The Sheep of Iona

I hadn’t been to the early service for at least a month what with all of the Holy Week activities and then the annual Parish meeting last week. So I set my alarm for 6:30 a.m. last night, plenty of time to compensate for any bad rolling over type behavior. As I pulled into the parking lot, I noticed the absence of Patricia’s red station wagon, with the bumper sticker that says “Separate Church & Hate.” In a space nearby, I saw a blue sedan—and remembered that Patricia was in San Francisco at her 30-year Peace Corp reunion.

I headed for the door, just in time to unlock it for Tim, whose arms were loaded down with projector-computer-type Sunday School teacher stuff. “You preaching, too?” I asked. He was not, just teaching.

Inside the door Maggie greeted me. “You preaching?” I asked for the second time in as many minutes. I think she nodded her head. In fact, I’m not sure what she said, if it was “good morning” or “yes I prepared a sermon” or what. But Maggie’s smile – indeed her whole mood -- was immediately infectious. I found myself smiling as I made a pot of coffee, for no good reason. It was like one of those song lyrics that you hear and then you can’t get out of your head.

In her sermon she talked about a long-ago pilgrimage that she made to the Isle of Iona, one of the oldest landmarks of Christianity. She recounted how a monastery had been founded there in 563 by Saint Columba and how the tiny island became the burial place for Scottish kings. How the island and Abbey became a holy place of pilgrimage.

Maggie also described the green rolling pasture land that surrounded the ancient edifice, and said one evening she and her companions sat outside watching the sheep that dot the landscape. As the day drew to a close, the mother sheep began calling their babies. A pair of twins, she’d been watching, heard their mother’s call amidst the general commotion of bleeting and bahhing of the other mothers. She watched as the twins immediately went to and found their mother and noted that all of the other babies were paired correctly with their mothers as they all settled down for the night.

The story helped to reshape and deepen the Gospel reading, John 10:22-30. Temple officials are trying to get Jesus to say he’s the Messiah but he has no plans to. “My sheep hear my voice,” he says. “I know them and they follow me.”

There are voices in our heads that we hear, all kinds of voices. Sometimes it’s the voice of denial and sometimes it’s the voice of God, Maggie said.

So I’ve been pondering the voices in my head quite a bit today. Sometimes, I find, I have more than one voice coming at me on the same subject. Neither is completely wrong but neither is completely right either. I’ll have to keep working on that one.

As far as the voice of God, I’m not really sure he comes to me that way, or that I think of her in that way. Although, of course, that makes perfect sense. But I can feel God, I think, in others. Just as it’s hard to see pain and grief in a friend without getting a knot in your stomach, there is also that pure unconscious joy that spreads from one person to another, spreads from the outside in,turned out again, almost light enough to be carried away by the wind. The gifts of God for the people of God.