“Feeling Sheepish”
Rev. Samuel Schaal
April 17, 2005
Fourth Sunday of Easter

John 10:1-10
Psalm 23
Acts 2:42-47

Most of us don’t like to be thought of as sheep, I would hazard to say.  According to the popular definition sheep are mindless, stupid animals.  To call someone a sheep is an insult.  We tell our children not to be sheep, not to mindlessly follow another, not to expect others to take care of you.  We want for our children and for ourselves what is the very opposite of sheephood – and that is authentic personhood—to be independent, strong, able to take care of one’s self. 

This is not a bad thing at all.  This quest to be self-empowered comes from the luxury of our social context as prosperous North American citizens, the beneficiaries of generations of living in the free society with all its attendant benefits.  We value autonomy, we value control, we value the freedom to choose our own way in life.

As a particular religious people, we Congregationalists especially value the freedom to choose our own way in religion. In fact, we distrust authority, so suspicious are we of the bishops and hierarchies of other Christian traditions.  We are, as we so frequently say, “God’s free people.”  We are not merely God’s sheep.

To be sheepish is to be shy, withdrawn, ineffectual.  Us, sheepish?  Never! 

We in our educated, enlightened, post-industrial, information age, we who command so much, we might have trouble relating to a world where sheep and shepherds were an everyday reality.  There isn’t really a modern equivalent of shepherd for most of us here in the 21st century.

But it was different in the ancient world of the Jewish people, in that agrarian society.  Shepherding was a common occupation.  It was a common occurrence to see among the plains and valleys, the simple shepherd, herding along the fold of sheep. And the world then was a scary place, without the modern conveniences or knowledge that we have today.   So in trying to describe God, in trying to get at the very nature of what God must be like, how this God worked to protect them from all that confronted them, the role of shepherd provided a descriptive and understandable metaphor for the people’s relationship with divinity.

In the Jewish scriptures, God is often symbolized as the shepherd, and the people of Israel as his flock.  “The Lord is my shepherd” in today’s lection is the most well-known sample of this.  In these beautiful and classic lines, we see not only an affirmation of protection, we see an affirmation that God gives us everything we need.  Green pastures and still waters are, for the flock, sustenance.  “My cup overflows,” the psalmist says.  Other passages in the Old Testament continue this theme of God’s relationship to us as a shepherd to the flock.  Psalm 100 is another example:  “(W)e are his people and the sheep of his pasture.”

In the New Testament this image continues, except that it becomes more specific: Jesus is the Good Shepherd.  Today’s lectionary text from John is the beginning of a larger section sometimes called the Shepherd Discourse and immediately following today’s text (v. 11), Jesus declares himself as the Good Shepherd.  

The image of Jesus as good shepherd in our religious imagination is strong.  We are all familiar with the sentimental pictures of Jesus tending the flock.  Because of this we might read John 10 and see the metaphor of shepherd as the primary Christological image mentioned.  But there is also the image of the door – or gate, as other translations render it, which is probably a bit more authentic to the culture of the day.  The idea of door, or gate, though, often gets subsumed into the image of the shepherd. 

Jesus is the shepherd, but more than the shepherd. Jesus is also the gate, which points us to the Christological heart of this passage.  Jesus is the way to life, the door or gate to life.  This gets at the very heart of Jesus’ identity.

These two images, shepherd and door, are related but distinct.  And they are relational, to us.  The role of the shepherd makes no sense without the sheep; without us.  So this is not merely a metaphor of a personal shepherd, this suggests a community, the community that has gathered … flocked … around Jesus.

So this passage engages us individually as well as a community.  We are the community gathered around this shepherd, the community that has come through, or is trying to go through, this gate.

This description about the gate can sound exclusive; that those who don’t go through the gate of Christ will have difficulty with their salvation.  “I am the door,” (in vs. 7 and 9) emphasizes the exclusiveness of Jesus as the gate of the sheepfold.

Perhaps instead of describing the exclusiveness of salvation through Jesus alone, the text speaks to the distinctiveness of Christ and his community.  Perhaps this is not a statement regarding salvation for all people, but a reflection of how John in his gospel is set on differentiating the religion of Christ from the religion of the synagogue.  John was written at a later date than the other gospels and the community around John was in high conflict with the synagogue.  So John presents a Jesus that is very distinct. 

The text does point us to the particularity of the Christian way.  I myself think there can be truth found outside Christianity, and so I don’t think of salvation as exclusively Christian.  Some of you may have come to other conclusions which is proper in a tradition based on spiritual freedom such as ours.  But even though I affirm a fairly inclusive approach to salvation, I do think that Christianity presents a distinctive way in religion; our way in religion.

I have given up on the quest to create my own religion out of the various truths of all religions. This is a salad bar approach to religion where you take a little of this and a little of that and make yourself a nice little lunch, or a nice little comfortable religion.    And I have given up on a spirituality that is so broad it is bland—a spiritual Esperanto, if you will, that doesn’t go very deeply.

