Cat Goodrich
Faith Presbyterian Church
Baltimore, MD

April 25, 2021
Sheep
John 10:11-18; Psalm 23

It’s wonderful to hear a different translation of that beloved Psalm, isn’t it?  The varied words and phrasing help us notice different images, to hear the promise of God’s care and concern in a new way.  Your beauty and love chase after me every day of my life, isn’t that a lovely way to put it?  This Sunday is called the Sunday of the Good Shepherd – one of the many ways we characterize and understand the identity and ongoing work of the risen Christ.  It’s also the Sunday after Earth Day, and the verdant imagery and pastoral scenes of the 23 Psalm feel appropriate.

During the past year of pandemic, we humans have coped with isolation and stress by getting outside as much as we can.  Parks and other public spaces have gotten more use than ever.  Suddenly untethered from an office, many found they could work wherever there is a wi-fi signal – and so city dwellers fled to smaller towns, and some even to rural places, where they could roam, hike, climb, camp and play outside during their off-hours.  In many ways, this is great for our mental health and for the environment – more people enjoying the great outdoors hopefully means more people willing to work to protect and preserve it.

But there’s been an unfortunate and perhaps predictable phenomenon to accompany this increase in outdoor adventuring, which is – a dramatic increase in the number of calls to search and rescue groups.  When ill-prepared and unseasoned hikers get hurt, get lost, or otherwise need help getting out of wilderness places, search and rescue are often the ones who get called.  It’s problematic because these operations are largely run by volunteers, who cover huge amounts of territory on a shoestring budget to begin with.  The influx of new and reckless adventurers needing help has pushed them past their limits.  Now, don’t get me wrong: I’ve gotten lost while hiking a few times – both lost the trail for a minute lost, and really lost – like rescued by firefighters with bloodhounds lost – and it can be scary.  I’m not one to point fingers.  But reading an article about this phenomenon a few weeks ago, I had to shake my head – we humans!  We think we’re invincible!  When really, it is so easy to just ignore a blaze and step off a trail, miss a turn, trip and fall, or otherwise get into real trouble out there.

A retired pastor in my former presbytery got lost a few years ago in the Sipsey Wilderness in Bankhead National Forest in Alabama.  A faulty map led him off course, and he ended up wandering for four days and three rainy nights before he was rescued by a formidable search and rescue operation: a collaboration between county sheriffs, firefighters, worried Presbyterians, and even some Mennonites from Tennessee.  He said for the first day or two, he was mostly embarrassed for getting lost in the first place – worried about how worried his wife would be, and upset with himself for not being better prepared.  As time passed, he became exhausted and hungry; his wet pants chafed his legs and rubbed them raw.  He got stuck in a ravine, and mostly was just ready to be rescued.  He was a very good sport about the experience, which was covered breathlessly by local news – and still felt a little sheepish about it after it was over.  But the truth is, all of us have gotten a little lost at one time or another.

And I wonder if that’s why the image of the Good Shepherd is so compelling for us.  Beyond the bucolic idea of a nap in a green pasture by a clear stream, it’s reassuring to think of God as one who seeks us out, even and especially when we’ve fallen down, lost our way, and need a little help getting back up.  As one who carries a rod to fend off lurking predators and a staff to pull us out of the brush when we trip and fall.

Now it won’t surprise you that I’ve not spent a lot of time around sheep, growing up in a small city of around 300,000 people.  I knew farmers, sure, but they mostly grew cotton.  Apparently, sheep tend to get into trouble every now and then, and it’s the job of the shepherd to help them out.  The most sheep I’ve ever seen were in the Scottish Hebrides, dotting the beautiful wild countryside as I hiked around the Isle of Mull near Iona.  From a distance, they look fluffy – soft – sweet.  Closer up, though, it’s a different story.  Up close, sheep can be filthy!  Their wool holds dirt, branches, and bracken like a sponge.  They smell.  And they can be noisy.  Just a few words Biblical commentators wrote about sheep: stupid, aimless, vulnerable.  They’re passive, easily startled, and always hungry.  They tend to wander off and get lost easily.  And yet again and again in scripture, we humans, we beautiful faithful people, we children of God … are compared with sheep!

What do we make of this?  Maybe it’s not so bad.

