Sermon for the Fourth Sunday of Easter

Preached at Canadochly Lutheran on May 11, 2014
Preaching text: John 10:1-10

There is a quote I see with some frequency on the Internet. It says that “the problem with today is that we were created to value people and use things, and yet now what we do instead is value things and use people.” And that is our society in a nutshell. We have become very cold-blooded towards other people in our madcap quest to get ahead in life. We are very mercenary towards others. Are you an asset or a liability? How much will it cost me in time, resources, and/or energy to help you?

But that mentality has its consequences.

Bishop Dunlop was here with us on Thursday evening at a synod-sponsored event. He began the workshop with a Bible Study on Moses and the Burning Bush. After taking us through the story (which most all of us know very well), he observed how God was listening to the cries of his people in slavery in Egypt and he wondered what sort of cries is God hearing from his people today?

We gathered together that night answered with what you might see as the typical lot of answers to that question: calls against poverty, injustice, inequality, etc. But Pr. Ed Robbins raised one that we did not expect; he said that one of the things we lack most today is a sense of connection and community with one another. The Bishop said in response that he receives that answer to this question probably more than any other.

We have myriad ways of making connections with one another: phone, texting, Skype, Internet message boards, Facebook, and so forth, and yet human beings have never been more isolated from one another. Talk about irony.

There was something else that jumped out at me in the Bishop’s Bible Study, something that I knew and had simply forgotten: Moses, at least at that point in his life, was a shepherd.

Now those two observations may not seem to have anything to do with one another, but bear with me for a moment...

If you looked at the width and breadth of the Scriptures, you find that shepherds are the most popular of professions. Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, the patriarchs were all shepherds at one point or another. Moses, as the Burning Bush story points out, was a shepherd. Before he was king, David was a shepherd. Shepherds were the first the hear the news of Messiah’s birth in the Christmas story. Jesus, in our Gospel lesson today, self-identifies as a shepherd. Even outside the Bible, this pattern continues to some degree. St. Patrick, for instance, has his beginnings as a shepherd.

It’s almost as if that’s the thing to be. The prestige job to have in the ancient world. Except that it isn’t.

Shepherds are slaves, or nearly so. It’s that no pay, no prestige job you give to the lowest of the low in the social order. Slaves or children (remember, this is ancient times when kids weren’t worth much). You might make your son a shepherd in much the same way you might tell your son or daughter today to do the dishes or fold a basket of laundry: menial labor that’s not worth paying a wage for.

Shepherds were nobodies. They had nothing. They were worth nothing. And maybe that’s the point.

Because shepherds, it seems, get more than any other profession or lifestyle the value of life over the value of things.

It’s astounding in many ways the stories you hear of what shepherds would do for their flocks. For instance, Jesus talks in our Gospel lesson about being the gate of the sheep. That was typical practice, not something unique to Jesus.

You see, most sheepfolds were caves. The shepherd, when the flock bedded down for the night, would lie across the mouth of the cave, becoming the “gate” of the sheep. None of the sheep could get out without walking over the shepherd, although conversely no predator could get in without likewise getting past the shepherd.

That sort of encounter likely didn’t end well for a sleeping shepherd.

But that was a given for the job, putting yourself into harm’s way for the sake of the sheep. Why? What makes these animals so valuable that each night you’d put your own life on the line for them? It’s not like these are the smartest or the greatest of animals. Sheep are pretty dumb, pretty helpless.

Understanding all this as a metaphor for God’s relationship to humankind only makes it worse in some ways. After all, we’re the sheep in that equation. But we’re not dumb. We’ve unlocked the secrets of the universe. We’ve made incredible advances in science and technology and social development.

·         We’ve discovered that burning fossil fuels poisons our atmosphere, but we keep filling our cars up anyway.

·         We’ve learned that smoking causes cancer, junk food obesity, and we keep gobbling those things down more and more as time goes on.

·         We’ve harnessed the power of the atom and then proceeded to build an arsenal of weapons based thereon that can destroy this planet 100 times over.

·         Many of us own a device that we carry with us everywhere that gives us access to the totality of human knowledge and we use it to laugh at cat pictures and get into pointless arguments with strangers.

Yes, we have the power of the universe at our fingertips and what we do with it is “I can haz cheezburger.” (If you don’t get that reference, count yourself lucky. Not knowing the inane world of internet memes is no handicap.)

In all the ways that matter, we’re no smarter than sheep. In fact, we might even be dumber.

It’s hard sometimes not to be cynical when it comes to human nature. We really do some of the stupidest things. But God doesn’t see us that way. Just as the shepherd sees the sheep as an animal in desperate need of his help, so too does God look at us. For God, what has value is life, not things. Life is what he seeks to give us, even at the cost of his own.

Because Jesus does put himself into harm’s way for our sake. He is attacked, beaten, and then killed for the sake of the sheep. All this he does so that we may have life. He never loses sight of that, never forgets that’s what really matters. Even if the granting of life to us costs him his own. Amen.