PEOPLE'S CHURCH OF DOVER

John 10:11-18                                                                        The Good Shepherd

Sermon May 3, 2009:  People's United Church of Christ, Dover, DE:  The Rev. Dan Griggs

 

          Lovers find interesting and unusual ways to send messages of love to each other.  One husband said that each morning his wife prepares his lunch and gives it to him in a brown paper bag to take to work.  One noon he unwrapped a sandwich and found a bite missing.  There was a note with the sandwich.  He opened it up and read, "Inspected by Number One."[1]

          If we send people we love such words, is it surprising that the God who is Love has sent us a divine Word of love made flesh?  Jesus Christ came into our lives to show us as much of God as we're able to comprehend.  The Gospel of John highlights the presence of God in Jesus with a series of "I Am" statements:  "I am the bread of life, " "I am the light of the world," and the one that occurs in our Gospel Lesson today, "I am the good shepherd."  The image of the Good Shepherd is one way we see God in Jesus of Nazareth.  Besides the twenty-third psalm, which was our first hymn today, the Old Testament prophets said long before Jesus' nativity that God would be the great shepherd of God's people.[2]  The Good Shepherd takes care of the sheep.  God in Christ takes care of us.

 

          The Good Shepherd is Jesus Christ.  I need to say something about this that's very personal.  Up in verse 8, before the text I read, Jesus says something that makes me feel strange:[3]  

 

 

Throughout the New Testament and in the teaching of the church through all the ages, pastors have been called "shepherds."  In fact, that's what the word "pastor" means—one who leads sheep to pasture.  The word is more a job description than a title.  But when I read the Gospel of John's statements about the Good Shepherd, as a pastor I've got a problem.  It's a little embarrassing to have the New Testament call my career into question!  If Jesus Christ is the Good Shepherd, am I one of these "thieves and robbers" he warns against?  Am I one of the "wolves in sheep's clothing" that Jesus warned against in the Sermon on the Mount?[4]  I've never enjoyed thinking about that.  But the church is warned again and again in the scriptures to be on guard against evil shepherds. 

          In the Gospel Lesson Jesus says that when the wild beasts attack the flock the hired hand leaves the sheep and runs away:  he saves himself.  As a matter of fact, you don't have to be a hireling to fail sometimes.  A father is something of a shepherd, but when I was a teenager as hard as my father tried he was just not able to understand my adolescent feelings and fears.  I was left to deal with those beasts on my own—and of course, that's what it takes to grow up.  And in school, for all the encouragement my mother gave me about learning, she couldn't help me with my exams:  I was alone in front of that mid-term exam.  My wife can't save me from growing older—although she makes me feel young.  My sister can't fix it so I don't have to pay the IRS.  My children can't achieve things I wish I had achieved, and give me vicarious success in life:  they have to leave me behind at home and go live their own lives.  And my pastor can't always "make it better."  A pastor can be with me in times of stress, but a pastor can't take away the sting of a divorce, or an empty nest, or a hospital stay.

          But I want to be a good pastor.  I want to be a good shepherd under Jesus Christ.  Sometimes I've used the metaphor of a sheep-dog:  Christ is the shepherd, and I'm the sheep-dog that helps—runs around behind the sheep and urges them back toward the shepherd.  It's just that at some point we all fail to help those we love:  because we can't. 

          Maybe that's not altogether bad.  You don't want me snooping into your life and giving advice about everything.  However well intended somebody else's advice might be, people want to make their own decisions.  They do want to be able to talk things over with an understanding pastor, to get a different perspective, or to vent some frustration, or to find some healing of wounds; but people don't want me to give them advice. 

          I guess what I'm saying is that if I am to be a good pastor, I need to tell myself that I'm not the "Good Shepherd."  There's only one "Good Shepherd," Jesus Christ.  At some point, even the pastor is himself also one of the sheep, in need of the Good Shepherd.

