Sermon for
Year C

April 29, 2007

Easter IV

The Rev’d Lloyd Prator
St. John’s in the Village
New York City

Acts 13:14, 43-52

Psalm 23

Revelation 7:9, 14-17

John 10:27-30

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In a Church I once served in the West, there was a stained glass window in the ambulatory. It was positioned right where the procession formed up before the Eucharist Sunday by Sunday, so I saw that window pretty much every time I served at the altar there. It was a depiction of Christ the good shepherd. There was the usual pious Jesus standing in the midst of some rather disinterested sheep. And there, across Jesus shoulders was the sheep that had got lost the one he went to save. And one of the sheep was pictured in that window looking directly out at the viewer of the window. And by some little fluke of design, the sheep was made to look as if it were sticking its tongue out at the observer. Maybe it was not an accident of design. But there was a pink tongue and it was sticking out and that is my story and I am sticking with it.

Perhaps for that reason, I am not keep about sheep imagery in the Bible. God knows there is enough of it, from the familiar Psalm 23, “The Lord is my shepherd,” to Isaiah, to Micah, to Ezekiel to Jeremiah to Ecclesiasticus. Everyone seemed to like this image of sheep.

And, frankly, most of the imagery does not much appeal.

For one thing, sheep are not attractive animals, we think. And we don't want to be thought of as dumb animals, but rather creatures of reason and freedom. There are times when we are glad to follow, but most of the time we don't want sheep dogs yapping and nipping at our heels.

Symbols always have contexts, and not every culture provides a context where sheep and shepherds work as divine images. When the church spread, for example, to Alaska, where no one had ever seen a sheep, it was a challenge to find a way to talk about God that did not involve sheep. One such effort to translate the liturgy into Eskimo languages yielded a particular funny reworking of that old prayer that used to describe human sin as “erring and straying from God's ways like lost sheep,” In one version, the prayer was rendered “We have wandered from your ways like silly walruses.” Context is everything .

So, how might we find a way to maintain and use the image of sheep and shepherds in Christian thought?

The first thing to do is to realize we are talking about symbols. There are special sounds and words of our religion, and sheep and shepherds are one of those symbols. This is not a classroom in which mathematics is being taught, with Ptolemaic clarity. This is not a lecture in chemistry, which involves the precision of ions, protons, and neutrons. Religious language is more the language of painting and poetry, architecture and music, dance and film. The language, say, of the Elizabeth Barrett Browning's “How Do I Love Thee?” which was sung at a wonderful concert here last week, or the crisp directness of the architecture of the Empire State Building is its own idiom, far too rich to be captured in just a single definition.

So, don't just shrug off the image of sheep and shepherd just because there are no sheep in the courtyard (I think) or because shepherds are rarely seen at Arte Pasta. It is worth the effort to try to make contemporary sense of the imagery.

To make this effort, set aside all the images of Bishops as shepherds, and pastors as shepherds, and concentrate on the one we call the Good Shepherd. Jesus.

Jesus is the good shepherd because he cares. If you love someone, you want to get close to him or her. Jesus loved us so much that he got as close as he could, in fact he got inside our skin and lived as we do. Facing the devils we face, the betrayals of every Judas we might know, and taking the worst bloody beating that we can ever take.

Jesus is the good shepherd because he looks after the lost. Remember that the Shepherd had 100 sheep, one got lost and he left 99 respectable, law-abiding sheep and went after the dissident. And when he found that disobedient sheep, did he give it a good thwacking on the backside and kick it back into the fold? Nope. He put it on his shoulder and rejoiced with the joy that only a lover can feel when finding a lost love.

Jesus is the good shepherd because he gets specific. Because he is God, he knows you better than you know yourself. He knows how you think, what you hope for, he knows that odd little turn of events which gives you delight, he knows what stirs your libido, he knows the secret fears planted in your past, he knows the dread which hovers over the future. He loves you, specifically and particularly.

Those are ideas about sheep and shepherds that make just as much sense in the West Village as they do on the West Bank or in West Virginia. They represent the eternal hopes of humanity for God, the universal aspirations of God-seekers everywhere.

Does this work to inspire the image? Might thinking in this way help you to see ways in which Jesus may still be, as the writer of the First letter of Peter puts it, “the shepherd of your souls?” Perhaps.

In any event, there will be for each and every one of us a moment when we are called by name by the One who created us, who lived as one of us, and still struggles to get inside each one of us. Whether or not you want to call that one the Good Shepherd matters hardly a whit at all. What counts is that you know him as the one who cares, the one who seeks and finds the lost, the one who know the real you. And it is my experience that that One is worthy of worship indeed.