Monday, April 30, 2012

Sermon April 29, 2012
Acts 4:5-12
Psalm 23
1 John 3:16-24John 10:11-18
 
“Total Commitment”
There are lots of cliches out there about sheep. I grew up in cattle country and they weren't flattering. Sheep destroy grazing land. Sheep, I've heard, will follow each other through a hole in the fence or push down fences. Sheep are dumb and will walk into the most dangerous of situations without looking. Most of what I learned about sheep in cattle country was insulting.

I've read a few things about sheep, in different places and from different sources that make me think sheep aren't all that dumb. In the north of England, where Beatrix Potter bought a farm about 100 years ago, there are sheep who are heafed to their farms. That means that the sheep are never lost, but know where they belong. When they are purchased and moved, they can be retrained to recognize their new pastures. The lambs graze with their mothers on the “heaf” belonging to that farm instilling a life-long knowledge of where on the fell they should be grazing. It sounds almost miraculous to me. I'm sure cattle aren't that smart. So these sheep not only know the shepherd, they know the pasture where they graze, too.

We aren't all that familiar with sheep anymore, but sheep were ubiquitous in Jesus' world—here, there and everywhere. You can tell because everybody talks about them and eventually everything important gets compared to sheep or goats, sheep pens, shepherds or flocks at some time or another. Kings are shepherds good and bad; priests are shepherds, too, good and bad.

And in the Christian tradition, we have continued this system. The word pastor, itself comes from the Old French, pastur or Latin pastorem, or shepherd because of these biblical systems. But really, the only truly good shepherd, according to one commentator the truly beautiful or ideal shepherd is Yahweh, the Lord of the 23rd Psalm.1

When my friend, Sharon Watkins, was elected General Minister and President, the blessing and celebration prayer of her election referred to her as our new Shepherd leader. She quickly refocused the image on God as Shepherd and upon Jesus as the only good shepherd and savior.

But, having said all that, having established shepherd, sheep and flock as solid biblical metaphor, what does it mean to have a shepherd, be a shepherd or to be a sheep, a member of the flock?

To be succinct, to be a shepherd is a huge responsibility—a total commitment to the flock, each member and all of them together. And the biblical story, in several ways, reveals how people often mess up the office of shepherd and how God comes back and reveals the beautiful ideal. And today we have the privilege to have heard once again how God is our shepherd, how Jesus, within himself, reveals God even more fully as shepherd and caretaker of the Jesus' followers.

In the gospel text, Jesus refers to himself as the good (ideal or beautiful) shepherd who lays down his life for his sheep. According to Jesus the ideal shepherd knows that his sheep must thrive to be any good to him, so laying down his life makes sense. In contrast, Jesus says, the hired hand runs away in the face of mortal danger because any responsibility that the hired hand has comes through payment instead of actual affection. “A hired hand does not care for the sheep.”

According to one commentator, Jesus' claim that I know my own and my own know me is obvious visitors to the Middle East. They can see this even today, as the sheep are herded through passage ways and recognize – know – the voice of the shepherd who calls them. I know that herding animals know the voice of their caretakers—my uncle had sheep, but my father's cattle knew his voice, too. They knew the sound of his pickup and the sound of the horn, too. And he knew them. He knew the difference in how they were marked and though he wisely didn't name them, he knew them. He chose who would be fed out and which heifers needed to be penned to calf, too.

The life of a shepherd, though was even more intimate. Sheep were kept over time, when beef cattle may not be. Though a shepherd might eventually eat a sheep—and some would be sacrificed over the years at the temple—the reasons to have sheep meant keeping them alive and well to fulfill their functions. And sheep provided warmth from wool and their body heat was important. I once saw a house in the middle east that was built in two levels. The animals were in pens in a kind of dugout and the people slept on a wooden floored platform above them—the animals kept the place warmer than it would have been as their heat rose above them. Sheep were integral to the culture—even those who lived in cities knew about sheep. They were, as I said, everywhere.

Being enfolded in love by the Good Shepherd is an image of God's love for Jesus and for us. Many commentators make this observation, but one puts it succinctly, that through the Incarnation, "God knows the people from up close." Jesus has shared our human experience and knows intimately what it means to suffer and to die. No wonder that the sheep can trust this Good Shepherd. Johnston writes that we might even say that our shepherd "knows exactly what it is like to be a sheep, and by extension, what it is like to be snatched by the wolf" (The Lectionary Commentary: The Gospels). It isn't such a reach, then, to understand Jesus as the "Lamb of God."2
Jesus is the Good Shepherd who lays down his life—and also the Lamb of God who is snatched up by the wolf, in this case the wolf is the corruption of Rome within the temple hierarchy, to show that the wolf has no real power.

Jesus was totally committed to the role of Good Shepherd. He allowed his life to be taken and was give the power to take it up again. His total commitment to God's purpose meant that he showed us the relative powerlessness of the wolf—we will die sometime, but death is not the eternal victor.

When I started to write this sermon, I knew that my reason for emphasizing Jesus' total commitment was to make us realize, all of us realize that total commitment is more than what Jesus did—total commitment is what is expected of us. We must be totally committed as disciples of Jesus Christ so that when we face hard choices, choices that cost, we can trust God to carry us through. We can trust that God will take our sacrifices, as we have carried the cross when it was offered, and turn them into life.

Now this is where things become more difficult, making room for one another in the fold of God's love. It seems like we ought to find it easy and even natural to relax into the warmth of God's care, to move over and make room for everyone else. And yet this image, of religious leaders themselves not recognizing the immeasurable worth of each individual in the eyes of God, is just as powerful today as it is in any age. Leaders and their flocks in the church have a hard time not thinking about who's in the flock, and who isn't, and that can equate with who's loved by God, and who isn't . . . or at least, who isn't loved by God quite as much, or in the same way, as we are. And yet, it's not up to us to decide who's in or who's out; this text tells us that Jesus has "other sheep" elsewhere and that he intends to draw them in, too. This flock "is open-ended.3 There are always others who recognize the shepherd's voice and enter the fold"4. We may want to decide whose really in, but Jesus says that it's about who he recognizes, not us and his recognition by member of the flock, not by anyone else. And no one can tell us we are out, either. Jesus is the one who calls and no one else.

How we treat one another within the church itself provides opportunities for demonstrating our total commitment to the body of Christ and to Jesus, the head of the church. How we treat those who are rejected and on the margins of society also provides even more important opportunities for being totally committed to our discipleship of Jesus.

Our commitment wavers, or at least our behavior wavers from time to time and person to person. Some folks are easier to love than others—even Jesus knew that and Paul comments on it in his letters, but in the long run as Christians, members of the Body of Christ, we are committed to this kingdom and what we do matters. Our behavior and demonstrating of the love of Jesus Christ within our lives and in how we treat everyone nurtures the kingdom or stifles its growth. We have a hand in the gospel, each one of us.

Whatever we do, we do as sheep of the one Good Shepherd. We do it as one who follows the ideal shepherd, the beautiful shepherd, who lays down his life for all of us and all who are his sheep.

To the glory of God, who loves us and cares for us and for all creation.


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