All Saints’, Dorval
May 3, 2020
The 23rd Psalm is possibly the best-known passage of scripture in the world – certainly in the top three, along with John 3:16 and the Lord’s Prayer. It’s so familiar that we often sing a hymn paraphrase in its place, as we did today, and we have read it in different translations at many funerals and on other similar occasions.
But although we may associate Psalm 23 with the burial service, and imagine it as describing the life of the faithful after death, it is also a text with very definite relevance to our present-day life. God wants to be, and is, our shepherd right here and now, not just in some yet-to-be-determined future. As Jesus says in associating himself with the image of God as shepherd, “I came that they may have life, and have it abundantly.”
But what does “abundant life” truly mean?
In the past couple of months, as life has been pared down to its bare essentials, we have had the chance to ask ourselves that question in a new and more pointed way. Forced to slow down and examine our daily lives, people have turned to sourdough bread, sewing masks, and planting gardens. We are realizing the fundamental importance of relationships with those we love, of health, of making things and watching things grow. And just perhaps, we are coming to understand that the frenzy of work and consumption that characterized our lives before, was not the way things inevitably are, but something we can choose to change.
After all, we’ve done it before. Our reading from Acts this morning tells us that in the early days of the church, when there were only a few thousand Christians in the entire world, “All who believed were together and had all things in common; they would sell their possessions and goods and distribute the proceeds to all, as any had need”. It’s a lot easier to have “all things in common” if you just don’t have that much stuff in the first place, and your life is focused elsewhere, perhaps on prayer, or helping others, or making art, or learning and teaching.
This is true human flourishing: not the accumulation of stuff, but the accumulation of love and connection and growth.
And this true human flourishing also makes room for the flourishing of all that is not human. In heartwarming and hilarious ways, the sudden absence of humans from much of the world’s surface is allowing nature to come back: the Himalayas, usually veiled by smog, are visible from the Indian lowlands; a record number of sea turtles have hatched on Brazilian beaches; and of course there’s that Welsh town that has been taken over by wild goats.
As the writer and activist Barbara Kingsolver said this week,
On the 50th anniversary of Earth Day, here’s a dispatch from an earth I never imagined: Airplanes grounded, everybody staying home, teleconferencing, cooking, learning to make do with less. Planting gardens, even. Skies clearing, fossil fuel an untouchable commodity.
Wow. This could be great, only it’s terrible. I’m heartbroken right now …
But look at us now. Doing really hard things, for the protection of the elderly, and maybe ourselves. Doesn’t it seem possible we could extend this same regard to our imperiled children and the future? …
I’m shaken to my core but I am looking to the trees, watching the world wake up to another spring. Every living species other than people is carrying on, untouched, undaunted. It helps.
Obviously, Pandemic Reality is not truly healthy or sustainable. We need to be able to go to work, to hug each other, to ride the metro and go to the theatre and meet for a cup of coffee. We need to be able to “break bread together with glad and generous hearts” in person, not just over Zoom. But there are deep and important lessons to be learned here, about what human flourishing – and the flourishing of all creation – looks like, and how we can be followers of the Good Shepherd in this life as well as the life to come.
God’s will for us is not that we suffer – either from social isolation and the attendant loss of livelihood, or from the exhaustion and overconsumption, the inequality and oppression, that were our reality before the pandemic.
We may encounter suffering; in fact, we surely will, and we are doing so now. And our reading from the first letter of Peter encourages us to bear suffering with patience, to learn from it, and not to perpetuate the cycle of abuse by lashing out and inflicting our suffering on other innocent people. But God does not inflict gratuitious suffering on us to teach us a lesson.
God’s will for us is to come in and go out and find pasture: good, green pasture, the kind that nourishes and sustains. God’s will for us is for our cups to overflow with all the really good things in life, the things that can be cultivated and shared infinitely without anyone getting less. Our basic needs met without harming the earth; meaningful work to do; loving relationships; and the use of our minds to think, our imaginations to dream, and our hands to serve. And of course the love of God, our Good Shepherd, expressed in the apostles’ teaching and fellowship, the breaking of bread, and the prayers.
We are living through a time of unexpected transformation in human life. As with any transformation, it is painful and it is productive. We do not know where our Shepherd is leading us. But we know that he came to give us abundant life. And if we learn to recognize and follow his voice, and not the voice of the stranger, we will go in and come out, and find the pastures that will restore our souls.
Amen.
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