Jack Hardaway
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What connects us?
What divides us?
What holds us together? What are the ties that bind?
What abides and what fades?
Like many others these questions have been on mind more than usual for quite some time now.
Our country, like most of the world, has become very aware of just how fragile those connections can be, especially when we forget what we all hold in common.
It doesn’t take much these days to turn normal days into nightmares of anger and grief and fear for our common future.
And there are those who count on that, the predators and opportunists who create and seize opportunities to profit from breaking us apart. Wolves scattering and snatching the sheep.
Old Scratch. The Prince of Lies. The Tempter. The Devil has been having a hay day finding easy prey to bend toward harming others. It doesn’t take much, a bad fraught filled moment, to set off so much enduring harm.
Community is precious, and fragile, especially when we forget what we hold in common.
The Gospel according to John. John’s community was grappling with these same questions, grasping for the ties that bind.
We hear John message of ironic hope this morning.
In John’s Gospel Jesus is the great division, the moment of judgement.
There are those who believe, and those who reject.
Those who worship Jesus as the full and unique divinity of God incarnate, risen from death, and those who reject Jesus as something less, or something malignant.
John’s Gospel has often appealed to those who like to build walls and emphasize the division between the saved and the damned.
But they miss John’s message of ironic hope.
Jesus is the one who brings division. The irony is that he is also the one who brings us all together. The Good Shepherd. None of the sheep are lost.
The Good Shepherd.
The tie that binds.
Greater than the division.
The Good News of God’s irony.
The one who divides us is the one who unites us.
The one who is broken is the one who makes us whole.
The one who dies is the one who lives.
The Shepherd we reject is the Good Shepherd who gathers and saves the flock.
There is a divine humor to the salvation story.
The Good News of God’s irony.
Salvation is inevitable according to the Good Shepherd. The Shepherd won’t stop.
And damnation is impossible. The Shepherd won’t stop.
Goodness. The Goodness of the Good Shepherd. The goodness and mercy of God follows us all the days of our life. We are pursued.
I had a Good Shepherd moment the other day. A mama possum was in my backyard with two little baby possums clinging to her back. One kept falling off. The mama would slowly amble back to the fallen babe and it would cling again, grasping to her neck, tumbling and flipping around her neck like a necklace of acrobats, as they moseyed on by.
The Good Mother Possum, guarding and tending her young, leaving no one behind.
The tie that binds us is God’s undaunted, stubborn as a bent nail, persistent, undauntable, unstoppable, stampeding, avalanching love.
The Good Shepherd is so much bigger, so much gooder, than the demonic and the predators who feast on our divisions.
It is the Gospel of ironic hope, God won’t be stopped, turning our darkness into light, our rejection into acceptance, our division into unity.
God is like a mother possum, ambling along, stopping and picking us up as we tumble to the ground.
What unites?
What divides?
Jesus divides and unites.
The divine irony, turning division into unity.
The tie that binds, eternal, inevitable, indomitable.
Be that tie, binding the world back together.
Like mother possums.
Like good shepherds.
Be God’s ironic hope.
The worse things get, the brighter God shines.
The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not overcome it.