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SERMONS

Fourth Sunday in Easter
May 3, 2009

By The Rev. Sylvia Czarnetzky            

Acts 4:5-12
Psalm 23
1 John 3:1-8
John 10:11-18

One of the problems with preaching on a book as ancient as the Bible is kind of a timing problem. Here’s what I mean. When the psalmist wrote the twenty-third psalm, and when John wrote these well known words in his gospel about the Good Shepherd, it was a pretty safe bet that people listening to them would know some basic things about sheep and the shepherds who led them. The writers of these ancient texts could safely assume that their listeners would be familiar, at least to some degree, with the practice of keeping sheep. Sheep were a familiar part of the landscape of Israel and Palestine in those days. In Jesus’s day, for example, most Galilean families kept sheep and goats. Their flocks grazed on land near the villages was set aside for grazing, usually because it wasn’t suitable for cultivation. (Vamoush 48) So most people in those days had some first-hand knowledge about shepherding..

Alas, we today do not. At least most of us don’t. (Lindner 21) And that creates a bit of a problem for us. Because we live in another time, separated by centuries from the world inhabited by the Biblical writers, we have lost that walking-around knowledge of that aspect of the ancient world. People today just don’t know much about herding sheep. As for myself, everything I know about sheep and shepherds I picked up watching Wile E. Coyote cartoons on Saturday mornings! And I’m guessing I’m not the only one. These days real working knowledge of shepherding is about as rare as hen’s teeth. So I feel like I, as a preacher, need to do some explaining in order for some of this hepherding language to convey its full power for us.

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.” (Vancil 1187) Or the sheepfold could be an enclosure with more substantial walls, (Merriman 113) or even a cave. (Vancil 1187)

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. (1187)  At night, however, all the shepherds in the village came back with their sheep 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. As you might imagine, it wasn’t all that easy. But each shepherd came to know his own sheep, and vice versa. (Merriman 113)
           
So ever morning there was this kind of chaotic scene in the sheep fold (perhaps not so different from your own routine in the morning if you’re trying to get kids off to school!) when the shepherds began the process, 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.  (Vancil 1188))

So when Jesus says, “I am the good shepherd.  I know my own and my own know me,” (Jn. 10:14) he is, I think, talking about how sheep listen for their shepherd’s voice and how the sheep know which voice is their shepherd’s. He is talking about being led out of the relative safety of the sheepfold into the world, where there are dangerous wild animals, but where there are also green pastures and still waters. He is talking about trusting the shepherd to lead us to the places where we may be fed. (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 voices calling to us in this modern world. Thanks to John’s gospel, we identify the shepherd described in the twenty-third psalm with Jesus. Then the question becomes: 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 gets easier for the sheep to recognize their shepherd’s voice, the longer that shepherd tends 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 material is about is listening daily for the voice of the shepherd in our own lives. Maybe this is talking about our daily prayers and devotions – 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 sound of the voice of its shepherd -- maybe when the cares and demands of the day ahead of us threaten to encroach on that time of stillness and listening, we need to ignore those other voices and strain to hear our Lord’s voice.

But one of the things that is marvelous about metaphors is that they can operate on several levels at the same time (what English teachers call “multivalent”). So here’s my question: If the world outside of the sheepfold is so dangerous, wouldn’t it make sense, if you were a sheep, just to stay in your sheepfold all the time? But I’m guessing that the problem with that approach is that there’s no grass in the sheepfold, or not much, so if you never venture out of the sheepfold, you’ll eventually starve! But the metaphor of having to leave the safety of the sheepfold and follow the shepherd into the dangerous outside world is a pretty powerful one. What if this Chapel is our sheepfold? After all, it’s all well and good to talk about charity and love and generosity in here, when we’re surrounded by like-minded folks; but what about taking that talk beyond the walls of the church? What about taking seriously the call, in the lesson from 1st John, to translate our beliefs into action? What if we were to take the gospel we proclaim on Sundays and translate it into action the rest of the week? Isn’t that part of our vocation as Christians? To carry the gospel of Jesus Christ with us when we leave the safety of the sheepfold?

But there is an aspect of this whole sheepfold business that is disturbing. And that is that the dangers out there beyond the walls of the fold 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 risk of our 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.  (French 439) A good shepherd will do everything possible to protect us from harm but the fact is that the dangers are still out there and the shepherd may not be able to protect us from all of them. And that’s where things get a little tricky.

You may remember Rabbi Harold Kushner -- he wrote a book many years ago 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 are some of the things he said about Psalm 23: 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.” ... I was paraphrasing the twenty-third Psalm: “Though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil, for Thou art with me. The psalmist is…saying, “This is a scary, out-of-control world, but it doesn’t scare me, because I know that God is on my side, … And that’s enough to give me the confidence.”  The twenty-third psalm is the answer to the question, “How do you live in a dangerous, unpredictable, frightening world?”

In times like these, when we just don’t know what’s going to happen with the economy or the swine flu virus, the 23rd psalm gives us words to live by. I had to memorize the King James version of the psalm as a child, and the lines just sing in my ears: “Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil, for thou art with me…. Surely goodness and mercy will follow me all the days of my life. And I will dwell in the house of the Lord forever.  Amen.

Works Cited:

French, Kent. Exigetical reflection on Psalm 23. Feasting on the Word. B. 2. Eds. David L. Bartlett and Barbara Brown Taylor. Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 2008. 437-41.

Kushner, Harold. Interview on Psalm 23. November 26, 2004.  Religion and Ethics Newsweekly website.

Lindner, Cynthia Gano. “Reflections on the Lectionary.”  Christian Century April 21, 2009. 21.

Lucado, Max. Traveling Light. Nashville:Thomas Nelson, 2001.

Maloney, Linda M. “The Season of Easter.” New Proclamation, Year B (2000). Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2000.

Merriman, Michael W. “Shepherd to All People.” Sermons that Work. ECUSA website (Year B, 2000).

Scott, Bernard Brandon. “The Season of Easter.” New Proclamation, Year B (2006). Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2006.

Searcy, Edwin. “Blogging toward Sunday.” Theolog (website of Christian Century) February 24, 2008.

Taylor, Barbara Brown. “The Shepherd’s Flute.” Bread of Angels. Cambridge: Cowley Press, 1997. 80-84.

Vamoush, Miriam Feinberg. Daily Life at the time of Jesus.  Herzlia, Israel: Palphot, Ltd.  2005.

Vancil, Jack W. “Shepherd, sheep.” The New Anchor Bible Dictionary. V. New York: Doubleday, 1990. 1187-90.