Simul justus et peccator, Baby.

Stephen Schwartz’ lyrical  and mystical Godspell has always provided new insights into the Gospel stories most of us know by heart.

The musical has been doing that for nearly fifty years and lately the infusion of disco, hip hop, blues, and funk brings the parables even closer to home. 

One of my favorite skits in the 2011 revival was the separation of the sheep (“baaahhh”) from the goats (“maaahhh.”) As the goats realize to their horror that they are being shut out of the kingdom because of their lack of empathy for suffering people, they taunt the sheep: “But, Lord, if we knew it was you, we would have invited you over – for LAMB chops.” But Jesus – on stage as in the bible – is unyielding. “Truly I tell you, just as you did not do it to one of the least of these, you did not do it to me. And (you) will go away into eternal punishment, but the righteous into eternal life.”

How could Jesus could be so mean? You can hear the pathos in the bleating of the goats: “Lord, when was it that we saw you hungry or thirsty or a stranger or naked or sick or in prison, and did not take care of you?” But Jesus makes it plain: when we step gingerly over a sleeping homeless person at Grand Central Station, we step over Jesus. There is a story that when First Lady Rosalyn Carter did just that in 1978, she wept.

But life isn’t always simple for us goats. Several years ago my niece in Melbourne, Fla., posted this on Facebook: 

Doorbell rings at midnight- creepy guy with a sketchy story trying to get in our house ...  My husband got up and went to the window with a baseball bat while our daughter and I hid under the covers. First the guy said there had been an accident. Then he said he had taken a cab but needed help to pay the driver. Finally, with the dog barking ferociously inside the house, the guy disappeared.

Was that guy Jesus? Not bloody likely. But how do we judge the divinity of every panhandler who greets us in the mall with a sob story? The truth is, sooner or later, we’re all goats. Maaahh.

But much of the time, we’re sheep, too. We care for those who are hungry, thirsty and ill clothed. We support the poor. We nurse the sick. We have our prison ministries. Baaahh.

It’s interesting to note, by way of a scientific affirmation of a metaphysical observation, there is such a thing as a goat-sheep hybrid – a geep. This doesn’t happen often in nature. Goat and sheep do cohabit on a thousand hills, and they have been known to cross species lines and do the nasty, although their offspring rarely survive. But sheep-goat chimeras were created by researchers at the Institute of Animal Physiology in England by combining sheep embryos with goat embryos. The offspring were a mosaic of goat and sheep tissue. The parts that grew from the sheep embryo were woolly. Those that grew from the goat embryo were hairy.

It’s puzzling and perhaps a little disturbing why physiologists would want to do this, but it does make an unusual sermon illustration. When Jesus separates the sheep from the goats, how will he deal with the fact that most of us are geeps?

It took Christian theologians several hundred years to realize we are all an awkward combination of sheep and goats: Simul justus et peccator, as Martin Luther put it. We are all simultaneously saints and sinners.

Actually, I think this is a bigger problem for us than it will be for Jesus. He knows very well that all of us sin and fall short of the glory of God, and there must be some kind of divine formula to protect us from eternal punishment when we miss a deposit at the food pantry. But how much slack is Jesus willing to cut us?

Luther taught that even when our bent to sinning is washed away by the waters of baptism, we will still be sinners.  Only the grace of God can save us and our only hope is that Jesus cuts us a lot of slack. 

Still, sin and saintliness are intricately interwoven in each of us.

The 2004 European film, “The Downfall,” directed by Oliver Hirschbiegel, depicts the final ten days of Adolf Hitler’s life in his Berlin bunker in 1945. In an unlikely but apparently documented scene, Eva Braun – soon to become Frau Hitler – and Hitler’s young secretary, Traudl Junge, take a cigarette break in the bunker and talk about der fuehrer. “I’ve known him for ten years, and yet I don’t really know him at all,” confesses Eva. The lithesome Traudl takes a deep drag and shrugs. “In private moments he can be so kind and gentle,” she says. “At other times, he is so brutal.”*

Hitler is one of those malevolent figures so monstrous that partisan comparisons of our current president to Hitler fall ludicrously short. No one in history, with the possible exception of Caligula or Stalin, was as bad as Hitler. He is evil incarnate.

