April 17, 2016
We are surrounded by many voices.
There’s rarely a moment within our waking lives that someone
or something isn’t calling out to us and, even in our sleep, dreams and
nightmares ask for our attention.
And each voice has its own particular cadence and message.
Some voices invite us in, promising us life if we do this or
that or buy a certain product or idea; others threaten us.
Some voices beckon us towards hated, bitterness, and anger,
while others challenge is towards love, graciousness, and forgiveness.
Some voices tell us that they are playful and humorous, not
to be taken seriously, even as others trumpet that they are urgent and weighty,
the voice of non-negotiable truth, God’s voice.
Within all of these: Which is the voice of God? How do we
recognize God’s voice among and within all of these voices?
That’s not easy to answer.
God, as the scriptures tell us, is the author of everything
that’s good, whether it bears a religious label or not.
Hence, God’s voice is inside of many things that are not
explicitly connected to faith and religion, just as God’s voice is also not in
everything that masquerades as religious.
But how do we discern that?
Jesus leaves us a wonderful metaphor to work with, but it’s
precisely only a metaphor:
He tells us that he is the “Good Shepherd” and that his
sheep will recognize his voice among all other voices.
In sharing this metaphor, he is drawing upon a practice that
was common among shepherds at the time:
At night, for protection and companionship, shepherds would
put their flocks together into a common enclosure.
They would then separate the sheep in the morning by using
their voices.
Each shepherd had trained his sheep to be attuned to his
voice and his voice only.
The shepherd would walk away from the enclosure calling his
sheep, often times by their individual names, and they would follow him.
His sheep were so attuned to his voice that they would not
follow the voice of another shepherd, even if that shepherd tried to trick them
(shepherds often did this to try to steal someone else’s sheep) by imitating
the voice of their own shepherd.
Like a baby who, at a point, will no longer be cuddled by
the voice of a babysitter, but wants and needs the voice of the mother, each
sheep recognized intimately the voice that was safeguarding them and would not
follow another voice.
So too with us: among all the voices that surround and
beckon us, how do we discern the unique cadence of God’s voice?
Which is the voice of the Good Shepherd?
There’s no easy answer and sometimes the best we can do is
to trust our gut-feeling about right and wrong.
But we have a number of principles that come to us from
Jesus, from scripture, and from the deep wells of our Christian tradition that
can help us.
What follows is a series of principles to help us discern
God’s voice among the multitude of voices that beckon us.
What is the unique cadence of the voice of the Good
Shepherd?
- The voice of God is recognized both in whispers and in
soft tones, even as it is recognized in thunder and in storm.
- The voice of God is recognized wherever one sees life,
joy, health, color, and humor, even as it is recognized wherever one sees
dying, suffering, poverty, and a beaten-down spirit.
- The voice of God is recognized in what calls us to
what’s higher, sets us apart, and invites us to holiness, even as it is
recognized in what calls us to humility, submergence into humanity, and in
that which refuses to denigrate our humanity.
- The voice of God is recognized in what appears in our
lives as “foreign,” as other, as “stranger,” even as it is recognized in
the voice that beckons us home.
- The voice of God is the one that most challenges and
stretches us, even as it the only voice that ultimately soothes and
comforts us.
- The voice of God enters our lives as the greatest of
all powers, even as it forever lies in vulnerability, like a helpless baby
in the straw.
- The voice of God is always heard in privileged way in
the poor, even as it beckons us through the voice of the artist and the
intellectual.
- The voice of God always invites us to live beyond all
fear, even as it inspires holy fear.
- The voice of God is heard inside the gifts of the Holy
Spirit, even as it invites us never to deny the complexities of our world
and our own lives.
- The voice of God is always heard wherever there is
genuine enjoyment and gratitude, even as it asks us to deny ourselves, die
to ourselves, and freely relativize all the things of this world.
The voice of God, it would seem, is
forever found in paradox.
No comments:
Post a Comment
Add