Scripture: John 21:1-18
What we heard in the scripture reading this morning were essentially Jesus’ last words. At least as John tells the story, the last things Jesus said were his words to Peter: Do you love me? Yes, Lord you know that I love you. Feed my lambs. Do you love me? Yes, Lord, I love you. Tend my sheep. Do you love me? I love you. I love you. Feed my sheep.
Feed my lambs. Tend my sheep. Feed my sheep. Although these are not technically the last words Jesus speaks in the gospel, they have the force of last words—words that are meant to be remembered, words to be carried away and kept, words that sum up what it’s all been about. Furthermore, they’re repeated three times. Peter must have thought Jesus thought he was hard of hearing and shows some exasperation. You don’t need to repeat it. I heard you the first time. But just in case Peter didn’t really hear it the first time, Jesus says it again, and then again. I think Peter was supposed to pay attention. I think we are supposed to pay attention.
So I thought I would…pay attention to these last words of Jesus. I thought I would put myself in the story and let the words be addressed to me. Try to take them personally. Try to receive them with the kind of urgency and compelling force that I am imagining they were intended to have.
Feed my lambs. Tend my sheep. Feed my sheep. It sounds like there is a sort of simple, honest, heartfelt message here. To paraphrase: Jesus says, I’m going now. Don’t cling to me. If you love me, do good to each other. If you love me, look after one another. If you love me, take care of each other. In a way, there is no sermon here, just these direct mandates that may be best left as they are, in their compelling simplicity, without explanation or qualification or complication. I wish I could do that—somehow talk about these things Jesus said in a way that preserves their simplicity. I wish I could do that, but I can’t.
I am sorry, for my own sake as well as yours, that I don’t seem to be constitutionally able to just let an apparently simple scripture reading remain simple. I have to talk back to it, ask questions of it, turn it around and upside down, sometimes fight with it, look for extra meanings, and in general make it more complicated than it was when I started out with it. That is how I take it seriously. That is how I try to make sure that I am hearing it, at least to the best of my ability for now. And so even though I do feel that simplicity can be a good thing and sometimes regret my own tendencies in the other direction, I don’t apologize too much. Thinking the meaning of a passage is simple and apparent can also be a way of dismissing it. Since it doesn’t require much attention, we don’t give it much attention. So for better and worse, I want to linger with our scripture a little bit this morning.
However, if I’m going to do that, the first thing I need to do, in good Sojourners fashion, is change the words. The lambs and the sheep have got to go. Lambs and sheep are God’s creatures and I can appreciate them when they are being lambs and sheep. When they are being metaphors for human beings, I appreciate them a lot less. So presumptuous though it may be, I am going to assume that I know what Jesus meant to say. He meant to say: Feed my sisters and brothers. Tend my people. Feed my people. End of sheep discussion.
But about the “my people” part, there are some things to say too. A kind of white bread interpretation of this would be that the phrase “my people” refers to everyone and that to feed my people means being nice and generous to everyone. And that’s a nice interpretation. Do good, be kind, offer a helping hand to everyone. Feed my people. Who could argue with that?
Except I’m not sure that’s what Jesus meant, or at least that that’s all he meant. At one level of course when Jesus says “my people” he means everyone. But maybe he means “my people” in a narrower sense as well. Sometimes when people say “my people” what they mean is family or where you come from or the kind of people you hang around with. It doesn’t mean you don’t recognize your kinship with everyone on the planet. It just means that “my people” has a particular meaning to it as well.
The people Jesus hung around with were mostly, to use the contemporary term, marginalized. People who were poor, people who were invisible, people who were not welcome in polite company, not only who were not welcome, were forbidden from polite company, people who other people weren’t supposed to touch or even get close to, people who were ill and shunned rather than cared for, people who didn’t have the power, the voice, the rights, the privileges that some people had. This is not a new insight. It’s hardly an insight at all. It’s just what stares you in the face when you read the gospels even casually.
So when Jesus says “feed my people”, I don’t just hear him telling me to go out and offer something, some kind of sustenance or encouragement, to everyone. I hear him saying, feed my people: feed those who are hungry because they are lacking in food or money or power or self-respect or dignity or fair treatment or basic recognition of their humanity. Feed my people, in my hearing of it, means juice, yes it means juice. It means being generous and giving to people in need. It means juice; it also means justice. Because that too is what people are lacking.
