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[Sing Tender Shepherd] “Watches over all his sheep”
That song was made popular in the movie Peter Pan starring Mary Martin. I grew up watching that film repeatedly. There are two additional verses to the song. The second verse says “tender shepherd you forgot to count your sheep” and the last says “let me help you count your sheep” For years, my image of a shepherds was that they are all kind old men, highly forgetful, and went around petting their sheep all day. So many of the images we have today about shepherds are seeped in sentimentality. It was years before someone helped to correct my image of shepherds; that they were anything but “cute”.
Shepherds were cut off from human society; they were the outcasts. You would have found them spending all their time out on the hills with the sheep. During the night, they herded them into pens and, if they were seriously committed to their task, they slept out on the hills, too - usually across from the gate of the pen. Their job was to find water and grazing for the sheep--not an easy task in the semi-desert. Most importantly, the sheep were kept safe from the predators that lurked in the rocks and caves where skittish or complacent sheep walked in “the valleys of the shadow of death”. Leading, feeding and protecting. Shepherding was not a job for the weak. Jesus’ use of the word shepherd in describing himself in our text for today was extremely controversial during his time.
And Jesus, in John 10, picks up on the “frontline” aspect of shepherding: “I am the good shepherd.” This comes after the verse that says, “I came that they might have life, and have it abundantly”. Jesus then moves immediately into the image of the shepherd whose “goodness” is seen in laying down his life for the sheep. Jesus is not saying, “I am the good shepherd because I am prepared to lay down my life for the sheep”. This is not about risk-taking. Jesus is the shepherd who will give abundant life to the sheep at the expense of his own life. He will do everything in his power to lead, feed and protect the sheep.
Sentimentality about shepherding is dispelled by the context of this passage. The setting isn’t a nice, quiet pastoral hillside, peaceful and calm. No instead we read of confrontation with the authorities and questions about Jesus’ authority, and danger is in the air around these religious leaders. Jesus speaks of thieves, bandits, strangers and wolves, and the violence and risk those images convey. What is even more strikingly powerful is the close relationship between the shepherd and the sheep. The sheep will only respond to the sound of the shepherd’s voice, never a stranger’s. Even though sheep are often described as hopelessly witless and contrary creatures they will respond individually to the shepherd who treats them with great care.
This understanding of the shepherd helps us to understand who Jesus is, and how he knows and loves us. It also helps us to understand ourselves as loved and cherished and known by a fiercely tender and caring God. This good or ideal shepherd brings abundant life to the sheep who are united not because they believe exactly the same thing, but because they are loved. This is a deep love, a love that we will never fully understand in this life, and it enfolds us. We are not loved by God because we are precious, but we are precious because we are loved by God.
Being enfolded in love by the good shepherd is an image of God’s love for Jesus and for us. It began with fact that the divine logos became flesh in order to dwell among us. It is impossible to be enfolded in love by someone who does not get up close and personal with us. Because Jesus shared our human experience, he knows what it means to suffer and die. This shepherd knows what it is like to be a sheep and by extension knows what it means to be snatched by the wolf. Jesus knows how easy it is to suddenly find oneself out of the fold, lost, and alone.
Belonging to Jesus, knowing him and being known by him, shapes us as a community of faith. We are all a part of the same fold. This community as well as the wider community of Christians is not founded on dogmatic unity but upon God’s knowing us and being for us. We do not achieve this, it is simply the way God is. God is for us. This intimate knowing transforms into love, the kind that is just at the edge of our understanding. This community we are a part of is not just a personal, just-me-and-Jesus relationship but that of a community, a flock, a fold, watched over by the good and ideal shepherd. Theologian Karl Barth observes for us that “there is no such thing as an individual Christian.” Let me say that again, “there is no such thing as an individual Christian.” Just as there is no separate singular form of sheep. There is no mouse for sheep, there is no goose for sheep. Mouse/Mice, Goose/Geese, Sheep---Sheep. It is always plural – sheep, just as we are not separate from one another. In our essential belonging, we are each bound up with the entire flock of the fold. This includes those with whom we break bread and say prayers, as well as those whom Jesus knows and God sees, but whom we can scarcely bring ourselves to acknowledge and welcome, let alone live along side or die to protect.
This is where it gets really difficult, making room for one another in the fold of God’s love. This Love is tough. It is the sort of love that is embodied, literally, in the shepherd who provides for the sheep and protects them with his life against the whole wilderness. We know love when we see it - and we see it in Jesus laying down his life for us. But that means that those of us who live because of that love need to live by it. John tell us, “… we ought to lay down our lives for one another!” Concretely, that means providing for each other’s needs - just as a shepherd does for the flock. Love is made real in truth through our actions.
