For Sunday, September 15, 2013 – Luke 15:1-10
Desmond Tutu (at that time Archbishop of Cape Town) was attending a distinguished gathering in New York in his official, priestly role. Noting that no one present seemed to be impoverished, he asked if he might go somewhere to celebrate communion with the truly poor. Arrangements were made for him to be taken to a prison north of New York City.
Sister Elaine, director of the prison’s Children’s Center, told us about it at Providence House that evening. There he came into the prison, she said, this elegant, joy-filled man, wanting to meet with some of the most defiant and hardened women. He looked around the room, saw the barren concrete walls void of beauty, and said he was quite relieved not to see any religious pictures hanging there. He said these pictures too often don’t tell the true story.
“Are you familiar with the picture of the Good Shepherd Jesus?” he asked. “You know, the one where he is wearing a beautiful white robe, with a perfectly scrubbed, gentle little lamb lounging across his shoulders as he brings it home? That picture is wrong. A lamb in that situation would not look good or smell good, and neither would Jesus. They would both be scratched and sweaty and have brambles in their hair. They would be exhausted and filthy. That is simply how it is when we are at last on our way home.”
We need new pictures to go with our stories. The truth is, sometimes we have left the flock, but sometimes we have stayed too long. We have been hurt and been the one doing the hurting. We have been both the bullied and the tyrant, the fearless and the fearful, the rule-follower and the rebel. We are a mixed breed, disheveled members of a new kind of flock—greatly beloved just as we are, yet invited even so to become and to become. The picture is one of both intimacy and isolation, blame and forgiveness, weariness and joy, wandering away and coming home.