I have chosen one story:  the Gospel of Jesus Christ, and it is with this story and in this story that I struggle and try to know God.  For I think, in my own opinion, that this story, when compared to the great world religions, has greater existential depth in how divinity works in the world.  For in this story we see God mediating the life of humanity in Jesus Christ and so identifying with the human condition.  This, to me, speaks directly to the heart of suffering and, moreover, models for us a way to go through the suffering to the other side.  I have chosen one story and though I recognize there are other stories, this is my story.

For many years it was easier for me to think of God in more general and more universal ways.  I grew up in the buckle of the Bible belt, among those who were strident about the dire necessity of giving your life to Jesus and I retreated from what I perceived to be a narrow fundamentalism into a spirituality that was generalized, not specific.  I was, as the term is so often used, “spiritual but not religious.”

It is easier, sometimes, to think of God in these more general terms.  It is a nice way to universalize divinity.  God is like a little of this and a little of that.  And I don’t really disagree with that concept, for I think that we err if we think we have really ever understood God in God’s complexity and fullness.  And yet sometimes there are events in our lives when we need God in specific terms, not in generalities.  There are times when life confronts us and we need a God who meets us in our particularities.

A good example comes, I think, from the author of the last hymn we sung.  Thomas A. Dorsey wrote the words and the tune to “Precious Lord, Take My Hand.”  There’s a story behind the song.  In 1932 Thomas Dorsey lived in Chicago with his wife—she was pregnant with their first baby.  He had begun to establish himself as a musician and a church musician, as he was choir director of a Baptist church.  He went to St. Louis for a large revival meeting where he was the featured soloist. As soon as he had finished playing and had left the stage, he received an urgent telegram telling him his wife had just died in childbirth.  Dorsey later recalled what a surreal moment it was—the shock of this sudden news while the crowd he had just performed in front of was still busy happily singing and clapping.

He rushed home and that night the baby died as well.  Once the funeral and visitation were over, he withdrew from family, friends, even from his music, feeling that God had abandoned him. 

He remained in despair.  Some time later a friend visited Dorsey and arranged to have Dorsey left alone in a room with a piano.  Dorsey finally sat at the piano, and his fingers beginning to browse the keys.  He began to feel at peace “I found myself playing a melody, one I’d never heard or played before, and words came into my head—they just seemed to fall into place.”1  The result was “Precious Lord.”  It was written virtually on the spot and it was an immediate and permanent success and has since been translated into 32 languages.

In his darkest moment, at a time when he felt God had left him, when very real tragedy had hit his life, he worked through his grief, and somehow the hand of God touched him in the particularity of his music, and he felt peace.  And he expressed that in specific terms.  Lord, hold my hand, lead me on, let me stand. This is not the vague metaphysical speculation of theology.  This is God brought down to our terms in a way we not only understand, but that we can experience. 

This is a God who indeed reached down and held his hand and over time healed him of his grief and moreover in the process Dorsey was able to give to the world a gift that has touched so many in their darkest nights of grief and fear.

Indeed, even in our advanced age when we achieve more and more control over our lives, even in our comfortable times there are times when our tsunamis hit.  And it is here, perhaps, that God manifests to us not in grandeur and glory, but in particularity, as the touch of a hand, as a shepherd, as the Good Shepherd, Jesus Christ.

One thing that makes Christianity unique – and what is I think at the heart of this Gospel passage today – is the particularity of Jesus Christ.  The idea of the particularity of Christ keeps our faith grounded in the heart of our community:  the life, ministry, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. 

And it is in community that we encounter Jesus.  The shepherd leads a flock, not a solitary sheep, though in another expression of shepherding, we know that Christ comes looking for the one sheep that has strayed.  The shepherd leads a flock and it is in the gathered community that we find the fullest expression of God.  The passage from Acts reflects this, of the wonders and the fellowship that result from the community of Jesus Christ in the early church.

One thing we can celebrate during this continuing Easter cycle is that we can know God through Jesus, that God in Jesus comes down to our level to lead us, to hold our hand, to provide for us what we cannot provide for ourselves.  This is to say, on this fourth Sunday of Easter, Christ is alive! Christ is among us and Christ is in the world.  And we are his sheep.  So in my own religious journey, I am feeling sheepish.

Though our tradition honors freedom and autonomy, though our tradition honors individual understandings of the Christian path, though we do have a personal relationship with God through Jesus Christ – our most primary relationship is in the community, as a flock.  Who we are is important, but in that old truism, whose we are is the key.

And further, it is in which community we are and we are in this community of Christ’s freely gathered flock.

Amen.

1“Story Behind the Song: Thomas A. Dorsey’s ‘Precious Lord, Take My Hand’” at www.christianitytoday.com/tc/2003/004/16.16html