Good Shepherd - Betty Carr Pulkingham - 4 Easter - year B - May 3, 2009

Today is GOOD SHEPHERD Sunday, and I am so glad!!  Now you might think, just looking at this service sheet and the number of times my name is printed on it, that this is Betty Carr Pulkingham Sunday.  But you would be deceived.  The really good news here today is that we have a Good Shepherd, Jesus Christ.  He has not only laid down his life for us, and offered us the gift of eternal life: He also intends to be there for us, to guide and help us along life’s journey, even on some of those treacherous pathways where we may find ourselves.  That is Good News! –

Today I have been encouraged to share some of my own life-journey with you, and hopefully we will see how Jesus Christ, the Great Shepherd of the sheep, has been there for me on that journey.  Omitting my early years growing up here in Burlington, and leaving off the past fifteen years back in the sheepfold at Holy Comforter (though much could be said about both of those) I want to focus today on the “Middle Ages!” – of my life, what I call my period of high adventure.

Along the way The Good Shepherd has actually caused me to lie down in some fairly inconvenient green pastures, places which did not look very green at first, but then, turned out to be!  So let’s take a running leap and dive into my life somewhere…let’s go to Coventry, England in 1972.  You are there with us! – my husband Graham and myself,  and our household.  We have just come across from Texas at the invitation of the Anglican Bishop of Coventry.  He had seen a CBS documentary about our church in Houston.  His sister saw the film with him and said, “Look!  Cuthbert!  It’s just like…during the war!”  (By which she meant a good  thing:  just like the time people were sharing with one another, caring for one another, moving out beyond their own families.)  So…the Bishop invited us to come live in his Diocese for a while, and we came.  

Here we are – fresh off the boat. We find ourselves in a house that is much too small for us, (the bishop had invited us to bring our household over, and there were only 16 of us!) The house was about right for an average English family (husband, wife and 1 ¾ kids!)  It was a roof over our heads!  We made a few adjustments; I’ll  spare you the details –except for one picture: The front hallway  was extremely narrow and was also the only place to hang our coats, since the English don’t believe in closets as we know them.  We lined the hall with coat hooks, and when our coats were hanging on them there was only one way to walk down the hallway – sideways!

The sixteen of us included nine children – five of them were ours, and five belonged to Virginia, our friend who was a single parent.  Virginia and I decided we needed at least one picture to hang in the living-room, so to downtown Coventry we went, and for 75 pence at a thrift shop we purchased a picture of a pasture with sheep.  It was actually a dark gloomy pasture of sheep; but it seemed to fit right in with the greyness of England.  As I sat and gazed at that picture I was reminded of some verses from John 10:

He calls his own sheep by name and leads them out…He goes ahead of them, and the sheep follow him because they know his voice.

Yes, Lord, you have certainly led us out … all the way across the Atlantic.  And here we are – the sheep of your pasture.  I am sipping my morning tea, and I am praying.  I am looking across the road at the old folks’ home over there, which is much larger than our house.  I am trying not to covet it.   But I am praying for a larger place for us to lay our heads! 

Now, here are just a couple of the amazing things  the Lord did for us: 

Our first “larger place” was the Bungalow, owned by an Englishman, a Baptist layman who had met us and was very sympathetic to our ministry.  He said, “My family would fit nicely in your small house;  – YOU come and live in our roomier Bungalow.” They literally exchanged houses with us.  Remarkable!  Still later, our “larger place” turned out to be an enormous old Victorian mansion in Berkshire!  (I have pictures of it, and of the gloomy pasture – in the parlor, if you want to see them later….)

So the Good Shepherd did lead us out, he did go before us, and provide for us. The reality of following Jesus Christ as Lord and Shepherd was becoming crystal clear to me during this period. 

The reading from Acts today is also very helpful to me in telling  my story.   It describes the earliest Christian community life like this: 

“They devoted themselves to the apostles’ teaching and fellowship, to the breaking of bread and the prayers.”

(They devoted themselves.  They didn’t just go to church:  they lived as if they were the Church.  And in truth, they were.  And in truth, we are.) 

Every once in a while this description of the life of the early Church grips the imagination of a group of Christians in an extraordinary way, and they set out to try and live into it.  I guess that’s what happened to us in Houston back in the 1960’s – only, I think we kind of “backed” into it. (This was 10 years before we moved to England.) 

Graham had accepted a call to Church of the Redeemer, a church in a changing neighborhood.  Demographically speaking, it was a church that was supposed to fail, like all the other main-line denominational churches in the area were doing.   Only Catholics & Pentecostals had staying power in places like this.  But our bishop saw a different possibility.  Graham liked challenges –especially the challenge of seeing the Church alive in the inner city.  And so, at the encouragement of the Bishop, we went.

