633 sligo avenue, silver spring, md 20910
633 sligo avenue, silver spring, md 20910
Rev. Susan G. Astarita
May 7, 2006
Dear Friends:
I invite you to consider the thoughts below.
"Sheep Or Not?" An Alternative view from Walter Wink
"...there's a down side to all the talk in Psalm 23 and John 10 about being God's sheep. Perhaps my attitude is jaundiced by my reading of the parable of the sheep and the goats (Matthew 25: 31-36). I (Walter Wink) have always sympathized with the goats in that parable. I can see good sheep being separated from bad sheep, and goats from bad, but to be blasted for being simply what you are, a goat, seems unjust. Besides goats are just more interesting! They have minds of their own, they don't follow blindly, they are rambunctious, and they eat anything! Surely God prefers goats to sheep.
The lectionary readings stress the Good Shepherd and Christ's willingness to lay down his life for the sheep...I am very wary of these texts (because) I believe that Christians have been instilled with a sheepish docility that has played into the hands of the Powers for centuries.
...obedience has been the highest virtue. obedience that was to be paid to Christ's representatives on earth...rulers and hierarchies...
As a result Christians (over time) have colluded in their own injury. They have accepted, without resistance, totalitarian rulers. They have been submissive in the face of tyrannous hierarchies in church and state, corporations and schools. Women have submitted to battering, economic exploitation and wage inequality. Men (and women) have been led off to war like sheep, flocking to their doom without resistance, as if to do so were the height of glory.
Sheep, bah!
—Walter Wink in the Christian Century on April 13, 1994.
Faithfully,
Mother Susan +