Each Week Fr. Scott's sermons may be read here on line.
Sermon for the Fourth Sunday of Easter – April 13, 2008
It was first published in 1942 and has never been out of print. Last year alone it sold over 900,000 copies. It’s been translated into 23 languages, including Hmong, Japanese and Hebrew. Now, “The Runaway Bunny” by Margaret Wise Brown, one of the most beloved and best-selling children’s books of all time,is about to make its Carnegie Hall debut. On April 29, for one night only, a classical music adaptation of this simple story of a wayward bunny will be presented to a black tie audience in a benefit for a children’s hospital in Israel.
Featuring the renowned Israeli violinist Ittai Shapira and narrated by Brooke Shields, the concerto is a work in the style of Sergei Prokofiev’s 1936 classic “Peter and the Wolf,” a musical adaptation of a Russian fable, a selection offered by nearly every orchestra in the world every year in a successful effort to attract family audiences.
There’s no reason why “The Runaway Bunny” should not be just, if not more,popular; it seems to me that the story has a broader appeal. “Peter and the Wolf” tells the rather frightening tale of a little boy who disobeys his grandfather by wandering into a meadow without permission – “The meadow is a dangerous place!” he is told when he returns home. “If a wolf should come out of the forest, then…you would be in great danger.”
Peter pays no attention to this warning – “Boys like him are not afraid of wolves,” the narration says – and back to the meadow he goes the next day where he proceeds to capture - and hang from a tree by its tail – a wolf who has been threatening a duck, a cat and a bird. The cat and bird manage to escape the beast’s jaws, thanks to Peter’s help, but, alas, he is too late to save the duck, which is swallowed whole. Peter then saves the wolf itself from some armed hunters and leads “a triumphant procession” to the zoo to deposit the luckless and probably hungry and hurting creature, the grateful bird chirping beside him singing, “My what brave fellows we are, Peter and I!”
As the piece draws to its conclusion, the narrator cheerfully tells the audience, “Perhaps, if you listen very carefully, you will hear the duck quacking inside the wolf, because the wolf, in his hurry to eat her, had swallowed her alive.”
Try sending your kids off to a good night’s sleep with that image lingering in their heads! In my house, this story always seemed to do the job: “Once there was a little bunny who wanted to run away. So he said to his mother, ‘I am running away.’ ‘If you run away,’ said his mother, ‘I will run after you. For you aremy little bunny.’” No matter what the little bunny says he is going to do - and no matter where he says he is going to go - his mother tells him she will find a way to be there to meet him. “‘Shucks,’” said the bunny, ‘I might just was well stay where I am and be your little bunny.’ And so he did. ‘Have a carrot,’ said the mother bunny.”
He flees her; she finds him; she feeds him. She lets him wander and leave home, because that’s what children do; but she never lets him go. No, this is not a cautionary tale of an overbearing mother; this is a comforting tale of a love which will never abandon us; a tale of a resting place that finds its way to us; a home at the end of the road.
If the promise of freedom found in the image of the road is a quintessentially American notion, the promise of a secure eternal dwelling place found in the image of home is a universal one. Little wonder “The Runaway Bunny” has been translated into so many languages and continues to sell so many copies all over the world; little wonder that the 23rd Psalm continues to be one of the best known and most loved chapter in the Bible, even by those who have had limited contact with scripture and even less with sheep and shepherds. It doesn’t matter; all of us have struggled through darkened valleys of despair and death; all of us seek someone who will walk beside us, protecting us from the snapping jaws of the pernicious predators that seem to assail us; all of us long to linger in a verdant sun-washed pasture, our souls as stillas the waters we lie beside.
All of us long for – all of us hope for - home and, much like Miss Wise’s brief, beloved story, David’s brief, beloved Psalm tells us where that longing and where that hope is to be found. In a mere fifty-seven words in Hebrew – and about twice that number in English translation – the author of the 23rd Psalm teaches us, as Rabbi Harold Kushner writes, to “see the world as God would have us see it.” That is, as a place where, no matter what happens to us; no matter where we go, God goes with us.
The earliest ancestors of the Hebrew people were nomads, biblical historians have pointed out. They owned no property of their own; they were bound to no particular location but instead traveled with their flocks wherever there was nourishing pastureland for their sheepto graze on. And before the temple was built, God traveled with them in the Ark of the Covenant, carted through the valleys and beside the streams.
They were a people called Israel, so named after Jacob wrestled with the angel all night long; a people who struggled with God, with each other, and with their neighbors – seeking a geographical home they would not finally attain until only sixty years ago; in the meantime they had to find their spiritual home in the God who journeyed along with them – as he journeyed with Jonah, remember, who also tried to run away.
