Names that smell like sheep

A Reflection for IV Easter                                             All Saints’ Episcopal, Southern Shores, NC April 26, 2015                                                                   Thomas E. Wilson, Rector

Acts 4:5-12          Psalm 23       1 John 3:16-24        John 10:11-18

Let us pray: Let the words of my mouth and the meditations of our hearts be always acceptable to you, O Lord, our strength and our redeemer. In the name of Jesus we pray.   Amen.

That prayer ends with “in the name of Jesus”; so what am I trying to say when I say “in the name of Jesus”? Is it a magic formula or what?

When I do confirmation classes, I usually ask people about their names; what do the names mean to them? Sometimes they answer that their name means they are different from someone else. Sometimes they wish they had a different name because it has become a burden - a version of the old that old Johnny Cash song with lyrics by Shel Silverstein, “A Boy Named Sue”.

So - what does your name mean to you? Think about that for a minute.  Anyone want to share?

 I have no idea why my father named me Thomas, but over the years I have come to know that Thomas means “twin”, and I find that at times I am the twin of the Thomas in John’s Gospel.  I pledge to be there like Thomas promised Jesus, but when the excrement hits the fan, I start to wonder if I need more proof. 

I know why I was given my middle name, Everitt; my father admired his father, Everitt Wyche Wilson, and he wanted his son  to grow up to be a man of honor and vision. Whenever I do something honorable or have vision, it is not me but the Spirit, the personality of Everitt Wyche Wilson and William Everitt Wilson that lives in me that gives me the strength to do it. Whenever I fall short, I do not live into the name that was given to me at my birth, the real self I was created to be. Still working on that.

The name of Jesus is the Greek form of the Hebrew Yehoshuah or Joshua, which means God (YHWH) delivers, or saves, or will deliver or save. The original Joshua was the follower of Moses who took the people out of the wilderness and into the Promised Land. The name was very popular since Israel was always surrounded by enemies and the people longed for someone who could deliver them from those who threatened them and bring wholeness and Shalom, peace, to their lives.  So when Peter says that the man born lame was healed, delivered, saved, from being a cripple and brought to wholeness by the name of Jesus, he is making a pun on the Jesus name.

Like my middle name Everitt, names carry personality as well. The early followers of Jesus had a mystical union with the Risen Lord. Jesus was not up in heaven but inside their very selves. In the Book of John when Jesus breathes his Spirit onto the disciples, they take that Spirit into their very lives and Jesus the Christ lives within them. They acknowledge in this story that it was not Peter and John who healed the man born lame but it was the living personality of Jesus in them that was able to deliver, save, redeem, make whole, and heal this man. When they live into the name of Jesus, they live into who they are at the core of their being and are able to bring about healing, deliverance, making whole.

There is a fondness for the phrase “In the name of Jesus” in some parts of the healing ministry in the wider church, and it seems to be used as a magic formula.  But whenever the ministers of the Healing Team in this church come forward to offer prayers of healing, they do not come out of their own power, but out of the humility of emptying themselves out of their own agendas so that they live into that mystical union with Jesus living in them and in the space between us. Their prayers ask for wholeness, peace, saving in the name of Jesus.

The writer of the Epistle lesson for today in 1^st John talks about being able to lay down one’s life for another and helping a brother or sister in need, thus living into the name of Jesus. The writer uses the phrase “believing in the name of Jesus” because, for the author and for me, belief is not a mental exercise but a commitment to live the Spirit of the Risen Christ in our lives on a daily basis.

We see this redeemer, savior, helper, bringer into wholeness and peace in the Psalm for today where God, in the metaphor of the Shepherd, is the one walking with the sheep, saving, protecting, making whole in the community gathered around the union with God. That metaphor of the Shepherd is reinterpreted when the Gospel writer of John remembers Jesus saying he is the living metaphor of the Shepherd, he is the one who held the smelly sheep in his arms becoming like what Dr.  Lynn Anderson wrote in 1996, “A shepherd who smells like the sheep”.

Pope Francis in his Maundy Thursday Homily in 2013 a month after he was installed urged his clergy to be out among the people who need them;

“The priest who seldom goes out of himself … misses out on the best of our people, on what can stir the depths of his priestly heart. … This is precisely the reason why some priests grow dissatisfied, lose heart and become in a sense collectors of antiquities or novelties — instead of being shepherds living with ‘the smell of the sheep.’ This is what I am asking you — be shepherds with the smell of sheep.” 

John’s community does not write John’s Gospel to do a biography but, as the ending of the Thomas story suggests: 

Thomas answered him, “My Lord and my God!” Jesus said to him, “Have you believed because you have seen me? Blessed are those who have not seen and yet have come to believe.” Now Jesus did many other signs in the presence of his disciples, which are not written in this book.  But these are written so that you may continue to believe that Jesus is the Messiah, the Son of God, and that through believing you may have life in his name.

I think that Thomas lived into his name, the twin, that moment when he allowed himself to go into the wounds of Jesus and into the compassion of Jesus to become the twin of Jesus, as he entered into mystical union with his true being.  All those who follow Jesus are called to go and become shepherds who will smell like the sheep. Jesus did not spend much time talking about going to church, or about life after death but about life in union with him in daily life.. I think he assumed that he was helping us live for today and that since God always redeems, saves, makes whole, then God’s love, which does not end, will continue to do that in this life and in the next.

Each week when we come here and take the bread and wine, we remember, we  re -member, enter into again, that mystical union as we are taking the body of Christ, the name of Jesus, into our lives.