Proper
In one of Wendell Berry’s “Port William” stories, there is a mentally ill man nicknamed Nightlife. He has what would now be called bipolar disease, which manifested as spells of bizarre behavior. When we meet him in the story “Watch with Me,” he has recently made a stir at a local revival meeting, having “throwed a reg’lar fit” when he wasn’t allowed to preach. Now, in a state of mania, Nightlife wanders into a neighbor’s barn and walks out with a loaded shotgun.
That neighbor, Ptolemy Proudfoot, being concerned for Nightlife and whomever he might be headed toward, begins to follow the disturbed man from a distance. Over the course of the story, Proudfoot is joined by a growing band of other neighbors, all seeking to keep Nightlife safe and protect the community from his derangement.
Eventually, they all end up once again in a barn, where Nightlife, realizing he has an audience, launches into a sermon. He takes as his text the parable of the lost sheep. But, as Berry notes, “Though Christ, in speaking this parable, asked his hearers to think of the shepherd, Nightlife understood it entirely from the viewpoint of the lost sheep, who could imagine fully the condition of being lost and even the hope of rescue, but could not imagine rescue itself.” Once his sermon was over, Nightlife set down the gun, which one of the men nearby quickly grabbed and disarmed—all now restored to peace.
Berry’s story lives out not only the Gospel’s parable, but also Berry’s Gospel rooted insight that “health is membership.” To be whole is to be a part of a larger wholeness; for that larger wholeness to be complete, we need everyone to be restored to the circle of care within a community.
The truth of the Gospel this Sunday, which includes the parables of the lost sheep and the lost coin, are not difficult ones to understand. Jesus is telling the Pharisees, who are concerned with maintaining the borders of community through boundaries of purity, that the aim of any good membership should look toward those whom it is missing. As in Berry’s story, the work of the community is to “stay with the trouble,” to keep with the person on the outside until they are restored to their place on the inside.
Though this Gospel is not hard to understand, however, it is hard to practice. And in our times of ideological purity, on both the left and right, where people are quick to say which groups they will and will not be a part of based on an ideal of safety or justice or truth, this Gospel is all the more difficult and essential.
Earlier this week, I had a conversation with a colleague about the scriptures in our lectionary for this Sunday. For my Episcopal Church, these include Jeremiah, Timothy, and Psalm 14 in addition to the Gospel. Each is centered on the brokenness and despair of our world. Our desperate need for a way out. As she pointed this out, I thought of the witness of Will Campbell and how his own sense of human lostness made him a man who went looking for the lost.
Campbell, a white Baptist minister who joined the Freedom Movement, writes of a low point in his work for Civil Rights in his memoir, Brother to a Dragonfly. The Episcopal seminarian Jonathan Daniels had just been shot in Alabama while defending a young Ruby Sales. In a soul-searching conversation with two friends, Campbell was asked to give a ten-word definition of Christianity. After thinking for a moment, he replied, “We’re all bastards, but God loves us anyway.”
Campbell went on to upset many of his allies in the movement by visiting and even befriending members of the Ku Klux Klan. For Campbell’s part, he saw these mostly poor, Southern white men as lost sheep and coins in need of being brought back into the circle of caring community. As he once explained, “Mr. Jesus died for the bigots as well.” Campbell understood, like his teacher Jesus, that becoming friends with the lost is a better way of healing them than exclusion and condemnation. Though he never wavered from his beliefs, and those he befriended in the Klan knew his stands on Civil Rights, they also came to understand that Campbell loved them. For some, it was a healing love.
When we, like Nightlife, understand our Gospel less from the side of the shepherd and more from the perspective of the sheep, we will come to see that we need mercy and healing, just like all the other wandering sheep of the flock. It is in our common sense of lostness, our deep brokenness, that we will be freed from our self-righteousness and condemnation, and see that to be whole we need even our enemies.
Like Jesus, and like Will Campbell, the living out of such a way will not make us popular. Many we thought were our friends might exclude us (Campbell said that the longer he worked, the more his hate mail came from the left, not the right). And yet despite that, we can continue the work of restoration, knowing the deeper wholeness of love, the circle of mercy into which God is seeking to draw all of us bastards lost sheep.