But I remember reading an essay by entertainer Steve Allen that speculated no one can be malicious all the time, and he used Hitler as an example. “Probably much of the time he was a very nice fellow,” Allen wrote. 

The speculation seems to hold true in many scenes from “The Downfall,” which are based on eyewitness accounts. At one point Hitler rages at his generals, saying the German people deserve to starve and die because they hadn’t done enough to defend the Reich. In other scenes, he tweaks the youthful cheek of a pre-teen soldier, or pats his secretary on the shoulder, saying, “You need to get some rest, dear.”

Probably no one is a monster 24-7. Many of the murderers I knew as a newspaper reporter were perfectly nice people. There is as telling scene in HBO’s Treme in which a felon in prison warns a visiting lawyer that a New Orleans councilman she admires is on the take. The lawyer, who believed in the councilman’s integrity, expresses shock, but the prisoner finds her attitude to be naïve. “We’re all nice guys,” he says. “We all love our mothers. We all root for the Saints.”

Even so, it’s not easy to think of ourselves as both good and evil, simultaneously goats and sheep. Our hymnology assures us that faith in Jesus will wash our all our sins away, leaving our souls – in that irksome Victorian metaphor – white as snow. We fervently want to believe that people can be good, that there are those who do not have “an evil bone in their bodies.” We’d like to think this was true of our sainted mothers, our favorite pastors, our idolized teachers. We’d like to believe that, someday, it will be true of us.

We’d like to think that, perhaps, but it’s not good theology or, for that matter, good psychology. The great psychoanalyst C. G. Jung insisted that evil and good do and must exist together in every human heart. In a Southern Cross review of an unpublished essay by Jung, Frank Thomas Smith quoted the great man:

“Evil is the necessary opposite of good, without which there would be no good either. It is impossible to even think good out of existence.” Jung, Smith writes, believed in the “titanic magnitude of evil,” and he believed Christian theologians “consistently and disastrously dwarfed the picture of evil as arising from the unconscious of humanity.” In Civilization in Transition, Jung wrote that evil “is of gigantic proportions, so that for the Church to talk of original sin and to trace it back to Adam’s relatively innocent slip-up with Eve is almost a euphemism. The case is far graver and is grossly underestimated.” 

Jung wrote these words before Hitler came to power, so history’s ultimate base line of “grossly underestimated” evil was as yet unavailable. But there is always ample evidence that evil impacts our lives with “titanic magnitude.”

Perhaps one of the messages in the parable of the sheep and the goats is that humans must strive to overcome the resident evil in our hearts by conscientiously living out God’s commandments to support the poor, “the least of these,” as Jesus called them. But out best efforts to be Christlike are not always successful. There are times when we will be moved to help “the least of these,” but also times when we will step over their sleeping bodies on subway vents. As in many animated features, the angel of our good nature orbits around our heads with the angel of our evil nature, one reminding us we are sheep, the other dismissing us as goats.

It’s not pleasant knowing good and evil are competing in our breasts but the knowledge does keep us realistically balanced. Some people go through their lives assuming they are good and godly, even while they ignore “the least of these” who cross their paths.

In this abnormally hot summer of 2019, the saint and sinner within us are writhe and kick as we Americans are called to take sides: 

Is it saintly to remain mute while tens of thousands of aspiring immigrants are arrested, imprisoned, and separated from their children? 

Is it saintly to close our ears as the president of the United States exacerbates racial divisions among us by saying some white supremacists are “very fine people,” or calls for Congresswomen of color to go back where they came from? 

Is it saintly to remain quiet while ignorant politicians deny the science which calls for immediate action to impede the factors which lead to climate change and global warming?  

Is it saintly to remain mute as one in five children go to bed hungry and 40 million Americans live at our below the poverty line in the U.S.? 

All told, that's several million unrecognized and largely ignored Jesi seeking food, water, shelter, safety, and justice.

It could not be clearer: we should not be able to see a person suffering from poverty, race hatred, xenophobia, islamophobia, antisemitism, homophobia, or any form of “othering,” without recognizing  the face of Jesus.

That probably won’t remove from us the stigma of being geeps, or temper the issue of good and evil in human hearts. 