When the Virginia General Assembly passes for the second time a bill that not only does not correct the injustices already being suffered by gay and lesbian people in the state of Virginia but in fact makes the injustices even greater, the General Assembly is in direct and flagrant violation of the spirit of Christ’s words, feed my people. When we live in a world with the extremes of wealth and poverty as we do, and those extremes keep getting worse and worse, larger and larger, we live our lives every day in direct and flagrant violation of the spirit of Christ’s words, feed my people. I’m not going to say again that I know what Jesus really meant to say—don’t want to press my luck; I might get struck by lightening—but I will say that what I hear him saying is not just feed my people, like take up a collection, which again is a fine and important thing to do. It also has for me the meaning of see that my people are fed, and don’t stop until my people are fed to the point where there is no longer any such thing as hunger or malnutrition or deficits of dignity. We do both. We try to offer food to the needy. We also attend to the much harder, impossible, yet necessary task of seeing that God’s people are fed. That anyway is how I hear Jesus.
But I do also hear the words Jesus says as being about me and being addressed to me. In the larger sweep of Christ’s love I am included in the people he refers to as “my people”. When he says feed my people he means me also. He means for me to be one of the people doing the feeding. You, Jim Bundy, feed my people. He also means that I am among those in need of feeding. You, whoever you may be, feed my people, such as Jim Bundy. In fact if feeding others means feeding people of privilege, such as myself, too, then the only way I can really think about what it would mean for me to feed others in that way is to try to think about the ways in which I need feeding. It’s a difficult and yet compelling question for me, and it’s one of the reasons I decided to focus my remarks around these words of Jesus. I read them—it’s the lectionary text for today—read them and wondered what that means for me. What is it that I need to nourish my soul?
For me, that’s not such an easy question to answer. As is so often the case, it’s easier to say some things that do not nourish my soul maybe than what does. This last week there was a national turn-off-the-TV day—or was it a week—I just happened to hear about it sort of sideways. Anyway, that’s an easy one. Television is something that does not nourish my soul. It’s not that I never watch it. And I won’t say it has never fed me. But it’s rare. The news doesn’t feed me, whether it comes in print, all folded and organized, or from people on TV with clear voices, sprayed hair, and wrinkle free clothing. I feel somehow like I need it, but the news doesn’t feed me.
Books—now we’re getting warm—some books feed me. Not all. Not many really, since feeding is different from being useful, entertaining or informative. But some books do feed me, and I think it is when an author has been able to let me know that there is someone out there who has also felt something important that I have felt, has seen something I have seen, understood something in a way that I have understood it, dreamed something I have dreamed, expressed something that I have wanted to express if only I had known how. There is some connectedness there between two people who don’t know each other, may or may not have a lot in common, may or may not even like each other if we were to actually meet. The author has fed me because she or he has managed to overcome the distance between us and let me know that at some significant level we are connected.
That’s how I’m thinking about feeding today. That it has something to do, a lot to do, with connectedness. Janet Legro, who many of you know, UCC minister in Green County, Janet and I and another minister get together on a regular basis. This last week Janet was relating a story to us, the details of which I don’t remember, but it was about a young woman, a college student who had been found dead in her dorm room after having been dead for several days without anyone missing her. Her death was listed by the police as an unattended death, meaning that they had ruled out homicide, but didn’t know whether it was the result of a heart attack or some other physical calamity or whether she had taken her own life. Janet was telling us this because the phrase unattended death had struck her and stuck with her, especially because of the circumstances of the person not being missed for several days. An unattended death with the suggestion of unattended living, even though the young woman was enrolled in classes and lived in a dorm and so forth.
I believe when Jesus says “feed my people”, he is calling us to an attended living way of life. It’s not so much about meeting needs in any simple sense, as in when a person is hungry and you meet their need by giving them food—that kind of feeding. Sometimes we can do that. Sometimes we should do that. But that’s not all there is to it. Sometimes it is not within our power to feed in that way, to satisfy a hunger or meet some need. Sometimes all we can do is share it. Sometimes it is most important thing we can do.
We can’t take away the loneliness another person may feel; we can occupy that space with them, share our own loneliness with them. We can’t very often take away the grief another person may feel. In my experience that doesn’t work very well, and if someone is obviously trying to cheer me up, it usually just makes me resolve not to be cheered up. We can share our various griefs with one another. Sometimes what feeds us is paradoxically being filled with a hunger for things that are worth being hungry for. We can only pray to be hungry for justice, hungry for peace, hungry for a beloved community, hungry for God. We can only pray for companions who share that hunger with us. That is some of what feeds me. I think it may be what Jesus meant by feeding.
Of course we are limited in this kind of feeding too. For one thing we are going to fail as human beings do, for no particular reason other than not being sufficiently thoughtful or attentive. And we can’t attend to everyone, everywhere, all the time. There’s just too much attending to be done, and the attending we are able to do will seem small. And sometimes we need to attend to ourselves, otherwise we won’t be able to attend to anyone else. All that is true. But even with all the disclaimers and qualifications, Jesus’ words continue to address us: feed my people, tend my people, let your living be an attended living. It is not a command so much as it is a promise of a blessing that awaits us. Amen.
Jim Bundy
April 25, 2004