And when Israel flourished and many of the people found other occupations than abiding in the fields, still they longed to live with One dedicated to keeping watch over them by night; one filled with love for every tender lamb; one who would find and carry them if they were to go astray. So in their psalms – which were, after all, their songs – the Lord is their shepherd, a far more appealing image than the God of hellfire and damnation.
The noted Old Testament scholar Walter Brueggemann has remarked that the shepherd, who “leads and feeds” the vulnerable sheep is an image full of “tenderness, gentleness, and attentiveness.” While we may think of a shepherd as a male – as they most likely were in biblical times and probably still are - Mr. Brueggemann says that “the God who feeds and leads has maternal qualities, and in those verbs does what a mother does.” Notice, he says, that in the Psalm the shepherd gets all the verbs – the shepherd does all the work – while the sheep does nothing, just waits and receives and enjoys the gifts.
I wonder how many mothers in how many cultures, through the course of how many centuries, can identify with the shepherd’s assorted tasks, right down to setting the table night after night. Of course, to prepare a table “in the presence of those who trouble me” is a different chore from unfolding a blanket and setting out the paper plates and plastic knives and forks. Early each day the shepherd David sings of has to prepare the fields for grazing; that means digging up poisonous weeds and thorns and clearing the area of the sheep’s enemies – snakes, scorpions, and so on.
Each evening, as the sheep were being corralled, the injured and sickly ones were separated from the others and treated with a medicinal drink made of fermented material and herbs sweetened with honey, making it easier to go down. Much like small, and even not so small, children, sheep can do very little for themselves, becoming easily lost, requiring virtually continuous monitoring and mentoring.
Here’s where we differ from sheep, I hope! We grow up; we venture on our own, often far from the fold. Instead of being waited on hand and foot, our every need attended to, our every movement directed by someone else, the time comes when we have to do the feeding and leading; the time comes when we have lambs of our own to protect; little ones who look to us for a sense of security.
In an old “Peanuts” cartoon Charlie Brown and Peppermint Patty are sitting under a tree when Patty asks, “What do you think security is, Chuck?” (She always called him “Chuck.”) Charlie Brown answers, “Security is sleeping on the back seat of the car when you’re a little kid, and you’ve been somewhere with your mom and dad, and it is night, and you’re riding home in the car asleep. You don’t have to worry about anything. Your mom and dad are in the front seat and they do all the worrying. They take care of everything.”
Patty replies, “That’s real neat.” “But it doesn’t last,” Charlie Brown says. “Suddenly you’re grown up and it can never be that way again.” “Never?” she asks. “Absolutely never.” With a horrified look on her face, Peppermint Patty pleads, “Hold my hand, Chuck.”
Yes, to take over the front seat is to take over responsibility for the verbs; instead of lying down in a green pasture – or on the back seat– now you’ve got to do the steering and navigating; you’ve got to watch for all the roadside hazards and get your charges home safely to the safety of their beds. Charlie Brown was right; now, you can never sit in the back again; now you’re in charge of all the worrying.
Well, I think worrying comes with the territory of being an adult, whether we’re parents or not. Only those with no responsibilities have no worries, and God knows we have more than our share of responsibilities. God knows we can’t do it alone. Thank God we don’t have to.
When we say “the Lord is my shepherd,” we are saying that we know we live in a dangerous, unpredictable world, ever mindful of what the philosopher William James called “the pit of insecurity beneath the surface of life.” But we are saying something else as well. When we say “the Lord is my shepherd,” we are saying that we can get up every morning and get behind the wheel and venture through the world, not under the illusion that nothing bad will ever happen to us, but assured that we will not have to face the thieves and the bandits alone; because we know, as David knew, “thou art with me.” Under the stormy surface, the sea is calm.
The Psalmist is all grown up. No longer a child sleeping in the back seat, now he has made his way through the shadowy adult world, the shepherd by his side the whole time whether he knew it or not. Now, he has been led through the valley; now the waters around him and inside him are stilled; now he has been invited into the house of the Lord, that he might live all his days in God’s presence.
Our names are also engraved on this invitation from the one who knows each of our names; God’s house is indeed our home. We don’t have to run away or sail far away, or join the circus or climb a mountain to get there, either. And we certainly don’t have to worry about finding God; more likely if we stop running and stop worrying, God will have an easier time finding us, coming to us where we are and as we need him: as a mother, a father, a shepherd; even a bunny; anyone who extends a helping, feeding, hand.
Have a carrot.