Sermon: Geep!
Texts: Ezekiel 34:11-24; Matthew 25:31-46
Date: November 23, 2008
Rev. Dee Eisenhauer, Eagle Harbor Congregational Church
It stands there on spindly legs, black hooves, floppy ears, big brown eyes. It’s pretty much got the shape of a goat, but its coat is like patchwork, woolly in places and hairy in others. A Time Magazine article about this little creature says “it looks like a zookeeper’s prank: a goat dressed in a sweater of angora.” But it’s not a joke. It’s a crossbreed of two entirely different species: a goat and a sheep. Guess what it’s nicknamed: a “geep.”
The geep that this article was about was produced by manipulating the embryos of sheep and goats when they consisted of just a few cells, and then placing them in the wombs of surrogate sheep and goat mothers and allowed to grow to term. The geep is “a mosaic of mismatched goat and sheep parts; the parts which grew from the sheep embryo are woolly while those which grew from the goat embryo are hairy.” While sometimes cited as a hybrid, the geep is not a hybrid but a “chimera,” a name adopted by the scientific community from the stories of the mythic monster with a lion’s head, goat’s body, and serpent’s tail. [1] What will they think of next?
I went down the “Google” information superhighway in search of the “geep” because of a commentary I read about the parable in Matthew. The commentary noted that in this story of the last judgment, “there are only two ways: either one serves the disadvantaged, or one does not; there is no middle way.” There is no middle way. I found myself thinking, “I beg to differ. There is too a middle way. I am a living example of the middle way.” When I mentioned this to the folks who attended the Bible study this week, there was a general nod around the room. We perceived ourselves as middle-way kinds of folk. What do I mean by that? I mean that sometimes we act like sheep, sometimes like we act like goats. Sometimes we are engaged in feeding the hungry, providing water to the thirsty, welcoming strangers, clothing the naked, caring for the sick, and visiting those who are imprisoned; and other times we avoid opportunities to do those things. Sometimes sheep, sometimes goats.
I can only conclude that we are, metaphorically speaking, a flock of geep. We are the geep of God’s pasture.
Not having imagined geep back in the prophet Ezekiel’s day, Ezekiel has a different metaphor that may apply to the geepish among us: fat sheep. The section for today’s reading begins with a tender picture of God the good shepherd gathering up the scattered sheep, rescuing them from all the dangerous places they have gotten into. God will put them in rich pasture land, bind up the injured, strengthen the weak. But: “the fat and the strong I will…destroy.” Or, “watch over.” Apparently some Hebrew texts have it one way and some have it another—the two words in Hebrew are so similar that one of them is probably a copying error and the other is not. I myself am rooting for “watch over.” That makes a little more sense in that the next line is how the fat sheep will be fed—“I will feed them with justice.” So it’s maybe more of a crash diet than a slaughter.
Even the milder “watching over” has a sense of keeping a close eye on the unruly members of the flock. The fat sheep aren’t fat just because they’re naturally big-boned. They are fat because they put their chubby heads down and butted the weaker animals away from the sources of food. And besides hogging the good pasture they trampled it down with their bulky legs and fouled the clean water with their stout feet. It wasn’t enough, in other words, that they took more than their fair share; they also misused the sources so that it was ruined for other members of the flock.
The Wikipedia entry on goat/sheep hybrids notes that sometimes people call geep “shoats.” That’s an improper use of the word “shoat” since it actually denotes a baby pig. But maybe that’s not so far off the mark, after all. I have seen baby pigs in action, and they’re pretty much all about looking out for #1. That sounds like a fair description of the trouble with the fat sheep Ezekiel is raging about. As for whether I qualify as a fat sheep or not, or whether you do…let your conscience speak to that. I do think there may be a prophetic hint there for all of us citizens of the first world who practice a kind of economic apartheid over the third world. As you are well aware, our country with something like 5% of the world’s population uses around 23% of its energy resources. [2] One American child consumes as much energy as twenty children living in India. The prophet Ezekiel wasn’t thinking about issues like energy consumption in his day, but the metaphor of fat sheep may still apply.
In both the Old Testament and New Testament texts today there is an element of judgment. “I will judge between sheep and sheep,” God says through Ezekiel. In Matthew, the Son of Man “will separate people one from another as a shepherd separates the sheep from the goats.” A person who’s pretty sure which camp he or she will be standing in might be comfortable with those images of last judgment. But what about us Geep? What if we have the deep, soulful eyes of a sheep but the insatiable belly of a goat? What if we have a sheep’s woolly heart, but a goat’s hairy wallet? What if we have woolly, soft, listening sheepy ears and the calloused forehead of a goat who thinks nothing of putting head down and shoving competitors out of the way? Will our parts be surgically separated from each other? Do we need to start racking up a few more sheep points so that when the separation comes we can limp into God’s realm leaving only a goaty hoof behind?
I realize I have strayed far into the realm of the facetious at this point. But it does seem to me that parables, promises, or threats of judgment may strike fear into our hearts precisely because we feel so divided within our own souls. We are well aware that we are within ourselves a thoroughly mixed bag of saint and sinner, and we may find ourselves wondering about which part of the mix will prevail at the crucial moment. It’s the issue of division that I believe we need to pay attention to as we read these and other parables of judgment. Not the division of the human race into the good guys and the bad guys, but the division we feel within ourselves and the divisions we experience in an imperfect human society.
