Easter 4A
2017
Rev.
Adam T. Trambley
May 7,
2017, St. John’s Sharon
Today is sometimes called Good Shepherd Sunday
because of our gospel reading. This
morning, the gospel of the Good Shepherd is paired with a reading from the Acts
of the Apostles describing the exponential growth of the early church,
beginning on that first Pentecost when Peter goes out and starts preaching to
the crowds. These two readings, together
with the twenty-third psalm, work together to give us a picture of what it
means to live out this Christian life of following Jesus.
Psalm 23 is a good place to start to talk about
Jesus as the Good Shepherd. The psalm’s
imagery is usually what we think about – not being in want, laying in green
pastures besides still waters, having no fear in the valley of the shadow of
death, a table spread for us, our cup running over, and goodness and mercy
following us. When the Lord is our shepherd,
we can trust in these promises. They are
comforting, and powerful, and beautiful.
Psalm 23, like most psalms, talks about the
Good Shepherd from the perspective of the individual speaking them. Much of the power of the psalms is that they
are written as a way for us to pray out of our own emotions. We can imagine ourselves in the valley of
death being comforted by the rod and staff of the shepherd keeping away
anything that might threaten us. We can
note, though, that there is nothing in the psalm from God’s perspective or
about the rest of the community. When we
need to pray psalm 23, and we often use it at funerals, we are praying it in
situations when we can’t really be all that concerned about God’s perspective
or how we are supposed to live in community.
We pray, “the Lord is my shepherd, I shall not be in want,” because we
are in serious of danger of being in serious want, and only God promising to
come in and do what he says he will do is of any real help to us. In these situations, we have Psalm 23 to
sustain us and to pray into God’s promises for us or for our loved ones in
difficult or extreme circumstances.
In the gospel reading, Jesus provides a very
different perspective on the Good Shepherd.
He is certainly drawing upon Psalm 23 and other Old Testament passages
depicting God as the shepherd of his people Israel. Anyone hearing him teach about the Good
Shepherd in this way would know immediately what he is talking about, and they
would also know all the benefits from Psalm 23 that the Good Shepherd
brings. Jesus doesn’t really go into the
psalm’s evocative pastoral descriptions of how we will feel about the Good
Shepherd, however.
Instead, Jesus focuses on the relationship
between himself as Good Shepherd and the sheep, which are us. Notice that Psalm 23 never really talks about
us as the sheep. The imagery of
beautiful pastures is much nicer without us seeing ourselves crawling around on
our hands and knees eating the grass.
Jesus is clear, however, that he is the shepherd and that we are his
sheep, because that relationship of sheep to shepherd has some special
characteristics. First and foremost, the
sheep know the voice of the shepherd and follow him.
Let’s face it, sheep aren’t the most
sophisticated of animals. But they know
how to follow a leader well. This may be
their greatest strength as a species, and is really what allows them to be bred
in captivity and remain safe. All the
great wool in the world isn’t of any value if they wander away where there is
no pasture, where there is no water, and where there are wolves, and lions, and
thieves, and robbers. No one can
substitute for that leader who calls to them and whom they know to follow. Jesus is saying in the gospel that he knows
each and every one of us, personally, by name.
He calls to each and every one of us.
He invites each and every one of us out to find good pasture and back
home at night to be safe and secure. He is
going before us and will lead us into all the promises from Psalm 23. But we have to follow. We need to listen to his voice when he
calls. We will recognize it, but we have
to be willing to let him take us where he leads us. We have to be good sheep.
Jesus also introduces thieves and bandits in
this passage as serious players. They
are a danger to us. They want to kill
and steal. They want to take us away
from the good shepherd. But Jesus says
he is not only the Good Shepherd, but he is also the gate to the
sheepfold. This “I Am” statement of
Jesus gets a lot less play than his others, like “I Am the Light of the Word”
or “I am the Resurrection and the Life” or “I am the Bread of Life”. Yet, by saying that “I am the gate for the
sheep,” Jesus is promising to protect his flock from those who would attack
them. He is the ultimate TSA agent, and
nothing bad is getting through his divine metal detector. All we have to do is pay attention and only
follow his voice, instead of traipsing off after other voices that aren’t
his. Those voices are always out there,
but we know they aren’t the voice of our Good Shepherd. If we ignore those others and focus on Jesus’
voice, we will be led in and out to pasture, and have salvation, and have abundant
life.
