Metaphor and Imagery

Easter 4: 13.4.08: – St. Mary’s and Ayot St Peter: Revd. Canon Dr. Alan Winton
Acts 2.42-47; 1 Peter 2.19-25; John 10.1-10

I imagine you would agree that the Bible is a collection of books that is particularly rich in metaphor and imagery, in pictures and models for all the different aspects of Christian faith and life. But that very richness can make it hard for us to know how best we are to use it to inspire our life and faith today. One way of thinking about this is to see the Bible as a magnificent tapestry that gets its beauty because of the combination of all the different coloured strands: pulling out one particular strand to admire its unique beauty is not half as impressive as the picture the whole can deliver, but each strand is important.

Let me just try to explore what this means with brief reference to the three readings we heard this morning, because they offer a rich selection of models and metaphors for what the church might be. And of course this is much more than just an academic question, because you and I each have a role to play in making this church what it is. I wonder how you or I or indeed a first-time visitor would describe the kind of community we have created here and how it matches up to some of the models and metaphors the Bible offers.

In Acts we were offered our first model in the picture that is painted there of the early church, in what has sometimes been referred to as primitive communism.  Acts chapter two describes a model of the early church in which goods were held in
common and people were provided for, “to each according to their need”. Much of the business of everyday life was shared by these early Christians, in fact Act 2 presents a picture of the early church as an ideal society. The model of leadership exercised by the apostles in this community seems pretty gentle and benign, and you are given the impression of happy co-operation without the need for any sort of coercion.

On some levels, it offers a very appealing picture of what the church could be, and it has a certain logic because if we truly believe, as we say, that “all things come from God”, and we love our neighbours as ourselves, how can we resist the desire to share these things according to people’s needs. And of course there have been people and groups who have set out to try to recreate this kind of communal life, throughout church history and in our world today, but it has to be said that the church has rarely lived out this vision of primitive communism in reality for very long.

And one has to wonder how accurate a picture this really is of anything that actually existed for any significant period of time in the early church. You don’t have to go on very far in the history of the early church to find separate Christian communities often squabbling over money, St. Paul picks this up in his letters to the Corinthians, and it seems that whatever reality there was to this idyllic picture of the early church, it was short-lived.

There are clearly truths to be learned from the picture of the early church presented in Acts 2, but should we elevate it above all others and claim that this is Christianity in its purest form, should we be trying to get back to what the early church was like, should we pull this one strand out of the tapestry to admire it on its own?

Well, let us turn now to the Gospel and what Jesus has to teach when in particularly pastoral mood. Here we encounter a very significant biblical metaphor, one that is all pervasive in Christian art and hymns and in the vocabulary of our faith: the shepherd and his sheep. The ordination service for priests and the service also when Bishops are consecrated draws heavily on this image of the priest as shepherd in the place of Christ and by implication invites God’s people to picture themselves as sheep, an ecclesiastical flock. And of course there are key texts at the heart of our faith that develop this image: “all we like sheep have gone astray”.  Some have observed that the imagery of sheep and shepherds works best in highlighting the essential waywardness of human beings. Sheep are safest when obediently following their shepherd, but the tradition is rich with stories of lost sheep, and that provides a powerful metaphor for our tendency to go astray, morally and spiritually.

In contrast to the reading from Acts, the world of sheep and shepherd provides a much more robust image of leadership: the good shepherd is the one who cares for his sheep, but also keeps them safely locked up and probably shouts at them from time to time to make sure they are heading in the right direction. Or perhaps in the case of modern day Bishops, sends in the sheepdog to yap at their heels – clearly, that’s what an Archdeacon is for!

It may be on a limited scale, but there is a clear hierarchy between sheep and shepherd: one is bright and knows where he is going, whilst the others are a bit dim and have a tendency to go wrong. This tradition gives us a picture of the church which would appeal to those who feel that all our problems could be solved with a bit of strong and firm leadership, or as a dear parishioner once tactfully exclaimed, ‘If only the clergy could discover their backbones’. Robust shepherding is what the flock really needs.  If Acts presents a picture of happy co-operation, John’s Gospel highlights the need for a bit of coercion in the face of those whose nature inclines them to be vulnerable and to go astray.

Here we have two ends of a spectrum, in fact a few years ago we might have likened this to the two ends of the political spectrum, if you’ll allow a bit of political metaphor into the sermon, between the socialist optimism of Acts and the Tory realism of John: the Scriptural Guardian versus the Daily Telegraph – no prizes for working out which is which.  Interestingly, both traditions have a valued place in the Scriptures, and both have truths to teach us, but you can’t just pluck one out without reference to the other – they stand in a kind of mutual, creative tension.

But let me leave you with one final image and this time it is drawn from the letter of Peter, and it comes in this instance in his opening greeting, where he addresses the faithful as: “Brothers and sisters”.  So we’ve had the church as primitive communism, the church as a flock of sheep following their shepherd, and now we have the church as a family in which we call each other brother and sister.  Here and elsewhere in the New Testament, the church is imagined through the imagery or metaphor of a family, as we look around at one another here this morning, we don’t just see comrades in an idealistic commune or fellow sheep sitting meekly and somewhat dimwittedly before their shepherd, we see our brothers and sisters within the family of God’s church.

For some people the metaphor of family will quickly throw up limitations and difficulties. Some people’s experience of family life may have been painful and abusive, and they will find themselves only able to think of family as something from which to escape. But for many people it can be a much more positive metaphor. A place of security and love from which we are enabled to go out and make our contribution to the community, a resource through times of hardship, a springboard for our achievements. Our relatives are people we love, whether they are like us and share our interests, or whether some of the things they like and do are inexplicable to us. This is what makes family life such a wonderful metaphor for the church, particularly at this moment in time, because it allows for enormous diversity, but holds on firmly and implacably to that love which binds us together. Our work, our interests, our passions may take us far away from one another, but when you do meet up, when you do come back together, there is that bond of family love which brings us close once again. Let us hope and pray that the Bishops of the Anglican Communion have that thought in mind when they meet up for the Lambeth Conference later this year.

Just in the three readings that happened to be set in the lectionary for today we have seen something of the enormous richness of the Bible with its wealth of imagery, metaphor and models for the life of faith and particularly for the nature of God’s church: the communism of Acts; the directive leadership of John; the family love that binds us together in Peter. To take one and elevate it at the expense of the others is to abuse and misuse it. Sometimes a particular image will press itself upon us for a time, and it may be this is how God’s word speaks to us in the situations we face. And if we find ourselves today particularly drawn to building what we do as a church upon the image of the family, then we should also remember and set our understanding alongside what some of these other models would tell us, and not lose sight completely of the essential equality of the picture in Acts or the realistic stance on what human beings are like in Jesus’ teaching about the sheep’s need of a shepherd. There isn’t one model of the church in the Scriptures that we have to follow, but these rich resources can help us reflect on what kind of church we need to be in our generation.

A final thought, and to go back to that opening image of the Bible as a rich and beautiful tapestry made up of threads of many different colours. Perhaps that is what we should have in mind when we pray for the unity of the church and struggle with some of the big issues our church faces today that threaten to pull us apart. If we gather our life together as Christians around such Scriptures, if we are serious about following their teachings, then surely the church that we create will also be like a rich and beautiful tapestry of many colours, where each thread needs the other for its beauty to be revealed. Amen.