          I like the painting of the crucifixion by the Renaissance painter Dürer.  It shows Jesus hanging on the cross, and the crossbar is sagging on both ends where his hands are nailed—the weight of the world's sins, or my sins are that heavy.  And on the left is standing John the Baptist, and on the right is standing the Apostle Peter; and they're both pointing at Christ on the cross.  This, I think, is the work of a good pastor:  to point to the Good Shepherd.  I try to do that.  Sometimes I fail.  Sometimes the wild beasts come up against me, and I know very well that I, too, am one of the sheep in need of the Good Shepherd.  The Good Shepherd is Jesus Christ. 

 

          Jesus says in the text, "The good shepherd lays down his life for his sheep."  This is another way of talking about Jesus' death on the cross for our sins.  We're in danger.  Our spiritual well-being is under threat.  The wild bests of the world come prowling around, looking for sheep to carry away.  These wild beasts are known to us—we know their identity.

          There's the bear called "love of money," which is the root of all evil, and more in our time than ever before, because "economics" has become such a critical issue in our time.  The Cold War was all about economics.  But "the love of money," or "greed," is still a false god, a wild beast that mauls our hearts as well as our devotion.  And the trick this bear uses is simply that everybody need some money, and everybody soon enough wants more money; and we wander very close to the bear cave.  How can I be saved from this beast "greed"?  My spiritual well-being is in danger.

          "The good shepherd lays down his life for the sheep."  Jesus Christ calls me to love God and to use money, instead of using God to fulfill my own love of money.  Like the shepherd boy David, who put a stone into his sling-shot and killed the bear that was threatening his flock, Jesus put himself on the line between "greed" and me; and the great bear "greed" slashed his great paw down on his head and nailed him.  He died to save me from "greed."  But in his resurrection he put that stone right between the eyes of the bear.  The good shepherd saves his sheep from the wild beasts that stalk the flock.

          What are the beasts that stalk your life?  This current economic crisis has hit some of us pretty hard, and we've realized that the snow-white tiger of a shrunken investment portfolio stalks in places we never expected.  And there are the illnesses of aging—those unwelcome aches that doctors can't touch, those slowly increasing weaknesses of eyes, of ears, of arteries and muscles.  Is there any redemption from such beasts that tear and cripple?  And then there is the hawk of loneliness, soaring above the heads of so many people, with its echoed screech of wistfulness and its empty distance.  And there's the wolf of mid-life transitions that disrupt lifetime dreams and comfortable lives.  What are the beasts that stalk your life? 

          The Good Shepherd lays down his life for the sheep.  Jesus Christ is your redeemer—from the power of sin, and from every temptation, and from the stresses life insinuates into our existence.  The Good Shepherd "knows [his] own" sheep, and we know his voice.  I don't mean that by some heavenly magic Christ can wave away old age, or unemployment, or loneliness or fear; but there is a speaking and a hearing deep within the human soul, where the Spirit of Christ takes our sorrows and our needs up into the love of God, and we are cared for.  We are shepherded so that the stresses we bear in life become bearable; and more, they become channels of inner growth and renewal, if God's grace is allowed to have its full sway.  The wolf at the door becomes an inner strength to live and to rise up above my former self.  This is the work of Christ's Spirit within.  This is the shepherding of the Good Shepherd.  The Good Shepherd knows us by our names and deals with our sorrows and our needs. 

 

          What have I said?  The Good Shepherd is Jesus Christ.  I am your pastor, but I'm not the good shepherd:  I'm one of the sheep, whose work it is to point to the Good Shepherd.  The Good Shepherd lays down his life for the redemption of his sheep—the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ is our promise that in spite of the wild beasts which threaten us in this world, we may hope in a transfiguration; and we may live by that hope.  The Good Shepherd knows you by your name, and speaks silently in the depths of your life to change you and make you better.  This is the Good Shepherd.  This is Jesus Christ, who has put his claim and his name on you.  Thanks be to God. 

AMEN