The first year was pretty much a disaster. Graham “tried everything they had taught” him in seminary, and none of it worked!  One thing he tried:  opening the church gym to neighborhood kids, who in pretty short order trashed it. This did not win him any “brownie points” with older members, many of whom were already leaving for the suburbs. Programs that worked in suburban churches were simply not working here for us.  What to do???

Unbeknownst to me at the time, Graham was spending hours in our church’s chapel  - weeping, praying.

“Lord, if you want this church to die, I will help you bury it.  If you want it to live, show me…”

New things began to happen.  While we were here one summer to see my family, Graham took a side-trip to New York to see David Wilkerson , the renown Assembly of God minister. Wow! This was definitely stepping outside the 9 dots!  Mind you, we had both read “The Cross and the Switchblade.”  I still wondered how those young people in New York could be set free from their drug addictions, while I, an advantaged person in Houston, could not seem to stop smoking!  Meanwhile, Graham had quit smoking – just like that…some weeks before.

Now he spent several days following David Wilkerson around, seeing his ministries in Harlem and upper-state NY., (while, I’m sure, Wilkerson was seeing this young minister’s anguish of soul.) Finally he said to him, “Get on your knees; I want to pray for you.”  He prayed for a fresh empowering of the Holy Spirit in Graham’s life and ministry.  And before they parted company he said, “I’m going to tell you something  I’ve been struggling with - because I’d rather not say it, I guess… I haven’t had too much respect for the denominational churches, but I think God wants me to say this to you.  Stay in the Episcopal Church.  Go back home and submit yourself to your organization and your Bishop, and God will raise up a powerful ministry right where you are.  I don’t usually tell people that but I think God wants me to say it to you.”

Now, why am I saying it to you??  Because that was exactly what God did!  It was a pivotal point in what was about to unfold. (God moves in mysterious ways His wonders to perform!)   Back in Houston God did raise up a powerful ministry right where we were.  It was like living the Book of Acts!

                * People were being healed, some miraculously.

                 *The Bible was becoming a living book full of exciting revelations – week after week.   

                 *The Lord was adding daily to our numbers, though there was no organized program of evangelism.  People were simply being drawn there by the Spirit.

                *Some wanted to move closer, to live near the church in order to involve in the daily life and not miss anything!  Household living became a givens –to make this do-able, and to pool our financial resources so that more could go

into shared ministries, eg., a medical clinic, a legal clinic, literacy teaching.   

                 *New songs were emerging daily – almost through the floor-boards they were coming! Some came through people who had never composed a song in their lives.  Notice I didn’t say “written,” for most of these songs were not written, not initially. They were “in the air somewhere.”  Which is, after all, where music lives -  in the air! – you can catch it – like the flu!!   Some of the songs came through children in the parish. A little boy named Paul Mazak, age 4, made up this song – and you will recognize that he had a good friend, a famous king named Wenceslas. (Betty sings Jesus is a Friend of Mine) We added verses, we sang his song in homes, on picnics, at the church.  This was little Paul’s “song-gift” to the body of Christ.

It was a remarkable time. Did all of this fervor and excitement last?   Not with the intensity of those early years.  Did it have a lasting effect on those who participated?  You bet!!  None of us were the same as before.  This was a laboratory in Christian formation: we were learning what it means to “lay down our lives for one another,” the very thing that we heard about in today’s Epistle reading from I John. 

By the spring of 1972 changes were afoot in Houston.  Graham had spoken at some large conferences in England, and found himself drawn to that country and those people.  The earth was moving under our feet.  And…I found myself drawn to the words of a little hymn in our hymnal:

“They cast their nets in Galilee, just off the hills of brown; such happy, simple fisherfolk before the Lord came down.” 

It’s an intriguing ballad about some simple fishermen who got caught up in the Lord’s dramatic enterprise.  I read and re-read these words, ‘til I could hear those gentle lapping waves on the shore of the Sea of Galilee.     

  …. And then, a tune came with the lapping waves, and before long I had written an anthem.  Tucked away in the text, unbeknownst to us, was the name we would eventually have: the name Fisherfolk.   By the time our choir sang the anthem that summer, the earth had shifted under our feet, and our feet were about to take us to England!  - 16 of us initially, and within six months there were 27.  And there on  British  soil a wonderful adventure unfolded.  By 1974 we had outgrown our Coventry accomodation, and moved into that large manor house in Berkshire.  British families began to come – to visit us, and some to live with us for a time and learn more about this ‘common life’ we shared, so they might take that back to their own home churches.

The young adults who had come from Houston began to travel  the length and breadth of England at the invitation of local churches.  Many times they led festivals of praise in cavernous large English cathedrals.  They were there to share the JOY of the gospel – in song, in liturgical dance, in drama!  One English cleric tried to introduce them to his flock; he said, “I want you to meet these young people from Fishermen, Incorporated, which is an outreach of the Church of the Redeemer, which is …” and finally he gave up and said:  “Welcome these young Fisherfolk!  And God said:  Fisherfolk!  From then on, that was our name.

