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Welcome to Hillsboro United Methodist Church! If you are searching for deeper meaning in your life that includes lasting relationships, spiritual growth and service to the world you have come to the right place. We offer a safe place in which to ponder important life questions within an atmosphere of support. Our hearts, our minds and our doors are open. We hope that as you visit with us that you will find a place to call home.
Sermon - April 25th, 2010
Shepherds As Change Agents
Rev. Gwen Drake
Psalm 23, John 10:22-30
Prayer of Preparation: We give thanks, O God of sacred stories, for the witness of your word today. Through Scripture you challenge our assumptions, increase our awareness, nurture our imaginations, and touch our feelings. May the words of my mouth and the meditations of our hearts be acceptable in your sight, O God, our creator and redeemer. Amen.
Have you had actual hands-on experience with sheep? (Raise your hand.) What is it like being responsible for sheep? My experience is limited to county fairs and what my Dad told me. Sheep are good at finding holes in fences. Sheep are head strong. Sheep hang out in flocks. Sheep, by themselves, are easy prey. Sheep are adorable when they are lambs. Sheep need boundaries. If sheep don’t have boundaries they need a really good shepherd and some well-trained dogs.
Sheep come in all kinds of shapes and sizes. They are classified according to their meat, milk, and the wool. (I learned this from the 4-H Website, Sheep 101.) Some produce very fine wool, some long wool, some medium wool, and some carpet wool. Last summer I saw sheep with hair instead of wool at the State Fair. I made one of my more intelligent comments, “Those sheep look like goats.” A very nice woman explained, you can tell the difference between a goat and a sheep by their tail. A goat’s tail goes up and a sheep’s tail goes down. (Now you know.)
Sheep and shepherds are mentioned a lot in the Bible—one source says 247 times. There are some very famous shepherds in the Bible, starting with Abel and Abraham and Lot and Jacob and Joseph’s brothers. There are a lot of sheep in the Book of Genesis. Sheep often became offerings for worship…sacrificed and burned. King David, Israel’s most beloved king, had his humble beginning as a shepherd. The Hebrew prophets often spoke of the unfaithful as sheep without a shepherd. In the Gospel stories, shepherds were the first to get the news about the birth of Jesus.
Sheep and shepherds used as a metaphor worked in the day of the Bible. Sheep were part of the landscape. Sheep were part of life. No fences kept them in. Sheep needed a shepherd. Everyone Jesus talked to knew something about shepherds and sheep, probably first hand.
When the Psalmist wrote, “The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want,” people were able to experience what it felt like to be cared for like a shepherd cares for his sheep. They felt known, fed, led, protected, they recognized the voice of a shepherd, they knew there was a powerful leader in their lives. And when Jesus said, “I am the Good Shepherd” they instantly knew that Jesus was like a shepherd who cared for the sheep, who would fight for them, lead them to water and food and call them by name.
We don’t know this anymore, not the same way. We don’t know how it is to be a shepherd. We have romanticized the metaphor or we have rejected it. If we romanticize it, we recall beautiful pictures of sheep in green pastures. Sheep are so photogenic! Sheep in pastures look so peaceful and well-fed. Life looks luxurious and perfect and so beautiful.
If we reject the metaphor, we may resent being thought of as a sheep—not a very bright creature, no mind of its own, really,and left to its own devices, it wouldn’t survive, sheep—bleh!
Is this shepherd/sheep image relevant anymore?
Anthony de Mello wrote a poem about sheep and a shepherd:
A sheep found a hole in the fence and crept through it. He wandered far and lost his way back. Then he realised that he was being followed by a wolf. He ran and ran, but the wolf kept chasing him, until the shepherd came and rescued him and carried him lovingly back to the fold. In spite of everyone’s urgings to the contrary, the shepherd refused to nail up the hole in the fence.
In the Gospel of John, Jesus travels to Jerusalem 3 times for annual festivals. This one way we have decided that his ministry lasted 3 years. This festival he attended was the Festival of Dedication, or Hanukkah. Hanukkah is the celebration of liberation and the restoration of the temple. The Maccabbees had resisted a tyrant king. The Jews in Jesus’ time were once again living under the thumb of a villain puppet-king--Herod. So here is Jesus at this festival talking not about kings at all. Instead, Rabbi Jesus was saying, “I am the Good Shepherd,” to a people, including the religious elite, who either wanted a Messiah like King David who left shepherding behind and built up an army. It was all or nothing—and Jesus was neither. He was changing the paradigm of Messiah on them and it was unsettling and threatening. Rabbi Jesus called himself the “good shepherd.” I am the Good Shepherd, he said. Good Shepherd, Good Samaritan. This was not good at all. It was sounding blasphemous by the time Jesus said the Father and I are one. Jesus was talking as if the lowly, the rejected, the contemptible were deserving protection and care. The equivalent today might be for Jesus to say, “I am the good illegal immigrant worker.” Jesus cut right to the expectations and prejudices of his hearers in unpredictable ways and turned them upside down. The Good Samaritan. The Good Shepherd. Jesus was in the midst of those who were discounted in a world of power and prestige. Not only that, the Good Shepherd laid down his life for them. But then maybe this Good Shepherd image isn’t relevant anymore.