It seems like we ought to find it easy and even natural to relax into the warmth of God’s care and then to move over and make room for everyone else. Yet, the image in the gospel of religious leaders who do not recognize the immeasurable worth of each individual in the eyes of God, outside of any dogmatic unity or purity, is just as powerful today as it was then or in any age. Society and even the Church often coerce us into thinking about who’s in the flock and who isn’t, which may equate with who is loved by God and who is not, or at least who isn’t loved as much or in the same way that we are. However, it isn’t up to us to decide who is in or out. Jesus tells us that there are other sheep elsewhere that he intends to draw into the fold.
As we read the scriptures, we are frequently reminded of the way that Jesus was. He embraces the outcast, the oppressed, and the overlooked. John reminds in his gospel that the work of gathering the flock belongs to Jesus and to God. It is up to us, however, to make room when they arrive so that they too may be enfolded by God’s love. The community that John envisions is open and celebrates its diversity as a true gift from God.
There are others that Jesus is calling that he cares about as much as each of us, that he wants to lead, feed, and protect as passionately as he protects us. This gives us a whole new perspective on hospitality and a much higher bar to aim for. Deep hospitality is difficult; it tests us. It can push painfully on our fears and insecurities. If we allow those fears and insecurities to run rampant and grow inside us, they will cut us of from our shepherd like the wolf cutting off particular sheep in the flock to capture and kill them more quickly outside of the fold. There is plenty of room in the fold, and while deep hospitality may push us to the growing edges, it will never push us out, we will only grow stronger as a flock.
In the Greek translation of the scriptures, the word for the practice of hospitality is philoxenia. The two parts of the word are philo, which is one of the four Greek words for love and xenia, for stranger. Love of stranger. In the words of Barbara Brown Taylor that “is about as counterintuitive as you can get. For most of us xenophobia-fear of stranger- comes much more naturally.” Rabbi Jonathan Sacks of Great Britian tells us that one verse of the Hebrew Bible commands “You shall love your neighbor as yourself,” but in no fewer that 36 places does it command us to “love the stranger.”
It was not too long ago in human history that we discovered the universe is not geocentric or Earth centered, and even less far back came the understanding that the universe is also not heliocentric or sun centered. That in fact the sun, our sun, is only the center of our very tiny section of our very small galaxy as compared to the whole of the universe. Our human tendency is to be at the center of our awareness and to forget that other people are at the center of their own awareness, at the center of their own story; instead we think of them as on the fringe of ours.
We are not living in the same situation as John’s early community, yet in fact we wrestle with similar issues as the early Christians. We still have to consider this question of the “other” and of being loved by God, and what it means to be a flock together, sharing the goods God provides to us all, not just to some of us. Today is Project Bread’s “Walk for Hunger” a 20 mile hike in which our very own Person, Person, and Pastor Karla are walking in to help raise money to feed those in the flock who are hungry. With the economy struggling, many families are finding it difficult to put food on the table—many for the first time. They are forced to go make decision between food and rent, utility, and medical bills. The “Walk for Hunger” is one way this community can and does, either through walking or sponsoring, offer extravagant welcome and make room in the fold.
Today is also Immigrant Rights Sunday and to me it seems impossible to think about the question “Who are ‘other’ for us?” while hearing about the good shepherd and not think of those who feel outside the flock, who perhaps feel abandoned but who are loved by God nevertheless? It is important for us all to remember that in moments of human loneliness, isolation, alienation, and hopelessness, that the Good Shepherd responds to the deepest human yearnings for community by offering an alternative to our fears, separation, and insecurities. That alternative is to be enfolded by the fierce and everlasting love of God. Once we are in that fold and know that voice and that love how can we not offer that love to others? How can we not share what we have found? How can we not want to help others to be in the arms of Jesus, the Good shepherd who is willing to fight and die for us?
As we share in the feast of love together this morning let us remember that to be “in Jesus” and to have Jesus “abiding in us” means that we will be those who, having experienced God’s love in Christ, live it out in world-transforming and community-shaping actions that are the work of the same Spirit that was “abiding” in Jesus. If we follow the Good Shepherd, it means that we must be there to offer the extravagant welcome to those entering the flock so that we may all be enfolded by the love that knows no end.
[Well I've got a hammer
And I've got a bell
And I've got a song to sing
All over this land
It's the hammer of justice
It's the bell of freedom
It's the song about love
between my brothers and my sisters
All over this land]
Amen.
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