Love Notes

by Bill Love

After taking its own sweet time, winter has descended. One Friday in December, I played golf. That Sunday driving to church, the temperature was 4 below zero, a harbinger of things to come. On December 30, it was 62 degrees, and I played golf again. A week later, we were blanketed with 9 inches of snow ( I do know the golf rule for snow and have used it once but not in 9 inches of snow. Snow is either “casual water” or a “loose impediment,” golfer’s option.), and the mercury again fell below zero. It is winter and will be for some time.

The gospel of John says: “It was the feast of the Dedication at Jerusalem; it was winter, and Jesus was walking in the temple, in the portico of Solomon.” John is such a master of language that, when he says, it was winter, we may suspect he is doing more than giving a weather report, that there is more going on: that the real winter, the real coldness he is talking about, is the winter of the human heart.

I thought of my interim ministry, which has taken me from the Great Lakes to the Gulf and from coast to coast. And I have thought about the lyrics to “My Heroes Have Always Been Cowboys” [I learned all the rules of the modern day drifter; don’t you hold onto nothing too long]. And I feel the chill of my own winter.

To this winter of the human heart, Jesus says, “My sheep hear my voice, and I know them, and they follow me, and I give them eternal life, and they shall never perish, and no one shall snatch them out of my hand.”

Sheep are mentioned almost 200 times in the Bible; shepherds, 75- 80 times. They are not always put in a flattering light. Rabbis viewed shepherds as thieves and cheats, whose roving life allowed them to steal from the flocks. People were forbidden to buy milk, wool, and lambs from them.

I think we tend to have gentle, kindly images of shepherds. A member of one church I served, who grew up around sheep, said to him the shepherd, far from being kindly, was the one who castrated the males, took the lambs from the ewes, and took shears to them all.

One year on “A Prairie Home Companion,” Garrison Keillor retold the Christmas story. About shepherds, he said: “They were kind of a motley bunch, those shepherds were. It was not a profession that educated people went into in those days.... They were not looked on with esteem by other people. They were not considered to be high class citizens, because sheep are not high class animals. You know that? From a distance they may be but not up close.

“Sheep are fine, if they are doing what they want to do, but, as soon as you try to make a sheep do what you want it to do, I’ll tell you all the high class people get out of the profession at that point. And the only people left to be shepherds are the ones who don’t have anything else.”

In the midst of the winter of the human heart, Jesus speaks as a shepherd.

The prelude on a recent Sunday was Bach’s Sheep May Safely Graze. I thought of Psalm 23 and God’s intention that sheep graze safely by still waters and lie down in green pastures. I thought of Psalm 100, which says we are the sheep of God’s pasture. And I thought about safety. I thought about the disproportionate distribution of wealth, which is getting worse. I read recently that in 1973 the CEO’s salaries averaged 45 times that of the lowest paid in their organizations and that today they are 419 times the lowest paid. People in higher paying manufacturing jobs lose their jobs to lower paying service jobs, and the poverty level reaches more people, including those working full-time.

I thought of the pastures available to us, of which God gave us stewardship, and remember reading about the EPA’s Superfund sites and how money is not available to clean up the toxic waste because Congress eliminated the required contribution by polluters. I thought of the food supply and fears of mad cow disease. I thought of what I read recently about limiting the ability of food inspectors to stop production lines to insure that animal waste did not contaminate meat.

I thought about 9/11 and its aftermath when America had the sympathy and support of the world and has squandered it by ineffectual pursuit of those responsible and an unprecedented preemptive invasion of another country, searching for weapons that didn’t exist and continuing to place our troops in harm’s way. I thought of the terror alerts we frequently heard on the news and how they are elevated, potentially arousing a physiological defense response with nothing to do but be afraid and feel helpless. I was riveted by reports of the school hostage crisis in Russia and the death of hundreds of children, even as I was riveted by the reports of Columbine, and our failure to make safe pastures for our littlest ones.

I suspect terrorists are gripped by as great a sense of desperation and believe there is no other way to achieve justice.

I have heard that the test of a society is how it treats those at the beginning of life, those at the end of life, and those in the shadows of life.

And it doesn’t feel like we sheep can safely graze. And the unsafe fields are of our own making. And our God wants something very different from what we have made.

It is winter, and we seek safe pastures. We know the sound of our shepherd’s voice. Still, it is winter, yearning for spring.