Sermon on the Good Shepherd

Ancient shepherds were pretty bad-ass, when you think about it, even though they held a very low status in society. Imagine being all by yourself with a hundred head of  pretty foolish livestock to protect. Imagine you don’t have a gun, just a rod and a staff—basically a couple of big sticks—and your flock is in constant danger from wolves, and lions, and rustlers who try to jump the portable fence you’ve put up for the night. Imagine there’s no closing gate to this temporary enclosure, just you with your two sticks, sleeping in the opening, so anything coming to trouble the sheep will have to go through you.

And then when day comes, your job is to call each sheep by its name—and every one of them has a name—and lead them all to good pasture, walking in front, where you’re the first to face any hazard.

Very truly, I tell you, I am the gate for the sheep. All who came before me are thieves and bandits, but the sheep did not listen to them. I am the gate.

When Jesus calls himself the Good Shepherd in this very poetic chapter, he’s evoking this image. The listeners would easily have pictured this lone herder literally placing his body between the sheep and the predators, lying in the entrance and being the gate.

He calls his own sheep by name and leads them out.  When he has brought out all his own, he goes ahead of them, and the sheep follow him because they know his voice.

In the Middle East, to this day, shepherds lead the sheep, from the front. This is a different herding method from what we have in the West, where we drive the sheep from behind, with dogs rushing at them and even nipping at their heels to move them forward. The sheep go where the shepherds want them to go because they are afraid of the dogs.

Have you ever felt driven from behind like that? I suspect that if something is driving us, if we’re only moving forward out of fear of the dogs at our heels, we may have lost sight of our shepherd. Have we ever done the “right thing” out of fear rather than out of love? The Good Shepherd doesn’t use fear to get the flock going in the right direction. He uses only the power of his voice.

They will not follow a stranger, but they will run from him because they do not know the voice of strangers.

If there’s a voice we’re hearing that’s calling us something false, calling us “names”, that’s probably the voice of a stranger looking to lead us off the path.

The voices of strangers are all around us, even inside our heads, the negative voices, the hopeless voices, the voices telling us we don’t deserve to be loved, don’t deserve to take up oxygen. I know I’ve heard those voices many times. I suspect most of us have. And sometimes I didn’t have the good sense of a sheep to run the other way. Sometimes I even started to follow them. Listening only to the voice of the true shepherd and running away from all those other voices is not as easy as it sounds for us easily-confused sheep.

The Good Shepherd calls his sheep by name. He knows each of his own, down to the last fiber of their many-colored fleeces, and that’s how they know and trust his voice.

 The hired hand, who is not the shepherd and does not own the sheep, sees the wolf coming and leaves the sheep and runs away, and the wolf snatches them and scatters them. 

Jesus was likely referring to the religious leaders of his time (many of whom were in the crowd) when he added the image of the hired hand, the guy who doesn’t own the sheep and doesn’t mind if the wolf scatters them. The religious experts who were listening would probably have known he was accusing them of being bad sheep-herders, of letting their flock down.

Plus, the listeners knew all the imagery in the Hebrew Scriptures, including Psalm 23, where God is described as a shepherd, so Jesus calling himself the true shepherd is tantamount to him calling himself God.

That may be why the next thing that happens, in verse 31, is that some folks start picking up stones to throw at him. What we’re used to hearing as a comforting story was actually quite a scandal at the time.

 “I am the good shepherd. The good shepherd lays down his life for the sheep… No one takes it from me, but I lay it down of my own accord."

Jesus apparently knows what kind of reaction he’s going to get when he talks about laying down his life. He’s quite aware that the wolves are nearby, but he declares that it is his choice to lay down his life, not theirs. He deliberately plants himself in that gateway, between the sheep and danger, where the wolves can take him down.

He calls his own sheep by name and leads them out. When he has brought out all his own, he goes ahead of them, and the sheep follow him because they know his voice.

The Good Shepherd leads the sheep out. Why out? Isn’t the sheepfold a relatively safe place, with the shepherd right there in the gateway? Granted, the water in the troughs is stagnant and the grass is trampled, but the wolves can’t get in, so why not stay there? Why Jesus says, “I have come that they might have life, and have it abundantly.” Let’s face it; life in the sheepfold isn’t very abundant. It’s comfortable, but it’s also very tame and predictable. There aren’t very many surprises, either bad ones or good ones, in our comfort zones.

We have to go out from the places we feel safe, out to places where there might be more danger, but also where the water is clean and flowing, and the grass is new and fresh, where there is deep nourishment and much more abundant life. The Good Shepherd doesn’t promise there won’t be wolves out there, but he will always be the first to face them, and he will always take the sheep somewhere worth going.

As we at St. Andrew’s work to discern how to better serve the community around this particular sheepfold, it’s helpful to remember that our bad-ass shepherd is going ahead of us.

I am the good shepherd. I know my own, and my own know me.

How do we learn to run from the strangers’ voices in us and around us so we can hear the Good Shepherd’s voice? In my life, I’ve found I have to listen pretty deeply. It takes a conscious effort of focus to filter out all the cruel and debilitating noise and find the voice that leads to abundant life.

As I’ve mentioned before, I used to teach in a Sunday School program called the Catechesis of the Good Shepherd, where the imagery in this parable is central to young children’s understanding of who God is and how he works. One time at St. Paul’s, Concord, another Catechist suggested a meditation to the children in the 6-9-year-olds’ classroom. Knowing the kids were deeply familiar with the parable by this age, she said, “I wonder if you can listen and hear the Good Shepherd calling your name.” Then she struck a singing bowl, and the children were silent until the tone died away. After a minute or two, several of them raised their hands to say they had heard it. You should have seen the looks on their faces. Somewhere deep between their ears and their souls, they had heard their own true names and were certain of who was calling them.

I’ve brought the singing bowl, and if it’s okay with you, I want to repeat the experiment. I wonder if we can be quiet enough, just for the time it takes the sound to fade to silence, to hear the Good Shepherd calling us by our names?

(Ring bowl. Wait for sound to fade.)

Amen.