Fourth Sunday of Easter

Here is a sermon I wrote a few years ago about following the Good Shepherd. It's about listening and following.

4 Easter A

May 15, 2011

Transcribed from a sermon given

At St. Barnabas Episcopal Church

Rev. Valerie Hart

Today is Good Shepherd Sunday. Every year on the fourth Sunday of Easter we talk about Jesus as the Good Shepherd.

The image of being a shepherd comes up often in scripture. We heard it in the 23^rd Psalm. In John’s Gospel we hear Jesus talking about himself being the good shepherd. It made sense to use that imagery, that metaphor, in those times because everyone would have been familiar with shepherds. The people of Israel were always a herding people. Abraham was a herder. He traveled from place to place with his animals and became rich because of his large herds.  When Moses brought the Israelites out of Egypt and they traveled around and wandered for forty years, they wandered with their herds. They had herds of sheep. It wasn’t just people. And David, the great King David, was originally a shepherd before he was called to be king. So the shepherd imagery was familiar to everyone. And in the time of Jesus there were lots of shepherds around. It was one of the main occupations in that area. On every hill you could see sheep. Even today, if you go to the middle east and you stay long enough, you probably at some point will see a tall man, at least he looks tall next to the sheep, standing with a staff and this group of fuzzy off white animals hanging around him. You will see that.

However on the central coast you are unlikely to see it. Very few of us have ever been shepherds. Some of us here do know something about being a shepherd, but not very many of us. Many of us have never seen a sheep, and probably for most Christians the main thing you know about sheep and shepherding is what you have heard in these sermons every year about the Good Shepherd. So it is not something that is existentially real for us. If you try to think about it in our culture, what would be similar? It is not exactly the same, but probably the closest we can come in our everyday life is our relationship with our animals, with our dogs, or our cats, or our horses. We love them and care for them, and make sure they have everything they need. You see, that is the shepherd’s job. The shepherd’s life is focused around the flock, and making sure that the flock stays healthy. He has to make sure that they find good food, that when one pasture wears out they go to another one, and that there is water. If a sheep gets sick the shepherd takes care of that sheep. When a new baby is born, and there is a little tiny lamb, and the flock has to move a long distance, the shepherd carries the baby that can’t keep up. There is total care of the sheep.

Sheep really need that, because sheep were domesticated pretty early and they were not domesticated in order to survive in the wilds. In fact domesticated sheep would die very quickly if there was not someone to take care of them. They have no defense against predators, except that they are a herd animal so if a predator comes the hope is that it will only get a few around the outside edge, not all of the sheep. They can’t fight back. They have no horns to fight back. And when they were domesticated it turns out that they don’t see very well. Sheep are very near sighted. So they only can see where they are. They can’t take a look around and see where is the next water hole. And they are kind of short so that makes looking around hard too. They are one of the few animals that will eat where they are until it is destroyed. The way that sheep eat grass is they eat it way down to the nub. And if you overgraze sheep in an area the grass won’t grow back. So, if sheep are left to their own devices, if it is green they’ll eat it, and they will keep eating until it is all gone. And then they will have no idea what to do unless they see something green over there and then they will go over to wherever that is. They don’t survive very well on their own. So they need a shepherd. They need a shepherd that can have a sense of where the rich pasture is. To know that at certain times of the year the pasture would be good here and then will take them somewhere else another time of year. Sometimes that mean taking them down into a dry valley to take them up the other side to good pasture.

The shepherd does everything for the sheep, to care for them. It is a relationship of love and affection and devotion. There is even willingness, for the good shepherd, to risks his life to protect the sheep from predators. So when Jesus talks about being the good shepherd there is that sense of love, like we would have with our animals. We know that when we have an animal we develop a relationship of caring and love. We make sure they have enough food, and we make sure they have enough water, and we make sure they get enough tummy rubs if it is a dog, and maybe a brushing and washing it occasionally. If it gets sick we take it to the vet. If it is the middle of the night we grumble, but we go to the emergency vet. And we feed them the medicine they need and we do whatever it is necessary to care for the animal we made a commitment to, for that is the nature of the relationship.

