Reading Parables Otherwise: The Crazy Shepherd (4th Sunday after Pentecost; Luke 15:4-6; July 2, 2017)

Reading Parables Otherwise: The Crazy Shepherd

4th Sunday after Pentecost
Luke 15:4-6
July 2, 2017

Rev. John M. Caldwell, PhD
First United Methodist Church
Decorah, Iowa

I've been thinking about Chaplain Jim White. I served with him in Germany in the late 70s. He was good at what he did. He was a capable pastor and a good officer as well. I liked working for him and it seemed that the feeling went both ways: I was always his driver when we went on field exercises.

It was when were on those exercises that the good ol' boy from Shreveport, Louisiana, would come to the surface. He never went into the field without a supply of communion bourbon which he would share in the evenings. He chewed tobacco and liked being in the field where in his words, "all the world was a spittoon." The rest of us in the chaplains' office amended that to read, "all the world is a spittoon, except for the inside of our tent."

It was in the evenings, around the communion bourbon, that the stories would come out. Chaplain White had served with the 101st Airborne Division in Viet Nam in the north up near the demilitarized zone. My favorite story was about an order of communion wine. (There seems to be a theme here!) He was running low on communion wine so he put in an order for a case, twelve bottles. In typical military fashion the order was filled, but instead of a case of communion wine, he got a shipping container full of cases of communion wine. It wasn't one of those forty-foot containers. That would have been ridiculous. Still, he found himself in possession of 175 cases of communion wine.

He tried to give them back, but there didn't seem to be any way to do that. So he turned to Sgt. Jones, his battalion supply chief. Sgt. Jones recognized barter goods when he saw them, and made a trade for enough steak and lobster to serve surf 'n' turf to the whole battalion, courtesy of the battalion chaplain.

I loved his stories.

Of course, there were stories he didn't tell. He began his tour in Viet Nam going on patrol with the companies in his battalion, but the company commanders were being "protective" of him and he realized that this was endangering the troops so he stopped going on patrol. Instead, he spent a good deal of his time at the battalion aide station.

This was where casualties were first brought in and "triaged". I had heard that term triage before. But it was from Chaplain White that I learned what it really meant. It means to separate the injured into three categories. In the first category are those whose injuries are not life-threatening. They can wait for treatment. In the second category of the injured are those whose injuries are life-threatening and whose lives can be saved with timely treatment. There is a third category, one that no one talks about, composed of those who will die regardless of what treatment they are given.

As the injured came into the battalion aide station, they were evaluated and categorized. The first waited to be treated until the "rush" was over. The second category was treated immediately, stabilized, and sent on, often eventually, back to the United States. And the third category? Well, they were sent to what was called the "check out line." It did not make sense to spend valuable medical staff time treating men who were going to die no matter what you did. It just made good sense to use that valuable time to treat those who would actually be helped. Chaplain White went where he was needed most: to the checkout line to comfort the dying. He spent much of his tour cradling young men in his arms, telling them that they were going to be okay, as they cried for their mothers or their wives or sweethearts until they died.

He didn't tell us those stories. I only learned of them much later. There wasn't enough communion bourbon in the whole world to unseal those memories.

Triage, as actually practiced in the Viet Nam war sounds brutal, but it saved lives. Spending hours on a patient who was going to die no matter what was done while allowing four or five patients to die who could have been saved just isn't a way to save as many lives as possible. Triage is just a severe and gut-wrenching case of a rational cost/benefit analysis. How do we get the most good from the resources we have?

We use that principle all the time, often without even thinking about it. Let's say that you are in an auto accident. You are okay, but your car got banged up pretty badly. You call your insurance company and they send an adjuster. They look at your car and decide how much it will cost to repair. If the cost to repair it is more than the car is worth, your car goes to the checkout line. It is, as they say, "totaled" and the insurance company sends you a check. If the car is worth the expense and effort to repair, the insurance company authorizes the repair. The cost is compared to the benefit in order to make a decision about what to do.

Let's take another, happier example. Let's say that there is a ten-year-old girl who has been figure-skating since she was five. She's always seemed to have an aptitude for it, but lately she's really caught fire. She is highly motivated. She's doing very well in competition, often out-performing girls who are older and more experienced. It's time for a conversation with her coach. She says that to go to the next level she will need to have access to better coaching. The question now is, Does she have what it takes? Is it worth spending the extra money and turning the family's life upside down? If she is truly gifted, then it might be worth the expense, but if she's not, then no amount of money will get her to the Olympics. The ten-year-old might have a life-long hobby and might even make some money teaching at the elementary levels, but the dream of Olympic competition will, sooner or later, get sent to the checkout line.

