Sermons: High Holy Days

Ten days ago, we celebrated the beginning of a New Year.  Beginnings invite us to open our hearts to possibilities of renewal and hope, the possibilities of change and growth.

Tonight, Kol Nidre, has a different purpose.  We are meant to recall our shortcomings, our failures, the ways we have wronged others and ourselves.  On this night, we are meant to feel broken.  

Tonight I feel that brokenness even more acutely.  When I used to drive home from Temple Israel after long and difficult days, I would often ask myself whether I made a difference with the people I worked with, taught or counseled that day.  After some thought, most of the time I could answer that yes, I may have stumbled, but in balance, what I did brought more good than harm.

Yet, during this time of separation, I don’t have this assurance.  I cannot see most of you except on a screen.   So it is hard to know whether what I do makes any sort of difference.

I wonder if you have felt this too.  Have you also felt uncertain about your ability to bring goodness to others?  Have you also felt powerless in the face of so much that is wrong?  If so, you are not alone.  Tonight I want to tell you a personal story that helped me discover a new perspective.

Tucked into a long-forgotten box of my childhood mementos, I recently discovered a small book with a red cover and gold lettering on the front.  It was a gift in honor of my confirmation in the church my family attended when I was young.  Confirmation was a ritual in which, at the age of thirteen, I took a vow to be a member of the Lutheran Church Missouri Synod my entire life.  (You can see how that worked out.)

On the inside cover of the book, the pastor of the church, Mervin Kellerman, had written a personal inscription.  I had not thought of my childhood pastor for years.  My memories of him were one-dimensional, flat and colorless.  I remember him as humorless and boring, notorious for long sermons about hell.  Of course, he was not the clergy person I would aspire to be!

I believed that Pastor Kellerman knew nothing about me or my life.  When my mother died, he officiated her memorial service and I do not remember him speaking any personal words of comfort about our loss.   Just six months later, Pastor Kellerman conducted my father’s wedding to the woman who became my stepmother.

Sometimes Pastor Kellerman came to our house to visit with my stepmother.  He seemed to like her. I assumed that he did not know that my stepmother had an untreated mental illness.  She could be loving one moment and raging the next.  I used to dread coming home after school.  I would stand on the porch and muster up the courage to open the front door, not knowing what would await me on the other side.  It never occurred to me that my childhood pastor knew of my troubles.

The word pastor comes from the Latin word for shepherd. Our earliest ancestors, the Israelites, were a shepherding people. In the stories of our people, Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Moses and David were all shepherds.  Our rabbis taught (Shemot Rabbah 2:2) that God chose Moses to lead the Israelites because of his actions as a shepherd.  In their midrash, Moses was tending the flock of his father-in-law when a lamb ran away.  Moses found the lamb by a shaded pool.  Moses apologized to the lamb for not knowing it was thirsty, and lovingly carried it back to the flock.  When God saw this, God said:  Moses is the one to lead my people.

Many passages in the Hebrew Bible portray God as a shepherd.   This image carries over into the High Holy Day liturgy, in the sacred poetry we call the Unetaneh Tokef:

All who come into the world pass before You (God), like a sheep before their shepherd. As a shepherd considers the flock when it passes beneath the staff, You count and consider every life.

In this poetic image, one by one, we sheep pass before our shepherd as the shepherd counts and considers each life.  Notwithstanding the fact that many of us might feel some theological discomfort with this image of God, still, the metaphor has something to teach us.

A medieval commentator (Maharsha) asked the logical question:  Surely God is capable of judging us simultaneously.  Why must we pass by one by one?

I am not a shepherd, but once I did watch a flock of sheep move over the Judean hills of Israel.  The sheep crowded together, flowing over the hills in a jostling mass.  To my eyes, the sheep all looked alike. It was impossible to tell which sheep might be thirsty, which one might have a wound hidden under its fleece, which one might be limping.

Only when a shepherd looks at each creature under his care one by one can he notice the needs they have and the wounds they bear. That is the model of a good shepherd.

For forty-five years I never looked at that little red book from my confirmation.  When I found it again, I opened it up to read what my childhood pastor had written in it for me.  It was a Bible verse.

The verse Pastor Kellerman selected to write is from the book of Joshua, words addressed to the new leader of the Israelites as he prepared to lead his people into the Promised Land.  The verse reads:

Be strong and of good courage, do not be frightened or dismayed.  For the LORD your God is with you wherever you go.  (Joshua 1: 9)

When I read that inscription, I had a flash of recognition.  Perhaps this verse was a message to me. I had been wrong to think that Pastor Kellerman did not know anything about my life. His inscription suggested that he recognized my fear and my dismay. He chose a verse for me about being strong and courageous, a verse that reminded me that wherever I journeyed in my life, I would not go alone.  He had been a good shepherd after all.

But at the time my childhood pastor wrote his message to me, I did not see or understand that.  In fact, I stopped attending his church shortly after confirmation and I never saw him again.  For forty-five years, his act of reassurance and kindness went unnoticed by me.  Did he feel uncertain and powerless then as I sometimes do now?

Now I understand that the question I used to ask myself after a hard day, the question about whether my actions had any positive effect, is the wrong question to ask.  We can never know for certain the impact we have on others.  It took forty-five years for Pastor Kellerman’s act of loving kindness to enter my heart.  With his message to me, he planted a seed, and decades later it blossomed. That is the enduring power of love and kindness. 

On this night, we pray for the vision to see each other’s wounds, struggles, and burdens.  We pray for the strength to respond with love.  While the seeds of kindness we sow for each other may not be recognized right away, may we never lose faith that these seeds can take root and grow, blossoming into beauty even long, long after we are gone.