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The Fourth Sunday of Easter Almighty God, the breeze of your love and grace is ever blowing; may we set our sails to capture that breeze, and may it inspire these words and those who hear them. Amen. If you came to last week’s Joy Mass, you met my friend, Shelley the sheep. Shelley comes with me to Joy Mass to help tell our gospel stories; with her thick wooly coat and her appealing face, she is quite popular with the kids, and I have to admit that I have a lot of fun with her. Shelley is not the only sheep you’ve seen me with lately. Some of you have noticed that I frequently wear a sheep pin on my jacket; on a shelf in my office there is a wooly sheep from Argentina, and at home there is another one from Iceland. As cute as these sheep are, however, they are more than mere adornment. They are, for me, a potent reminder of not only what I am about here, where I am called to be “pastor, priest and teacher,” but also of our ongoing relationship with the one in whose care we all rest, Jesus, our Good Shepherd. As today’s readings remind us, it is in this relationship that we find not only our care and our sustenance, but also our mission as a community of faith, our call to love others as Jesus our shepherd loves us, and to live out that love in the world. Today’s readings draw heavily on the imagery of sheep and shepherding. In our 21st century world we have a rather poetic view of shepherding—sheep grazing peacefully on a verdant hillside while the shepherd watches over the idyllic scene, but in the world of the people of Israel the reality would have been much grittier, much edgier. Shepherds charged with the care of their masters’ flocks led them out into the distant hillsides to graze in areas inhabited by thieves and wild beasts, far away from the warmth and security of home and family. Shepherding was a lonely, dirty and dangerous job, one with both great risks and great responsibility—the existence of the flock depended almost entirely on the shepherd’s diligent and watchful care. This shepherding metaphor, with all its edginess, is woven throughout the Old Testament as a way of describing God’s care for God’s chosen people—a people who, like sheep, could be willful and stubborn. At times God entrusts the shepherding of the people to others, some who like Moses leading the people out of bondage in Egypt, cared for the flock faithfully, and others who put their own interests ahead of their flocks, neglecting or even exploiting them. When God’s representatives failed, God tended to step in to care for and lead the flock for a bit, and then returned the care to another designated shepherd. This pattern picks up in our gospel reading where Jesus assumes the role of caring for the flock. “I am the Good Shepherd,” Jesus proclaims. “The good shepherd lays down his life for the sheep. I know my own and my own know me, just as the Father knows me and I know the Father.” These words must have sent chills down the backs of Jesus’ followers. Jesus spoke them in the midst of his ministry, part of a discourse aimed at clarifying his true identity, but it may have been only in the aftermath of his death and resurrection that their full import became clear. Like a good shepherd, Jesus provided guidance and care for his flock—care grounded in a love so deep, so profound that it led all the way to the cross. The implications of such a love and such a sacrifice are, of course, far-reaching. Jesus consistently called his audience to emulate his behavior— "I give you a new commandment, that you love one another,” he says. “Just as I have loved you, you also should love one another" (John 13:34)—and with this one metaphor, he provides a model for doing so. All these years later we, like the first disciples, must ask how we are to respond to this model of self-giving love. Today’s second reading, from the 1st letter of John, provides one answer. Harkening back to the message of the good shepherd, John writes to the early church, ““We know love by this, that [Jesus] laid down his life for us-- and we ought to lay down our lives for one another.” We ought to lay down our lives for one another. In the early years of the church this might have been heard as a call to accept martyrdom, and indeed many of early Christians literally gave up their lives for their faith. But John’s letter proposes another way in which we might lay down our lives for one another, a way that may be every bit as challenging. But just as shepherds cannot shy away from challenges when caring for their flocks, it may be that challenging and changing our lives is exactly what we are called to do, and therein lies the rub. In these hard economic times our impulse is to pull back, to care for ourselves, to look past those in need. But even in the midst of these days of great economic difficulty, most of us have access to more of the world's goods than much of the rest of the world can imagine. Perhaps it is in these hard times that we might most be called to “lay down our lives for others” by putting aside our self-interest and our fears, and digging deeper to reach out to God’s neediest, to the least among us. This is no small thing we’re asked to do. But in these challenging times, the image of the good shepherd provides us not only with guidance and love and a call to mission, but also –and perhaps most importantly—the Good Shepherd provides us with the reassurance that we need not live in fear. No matter what obstacles we face, no matter how dark things might seem Jesus our Good Shepherd is with us, supporting us every step of the way. As the psalmist writes: The Lord is my shepherd; * Though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, Surely your goodness and mercy shall follow me all the days Amen. |
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