There is a relationship between the shepherd and the sheep. The shepherd’s commitment is to care for the sheep. What is the sheep’s part of the relationship? What’s the sheep’s responsibility? The sheep’s responsibility is to listen for the shepherd’s voice and then follow where the shepherd leads. That’s it. To listen and to follow. It is sort of like with our dogs, we hope we can train them to come when we call. We do that. We want our animals, especially our dogs, to respond to our voices because if they are running toward the street we want them to stop and come back for their own safety. That’s my dog’s responsibility - to love me and hopefully listen when I tell it to do something. That’s our responsibility as sheep - to listen for the shepherd’s voice and to follow.

But one of the things about listening for the shepherd’s voice is you need learn to discriminate between the Good Shepherd and the other voices out there. Jesus in this passage talks about the different shepherds and the sheep recognize their shepherd voice and follow their shepherd because there has been a relationship. The sheep learn over time who to trust. Who is the one that feeds them and cares for them. Over time they learn to distinguish that voice from all the other voices.

Sometimes it’s hard to distinguish the voice of Christ. There are so many voices out there. You turn on the radio and there are voice telling us to buy things and political points of view and news and all kinds of different voices. And then there are the voices of our friends or our associates who are telling us things. And then there are the voices of our mother and our father that sit on our shoulders and talks to us and tells us what we are suppose to do. And then there are the voices of our own guilt. There are voices that come from all different kinds of places.

How in this cacophony of noise in our minds are we to discriminate the voice of the Good Shepherd? It takes time and practice and relationship. We listen to the voice of God in scripture. We come together as a community, as a flock, and we listen together. If you have the flock of sheep and you have the shepherd, if the shepherd calls out and only one of those sheep hears and starts to follow the shepherd all the other sheep will follow. But of course if one of the sheep listens to the wrong person and goes the wrong direction the sheep tend to follow too. So one of the ways we discriminate is we get to know pretty well in a community who are the ones who hear God’s voice that we can rely on and we can trust. And we learn when to say, “eh, there they go off on their own again.” Maybe that is not right. Discrimination, discernment. We come to know God’s voice as we come together to worship every week and we listen, and we hear, and we sense God’s presence, and we begin to know what it feels likes when we are in relationship with Christ. And we learn what it feels like when we are not. That takes time and practice and relationship.  But you learn to hear it better and better, then you follow, to trust that where it is going to lead is to life - to life abundantly.

Last night I was on the phone with a friend and she asked me what are you going to preach on so I gave her kind of a synopsis of what I just said to you and she said, “listening to the shepherd and then following. That sounds really boring.” And I said, “Yeah, it can be.” It can sound really boring to be a sheep that just listens to the shepherd and follows along. There are a lot more exciting voices out there. There are wonderfully exciting voices. Come and do this and have fun and party and we’re going to have a great time. The first time you have a drink it’s fun. And the second time you have a drink its fun. But by the fortieth party you go to it is starting to get a little boring and then suddenly that you are in an AA meeting and you are lost in the valley of the shadow of death.

There are lots of more exciting things then following the shepherd, although once you really start following the shepherd it can get pretty interesting. But those other voices, those more exciting voices, sometimes lead us to the valley of the shadow of death. Sometimes they lead us into places where there is no water, there is no nurturance, there is dryness and emptiness. Sometimes we find ourselves in those kinds of situations, when we are one of those little sheep have walked off the wrong direction (because that’s what sheep do) and that is what we all do sometimes. But the good news is that when we find ourselves in that valley of the shadow of death the shepherd is still with us. And the moment, the moment, we turn and say “help!” he’s right there to lead us home, to care for us, to protect us, to heal us and nurture us and forgive us.

It’s a relationship. It’s about listening. It’s about responding when we hear his voice. Each one of us will find his or her own way of discerning the voice of the Good Shepherd. Some people have a sense inside when they hear it inwardly. Others find the voice in scripture, others find the voice in worship. But with time you learn to discriminate that voice and when you follow, when you listen and you follow, what you are offered is life. Abundant life.