Rev. Paul Tellstrom                                                               Irvine United Congregational Church

Easter 4C “Paddy’s Farm”                                                                                         April 29, 2007

Psalm 23               

Gospel Reading: John 10:11-18                                                                                      word count: 1,888

This Sunday marks the first year that we have been with you.  Shortly after I arrived, Carl and I took a trip to Ireland that we had planned for a long time.  While I was gone, I knew that I would be coming back to this place and not my former church, and I thought about what I hoped this experience might be like for me.  I felt had found a match with you in both my pluralistic beliefs, and in my desire to help continue to build a welcoming community where thinking and questioning are both welcome. 

We had an experience in Ireland I would like to share with you from my journal, and fill in the other pieces as I go.

Monday, May 29, 2006

            Cold morning and windy, coming down stone stairs from a castle whose claim it is to hold half of Jacob’s pillow; the stone on which he dreamed his dreams of angels ascending and descending on ladders to heaven where he heard of a promised land.

            We travel through County Cork north to County Limerick to a farm settled in a little green valley in the Ballyhoura Hills.

            Paddy and Margaret meet us at the front gate of the farmhouse and usher us in.  Old ivory lace cloths cover the tables Margaret has set in both the dining and living rooms to accommodate over twenty guests.  Paddy explains that this is the new house, and that we would now be walking down the hill to the old family home while Margaret tends to our meal. 

            The old farmhouse is over three hundred years old and the same stream still rolls by it after centuries of prosperity and famine.  The same family has worked this land all this time and more. 

            We stoop to walk through the front doors and into the small common room, all twenty of us looking for a position to occupy in this place that time has left alone.  The farmhouse furnishings are sturdy and comfortable, and the walls are hung with family items in homemade frames.  Paddy, as laird of the house, takes his place in front of the fireplace and addresses us.

            Directing our attention to one of the two small rooms behind us, he tells us what has happened there.  What we see is old wallpaper, an oil lamp on a bureau, and a hand-colored religious print hanging from a chain on the wall.  The bed is iron and neatly covered with a white spread.  A string descends from the fixture that holds a light bulb over the bed from when electricity first came to County Limerick.

            “It was here that my sons were born.  Here it was that I was born as well” he says, “My mother brought me into the world right there in that room.  It was the bed in which my father was born, and his father before him.  It is also the room, and this the place, of many a wake that I can remember, and many more over centuries gone by, and much food and drink has been shared at those times, no matter how lean they were.” 

“It is our job to come into this land and tend and care for it, and that we continue to do.  We raise sheep and pigs, and there are eighty head of cattle that my son Patrick is looking after as we speak.”

Paddy is warm, funny and personable.  He tells us that though he has eighty acres, it was once a larger farm before Cromwell’s army came in 1649 after the Irish Rebellion and confiscated their lands, making the Irish tenants on their own farms, while a third of them were killed or exiled.  Irish Catholics were the wrong kind of Christians to the new breed of religious extremists that now headed both church and state as well.  Paddy’s family lost their rights to the land and was plunged into poverty.  But, there were still sheep to be tended and cattle to be raised, and the family stayed on the land; from owners to tenant farmers, and finally to owners once again.

            Now he directs our attention to the prize possession of the house.  The deed to their farm, won back by his father through hard work in 1961, is framed and set under glass on its own table in the corner.  This piece of paper shows the legal transfer of ownership back to the family from whom it had been stolen; a family that has lived here conceivably even before the Celts, whose ancestors could tell us the secrets of the old habitations that are all around the mountains— massive dolmens and wedge tombs and the stone forts carved out of limestone. 

Still here.  Still here…this family weathers on like the rocks in the hills, and feeds and tends their flocks.  One may even wonder for a moment if this history is ingrained in their flocks as well—do they know on some psychic, or spiritual, or perhaps even karmic level, that this symbiotic relationship between shepherd and sheep, farm animal and farmer, has been going on throughout the centuries?

            And this descendant, this farmer’s son and son many times again, a tender of sheep and livestock, stands at the 300-plus year old hearth and now directs attention to himself.  He hooks his fingers under the lapels of the jacket he has put on to receive us, and he clears his throat in order to recite a poem from memory.

            He begins, and he delivers it well.  He has done it many times and knows that his audience will receive it, and we do.  It isn’t often that you unexpectedly find yourself in an Irishman’s ancient farmhouse and also find that said Irishman has chosen to break into verse.  Of course we are interested. 

It is a poem about the meaning of life, like many a poem we learn in school and commit to memory.  And why do we do this?  How many of us have a memorized verse within us?  Is it so that perhaps we too can one day stand at a similar altar and deliver our own Poem; the clumsily learned piece that we may feel sums up a philosophy of life that we choose to offer up as liturgy?  Liturgy that demonstrates that we can say there is something lofty, something higher about our lives (though carried perhaps in borrowed words) that brings together all the pieces of things we partly believe, seek, feel, know, experience… into one great chord of beautifully ordered bars and stanzas?

