Love Story In Harvard Watch Online
Xena Donovan
Hello. I guess it's worth naming that this is my first time preaching on a Sunday here in this church. And that it's maybe a little unusual that someone with my position of running Student Programming would be up here at all. I also think it's worth admitting that I find this really scary. There's a history and a weight, a pressure to this pulpit that I take very seriously, and I'm quite honored to be here. But there were many times in the past week when I really wished I hadn't decided it might be a good idea to challenge myself, as I stared down a blank piece of paper, wondering what I could possibly say up here in this, let's be real, ridiculously big, grand pulpit.
But as one of the pastors here, who I'm not not naming out of maintaining anonymity, but truly because I can't remember which one it was, said this to me, "The congregation knows you. Trust them and they'll trust you." Because it's true. Over the course of nearly three years of Sundays, you have learned my face and I have learned many of yours, and there's a trust, hopefully, here on both ends. We are in community together, and that can make putting yourself out there feel safer.
I think that's a little bit what the readings today are about, about knowing and being known. There's so much here about the joys of community and belonging, and what it can do for us, both for ourselves and for our relationships to the Divine. Both Jesus as the good shepherd, and the writer of 1st John, tell stories of communities of deep care and belonging. In the gospel, Jesus tells us that He is the Good Shepherd and we are His flock, and that the flock knows Him and He knows us. In 1st John, the writer affirms that our love and care for each other is an essential part of being a Christian, of showing our love for God. They even sort of do the work of crafting these communities through their storytelling. They really imagine their nascent communities into being. They give them shape by naming them and describing them.
I actually think that the ways in which we build, imagine, and craft our communities can be deeply sacred work. Life-giving, certainly life affirming, and also sacred. I think, for example, of queer kids growing up around the world, and the ways in which online communities can give them hope and belonging that they might not feel daily. I think of the early Christians too, and how their community was an act of creativity and imagination. A social experiment of who might be in community with each other that stretched beyond the boundaries of social norms at the time. Even in more fleeting moments, this sense of shared experience and belonging is deeply joyful.
I think of all the people who found themselves in the same place to watch the eclipse a few weeks ago, staring at the sky in awe. Faces turned up in unison to watch a wonder free of human interference. And you can totally laugh at this one, but I did spend all day Friday online and texting my friends when I probably should have been working on this sermon because Taylor Swift released a new album and there was a lot to unpack. Okay. The community created through something shared, whether it is the wonder of an eclipse, or an artist releasing something new into the world, is something I will always find deeply moving. But I wonder if we sort of know this already, right? If we know, of course, that community is rich, and powerful, and meaningful. The story of the Good Shepherd is so familiar, and we all know, hopefully, that we should love each other.
And so, the nagging part of my brain, that is either just inherently warped or took too many classes with Matt Potts in Div school kept asking, surely there must be something in these seemingly nice and simple texts that's actually a little sad and scary, right? Or perhaps another way of asking that is, what new stories can these texts tell us? What secrets might they still hold if we just poke at them a little bit?
Reading around the small excerpts we get in the lectionary, and placing the readings in the larger context of their books of the Bible tells a different less straightforward story. Both of these texts, with their messages of deep love and care, are actually born out of conflict. The pastoral story of the Good Shepherd comes at a time of great tension in John's gospel, when Jesus is indirect and near violent conflict with the religious leaders and the people around him.
You might not believe it, based on the excerpt we heard, but today's gospel story comes directly between attempts to stone Jesus. Jesus's metaphor that has lasted throughout the millennia and continues to hold deep meaning in the theologies and imagery of the church is, of course, spoken out of deep love for His followers. It also though, comes at a point of argument, out of a desire to distinguish Himself from the religious authorities and the perceived non-believers around Him with whom He is in conflict. As Jesus calls Himself the Good Shepherd, it is in contrast to those around Him with literal or figurative stones in their hands. The hired hands who would leave their flocks to the wolves.
