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SERMONS

Fourth Sunday of Easter
April 29, 2007

By The Rev. Sylvia Czarnetzky

Today is Good Shepherd Sunday, in case you didn’t know. One of the problems with preaching on Good Shepherd Sunday is that most of us don’t know much about sheep and shepherds. I don’t, at any rate. You could fit all I know about sheep on the head of a pin and still have lots of room left over!

My only experience with sheep and shepherds came when I was in high school. Every December our youth group put on the Living Nativity: we set up a mock stable in the front yard of St. James, right there on Washington Avenue Then we all dressed as shepherds angels, kings, and so forth, and we stood out there in our costumes in the freezing cold, while people drove by in their toasty warm cars and looked at us!. One year we thought it might add an element of authenticity for the stable to contain actual animals, so somebody loaned us a couple of sheep! The farmer who loaned us the sheep didn’t especially want to haul them back and forth from the farm every night (the Living Nativity had a three-night run) so we built a make-shift animal pen on the lawn of the church -- you can imagine, by the way, how popular THAT was with the women of the church!

Anyway, there was, naturally, an incident. One of the sheep escaped from the pen late one night and had to be rounded up at three o’clock in the morning by our EYC advisor.

Obviously, if that’s the sum-total of my experience with sheep, Then I know virtually nothing about sheep and shepherds, And I have a hunch I’m not the only one in that situation. Because our knowledge about sheep and shepherds is limited or nonexistent, we have a bit of a problem.

Because in Jesus’s day and when John wrote his gospel, You could just assume that most readers and hearers would be familiar with the practice of herding sheep. After all, sheep were a familiar part of the daily landscape, so Jesus and John could count on their listeners knowing enough about shepherding, that the metaphor makes sense.

When we come to these texts two thousand years later, With virtually no knowledge about herding sheep, we preachers end up having to back up and do some explaining -- fill in some blanks -- about shepherds and sheep-herding, in order for the metaphor of the good shepherd to really make sense.

A typical village in ancient Palestine had something called a sheepfold that all the shepherds in the village used for their sheep. A sheepfold could be “a simple walled enclosure made from tangled bushes,” which provided minimal “protection from weather and enemies.” the sheepfold could be an enclosure with more substantial walls, or even a cave.

And here’s how a sheepfold was used: During the day, each shepherd in the village took his or her sheep out to find food for grazing and water for drinking. At night, however, all the shepherds in the village Brought their sheep back to the village and put them in the sheepfold. [By the way, that’s where our expression, “return to the fold” comes from -- the idea of returning to a place of safety and belonging.]

So, as a practical matter, each morning, the shepherds would come to the fold to get their sheep to take them out to graze for the day, and they each had to separate their sheep from the rest of the sheep. Sheep all kind of all look alike to me, but apparently each shepherd came to know his own sheep, and each sheep came to know its own shepherd.

The point is that each morning, when the shepherds came to the sheep fold, in the process of sorting all these sheep out, each sheep would respond to its own shepherd’s voice, or to the sound of its own name upon the shepherd’s lips, and would follow that shepherd out of the sheepfold to graze.

So when Jesus says, “My sheep hear my voice...and they follow me,” he is, I think, at least in part, talking about this sorting process. He is talking about sheep listening for their shepherd’s voice and about the sheep knowing which voice is his. He is talking about the shepherd leading his sheep into “green pastures” and “still waters”. He is talking about trusting the shepherd to lead them to the places where they may be fed and watered. (see Taylor 81)

Then, of course, the metaphor of the shepherd starts to make better sense. The ability of each sheep to recognize the voice of its shepherd from among all the other shepherds’ voices becomes the ability of each of us to know our Lord’s voice, from among the many seductive voices calling to us in this modern world. How do we recognize our shepherd’s voice from among the clamor of voices that call to us every day?

Well, as a practical matter, it probably got easier for the sheep to recognize their shepherd’s voice, the longer that shepherd tended that sheep -- over time, the voice of the shepherd becomes more familiar to the sheep because he hears it morning after morning after morning.

And that suggests to me that perhaps one of the things this good shepherd business is about is listening daily for the voice of the shepherd in our own lives. Maybe part of what this is about for us is our prayer life the time each day we try to set aside to listen for our shepherd’s voice, and try to follow him out of the safety of the sheepfold into the rough-and-tumble world beyond its boundaries. That prayer time each morning is like the chaotic time in the sheepfold when shepherds are all calling for their sheep, and each sheep is straining for the voice of its shepherd -- maybe when the cares and demands of the day threaten to encroach on that time of listening, we need to imagine those cares and concerns as the voices of shepherds that we so not need to listen to or follow! So perhaps the image of straining one’s ears to hear the familiar voice of our shepherd is, for us, about prayer.

One of the things that is marvelous about metaphors is that they can operate on several levels at the same time. So let’s consider the sheepfold from another angle:

Now, if the world outside of the sheepfold is so dangerous, wouldn’t it make sense, if you were a sheep, simply to stay in your sheepfold all the time? I’m guessing that the problem with that approach is that there’s not enough grass in the sheepfold, so if you never venture out of the sheepfold, you’ll starve! But maybe you have to leave the safety of the sheepfold And follow the shepherd into the dangerous outside world To be fed, and that’s a pretty powerful notion. What if this church can is our sheepfold? What if our call is to venture out from The safety of the sheepfold, into The dangerous world. I mean, it’s all well and good to talk about Jesus and charity and love when we’re safe in here, surrounded by like-minded folks; but what about taking that talk outside the walls of the church? What about taking the gospel we listen to on Sundays out into the world during the rest of the week? Isn’t that part of our call from God? To carry the gospel of Jesus Christ with us when we leave the safety of the fold? But there is another aspect of this sheepfold business that is disturbing. And that is that the dangers out there beyond the walls of the sheepfold are real and terrifying. A good shepherd can not eliminate dangers from our path -- all the good shepherd can do is try to protect us from the dangers out there – the wolf who wants to eat us; the danger of wandering off and getting lost or falling off a cliff -- these are realities in the world outside the sheepfold, and there is no guarantee that the shepherd can protect us from harm.

A good shepherd will do everything possible to protect u, but the fact is that the dangers are still out there and the shepherd may not be able to protect us from the damage they can inflict. And that’s where things get a little dicey.

You may remember Rabbi Harold Kushner -- he wrote a book a few years back called When Bad Things Happen to Good People. Well Rabbi Kushner has written another book, called The Lord is my Shepherd, which is an extended meditation on the 23rd psalm. When the book came out, Rabbi Kushner was interviewed on PBS, and here’s a bit of what Rabbi Kushner said:

Right after 9/11 -- when everybody was asking me, “Where was God that Tuesday? How could God have let such a thing happen?” -- the answer I found myself giving was, “God’s promise was never that life would be fair. God’s promise was, when it’s your turn to confront the unfairness of life, no matter how hard it is, you’ll be able to handle it, because He’ll be on your side. He will give you the strength you need to find your way through.” (Kushner)

The Lord is my Shepherd, I shall not want. Or as the hymn we will sing at communion says: The King of Love my shepherd is, Whose goodness faileth never. I nothing lack if I am his, And he is mine forever. Amen.