We are a little like sheep sometimes.  In theory, people are beautiful.  Wonderful!  Brilliant!  Compassionate!  Up close and personal – we are complicated.  Messy.  Sometimes a little bit stupid.  Sometimes a little bit stinky.  Painfully vulnerable.  Aimless.  Easily startled.  Always hungry.  And some of us… do get lost easily.  And so this depiction of God who can work with that, who seeks us out despite our messy, stinky, sheepishness – it’s comforting.

Psalm 23 paints an image of God who knows us personally, and accompanies, guides, and cares for us… who finds safe space for us to rest and be restored, who sets an abundant table for us, protects us from enemies, and showers us with love and mercy… This is a psalm of thanksgiving for all the ways God is present to the psalmist.  I don’t know about you, but this is not always my experience of God.  In fact, the world in which we live, where children go hungry, and those charged with protecting us don’t always make us safer, and guns proliferate, and those on the margins suffer, and the virus threatens to undo us … It can feel like we are on our own in the darkest valley with no guide, no one to fend off evildoers, nothing but our wits to save us.

It helps me to know that though many Psalms are balanced – in that they contain both lament and praise, cries for help and thanksgiving – this one is not.  Instead, it is preceded by a psalm of deep lament, the psalm Jesus quotes from the cross – My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?  Why are you so far from me, from the sounds of my groaning?  So perhaps the intimate care and concern, the calm pastoral provision of the 23^rd Psalm is the psalmist’s answer to the powerful lament and pain of the 22^nd… which tells us that the life of faith invariably moves between both places – times of feeling God’s care and provision to times that feel like complete abandonment.  From the pit of despair to an abundant table, a cup brimming with blessing.  And the promise inherent in these ancient writings is that wherever you find yourself… it’s okay.  God is still God, the shepherd who walks with us through the darkest valley, whose goodness and grace chase after us, seeking to find us wherever we are.

The pastor who got lost in the Sipsey Wilderness spent the first few days and nights walking, constantly walking, trying to find his way back to the trail.  In retrospect, that was one of his mistakes.  He didn’t give the people who were looking for him a chance to find him, because he was always on the move.  Had he found a spot to sit tight and trust that someone was searching for him, and if he waited they would find him, he probably would have been found much earlier.

We do this, don’t we?  Struggle and struggle, trying so hard to make it on our own, walking without stopping to rest, pressing on in the face of problems without asking for help, convinced we have to save ourselves.

But God calls us into community, gives us to one another, so that we can help each other.  That requires a bit of vulnerability… to feel perhaps a little sheepish and say – I’m struggling with this.  Can you help?

For me, that’s how the shepherd shows up most often: in and through the people around us, who help us find our way, who remind us that we are welcome and loved, who help to set an abundant table, and who make space for those who might be left out.  And I believe this is the calling for we who seek to follow the one who calls himself the Good Shepherd: to give our lives for and to one another, trusting in God to lead us and guide us even through the darkest valleys, to restore our souls when we are weary, and to pursue us with goodness and mercy every step of the way.

Cat Goodrich
Faith Presbyterian Church, Baltimore, MD
April 18, 2021

I believe… help my unbelief!
Luke 24:36-48

There is a place that I have missed during the pandemic, somewhere I haven’t really thought about for a long time that I used to go fairly regularly… a place that probably looks pretty different these days.  That’s the arrivals lobby of an airport.  Dary used to travel frequently for work, visiting farmers and producers, so it was a place I was fairly familiar with.  The one I picture is in Atlanta, and the Hartswell-Jackson International Airport there – but I can also envision the one at Boston Logan, in Portland, and Asheville – you probably can see a few in your mind’s eye, too.  In Atlanta, there are long escalators leading up to the baggage claim area, and there always used to be a throng of people at the top, waiting for their friends and loved ones.  It’s one of my favorite things to see people greet each other there.  Almost everyone is clearly delighted – relieved, excited, overjoyed.  People wave their arms and jump up and down, shake hands, cheer, kiss, clap, hug and squinch their eyes closed, patting each other on the back, saying, “Ahhhhh!  Welcome!  I’m so glad you’re here!  I missed you!”

Waiting there, in the ATL, there were for many years USO volunteers who would staff a cheering section for arriving service members, coming home for holiday or arriving for training.  People in desert fatigues, loaded down with gear, weary and stoic, greeted by riotous applause at the top of the escalator.  It was moving.