A final implication of Jesus description of us
as sheep in his flock is that we are part of a flock of sheep. Jesus, our Good Shepherd, does know us
personally, but we are part of a larger community. The Good Shepherd provides us what we need,
but we aren’t in this by ourselves. Our
sheepfold contains other sheep, and they go in and out to pasture with us, as
well, and Jesus also loves and cares about them.
Our reading from Acts, while it doesn’t talk at
all about sheep, is much more focused on how we live together as Jesus’
sheep. Thousands of people have just
heard the voice of Jesus as their Good Shepherd as started to follow after
him. They have stopped running after the
voices of thieves and robbers and committed themselves to following Jesus. Now they have to start figuring out how to
live as Jesus’ flock instead of living as if they were in the midst of a pack
of wolves.
Luke’s description of how the early Christians
began to live is simple, powerful, and more than a little bit difficult. He starts by describing four components of
their lives: the apostle’s teaching, the fellowship, breaking bread, and
prayers. These four pieces were an
important part of the early Christian’s life, and remain essential for ours
today if we are going to follow Jesus voice.
The first piece is the apostles’ teaching. Those who were following Jesus’ voice but who
hadn’t met Jesus while he was alive had to learn from those who had known
him. We still have listen to others if
we are going to deepen our Christian walk today. Much of the apostle’s teaching has been written
and preserved for us in the scriptures and in the church traditions like
baptism, the Eucharist, and the historic creeds that have been handed down to
us. We need to read the Bible and say
the creeds ourselves. But we also still
need to listen to the church’s teachers.
The Bible was written over about a thousand years in three languages
that none of us speak and in cultures that are pretty different than 21st
Century America. There are a whole lot
of ways to get things wrong if we decide we can figure this whole Christian
thing out ourselves. We all need people
to teach us, and, ideally, we are looking for people to teach us who help us
hear the Good Shepherd’s voice to love God and love our neighbor more
fully. Jesus gave his teaching to the
whole Church, and we can’t learn to live how Jesus wants us to live without the
whole Church teaching us.
Then Acts tells us that they early Christians
had fellowship. Luke goes on to define
fellowship as Jesus’ flock being together and having all things in common and
selling their possessions to give to any who had need. This description is a pretty strong
fellowship. It could be seen as a
description of a family that has a bond beyond biology. Notice, too, that it doesn’t say that people
just sold stuff and gave it away willy-nilly, but that they provided for the
needs of the community – the people they knew and had come to love. Everybody was all-in together for one
another. Now it wasn’t perfect – Acts
goes on to tell stories of Ananias and Sapphira lying about their stuff and the
widows getting into arguments about who got the more food. But they knew that Jesus would lead them to
good pasture, so they weren’t worried about holding onto their belongings for
the future. They also knew they were in
the same sheepfold together, so they needed to help and support one
another. Their fellowship was real
fellowship where they spent time together and really knew one another and were
able to help each other out, and as the community grew, they appointed people
to make sure that everyone’s needs continued to be met and no one fell through
the cracks.
The early Christians also broke bread
together. We talked about this in detail
last week. Today, we might add the
addendum found in Acts today, that “they ate their food with glad and generous
hearts.” So often, we find ways not to
be glad and generous for the basics in life, such as our food. Privilege and entitlement creep in,
especially for those of us who should probably be most grateful for the
incredible blessings we have received.
But having glad and generous hearts is a great way recognize and follow
our Good Shepherd.
Finally, Acts mentions, “the prayers.” “Day by day,” we hear, “they spent much time
in the temple.” They were “praising God,
and had the goodwill of the people.” If
we are planning to hear the Good Shepherd’s voice, we need to listen for
him. If we aren’t spending time with
Jesus, we can start to forget what he sounds like, and then those thieves and
robbers sound more familiar than they should.
Prayer together, in church or in other situations, is also how we stay
focused together on following Jesus.
Only the work of prayer keeps us dedicated to the mission and ministry that
God calls us to in ways that would provide us the strength to actually sell what
we have and meet each other’s needs.
Without common prayer, we can hardly get through a meeting with each
other on some days without them deteriorating into pettiness,
self-aggrandizement or other opportunities for egoism. But the more we pray, the more we will be
able to follow after Jesus ourselves, and the more we will be able to live as
part of his flock. And those are just
the beginning of the huge variety of fruit that stems from prayer.
Listen to your Good Shepherd who calls each and
every one of us by name to follow him.
Live into the full life of this flock through the apostles’ teaching and
fellowship, the breaking of bread and the prayers. And be able to say in your heart, “The Lord
is my Shepherd. I shall not be in want.”
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