And then the book of Revelation comes along and messes with the metaphor even more. The Good Shepherd is also the Lamb that was slain. He is both the shepherd and the sheep: “…for the Lamb at the center of the throne will be their shepherd, and he will guide them to springs of the water of life, and God will wipe away every tear from their eyes. (7:17). The scene is dramatic and heavenly—out of this world. No more grief. No more tears. Scattered sheep are brought together—restored, reconciled, healed, forgiven.
The 23rd Psalm is so familiar to us we almost don’t hear it at all, for in this psalm the the Lord is my Shepherd who brings all to the table with plenty of food for everyone: friend, stranger, outcast, enemy. At this table, barriers are broken, divisions are overcome, enemies become friends. But then, maybe the Good Shepherd image isn’t relevant today.
So, let’s look at it another way. How many of you have a pet or sometime in your life had a pet? And I bet you all have stories to tell about them. I have stories to tell because almost all my life there has been an animal in it. Right now, I have 3 cats, a dog, and a horse. And my life wouldn’t be the same without them. My horse is my therapy. My dog is my inspiration! My cats, well, you know, they are cats. All of them, know my voice, my routine, my body language. They are all at the door waiting for me when I get home. When I drive up to the barn where my horse is, I am sure he recognizes my car. His head goes up, he watches, listens for my voice, and heads for the gate. They are mine. And I am theirs. They know my touch, my voice, my walk. They know how I am with them.
You can see that I am talking about a very special kind of relationship. It is about being bound to someone beyond ourselves. It’s about identifying with the relationship so deep, it becomes part of us. When it is threatened, we defend it as if we were defending ourselves. It is important to us, so important. We are relational beings. Our God is relational. And just having celebrated Earth Day, and National Volunteer Week—it just has to be clear that all of creation is the intricate, fragile and fierce bonding and balance of everything, every THING, even the most lowly and contemptible of creatures. The Native Americans understood this so well—we are all related.
So, we have all these levels of relating to creation, to animals, and to each other. And it seems like the closer we get to each other the more complicated it gets: in the world, our communities, our families. We deserve someone in our life who is willing to stick by us no matter what, like a shepherd and his sheep, like me and my dog, like father and child, mother and baby, like best friends. We all deserve love, unconditional agape love. Our hope for the world is through our very real, in the flesh, face to face relationships where we learn to care deeply and respect each other.
Jesus was a Good Shepherd who laid down his life for his sheep. The disciples huddled together as if they were sheep without their shepherd—they huddled for safety, unable to think, unable to move. And then they heard a flute—a shepherd’s flute--far away at first drawing nearer—it woke them up, and once again they stood in the presence of the Good Shepherd. Except something was different. They were different. They had become the shepherds. And then Jesus gave them each a flute and said to them, “Go and do for them as I did for you.”
That’s what the Good Shepherd says to us today, “Go and do for others, as I did for you.” It’s relationship that we all need. Because there are holes in the fences all over the place. And the Shepherd refuses to nail up the holes in the fences. And I think I know why. It’s part of being human. We wander out, we get lost, we find danger or danger finds us, and God is the Good Shepherd who brings us home again and again and again to ourselves. Call it what you want…waking up, finding yourself, creating yourself.
“Go and do for others, as I did for you.” Be bold, get curious, listen, be present, be engaged, offer to walk with someone, sit at the table together, encourage, and let yourself be transformed by the relationship. If the Shepherd image doesn’t work, let it go and find another one, Jesus won’t mind. He’s not into herding us around. He’s into loving us so we will love ourselves enough to create meaningful relationships and powerful lives. So who we change is ourselves! Amen.
Pastoral Prayer:
Gracious Loving Shepherd, we gather, some feeling meek and mild, some at peace, some restless, some living in a fog, some looking for their shepherd, some looking for their lost sheep. We smile, we try to understand, we live in the shadows, maybe we are a shadow.
It’s our life, our holy, holy life, we live, sometime half-heartedly, sometimes full speed ahead, yearning so deep inside for something a clear as a church bell to lead us and sustain us—letting us know that you are our Shepherd who leads us through this long road called life.
May this holy, safe place and time fearlessly awaken us, and heal us, and illumine our path. We are drawn into your consuming love, so we dare to ask, seek, be silent, knock, and know when the door is opened to us. Inside your love, we die to love. You open the prison door, and we will not stay chained to our familiar ways. We close both eyes so we can see. We close our mouth so to be fed. We stop talking so to be heard. It is okay that we don’t know what to do. Guide us. Help us. Protect and gather us as a loving shepherd. And may our bold answer to your call be yes, yes, yes.