Stand there long enough and you see the same scene replay over and over again – different families, different faces, various configurations of parents and children and friends, sometimes with animals and always awkward with luggage.  And the joy!  And the tears!  So much hugging!  There is a moment or two, after the person I’m waiting for arrives, particularly if the trip is much anticipated or the separation has been long, when I am struck with a feeling of disbelief: I can’t believe you’re finally here!  I’ve been waiting for you for so very long.  I’ve missed you.  A moment when you have to pinch yourself to make sure you’re not dreaming.

As friends and loved ones get vaccinated, maybe you’ve felt this way even outside of an airport – seeing someone, hugging them, sharing a meal for the first time in forever.  You can hardly believe it’s really happening.

That must have been how the disciples felt when Jesus came and stood among them after his death.  Imagine the initial shock of seeing him, the frisson of fear that must have run up their spines; see them rubbing their eyes and scratching their heads as he invites them to touch him, to feel that he is real, really there, somehow, despite their grief, and the fear that led them to lock the door to that upper room in the first place.  I wonder if, as the smiles broke over their faces and they stood there with him, they, too, were struck with a feeling of utter disbelief.  My favorite line of this passage – “in their joy they were disbelieving and still wondering, so he said to them, ‘do you have anything to eat?’”

That’s wonderful, isn’t it?  Jesus shows up, improbably having conquered death, he is hungry!  In the gospel of John the risen Christ fries fish on the beach.  He breaks bread in Emmaus.  And here, in Luke, he improbably appears to find his friends who are still gripped by grief and guilt and though they are overjoyed to see him, they are also not sure what to believe – he was dead, after all, and now he is alive again.  And so he asks them for a snack!

There is a picture that was shared recently in a mom’s group I am part of, of Beyonce at the Grammy Awards with her daughter, Blue Ivy.  Beyonce is dressed up – she’s just walked the red carpet – with a fabulous hat and superstar sunglasses and silver earrings that dangle past her shoulders.  Blue Ivy is little, about 5 or 6 years old, eating a snack.  And her mom, the Queen Bey, one of the most celebrated bestselling artists of all time, winner of 28 grammy awards, is patiently holding her snacks – a bag of goldfish and a juice box.  Did Beyonce sneak the snacks in special pockets in her ball gown?  As a mom, whose children go through each day from one snack to the next, it’s reassuring to me that even Beyonce has to travel heavily snacked.

Apparently, the disciples do, too.  They should, of course, know this by now.  They’ve learned this on the mountainside when faced with a crowd of thousands of hungry people and Jesus told them, “You give them something to eat.”  And again when he broke bread and gave it to them, saying, take, and eat – do this and remember me.  When Christ is around, hungry people get fed, and the disciples are the ones to do it.

It was vitally important to the early church that Jesus ate and drank with his followers after the resurrection.  Important because it meant that his body – his real, physical body – was alive again, resurrected by the power of God.  He wasn’t a ghost, or a spirit, some ephemeral trick of the light or a collective delusion.  In a moment, we’ll affirm our faith using the words of the Scots Confession, written as the foundational document for the church of Scotland in the mid 16^th century.  It’s a favorite of my former colleague, Shannon Webster, a scholar of the Reformation and lover of all things Scottish – including Scotch.  The confession attests that the resurrection was confirmed, “by the testimony of his angels, and by the senses and judgment of his apostles and of others, who had conversation, and did eat and drink with him after his resurrection.”  He always got a little choked up when reading that part.

What does that mean for us?  What does it matter that Christ was actually, physically present with his disciples after the resurrection?  Tradition tells us that it is a testimony to the goodness of creation.  That the universe created by God’s word and proclaimed good at the beginning, is indeed redeemed and wholly and completely good in and through Christ’s life, death, and resurrection.  And it means that bodies – our bodies – are not merely an inconvenience, they aren’t something to be ashamed of.  Bodies are not just bags of flesh and bones and blood we shouldn’t wait to shuffle off along with our mortal coil.  Our bodies are precious.  They matter to God.  We matter to God.  In all our imperfections, our wrinkly eyes and creaky knees, our strengths and weaknesses, our wounds and the scars they leave behind – all of it is precious, worthy of the new life Christ offers.  Bodies, our bodies are created good just as they are, we are worth saving.  The bodies of old people are precious and worth saving.  The bodies of transgendered kids in Arkansas and Mississippi and everywhere else are precious and worthy of belonging, the bodies of black boys in Chicago and Minnesota and everywhere else are precious and worth protecting, the bodies of men and women and nonbinary folk are precious and good and worthy of redemption in our homes and workplaces and on the street – and it is the will of God that we be safe, and protected, and fed, and valued, and allowed to flourish in every one of those places, every single one, all of us.