And I don't know what it says about me, that I seek to problematize or complicate one of the most lovely pastoral pieces of imagery in the Gospels, but I think that knowledge of 2000 years of Christian history makes it kind of hard for me to take as fact any sort of division or drawing of strict lines between us and them in the Christian scriptures, between good and bad. Especially in John, with its often unflattering portrayals of the Jewish people.
And the first reading too is born out of conflict, this time internal. Scholars assess that there was some sort of internal schism that had happened amongst the followers at the time of its writing, probably around the divinity of Jesus. And that all of 1st John is a sort of rally the troops message to the community that remains. Something interesting I learned is that this is not technically an epistle. It's not a letter, really. It's not addressed to a person, or even a specific community, like most of the rest of them are. It was probably intended to be a more general address. Perhaps it took the form of a sermon, or a sort of pamphlet or essay. Dare I say, it might be most akin to a sort of blog post of antiquity. The writer is seeking to encourage and fortify his community, but as he's doing so, he's also implicitly drawing a sharp line between us and them in a way that makes me a little uncomfortable.
I know this might seem like a huge jump, but for me reading this, in the context of the book, it wasn't hard to imagine the 1st John writer as a modern blogger or podcaster spouting off about dissenters and how they should be excluded and how we are right, et cetera, et cetera. And notably, the opponents are totally relegated to the shadows in this text. Through the forces of history, we don't really know who they are. They don't get to speak. They remain mysterious, unnamed, and our modern brains don't really wonder about them. Just as we can imagine community, we can also construct imagined enemies. Because can't community and its imagined contours also harm and exclude, warp, and fester, and rot? I don't think all human association and gathering and counting oneself as a part of something bigger is always necessarily a good thing. A group of sheep is normally called a flock or a herd, but a particularly large one can also be called a mob.
I read something recently about a right-wing national organization of mothers who are waging battles in school districts across the country to ban books and take away rights for trans kids, teaching about race in schools. The list goes on and on. And I was kind of freaked out to learn that a lot of their organizing meetings are woven into community events like ice cream socials and candle making. I just found the idea of people chatting about what books to ban from their kids' libraries while they scoop ice cream or craft really chilling.
But clearly, there is community there, right? There's a sense of belonging, one that we all crave, and one that is increasingly hard to find in modern American life. We all wish to be known and understood, to feel a part of something, to make connections with our neighbors. For some, those connections are happening over banning books, or making life hellish for trans kids, all in the name of Christianity. In times of conflict or fear or perceived threat, there's a dark human tendency to draw inward. To close the windows and lock the doors, and I can't help but wonder at the hints of that in both of these readings.
So then it all returns to where it so often returns for me when it comes to the Bible. How do I carry this mantle, and do I want to? Do I really want to be a part of this flock if the sheep have, over the course of history, turned violent and hurt many other sheep? I know it's kind of annoying of me a little bit to pull and poke at all these threads, and just toss it up all in the air at once. Some might argue that's just sermon writing. These are a lot of questions. Ones that I'm sorry to admit I can't adequately answer in the time I have here and get everyone to coffee hour on time.
So then the really big question remains, as it always does when one throws a bunch of problematic paint at the wall in a sermon, what's the good news here? The text won't just abandon us. It's not going to just go away, and so we can't and shouldn't abandon it. I think in a lot of ways, this is the lifelong work of faith. A journey that always requires being able to see and face the negative while still always trying to seek the good. The text, I think, is in the corner over there with its hand raised, eager to speak. It wants to answer, and the answer maybe is to turn back, as we consistently must when engaging with scripture, to the deep love therein. The care described here, the community that we started with, I think that is where the inherent goodness lies.
So then what are we being called to in this text? I think maybe we're being called to the immediate, to the concrete, to a sort of deep, tangible love and care that roots deeper than imagined borders and boundaries. Not just Christian identity, for example, but maybe the community of this specific church. Not just an American, for example, but a citizen of your street, of your neighborhood, of your block.
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