Dean's Letter

May 2008

From The Very Reverend David Bird, Ph.D., Dean and Rector

One Flock, One Shepherd

We have learned a lot about the best way to teach children during my lifetime.  One of the earliest recollections is a children’s television program which I managed to get my mother to turn off for me (I was too young to be allowed to touch the television and remotes were part of science fiction then).  What was so scary?  It was the great British actor, Leo McKern, with his deep bass-baritone voice playing Noah or one of the great patriarchal figures of the Old Testament.   

At an early point in the story, McKern’s character was praying to God for guidance or help.  There was neither.  “See, never there when you want him,” was the patriarch’s response.  A little later the patriarch went to do something bad and the voice of God thundered from the clouds in judgment. 

Children’s television had in these five minutes taught me that God was scary when I did something bad, and not there when needed.  I don’t believe that was good religious education.  It stuck with me for years and I am grateful to my mother that she had the good sense to turn the BBC off.   

Some theologians would have rejoiced that I had been taught that God was all-seeing or omniscient as they like to call it.  I had learned rather that God was all-seeing and only interested in me if I did badly. 

Perhaps implicit in this show was that God was also all-powerful or omnipotent.  After all, God could come into the picture exactly when God wanted to.  The theologian would have rejoiced.  This small, frightened child of God now knew that God was all-seeing and all-powerful, and if all-seeing, surely all-knowing, and if all-powerful, then surely all-competent, or omni-competent.  

God bless the BBC! The child may now be terrified of God; convinced that God doesn’t respond to our pleas for help; but has learned the basics of what many people consider the traditional understanding of God:  God is all-powerful, all-knowing, all-seeing, ultimately competent--and the ultimate Being to be scared of. 

In brief, traditional theological teaching had made a practical atheist of this small child, particularly when this teaching was reinforced either by authority figures or by being taught the well-intentioned but surely demonic view of God embedded in certain aspects of conservative or traditional Sunday school material. 

It’s no wonder that Christian teachers had to stress that Jesus was God and spend endless amounts of time on the healing miracles of the Gospels and those parables or stories told by Jesus which emphasized the centrality of Christian love.  I thank God, now, for being forced to go to church every week with my parents and listen to the Lord’s summary of the Law:  “Hear, O Israel, the Lord our God is the only Lord and you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind. This is the first and great commandment. And the second is like unto it: You shall love your neighbor as yourself. On these two commandments hang all the Law and the Prophets.” 

Somewhere love was to be present. 

How do we connect the kind of dilemma we are talking about, the God who can do anything, but often doesn’t, to the kind of tragedy we as a church community have been dealing with recently?  Piet, a member of our church and of our choir, and a much loved vacation bible school teacher, has died in a horrible accident, at a time when life had become so good for him.  Why did this all-powerful, all-knowing, all-seeing God fail to do something about this? Why doesn’t God intervene? 

When I used to teach this very topic in a Roman Catholic university some years ago, it took weeks to get through the lectures.  What I write here must be very brief and potentially inadequate 

First, the vision of an all-seeing, all knowing, all-powerful, omni-competent God is the vision of philosophy not of the Bible.  The Bible depicts rather a God who cares for us, seeks to guide us, tries desperately to communicate with us, but also stands at a distance from us so that we can become true children of God, not human robots or puppets.  The consequence of this God-given freedom is that things will happen that God doesn’t desire, and that we don’t desire, and sometimes they will be terrible.  We may blame them upon God.  We may argue that given such circumstances, there cannot be God.  Or we may see human tragedies such as Piet’s death as the unhappy consequence of human freedom. 

Secondly, there is a very specific type of evil called natural evil: earthquakes, floods and the like.  This is dealt with in a different way and there is no room for this now.   

We are concentrating here upon why bad things happen to people.  Simply put: they happen because God gives us freedom and, because of this freedom, God doesn’t intervene in a controlling way. 

The key term is “controlling.”  Think of the times when a small inner voice has said to you, “no, don’t do that.”  Think of the times when an intuition has come through to you and you haven’t, thank heavens, done something you were going to do.   

Just as a parent tries gently to influence us, so does the voice of God communicate gently with us.  The Bible is clear that sometimes we hear this communication and sometimes we don’t.  Just as a loving parent will try to turn us in a particular direction, so does God.  But we will not always hear or respond.  In another way the whole teaching of Scripture, and particularly that of the life and teaching of Jesus, is a narrative which seeks to inspire and direct our lives. 

Despite this, however, bad things happen.  And that is one reason why we are so sad and frustrated at our loss.  Any amount of rational talk about God cannot take from us the confusion and despair we feel as one of us is lost in what is so accurately called an “accident”– accident because it is not something that anyone wills.  It is also tragic, because so many individual freedoms are often involved in a single accident. 

Where do we go from here as a church community?  First, we recognize what has happened.  Only when we do so can we take the next step: to give thanks for what was given to us in the person we have lost.  Secondly, we learn to accept it without blame or guilt.  It happened and it is not going to be changed.  Of course, we will still ask, “why? Why?”  We may be angry with God.  God doesn’t mind.  God understands.  Eventually we come to the point where we realize that God does indeed understand and it is there that we come to the point which must end this discussion. 

In one of his letters, St. Paul waxed eloquently about God’s love for us when he wrote: “I am convinced that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor powers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor height, nor depth, nor any other creature, shall be able to separate us from the love of God, which is in Christ Jesus our Lord.” 

There is a wonderful passage in John’s Gospel about Jesus as the Good Shepherd.  It first paints a picture of a small, individual flock of sheep, huddled together as they would be at night with their shepherd in their sheep pen.  Later the imagery suggests rather a much larger series of flocks scattered upon the hillside and making one much larger, all-encompassing flock.  These also, claims Jesus, are his.   

Does it seem to you as it does to me, that Jesus is telling us: “There are other sheep, which are not held within this sheep pen we call the church, they too (the outsiders) shall hear my voice and there shall be one flock one shepherd.” 

Ultimately we are all tied into the love of God and, if we stray, God will forever seek to bring us back.  That is why at every funeral service I love to use a prayer which includes the words, “Come, ye blessed of my Father, inherit the Kingdom prepared for you from the beginning of the world.”   

This is not a statement about predestination in the sense that our earthly path is predetermined.  It is rather an affirmation of the truth of God, that God is always ready and waiting for us in God’s and our own good time.  No one is to be coerced.  All are welcome.  For in God’s heart, there is one flock, one shepherd. 

— David

Past letters:

• Whither the Seminary?
• What would Jesus do?
• Lenten Meditation
• " Our call is not to divide, nor to conquer. It is to stay together under Christ."
• Christmas Meditation
• Faith in the Whole of Our Lives
• Beware the "Herd"
• Christian Unity
• A New Understanding of St. Paul
• Revisiting the Sermon on the Mount and Saint Paul
• Was Jesus sinless and can we be sinless?
• Enjoying C.S. Lewis
• Thinking about Advent
• Three Current Conflicts

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