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SERMON BY THE REV'D PATRICK T. GRAY AT THE CHURCH OF THE ADVENT, I can’t remember exactly when it was, maybe it was about a year ago, but I was away at something or other, clergy conference, something like that, and I would call home at night before my boy Ezra went to bed, to say “goodnight.” And one night, I think I was coming down with something, my nose was all stuffy, and my throat was scratchy, but I wasn’t going to use that as an excuse not to call home. Now mind you, usually when I would call, after chatting a bit with my wife, who would then put my boy on the phone, the conversation would go something like this – “Hi sweetie.” “Hi!” “How are you?” “Good.” “Did you have fun today?” “Yep.” “Are you being a good boy for mommy?” “A-huh.” Then I’d hear my wife whispering something to Ezra, and Ezra would say, “I love you!” “I love you, too, honey.” “Bye-bye.” “Bye, sweetie.” And then he’d hand the phone back to mom. And that was our phone conversation. Not very much, but you know, it got the basics in, we at the very least had a chance to say “I love you” to each other. Not much of a conversation, but at least a connection. But then when I called home with my stuffy nose, and scratchy throat, and I chatted with my wife Naomi for a while, and as, per usual, she put my boy on the phone, and I said, “Hi sweetie.” Silence. “Hi, sweetie.” More silence. “Ezra?” “Daddy?” “Hi, sweetie.” “Daddy?” “Yeah, sweetie, it’s Daddy.” More silence. “Ezra?” And then I hear, “Mommy, that’s not Daddy,” and he hands the phone back to my wife, and goes back to doing whatever he was doing before he was rudely interpreted by this stranger’s voice on the other line, claiming to be his father. Because my voice did not sound like my voice. I was stuffy, probably nasally, and it was clear to my child that this was not me. This was a stranger’s voice. And although we tell our children “don’t talk to strangers,” I wasn’t a stranger. And yet there was something not quite right, and my child wasn’t going to take a chance on heeding a stranger’s voice. Now you know, if you’ve seen our Christmas Pageant, we dress up the kids that are my son’s age like sheep. And we often dress up there parents as shepherds, because you never what the sheep are going to do. But if there is at least one thing we can depend on, it’s that they will heed the voice of their parent, who plays the shepherd to their sheep. To some degree, we’re typecasting a bit with making teenie-weenies into sheep. It’s cute, it’s worth a picture, but also, the expectations are pretty low. If they run around like banshees, ah, they’re kids, and besides, that’s just what sheep do, right? Sheep can be a little crazy, a little slow, perhaps, so perfect for a little kid. But maybe sometimes we don’t give our little ones enough credit. Maybe they’re smarter than we realize. And maybe those sheep that we hear so much about in scripture, maybe they’re not as dumb as we think. Our Gospel lesson today, of course, on Good Shepherd Sunday, is about sheep and shepherds. And it’s a parable, a parable Jesus tells the disciples. So no wonder John tells us they didn’t understand. But we’re probably not going to understand very well, either, if we don’t know why Jesus told the parable in the first place. In chapter nine of John’s Gospel, the chapter right before our passage that we heard this morning, there was a central question that dominated the entire chapter – Is Jesus from God or not? Is he a prophet or not? Is he the Messiah or not, the “son of man” whom God will set as judge over the world, or not? And here, at the beginning of chapter ten, we have a parable about sheep and shepherds. What’s the connection? (1) Now if we think about those people who “run things” in our modern world, our rulers and leaders, whether they be politicians (despite their best efforts in an election year), whether it be celebrities (who we actually feel like we know because of their ubiquitous presence in the media), whether it be presidents of banks or big companies, it is these people who are often quite removed from the people they represent, the people they entertain, the people that work in their organizations. Leadership, rule, “running things,” in our modern world implies a distance between people. And we accept that as the way things are. This is how you do leadership. But this is not the biblical image. The portrait we have throughout scripture of leadership, of kingship, of the relationship between a ruler and his people, is that of a shepherd with his sheep. It’s quite possible that this ideal king as shepherd was modeled on David, who was the shepherd-boy who became king, the king after God’s own heart. But whatever the motivation for our Old Testament writers to speak of God and his people through the lens of shepherd and sheep, it was this image that Jesus chose to explain his own claim to be the true king of Israel. (2) Because everyone knew in Jesus’ day about the intimate relationship, the trust between a shepherd and his sheep. Everyone knew that a good shepherd not only cared for his sheep, not only protected his sheep, but called each and every sheep by name, each sheep had a name. And the sheep, those animals that we think are so dumb, knew not only their name, but knew the voice of the one they could trust. And it didn’t matter if others knew their name or not. They only trusted the one they could trust, the voice of their good shepherd. So maybe sheep aren’t as dumb as we think. Maybe they can be naïve, maybe deceived at times, but if they hear a stranger’s voice, no matter who that stranger claims to be, even if he knows your name, it’s still not quite right. And you tell a true king, a good king, the same way you tell a true shepherd, a good shepherd. Anybody can turn up in Jerusalem and call himself a leader. But only the one who comes the way God has appointed has the right to do so. Anyone can call followers. But the sign of the real king is the response that comes from the heart, when people here his voice and, in love and trust, follow him. (3) But the people didn’t get it. His audience, we gather from John’s Gospel, just looked at Jesus blankly. So Jesus tried again, this time calling himself “the sheep gate,” which probably just confused his listeners all the more. “First he’s a shepherd, now he’s a gate?” But he finally gets to it. He finally gets to his point. And Jesus said to them, “I came that they may have life, and have it abundantly.” Here’s the pattern to look for, here’s the voice to listen for. Who gives life? Who gives life in such abundance? Who is the one that calls us each out, calls us each by name, and we know that this one is worth trusting? Who is this one that we can follow? I think the assumption for most of us here today is that we claim Jesus as our good shepherd. We claim him as our king. That he is trustworthy, that he is the one that calls us out of ourselves, calls us out of our self-absorption to a life of self-giving. For it is clear in John’s Gospel that the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ is the established pattern of self-giving love that those who follow him should imitate, should embrace. And I think there’s a lot of sheep out there. Maybe they’ve been told lies, deceived, stolen and left for dead, as it were. But they’re still listening for a voice, a voice they can trust. And they watch the other sheep, you and me, to see what we do when we hear the voice that we say we trust. Do we give life in what we say, and what we do? It’s clear it does strange things to you when you listen to the voice. We have the evidence of that right here in our very midst. You start showing up on Tuesdays nights to help serve a meal to those who need one; you start getting together in the middle of the week to read the Bible and pray together (how strange is that for Episcopalians?); you commit yourself to teaching kids about Jesus every Sunday, of taking care of kids every Sunday; you even go through all the hassle of getting a plane ticket, giving up precious vacation time, all to go to someplace that is anything but a vacation, to build a house in Mississippi, to feed orphans in Kenya. Living into God’s abundant life starts doing crazy and odd things like that to you. And the world needs more of it. Your friends, your family, your neighbors, the world waits to see what can happen when wandering sheep, brought home by the Shepherd’s love, start to live by the same pattern that he lived – the pattern of life-giving and abundant love. (4) Let’s hear his voice again today, and let us continue to spur one another on to love and good works, and let us go out and tell others about this good shepherd. About how his is a voice worth listening to, worth trusting, worth following. Amen. (1) Tom Wright, John for Everyone, Part 1 ( London: SPCK, 2002), 148. (4) N. T. Wright, Twelve Months of Sundays: Reflections on Bible Readings, Year A ( London: SPCK, 2001), 61. |