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Sunday May 7, 2006- Easter 4, Year B

A few years ago
I saw a great ad on TV. It was the type of scene
you’d expect in an old western, or that long running TV show
Bonanza: dry western plains, mountains in the distance, big cloud streaked sky,
a bunch of cowboys on horseback, and western music playing in the background.
And they were all ready for a round up. Except...except what they were rounding up
was not cattle
but cats.
Regular old common cats — smooth haired ones and fluffy ones, some with those kind of squished in faces and others sleek and proud. They were running across the prairie, milling round in circles, even swimming across a river, though some had to be carried. There was one shot of a cowboy climbing up a tree to catch three cats lying along a branch, and another one draped across a saddle, looking around curiously. One scene showed a cowboy winding a ball of yarn; another two cowboys
discussing the scratches they had received.

The metaphor of herding cats
is one that has come into our language
as meaning something
that is pretty much impossible.
Any of you who own a cat know that
they are not really interested
in pleasing anyone
except themselves.
Unlike cattle, they don’t clump together — put two cows together and they’ll look at each other, two sheep will follow one another, two cats . . . well, they’re most likely to fight.
And if you’ve ever tried to train a cat, you’ll know it’s almost impossible.
They’re not stupid, they’re just very determined
to do things their own way.
And one moment
they’ll be snuggled up beside you, purring,
and the next
they’ll bite you — they’ve had enough.

As I was thinking about our readings today, it occurred to me
that as beloved as the metaphor
of Christ the Good Shepherd — and us the sheep —
might be,
a better image
might be Christ the cat-herder
and us as cats.

Sheep are few and far between here in the US, at least in comparison with Australia where I grew up, or even more so, New Zealand, where there are said to be 12 sheep for every person. Here in southern New Jersey
we have a few sheep around,
but most of us don’t really know what they’re like.
And that means
that when we say
God is our shepherd
and we are like sheep
it doesn’t really mean much to us.
Which is why it made me wonder
would it make more sense
to describe Jesus as being
the good cat-herder, or maybe even
the good cat-lover?

And would it make more sense
to say that we humans
are a bit like cats
in the way we relate to God?

Cats
can be wonderful companions. They snuggle up close,
they purr loudly, they look up at us
with what we interpret
as adoration in their eyes.
But — and I hate to say it —
but for the most part
cats do this
for their own benefit.
They come to us for comfort,
and of course
for food.
There are many cats
who spend their days out exploring the endlessly exciting world — or napping in the sun —
only reappearing
when it’s time for food.

The reality is that most cats are pretty independent.
They do what they want. They live on their own terms
within the boundaries we set for them,
but they submit to those limits
only because we are bigger than they are.
They come to us for what they need
because they know we can provide it.
But they tend to only want attention
on their own terms — and are quite happy to scratch or bite
to make it clear
that they only want attention
on their own terms.
And they bring us offerings, those wonderful gifts on the carpet or on our beds in the middle of the night
of a dead mouse, or if we’re lucky, a well chewed toy.
All of these things
are cats
acting like cats.
And we love them.

And that’s kind of how we relate to God. We tend to want God
on our own terms.
Sometimes
we’re willing
to get as close as we can to God. We pray, we worship, we seek out
God’s presence.
But other times
we keep our distance,
go do our own thing.
And in those times,
the way we interact with God
is when we want something. We suddenly begin to talk to God again
until we get whatever it is we need,
and then we head off on our own lives again.

And sometimes, when God responds,
we decide
that we aren’t interested.
We resist, we get angry at God,
we do the prayer equivalent of hissing and scratching and biting
and then go hide.

We even bring God offerings, promise to give up something,
to do something,
to try to get favor with God or to say thank you.

All of these things
are about being human.
And God loves us.
God loves us
when we are up close and purring,
God loves us
when we’re off doing our own thing.
God loves us — and forgives us —
when we scratch and bite;
God even loves us
when we bring offerings
that God doesn’t need.

God is like the good cat-owner
who cares for
and loves
cats.

Christ is the good shepherd
who gives up his life for the sheep.

Both of these
tell us something about who God is.
We use something we know well — cats and cat owners, sheep and shepherds —
to talk about something we don’t know well,
that is, God. Metaphorical language
is the main way
we talk about God.

Of course, any metaphor, whether it’s herding cats or herding sheep,
eventually becomes too narrow, too confining
for the reality it’s trying to describe.

Back in the nineteen-fifties
a book came out called
“Your God is too small.”
Our God is always too small. We only ever get a glimpse of God.
Remember the story of Moses? He asked to see God
and God granted his request. But even then
he only got to see a bit of God. God had him hide in a crack in the rock, and then God passed by, and Moses got to see
a glimpse of God’s back.

Our minds and our souls
simply aren’t capable of knowing
and understanding
the whole of who God is.
But we do the best we can.
We get a glimpse here
and a flash of understanding there,
and we build up a picture
out of all those pieces.
And because God
is bigger and more complex than anything else we know,
the best we can do
to explain what God is like
is to make comparisons
with things that we know, metaphors.
We say, God is like this, and God is like that.

In biblical times
they used, obviously,
the metaphor of the shepherd.
But there were lots of other metaphors for God too:
God is described as being like an eagle, like a mother hen, like a rock, like a fortress, like a father. Jesus describes himself as the vine, the bread of life, the good shepherd.
We don’t mean that God actually is
any of these things — we don’t mean that we worship a God with feathers,
or made out of granite or whatever, that Jesus is literally a vine or bread.
That would be silly.
What we mean is that God and Jesus share characteristics with these things, that they are like these things.
Metaphors help us know something about who God is, and who Jesus is.
We can connect with them.
But none of them tells us
everything.
Eventually
they fall apart.
God is all of these, and none of these. God is even more.

And so
what we are left with,
is God. God in all the fullness of divine glory.
The One who we can’t quite get a handle on
but who knows us
intimately
and loves us
with all the passion in the world.

The good cat owner
who loves us
no matter what.
The good shepherd
who lays down his life for the sheep.

This is the God that we worship. This is the God that we love.

 

Sermon ©Raewynne J. Whiteley 2005