But it will remind us that when we walk among those who are hungry, those who are thirsty, those who can’t afford a decent set of clothes, those who are persecuted by injustice, we aren’t walking among strangers. We are saved by the grace of God and we are walking with Jesus.

We won’t be able to help everyone, perhaps. But knowing who we are walking with should be wonderfully clarifying – and motivating.
______

*Toward the end of her life, the real Junge told an interviewer: “I was satisfied that I wasn’t personally to blame and that I hadn’t known about those things. I wasn’t aware of the extent. But one day I went past the memorial plaque which had been put up for Sophie Scholl (a 23-year-old Nazi resister), and I saw that she was born the same year as me, and she was executed the same year I started working for Hitler.  And at that moment I actually sensed that it was no excuse to be young.”

Escheweth Thy Burdens and Chilleth

“He maketh me lie down in green pastures; he leadeth me beside the still waters; he restoreth my soul.” 
Psalm 23:2-3

“And he said unto them, Come ye yourselves apart into a desert place, and rest a while; for there were many coming and going, and they had no leisure so much as to eat.” Mark 6:31

Familiar bible verses, like oldies rock songs, cometh heavy laden with clandestine memories.

The 23rd Psalm takes me back to fourth grade Sunday school in the United Church of Morrisville, N.Y., circa 1956.

The old church is gone, long ago reduced to ashes by undetected frayed wiring. 

The Sunday school teachers have adjourned to the village cemetery on Cedar Street. 

The students have grown old and gray and need large-print name tags to recognize one another at class reunions. 

But the words of the psalm bring them all back with uncanny clarity:

The crew cut boys in pressed white shirts and clip-on bowties. 

The pony-tailed girls in billowing crinoline skirts and ankle socks. 

The dusty green chalk board propped kitty-corner on wobbly wheels in the front of the room. 

The smell of well-thumbed India paper in the tattered Authorized bibles we borrowed from our parents, books we caressed with our hands and pressed to our noses to experience the tactile comfort of the holy.  

We memorized the 23rd Psalm in the Authorized Version - King James English - motivated by the promise that our diligence would be rewarded by a gift of our own personal bible. 

Some of us memorized the 100th Psalm, or John 3:16. One or two tried to stuff the Beatitudes and all ten commandments into callow lobes. 

But all of us memorized the 23rd Psalm and took our turns standing nervously in the front of the class, lisping Jacobean fricatives. 

I think I was good at it. And so were Donnie and Joan and Jack and Reese and Mary Linda. I had known each of them all my life, and now the first thing I think of, when I think of them, is how they stood tensely in the front of the classroom to recite the 23rd Psalm:

“…Thou preparest a table before me in the presence of mine enemies: thou anointest my head with oil; my cup runneth over …”

The poetry was delicious even to 10-year-olds. We didn’t know the words were early 16th century English so we assumed that was how God talks. But in sooth, it was merely the way King James Stuart talked whilst he wresteth with Guy Fawkes, the Gunpowder plot, and a dissident Parliament.

But to us and millions of English speakers, God could be heard most clearly when God spake in Jacobean rhythms.  It was a shock, then, when we received our newly published Revised Standard Version presentation bibles to discover God was now speaking with a mid-20th century American accent. The meaning was clearer, perhaps, but my generation memorized long passages of scripture when God still spoke with old world lisp. When the 23rd Psalm is summoned to mind, many of us find it is the King James Version that remains deep in the furrows in our brains. And many of us still turn to the fading cadences of that distinctly unsaintly reign when we seek a scriptural balm for our fevered brows.

The 23rd Psalm is a psalm of David. Perhaps he wrote it when he was a shepherd boy. Or perhaps his ghost writer thought it was the kind of thing he would have said when he was bent down by the burdens of kingship, wistfully remembering the day when all he had to worry about was wayward sheep.

The power of the psalm is its reassurance that, no matter how complicated or stressful or threatening life becomes, God looks over us as a good shepherd. The metaphor of lying down in green pastures or lapping from cool, still waters is probably meant for sheep, but it is no less appealing to us humans. And the psalm assures us that God relieves our stress, offers peace and recreation in the midst of overwork, and promises us a safe outcome – in this world or the next – when we face mortal dangers.

This relationship to God the good shepherd works best when we think of ourselves as sheep, and when we make it a point to avail ourselves of God’s offer to relieve the strains and worries of life. 