I went to a “Jesus Seminar on the Road” session a few weeks ago, and was struck by the way biblical scholar Roy Hoover described Jesus’ vision as he understands it. He said Jesus’ message was in essence “an appeal for single-mindedness, or whole heartedness.” Jesus’ teaching was about urging people to make an unconditional commitment to live under the rule of God, and to live in unconditional trust in God’s generosity and love. Single minded commitment. Whole-hearted trust.
Seems like making that single-minded, whole hearted commitment to live under the rule of God is the cure for what ails us—only this kind of commitment will eventually heal the fissures in our souls. And looking to Jesus as the pioneer and perfecter of our faith, we see what this parable hints at: that a whole-hearted commitment to loving God leads to a whole-hearted devotion to our fellow humans, especially those toward whom God is particularly tender, the lost and the least. We ordinary mortals are apt to divide up humanity into the more loveable and the less loveable, the ones we care about and the ones we don’t, those for whom we feel some responsibility and those toward whom we are apathetic or hostile, the hot and the not. In contrast, Jesus teaches and makes evident in action that no such division exists in God’s heart. The divisions we experience in human society that keep folk sorted out are entirely human-made. God’s grace transcends all such division, and God’s prophets press their listeners to see a unity where we are used to seeing division.
Kathleen Norris’ take on this is that Jesus’ parable of the sheep and the goats appeals to the listeners’ imagination. We are to imagine, and act as if Christ is in other people, “even the stranger whom we believe we have reason to fear, the prisoner whose acts we find reprehensible, the sick we'd rather condemn because we're convinced that their lifestyle contributed to their illness, the hungry who should have been able to fend for themselves. If we cannot recognize Christ in these others, what we have, to paraphrase the prison guard in Cool Hand Luke, is a "failure to imaginate." I love that phrase. If we cannot see Christ in others, which is a short-hand way to wipe out the hierarchies in our outlook on humanity, then what we have is a failure to imaginate.
Norris continues: “The exercise of our imaginations is vital if we are to find Christ in others. But it is also necessary that we utterly reject the temptation to sloth, that perversion of imagination which gives us, in the words of Fred Craddock, "the ability to look at a starving child... with a swollen stomach and say, ‘Well, it's not my kid.' To look at a recent widow... and say, ‘It's not my mom.' Or to see an old man sitting alone in the park and say, 'Well . . . that's not my dad.' It is that capacity of the human spirit to look out upon the world and everything God made and say, I don't care." [3] That’s the perversion of holy imagination.
There are lots of great stories written about meeting Christ in the lost and the least, stories like Tolstoy’s “Martin the Cobbler” that are meant to spark our imagination about the sacredness of the people we meet. I am convinced that our own life stories have threads of meeting Christ in others. Have you ever reached out to someone in need and found yourself quite suddenly standing on holy ground? I have. I gave some money to a young woman in the city once and had a strong sense of “mothering” her on behalf of God. I received a gift of a bus transfer from someone down and out who wanted to be generous to anyone who happened to be at that bus stop, and in a moment we connected as human beings who ordinarily live in parallel universes. I’ve prayed with the lonely, ill, and distressed, hardly knowing what I was saying, to find out later that I was given words that were healing. It doesn’t happen every single time we extend ourselves, but often enough, we meet Christ in such encounters and proud divisions between people evaporate. And we find in those moments that the fractures within our souls begin to heal as well.
What’s more, the gap we perceive between ourselves and God disappears in such moments as we experience the tangible presence of the Holy. Dostoevsky wrote a scene in The Brothers Karamozov in which a woman who is deeply troubled by her loss of faith begs the saintly monk Zossima to tell her how she can conquer her doubts and recover her trust in God. Zossima tells her that there is no way to prove that God exists, but there is a way to be convinced. When she asks how, he answers: “By the experience of active love. Strive to love your neighbor entirely and indefatigably. In as far as you advance in love you will grow surer of the reality of God and the immortality of your soul. If you attain to perfect self-forgetfulness in the love of your neighbor, then you will believe without doubt, and no doubt can possibly enter your soul. This has been tried. This is certain.” [4]
In the end, I don’t think we should worry too much about God dividing up the fat and lean flock or dividing up the sheep and the goats on judgment day. If such images motivate us to do better, fine. But we should remember that above all God is not in the business of dividing but rather in the business of putting back together. God wants to put us together as one human family—rich and poor, young and old, liberal and conservative, male and female, gay and straight, every color on the human palette. God wants to put our souls torn asunder by conflicting impulses toward good and evil back together as well. If only our divided hearts could be whole—whole heartedly devoted to God and to God’s gracious rule! I am persuaded that healing the painful splits within us is God’s deep desire as well as ours. And ultimately, God wants us to enjoy union with Godself; not to be separated from God but joined in spirit with the great Love active in the universe.
It is love alone that will heal the divisions among us and within us. Dear flock—sheep, goats, geep, shoats—a loving God is the shepherd of us all. May we be bathed in that love and changed by it so that we may be healed and become, in turn, healers.
[1] http://www.messybeast.com/genetics/hybrid-sheep-goat.htm
[2] http://worldpopulationbalance.org/pop/energy/
[3] Norris, Kathleen “Imagining Christ” CHRISTIAN CENTURY November 15,2005
[4] Dosteoevsky, Fyodor quoted in The Parables of Peanuts by Robert Short