way, and the high drama of a God who searches to find his lost sheep.
And we get so scared, do we not, when we are afraid there will not be “enough,” even when we aren’t quite sure what enough would look like, or even what it is we are afraid we will not have enough of. Each of us has been scared. Perhaps it took the form of an illness, a call from the Drs office or a loved one, a plummeting stock market, or a call from the police late at night. Perhaps it was a letter on the kitchen counter that said, “I’m not coming back,” or a pink slip one Friday afternoon. The shadow of the valley, like the Good Friday losses of our lives, can take infinite forms. I bear witness to them in my clinical practice, and in my own life, just as you have done so in yours. In his book “The Second Mountain: The Quest for a Moral Life,” David Brooks says that he has observed two kinds of people, and for both types, as he writes, for the first type…:
…Life had thrown them into the valley, as it throws most of us into the valley at one point or another. They were suffering and adrift…Some people are broken by this kind of pain and grief. They seem to get smaller and more afraid, and never recover. They get angry, resentful and tribal….But other people are broken open. The theologian Paul Tillich wrote that suffering upends the normal patterns of life and reminds you that you are not who you thought you were. The basement of your soul is much deeper than you knew. Some people look into the hidden depths of themselves and they realize that success won’t fill those spaces. Only a spiritual life and unconditional love from family and friends will do. They realize how lucky they are. They are down in the valley, but their health is O.K.; they’re not financially destroyed; they’re about to be dragged on an adventure that will leave them transformed.
In the Gospel for today we have a description not only of how Jesus relates to us, but how we are to relate to one another. In coming to one another Jesus is to be the way: In this same passage from John, Jesus says I have come to the sheep that they might have life and have it more abundantly. We are called to be in relation to one another as Jesus is in relation to us. This is how those who cared for us remain with us: we hold their voices inside us, and we remember that we have been seen, that others have “stretched out” for us. The shepherd could lead because the sheep could hear his voice, could see him moving steadily ahead of them, and they trusted him. Ultimately, of course, we are all called to be Shepherds, all called to create together a safe sheepfold—or holding environment—within which we are nurtured, sustained, and nourished. As David Brooks writes:
Joy involves the transcendence of self. When you’re on the second mountain, you realize we aim too low. We compete to get near a little sunlamp, but if we lived differently, we could feel the glow of real sunshine. On the second mountain you see that happiness is good, but joy is better.
Each semester for many years of teaching at Columbia and in the doctoral program we shared with Emory and ITC, we covered topics such as addiction, mental illness, psychology and religion, and family systems theory. Through each module the abiding image was that of the pastoral caregiver as a shepherd, and of staying in relationship in the service of a transcendence of self in commitment to the common good. We studied, and learned together, in order to remember that it is more important to be in right relationship than it is to be right, and we can love completely without complete understanding. As Richard Rohr has said so well;
There is no other form for the Christian life except a common one. Until and unless Christ is experienced as a living relationship between people, the Gospel remains largely an abstraction. Until Christ is passed on personally through faithfulness and forgiveness, through concrete bonds of union, I doubt whether he is passed on by words, sermons, institutions, or ideas.
This past week we observed the Feast Day of Julian of Norwich, whom our weekly women’s spirituality class has also been reading. She too, was a shepherd of a kind, helping us to re-imagine our images of God, just as one of my primary images of God is informed by my own maternal grandmother. To Julian of Norwich, feminine depictions of God were not radical, subversive, or rebellious. They were obvious, inevitable, and clear. She didn’t feel the need to defend her words, she simply wrote what was revealed to her in the visions: God has masculine qualities and God has feminine qualities. Both are important, and this is a non-dualistic opening of our relationship to the Living God.
Unfortunately, it’s not so easy for most of us. We are constantly filtering our theology through what we consider to be permissible. Unlike Dame Julian, we tend to defer to precedent rather than follow the nudging’s of our own souls. We sometimes trust those in authority more than we trust ourselves if, indeed, we are even given the opportunity to explore these narratives. But the witness of Julian of Norwich asks us to be brave; to dig deep within and experience God in our guts, not just in our churches; to engage our spiritual imaginations in the pursuit of a salvation that sets us free today—not just after we are gone from this world.