But a lot of us tend to gird ourselves with the pervious armors of own self-sufficiency, because we think reaching out for help – to God, to anyone – is a sign of weakness. 

That dubious and often self-destructive approach is particularly common among the shepherds themselves: pastors, executives, parents, teachers, anyone given charge over others. For them, shepherding may be perceived as so essential a calling that it must take precedence over personal needs. Naps, days off, vacations, or sabbaticals are postponed indefinitely lest they take time away from vital ministries or dependent sheep. 

For the record, Jesus didn’t call anyone to such an exhausting, soul-draining ministry. 

Nor did he set that kind of example. He napped when he was tired, dined and imbibed with friends, and encouraged his hard-working apostles to take breaks when they needed them.

“Jesus said to them [in American English], ‘Come away to a deserted place all by yourselves and rest a while.’ For many were coming and going, and they had no leisure even to eat.” Mark 6:31

However you say it, this is a message of crucial importance. It’s too bad we don’t encourage kids to memorize it along with the Beatitudes and Decalogue. We may not realize it when we are 10, but almost certainly our lives will devolve to the point at which our jobs and careers will keep us coming and going until we don’t have time to rest and eat. 

If we don’t get that under control, we will lose our ability to employ the gifts God has given us to carry out the tasks and ministries to which we have been called. 

It’s an alternative form of the Peter Principle, which observes that companies and institutions, including the church, keep promoting their best people until they rise to a level at which they no longer have competence. 

In the alternative, gifted shepherds work so unremittingly hard that they burn themselves out and are no longer useful to their sheep or to themselves.

There have always been leaders who work themselves to irrelevance, but it’s hard to think of a time when it has been more prevalent than now.

In thousands of non-profit service organizations, denominations, and congregations around the country, leaders are pushing themselves to the brink of collapse to keep their ministries alive. 

The Great Recession of 2008 still has a death grip around the neck of the churches. There is not a mainline denomination in the United States that has not been forced to cut critical programs and hundreds of employees to minimize financial deficits.

Once august and indispensable ecumenical councils, no longer able to depend on contributions from struggling member churches to maintain their ministries, have slashed programs and staff until they are mere shadows of their former selves.

The resulting dynamic is that surviving staff feel obligated to work harder – often at significantly reduced salaries – to maintain the same level of ministry as before. The reality is that no one individual, however gifted and eager, can do the work of five or ten fired colleagues. 

In most cases, the well meaning CEO’s and boards of church institutions can do nothing about it. 

Their statements exalting the creativity and devotion of overworked staff are necessarily mitigated by periodic memoranda announcing salary reductions and furloughs. 

But these staff are not mere bureaucrats; they are shepherds who have heard God’s call. The more their hours and salary are cut, the more energy and time they pour into their jobs. 

In too many cases, it becomes a race to see who will expire first: the fiscally beleaguered institution or the savagely overworked shepherd.

Certainly these harsh realities are not restricted to the church. These are harsh times, and unemployment figures remain unacceptably high. The White House and Senate continue to propose budget cuts to programs that support individuals and families living on the edge and below the poverty line. 

People are exhausted, struggling and stressed out. And the greater the stress, the harder it is to hear Jesus’ voice amid the tumult: 

“Come away … rest a while.”

So let’s stop whatever we’re doing, take a deep breath, and listen.

“Come away,” Jesus said. “Come away to a deserted place all by yourselves and rest awhile.”

Jesus, we should note, is not saying, “Come away because what you’ve been doing is not important,” or, “Come away because we’ve decided to cut your program.” When he says, “Come away,” he means there is nothing more important to him or to you than your mental, physical, and spiritual health. And in order to maintain that, you’ve got to come away and rest a while.

No doubt those of us who take a break from important ministries will soon discover God has other plans for us. In the same chapter of Mark, Jesus and his disciples are back to work almost immediately – tanned, rested and preaching to the multitudes.

But none of us will be of any use to future ministries if we don’t take a break when it’s offered, and when we need it so badly.

So this is the Scripture message of the day:

Take a moment. 

Lie down in a green pasture with a loaf of bread, a bottle of wine, and an iPad of verse. 

And let the good shepherd restoreth your soul.