*We began to publish songbooks and recordings – to corral some of the amazing creativity and  share it. 

*The Bishop of Oxfordshire was now our bishop, and as chaplain to all the Anglican religious orders, he was able to help us define ourselves more clearly.  It was there that we took on the official name “Community of Celebration.” (though the popular name always remained Fisherfolk.) 

      But it was not until we went to Scotland in 1975 that I heard the music of the lapping waves again.  As we stood at the water’s edge waiting for a ferry to take us to the Isle of Cumbrae, I heard those waves, that same music – it was one of those incredible “thin places” where the Spirit’s intent is so powerfully real. The Lord had given me the music three years before; and here we finally were – where the music belonged!  Graham had been appointed Provost of the Cathedral of the Isles, so here we were now in the Scottish Episcopal Church (not to be confused with that south-of-the-border church of the Establishment:  the Church of England. They are very different.)  Interestingly, it is from the Scottish Episcopal Church that our own American Episcopal Church sprang.

For the next ten years the Isle of Cumbrae was to be the Community’s home, and  there in Scotland we began to face more difficulties and hardships: things like trying to befriend the Scottish islanders who seemed to view us as an invading presence!  - despite our best efforts to be friendly;  things like trying to keep warm with no central heating, and only  tiny coke-burning  fires that had to be fed constantly -with coke you went and shoveled outside where gales were blowing!  Looking back, England had been a much cosier place to live.  Also, we lived on very little, as we were trying to make our own way and not over-burden the church back in Houston.  I recall that when our daughter Martha turned 12, we gave her a coin-purse as a birthday present.  (Heaven knows why!)  She looked up and said, “What shall I put in it?… buttons?”

There were two college buildings attached to the Cathedral, and we lived in those.  Six months after we arrived a devastating fire broke out and destroyed one of the two  buildings.  More than half the community lost everything they had brought from the States.  Suddenly lines from the anthem had more meaning:   

Young John who trimmed the flapping sail, homeless in Patmos died; Peter, who hauled the teeming net, head-down was crucified.”

Lord, have you brought us out into this tough place to die?   Those disciples of old  started out strong, courageous, some of them even flamboyant!  But before all was done they suffered for Jesus’ sake.  We were beginning to taste a bit of that suffering. There had been great excitement, deep joy and love of the brethren amongst us.  But…  a gospel of success was not the cup the Lord had for us.   Our roots had been in the inner-city…./ our life in Scotland would be lived out on this economically depressed island … / and  returning  to the USA in l984  the Community settled in a dying steel town outside of Pittsburgh, where today six members still live and minister as the Community of Celebration -  a religious order of the Episcopal Church, whose mission is to bear witness to the church– as– community.  There are also two members living in the U.K., and several hundred Companions, not to mention hundreds more who look back to their time at Redeemer, Houston and/or with the Community of Celebration as a life-changing experience and training-ground for their own ministries. I am currently a Companion of Celebration.    

The anthem ends like this:  “The peace of God – it is no peace, but strife closed in the sod, Yet let us pray for but one thing:  the marvelous peace of God.”

That is surely the peace that passes understanding; it is not a peace that takes us out of this world’s troubles (as the writer of that hymn knew.)  We may go to our graves before seeing with our own eyes the fulfillment of much that we have longed and prayed for.  That’s OK – as long as we’ve been walking close to the Shepherd of our souls, hearing his voice, following his leading.  My younger friends the Fisherfolk could always put a light “spin” on things:  As they bounced around Britain in their mini-van they used to sing:  “A piece of pie – it is no piece, when divided sixteen ways!!” A sense of humor is a great help on any journey!   

Looking back, what a great adventure we had!  How blessed we were to be God’s adventurers and take some risks for his Namesake!  How blessed our children were to be exposed to a bigger world and learn to be fruitful in it!  What wonderful companions the Lord brought along to share the journey with us – all the joys, all the sorrows! 

How blessed we all are when we listen for the lapping waves in our own lives, hear the Spirit beckoning us, and follow where the Shepherd leads.  He has a special path for each and every one of us, whether it leads to faraway places or not.  Sometimes we are asked to stay put and be - quite simply - a nail in a sure place.  As we follow the Shepherd of our souls there will be adventure, we will take some risks.   But…to whom (besides Jesus) shall we go?  “You, Lord, have the words of eternal life.” 

When the choir sings the “Fisherfolk” anthem today, listen for those lapping waves, feel the spray in your faces, and draw close to the Shepherd, the One who is willing to lay down his life for us, in order that we may be able to lay down our lives for one another, in order that God may be glorified.  

Amen.