            With Paddy, the poem that comes forth is unimportant.  The poem is the man himself, able to stand before his guests and recite words in the room where he was born, and his father before him, indeed all the family from which he came, born from an old iron bed and then out onto the farmyard to the work of being faithful to the land.  And, to these farm animals that also come in and go out of this world in the same sheds and fields as their own parents just outside these walls.  His poem, his own self, is about being faithful in the cycle of life.

            We exit to where Paddy’s son explains the work of the farm today and the challenges for tomorrow, and we walk back to the new farmhouse where Margaret ushers us in to take our seats and have a meal.  It is an Irish meal followed by Guinness cake, tea and trifle, and homemade scones with fresh cream and jam.  She fusses over each of us, and together they walk us back to the coach that will take us later to Dublin.

            In the Gospel of John (normally read on this Sunday) Jesus says, “I am the good shepherd.  The good shepherd lays down his life for the sheep.  The hired hand, who is not the shepherd and does not own the sheep, sees the wolf coming and leaves the sheep and runs away—and the wolf snatches them and scatters them.  The hired hand runs away because a hired hand does not care for the sheep.  I am the good shepherd. I know my own and my own know me.”  John 10:11-14

            But here at Paddy’s farm, the shepherds have been faithful, watching the flocks for centuries, as owners and as hired hands, and then as owners again.  When the wolf was there over them, they stayed on in spite of him.  They recognize first and foremost their connection to their flocks, to the great pulse, to the chord “Aum” and the great “I Am”, to the land that brought the Celts to this place to live in the shadows of stone dolmens and ruined castle keeps where God was known by other names but was still God, and where they were still the faithful people they are today.  Here today and tomorrow and every yesterday, these shepherds have led their flocks beside the still or flowing waters around the old house and the older house before it, and have led them to the green pastures of County Limerick, and Ireland itself.

            And so today, I am reflecting on this first year and taking this opportunity to say what I believe.  There must be places of spiritual safety, where the stranger is welcomed and the good word is more about grace and less on law.  People often come to churches like ours because they are looking for a place where they can fit in when it was impossible elsewhere.  They come from hurting places, from religious as well as intellectual exile.  Many are not safe from prejudice, others feel righteous anger at the prejudice and injustice around them, but I believe most come looking for a safe and spiritual community.

This is one of those places, and this is where I want to be with you.   The religious landscape has changed so much in my own lifetime that I feel like an outsider myself, a tenant farmer whose familiar terrain called “church” has been taken away by a new breed of Cromwell, leaving me to wonder what it is I must do with my own faith.    

The answer lies in what I find in the story of Paddy’s farm.  The earth upon which we are born is still the earth we must care for.  There is nothing else to do but to embrace it, and continue to be faithful.  We are shepherds to this place, to this community, to this city—all of us.  Together we watch over the flock and care for the land and its people.  Cromwells come and go—there is nothing we can do about that.  But we can be faithful people, faithful to each other and by keeping these doors open, faithful to those whose names we do not yet know who will come through them needing what we can offer.  This may be our own Poem; the clumsily learned piece that sums up a philosophy of life and understanding of God that we choose to offer up as liturgy, a poem of life lived faithfully that brings together all the pieces of things we believe, seek, feel, know, experience…  into one great chord of beautifully ordered bars and stanzas.  I want to share that poem with you.  Amen.

Scripture for Sunday, April 29, 2007 “Good Shepherd Sunday” Easter 4C

Psalm 23                (read in unison with congregation)

The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want.  He makes me lie down in green pastures; he leads me beside still waters; he restores my soul.  He leads me in right paths for his name’s sake.  Even though I walk through the darkest valley, I fear no evil; for you are with me; your rod and your staff— they comfort me.  You prepare a table before me in the presence of my enemies; you anoint my head with oil; my cup overflows.  Surely goodness and mercy shall follow me all the days of my life, and I shall dwell in the house of the Lord my whole life long.

 John 10:11-18

     “I am the good shepherd.  The good shepherd lays down his life for the sheep.  The hired hand, who is not the shepherd and does not own the sheep, sees the wolf coming and leaves the sheep and runs away—and the wolf snatches them and scatters them.  The hired hand runs away because a hired hand does not care for the sheep.  I am the good shepherd. I know my own and my own know me, just as the Father knows me and I know the Father. And I lay down my life for the sheep.  I have other sheep that do not belong to this fold. I must bring them also, and they will listen to my voice. So there will be one flock, one shepherd.  For this reason the Father loves me, because I lay down my life in order to take it up again.  No one takes it from me, but I lay it down of my own accord. I have power to lay it down, and I have power to take it up again.  I have received this command from my Father.”