The risen Christ tells us that faith in the redemptive power of the resurrection is not just a thought exercise. Belief is not just a mental ascription, a box to check and be done with it.  Faith is a physical, real, lived experience.  It is embodied – the feeling of shock and joy when we realize that life after death is possible.  It is men and women terrified together in an upper room, daring to believe the impossible, seeing their friend and teacher again, eating and drinking and laughing with them again.  In their joy they are disbelieving and wondering – how could this be true?  But somehow, by the power of God, it is.

Their testimony tells us that when we eat and drink together, when we feed the hungry, he shows up among us.  The life-giving power of God becomes embodied, in and through us.  When we honor one another’s created goodness, when we stand and serve and seek to protect the bodies of those who are most vulnerable, bodies that are criminalized and dehumanized, he shows up with wounded hands and feet, offering peace, sharing the healing power of God.  We might not believe it possible.  We might be gripped by our grief and mired in doubt that the world will ever change.  But still, he appears, even to us.  Helping us have faith that with God, all things are possible.  Thanks be to God.

 

 

 

 

 

Cat Goodrich
Faith Presbyterian Church, Baltimore, MD
April 4, 2021

While it is still dark…
John 20:1-18

There is a pandemic image from last May that has stayed with me:

A health care worker – a nurse, I think – was hugging her mom, through a shower curtain.  Face turned to the side, still masked and gloved and wearing a protective gown.  Her mother blurred and indistinct on the other side of the plastic.  Awkward and uncomfortable but still, hugged.  Held.  It brings to mind also the number of visits that have happened through glass or at a distance, at nursing homes and retirement communities and back yards.  We’ve been desperate to see our loved ones, but we don’t want to put them at risk.

As we packed up and got ready to move to Baltimore this past June, a friend came over with rain ponchos to send us off.  As she came onto my porch she tossed one to me and said: “here, put this on, you’re not leaving town without a hug!”

One of the harder and more awkward adjustments for the pandemic has been around human proximity: the change to how close we are able to get to one another, and how dangerous it became to touch each other.

When Mary recognizes Jesus in the garden, when she sees him and he says her name and the lights turn on and she realizes it’s him – Heavens, she runs to him, arms held out wide, ready to envelop him, to cling for dear life to this friend who had been lost, broken, dead and gone, but was alive again!

But no.

Don’t hold on to me, Mary, he says.

Why not?  Was the cold stench of death and decay still clinging to his clothes?  Was it the mysterious incorporeal nature of his risen body?  Is he afraid they’ll be seen by the guards?  Or does he have somewhere to be?  Does she?

Whatever it is, she can’t hold onto him.  Can’t hug him just one last time.

We can understand the pain of that separation, it feels close to the heart of our own suffering, the mystery of what we’ve survived over the past year.  We’ve endured 14-day quarantines, suffered sickness alone. Everyone who has had to be in the hospital this year and had to do it alone, Cathy and Ann and Sandra and Andy and Doris and Mike and Maddy and whoever else – alone and apart from your people.  Everyone who got the virus or were exposed and forced to stay apart, alone, waiting to heal.  Going without hugs when you probably needed them most.

We understand why Mary, when she saw Jesus, the rabbi she loved, the man she’d left everything to follow, the friend she’d seen humiliated, his body broken and desecrated, and left for dead, when she saw through her tears that he was alive again she wanted to hug him, hold him, my God never let him go!

She hadn’t gone to the garden expecting that.  She’d gone early in the morning, while it was still dark.  Feeling her way along the road, stepping quietly and carefully through the grass wet with dew.  She’d gone expecting to find the tomb closed and cold, she’d gone wrapped in her grief, expecting death.

I can understand that, can’t you?  We know enough about the world to know not to expect anything different.  The dead stay dead.  The poor stay poor, the wheel keeps turning, the violence keeps churning, the power keeps pressing, the broken keeps breaking. And on and on.

In Myanmar, more than 550 people have been killed by the military since the coup two months ago, at least 40 of them children.[1]  One of them, a ten-year-old girl, with a slice of fresh coconut, ran down her front walk in the late afternoon sun and fell to the ground, dead, shot while her father stood by, helpless.[2]  The violence meant to intimidate.  To suppress.  To maintain power and control.