Engaging with the feminine face of God does not mean discarding the masculine one. Not only is there room for both in our spiritual imaginations but Julian of Norwich would argue that there’s room for both at the same time. Dame Julian approached gender binaries playfully, with a refreshing absence of precision. She repeatedly wrote things like “Jesus births,” “he mothers,” and “Jesus as both Son and Mother.” Amid our own discomfort and hesitancies, Julian of Norwich offers an ease, a gentle reassurance, that God is much larger than our finite brains can comprehend. This God we know and love—this God we have experienced—is big enough to hold it all. The question is, can we put aside our fears and prejudices and get on board with that? Can we allow Julian, and other good shepherds, to encourage us to use our imaginations to become, in the process, more fully alive.
Yes, bearing witness, stretching out, attending, feeding, sustaining, healing, guiding, making our voices be heard. These are the tasks to which we are called in community. As the Apostle John has written, we are children of God, made in God’s image, growing as we move on in faith. We do not know what wonders God has in store for us, but we do know we are called to listen, to hear God’s voice and follow God’s lead. So let us now come to the Table of Grace with hopeful hearts as we live into the Resurrection of our Lord Jesus Christ, and let all the people of God say, AMEN.
May 4, 2025
Third Sunday of Easter – Bill Harkins
The Collect
O God, whose blessed Son made himself known to his disciples in
the breaking of bread: Open the eyes of our faith, that we may behold him
in all his redeeming work; who lives and reigns with you, in the unity of the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever. Amen
The Gospel: John 21:1-19
Jesus showed himself again to the disciples by the Sea of Tiberias; and he showed himself in this way. Gathered there together were Simon Peter, Thomas called the Twin, Nathanael of Cana in Galilee, the sons of Zebedee, and two others of his disciples. Simon Peter said to them, “I am going fishing.” They said to him, “We will go with you.” They went out and got into the boat, but that night they caught nothing…This was now the third time that Jesus appeared to the disciples after he was raised from the dead…Jesus said to him, “Feed my sheep. Very truly, I tell you, when you were younger, you used to fasten your own belt and to go wherever you wished. But when you grow old, you will stretch out your hands, and someone else will fasten a belt around you and take you where you do not wish to go.” (He said this to indicate the kind of death by which he would glorify God.) After this he said to him,
April 27, 2025
Second Sunday of Easter – Year C – Bill Harkins
The Collect
Almighty and everlasting God, who in the Paschal mystery established the new covenant of reconciliation: Grant that all who have been reborn into the fellowship of Christ’s Body may show forth in their lives what they profess by their faith; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.
The Gospel: John 20:19-31
When it was evening on that day, the first day of the week, and the doors of the house where the disciples had met were locked for fear of the Judeans, Jesus came and stood among them and said, “Peace be with you.” After he said this, he showed them his hands and his side. Then the disciples rejoiced when they saw the Lord. Jesus said to them again, “Peace be with you. As the Father has sent me, so I send you.” When he had said this, he breathed on them and said to them, “Receive the Holy Spirit. If you forgive the sins of any, they are forgiven them; if you retain the sins of any, they are retained…”
In the name of the God of Creation who loves us all, Amen. “Blessed are those who have not seen, and yet have come to believe”. What powerful, mysterious words these are; made all the more remarkable when we think about Jesus’ disciples who,
April 20, 2025
Easter Sunday – Bill Harkins
The Gospel: John 20:1-18
Early on the first day of the week, while it was still dark, Mary Magdalene came to the tomb and saw that the stone had been removed from the tomb. So she ran and went to Simon Peter and the other disciple, the one whom Jesus loved, and said to them, “They have taken the Lord out of the tomb, and we do not know where they have laid him.” Then Peter and the other disciple set out and went toward the tomb. The two were running together, but the other disciple outran Peter and reached the tomb first. He bent down to look in and saw the linen wrappings lying there, but he did not go in. Then Simon Peter came, following him, and went into the tomb. He saw the linen wrappings lying there, and the cloth that had been on Jesus’ head, not lying with the linen wrappings but rolled up in a place by itself…
Birds flying high, you know how I feel
Sun in the sky, you know how I feel
Breeze driftin’ on by, you know how I feel
It’s a new dawn
It’s a new day
It’s a new life for me, yeah
It’s a new dawn
It’s a new day
It’s a new life for me,