Bill Countryman Good Shepherd Berkeley

Fourth Sunday of Easter, April 21, 2024

Year B: Acts 4:5-12; Psalm 23; 1 John 3:16-24; John 10:11-18

OUR GOOD SHEPHERD

I am the good shepherd. The good shepherd lays down his life for the sheep. (John 10:11)

The Good Shepherd is a central image for us in this congregation. He’s kind of built into our church, with his name on the sign out front and his image in the window we all look at Sunday after Sunday. It’s a strong image. Some years ago, when church-in-the-round was in fashion, we tried it out in Good Shepherd. But it meant that some of us were sittingwith this window behind us—and, to me at least, that just never felt right. 

So we look at the window. And— just to be sure we don’t miss the point—there’s our text for today, written up right beside it in elegant Victorian script. It would be hard not to be shaped in some way by all this. But there’s a problem that goes along with it: for most of us, it’s a bit of an empty metaphor. What do we know about sheep? What do we know about shepherds? As a child, I did spend some time on my grandfather’s farm, but that was a wheat farm in the Oklahoma Panhandle. I don’t think anybody raised sheep in Beaver County. And I pity the poor animals, if they did, because it’s really hot in the summer. So I don’t know much about sheep. And I’m not sure I’ve ever seen a real shepherd at work, except from the window of a car a couple of times in England. 

So “sheep” and “shepherd” can be rather vague notions for many of us. We may call ourselves “the sheep of the Good Shepherd.” But, by and large, when we call a group of people “sheep,” it’s not a compliment. Sheep are herd animals. They stick with the group. If they wander too far off, they may get lost and panic. They don’t cultivate individual perspectives on the world or respect dissenting opinions. That doesn’t sound much like this crowd!

And yet, there’s another side to this, isn’t there? It’s a great gift to belong to the right sort of human group–a group that’s not quick to impose conformity or limit creativity, a group that listens and shares thoughts and experiences and gives encouragement. We human beings are herd animals of a kind, too. After all, it takes a more than a decade of a human life just to get us to the point of being able to take reasonable care of ourselves. (Some of us take more than two decades just to get the education we need.) 

And the great majority of us find that we need and want to stay in touch with family: our families of origin, when that’s possible, our families of choice, and the less definable “families” made up of friends and other people who form the context for our individual lives. Good Shepherd has some of the qualities of an extended family—something I may be particularly conscious of just because I’ve been here for more than forty years and I’m aware of how much I have received from others all that time.

So, yes, being a sheep in the Good Shepherd’s fold has been a very good thing for the herd animal in me. And I’m happy to express my gratitude for all of you who are a part of it as well for all those no longer physically with us here.

But what about shepherds? Do we know them any better than their sheep? Some years ago, I was at the Diocese of Nevada’s diocesan camp on Lake Tahoe, where they had invited me to give some talks. And, walking in the mountains up above the camp, you saw plenty of evidence of shepherds in their messages carved into tree trunks. But we never saw the shepherds themselves. (I understand they’re mostly Basque. Maybe the most visible evidence of their presence, for the visitor, is the number of good Basque restaurants in northern Nevada.

But the life of a shepherd tends to be isolated. The sheep have to be kept on the move or they’ll destroy their pastures by eating the plants right down to the roots. So shepherds see, at most, just a few human companions on a day to day basis. And they can expect some less desirable company—wild dogs, wolves, coyotes, perhaps even a cougar, looking for an easy meal. Young David, as you remember, shepherded his father Jesse’s sheep and got so good with his slingshot that he could fell a heavily armed giant with a single well-placed stone. So when Jesus calls himself a shepherd, he’s saying that he was willing to live a dangerous, lonely existence in order to protect others from ill. Putting that as bluntly as possible, he says, “The good shepherd lays down his life for the sheep.” 

And that, of course, is exactly what will happen as the gospel story progresses. The wolves don’t like what he’s doing, and they gang up on him. If he were just a hired hand, he could run away. But he isn’t, and he won’t. We are his sheep and he will die to protect us. But to start with, he lived to protect us—lived a life of giving to our needy humanity—giving health, giving food, giving hope, giving us new understanding of God and of ourselves. 

And that’s exactly what got him killed. Why? Because people in power got jealous of him. Priests saw him as a threat to their authority. Pharisees (we would call them “devout lay people”) saw him as a rival for their influence. Scribes (think “theologians”) saw him as undermining their monopoly on religious information. Now, the Roman governor wasn’t feeling too threatened. Jesus wan’t trying to turn his disciples into warriors or Roman soldiers into pacifists. But Pilate knew little about local religious affairs and cared about them even less. And he certainly didn’t care enough to rescue Jesus from those he had offended. 

Yes, Jesus did lay down his life for his flock. 

And we, still members of that flock after all these centuries, continue to be blessed by all we receive from him. We remember how he embodied the love of God for God’s creation. One of the things I’ve been particularly grateful for as part of this community is that I’ve been hearing, for so many years, the good news of God’s love proclaimed from this pulpit. Being a person of faith isn’t primarily a matter of getting the rules right or of being able to explain obscure doctrines. It’s a matter of opening up to the love of God as it comes to us and of sharing it with others—receiving God’s gifts with thanksgiving and sharing them. 

Our second reading this morning, from 1 John, sums it up nicely: “Little children, let us love, not in word or speech, but in truth and action. And by this we will know that we are from the truth. . . . ” We learn to embody something of the good news into our own lives. And Jesus, the Good Shepherd, shows us the way. The wonderful thing, you see, is that sheep can actually be shepherds, too, both receiving and sharing gifts with one another. 

Now there’s something for all of us sheep to think about on this Good Shepherd Sunday.