Over the past month, in Arizona and Texas, New Mexico and California, our government apprehended more than 18,000 children who crossed our southern border alone,[3] housing them in overcrowded shelters that look a lot like the ones the last administration used, with kids sleeping on cots under silver mylar blankets, separated into fenced cages.  In one facility, a nine-year-old boy helped care for his three-year-old sister, terrified and alone, while DHS and HHS try to figure out what to do with them.

If Easter is trumpets and triumph, joy and hope, it seems like the world hasn’t gotten the message.  Because near and far, no matter where we look, no matter who we ask, suffering sneaks in.  Violence and death are real and unavoidable.  Tragedy does not discriminate.  Especially after the year we’ve just had, we know to expect death!

We know what it is to walk while it is still dark.  To feel our way carefully, quietly, without making a sound.  We do that every day.

And yet, today we proclaim that there was a time when death did not win.  A heart still for 36 hours began to beat again; a body bruised and battered and seemingly defeated by Jerusalem’s finest breathed and rose up and went on with its work.  There was a time when the powers and principalities did not get what they wanted – because early in the morning, while it was still dark, Mary went to the tomb and saw that the stone had been rolled away.  She was met first by angels, and then by her risen Lord.

And though she sees him through the fog of her grief, her eyes clouded with tears, when he says her name, she recognizes him.

I imagine many of us have wondered –

is it true?  Could it possibly be true?

To be honest, I don’t know.  None of us can ever really know.  We can only hope.

I do know that I’ve seen resurrection.  I’ve felt it.  I’ve read about it.  I’ve lived it.  Maybe you have, too.

In Myanmar, there is a new kind of protest happening.  Creative, nonviolent resistance springing up amongst young people who refuse to capitulate to military control, Gen Z, the “generation of pop-up and work-around is joined also by many others” a poet describes the resistance:

“Every night is the “metal bucket protest,”

fifteen minutes of banging pots and pans.

Too short to pinpoint the homes,

and too traditional,

after all, it is

the way to drive out evil spirits.

Ten cars stop in the road, open their hoods,

tell police they’ve broken down –

traffic grinds to a halt.

A bride in a wedding dress

holds a sign telling the world

she doesn’t want her babies

to grow up under martial law.

And students cross the streets

with bags of onions,

except [the bags have] holes in them.

Cars stop,

while they pick up and bag again,

pick up and bag again –

onions, the same ones,

over and over again.”

The poet writes, “I am praying for Myanmar

in the midst of this terrible coup,

and my heart fills

with their tremendous courage –

today these onions do not make me cry.”

While it is still dark in that country, there is a powerful force at work in the hearts of ordinary people who are finding the courage to resist.  To stop traffic, and clog ports, and shut down commerce to say, “not again, not here, not on our watch.”

I wonder if Mary could not hold on to Jesus’ resurrected body because it was different somehow than it was before.  Changed by the trauma of crucifixion and death.  Transformed as new life was breathed into it while it was still dark.  Because while it was still dark,

God was at work.

And while it was still dark,

God is at work,

And while it is still dark,

God calls us to get to work, too!

After Mary recognizes him, Jesus sends her to tell the others what she has seen. We’ve heard the story now, too.  So it’s our job to go, and tell the good news of Jesus Christ, the son of God.  To show up in new and creative ways for each other.  What would it look like for 18,000 churches to open our doors and our homes to those 18,000 children, to say to our government – here, let us help house and feed and clothe them as we look for their aunties and uncles and primos y primas and seek to reunite them with their family here in the states.  If while it is still dark, we joined together to creatively resist evil, to bring forth new life.  Because the good news of Easter is that God is taking on the powers of this world, defeating death, and calling us to build the kingdom here and now.  Though it is still dark, God is calling us to rise up, to practice resurrection with unmitigated joy and unrelenting hope- Because Christ is risen!  He is risen indeed.

[1] Beech, Hannah, “She just fell down.  And she died.” The New York Times, April 4, 2021, https://www.nytimes.com/2021/04/04/world/asia/myanmar-coup-deaths-children.html?action=click&module=Top%20Stories&pgtype=Homepage

[2] Ibid.

[3] Ainsley, Julia, “A record number of unaccompanied children crossed the border in March,” NBC News,  https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/immigration/record-number-unaccompanied-children-crossed-border-march-n1262901.