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Spiritual Sunday
With our regular rector Rob Lamborn on sabbatical, we are fortunate to have a former English major taking his place. Fortunate, that is, because Scott Lee draws heavily on literature in what has been a series of memorable sermons. Two weeks ago Scott used a poem from one of T.S. Eliot’s cat poems to explain Jesus’s parable about the shepherd who knows his sheep.
Here’s the passage that Scott made the subject of his sermon (John 10:1-10)
Jesus said, “Very truly, I tell you, anyone who does not enter the sheepfold by the gate but climbs in by another way is a thief and a bandit. The one who enters by the gate is the shepherd of the sheep. The gatekeeper opens the gate for him, and the sheep hear his voice. He calls his own sheep by name and leads them out. When he has brought out all his own, he goes ahead of them, and the sheep follow him because they know his voice. They will not follow a stranger, but they will run from him because they do not know the voice of strangers.” Jesus used this figure of speech with them, but they did not understand what he was saying to them.
So again Jesus said to them, “Very truly, I tell you, I am the gate for the sheep. All who came before me are thieves and bandits; but the sheep did not listen to them. I am the gate. Whoever enters by me will be saved, and will come in and go out and find pasture. The thief comes only to steal and kill and destroy. I came that they may have life, and have it abundantly.”
T. S. Eliot, Scott said, knew something about this business of secret names before quoting from the opening poem of Ole Possum’s Book of Practical Cats:
The Naming of Cats
The Naming of Cats is a difficult matter,
It isn’t just one of your holiday games;
You may think at first I’m as mad as a hatter
When I tell you, a cat must have THREE DIFFERENT NAMES.
First of all, there’s the name that the family use daily,
Such as Peter, Augustus, Alonzo or James,
Such as Victor or Jonathan, George or Bill Bailey—
All of them sensible everyday names.
. . .
But above and beyond there’s still one name left over,
And that is the name that you never will guess;
The name that no human research can discover—
But THE CAT HIMSELF KNOWS, and will never confess.
When you notice a cat in profound meditation,
The reason, I tell you, is always the same:
His mind is engaged in a rapt contemplation
Of the thought, of the thought, of the thought of his name:
His ineffable effable
Effanineffable
Deep and inscrutable singular Name.
After noting that each of us has our own “deep and inscrutable singular name,” Scott cited instances of such names in the Bible. For instance, after Jacob wrestled with the angel, he was told, “You shall no longer be called Jacob, but Israel”(1 Genesis 32:28). God told the prophet Jeremiah, “Before I formed you in the womb I knew you” (Jeremiah 1:5a), and Isaiah reported, “The LORD called me before I was born, while I was in my mother’s womb he named me” (Isaiah 49:1b).
What is true of the prophets,” Scott said, is true of each of us. Indeed,
to God all hearts are open and all secrets are known – including that name that says who we really, really are. In what Jesus says to us this morning we have, most supremely, the words that assure us that we are known by Jesus, who says he is the kind of shepherd who “calls his own sheep by name and leads them out.” When he has brought out all his own, he goes ahead of them, and the sheep follow him because they know his voice.
Notice, Scott continued, that
these sheep follow one whose voice they have learned to recognize. They follow as he leads the way, who shows them, shows us, the way to go; not like a New Zealand sheep dog nipping at us, frightening and coercing us to go where he wills, but a loving shepherd who calls us by name. So, whatever your secret name is – that is whoever deep, deep down in your very soul you are–Jesus knows you. Deep, deep down in that place where you are really, really real, Jesus knows your name.
Our true name, Scott explained, is the person “who is really, really you – without any pretending or posturing or concealing.” And even though
many, maybe even most of us, don’t know that secret name very well, just like Ole Possum’s cats we can come to know it and can revel deep inside with the joy of knowing that we are already known. It is a name we can come to know as we are willing to slow down, to sit in silence, to listen for the voice of God.
Scott concluded his sermon by listing some of the deep, inner, ineffable names by which we are known to God, including
Image of God
Crowned with glory and majesty
Wonderfully made
Bought with a price
The sheep of God’s pasture, Lamb of his flock
Justified
Saved
Redeemed
The image and the glory of God
Ambassador of God
Beloved of the Lord
Little lower than the angels
The apple of God’s eye
The temple of the Holy Spirit
The crown of creation
and the loveliest name of all:
Child of God
“That,” Scott said, “is who we are. We have only to be still and listen for the one who knows us and calls us each by name.”
Further note:
In a previous post I reported on a presentation that Scott gave to our adult Sunday school where he cited Romantic poets Samuel Taylor Coleridge and John Keats to capture how Jesus uses parables to get people to imagine the kingdom of God come to earth. Parables, Scott notes, speak to the human imagination, which Coleridge described as “the living Power and prime Agent of all human Perception” and “a repetition in the finite mind of the eternal act of creation in the infinite I Am.”