You see how this works? The buyers of the house that used to be next door went through the same process. Does the benefit of having that house outweigh the cost of moving it and then updating and repairing it? Or would it make more sense to start from scratch and build it the way they want it from the ground up?

Doing a cost/benefit analysis is just being smart and sensible. That's always been true.

—

There was a shepherd who had a hundred sheep and one of them wandered off, as sheep will do. At some point the shepherd noticed that there no longer one hundred sheep; one of them was missing. Now, here's the question: Does it make sense to go after the lost sheep if doing that means leaving the ninety-nine sheep behind?

Now, the shepherd is not alone; he has his dogs. Sheep dogs are amazing animals. They use many of the skills that wild dogs use to find and kill game, but they don't kill or even injure the sheep. Instead they keep them together and protect them. Obviously, though, one stubborn sheep has gotten past them. Does the shepherd leave the ninety-nine sheep with his dogs--the same dogs who have already let one of them get away--or does the shepherd stay where he is and send a dog after the lost sheep instead. What's the smart and sensible thing to do?

If we hadn't been carefully trained by repetition to think that it makes sense to abandon the ninety-nine in search of the one, we would interrupt Jesus when he says, "Wouldn’t he leave the other ninety-nine in the pasture and search for the lost one until he finds it?," and we would say, "Of course we wouldn't! That's not the smart move at all! This shepherd is nuts, crazy! The percentage move is to send a dog. That's what we would do. That's the smart and sensible thing to do." And we would be right.

This is place where the story goes off the rails. And this is the place in the story that reveals God's dream. The shepherd in this story doesn't use a cost/benefit analysis in deciding about going after lost sheep. This shepherd doesn't triage his problems. This shepherd is crazy, but it's craziness skewed in favor of the lost sheep. Van Morrison kind of got it right: it's "love, love, love, love, crazy love" that motivates this shepherd.

That's what God's dream is like. In God's dream no one gets triaged. We might be off by ourselves thinking, No sane and sensible God would come looking for me. But we don't have a sane and sensible God. We have a crazy God who comes and finds us anyway.

Or, more likely, we might be one of the good ones who never wander off, never give God any trouble. One day we might notice that one of us is missing and we say, "Hey, where did Sven go? Isn't that just like him? It's a good thing we're not like that, because no sane and sensible God will leave us to go find someone who has wandered off." But God isn't a sane and sensible God. God is crazy. Our God is crazy stubborn and one more time we see the wisdom in Bishop Palmer's formulation of the Good News: God loves you and there is nothing you can do about it.

In all the time I spent with Chaplain White I never once heard him even suggest that someone was beyond God's caring. From the private who just could not seem to get his act together to the upwardly mobile colonel, they were all within the circle of God's crazy love.

So you can imagine what it cost him to carry that crazy love to the checkout line, and tend to the soldiers who had been left to die, to the place where sane and sensible becomes a kind of physical and moral hell. Chaplain White bore the weight of that moral injury all his life. He numbed himself with bourbon that went far beyond the sacramental. His marriage crumbled. Eventually he succumbed to the weight of the unseen injuries he had suffered, a late but by no means the last American life lost in that war.

It was, I believe, the contradiction between God's dream and the reality he confronted at battalion aide that tore his heart in two. Rather than face this injury he consigned himself to the checkout line. This is the contradiction at the heart of the cross, in which the reality of the world attempts to put God's dream to death.

Eventually, we have to choose which of those two will have the allegiance of our hearts. Will it be the sane and sensible course or the path of a crazy God? We know that Jesus' choice was vindicated on the third day. Jesus was raised to new life. I didn't always know, as I do now, that Chaplain White who laid down his life for his friends and who died on account of the sin of the world, will be vindicated and raised to new life. And you and I with him. We, too, have the choice between the careful calculus of a dying world and the unbounded life of a God of crazy love.

I can't choose for you, but I can offer you something that might help. Here we have Christ's table, and it is a way of making visible in our midst God's crazy dream. There is a reason why we refuse to triage people at the table. No one can get along fine without it. No one is unreachable through the meal that is offered here. We are all hungry. We are all thirsty. We are all torn. We are all in need, in the same need, of the healing and nourishment here freely given.

When the crazy shepherd found the lost sheep, "he [was] thrilled and [placed] it on his shoulders. When he [arrived] home, he [called] together his friends and neighbors, saying to them, ‘Celebrate with me because I’ve found my lost sheep.’" In God’s dream no one gets triaged.

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