This is the sermon I gave at First Congregational Church of Maltby on Sunday, April 17, 2016.
Baa
Rev. Dr.
Tom Sorenson, Pastor
April 17, 2016
April 17, 2016
Let us pray: May the
words of my mouth and the meditations of all of our hearts be acceptable in
your sight, O God, our strength and our redeemer. Amen.
I think I’ve mentioned
to some of you before that I once gave a sermon with the title Baa.” Since the
scripture readings for this week deal once again with images of sheep and
shepherds I went and found that old sermon. I gave it in May, 2003, so that’s
getting to be a while ago. I want to talk again about those images of shepherd
and sheep as it applies to us, and that sermon I gave so long ago isn’t bad.
This sermon isn’t exactly that sermon, although I confess that a good deal of
it comes pretty much word for word from that sermon. So here goes with a sermon
about shepherds and sheep. I know I’ve said some of this before, but I haven’t
said it to you; so I guess I can get away with reusing some of my old material
here. Just between you and me, I’ve done it before here.
Christians talk a lot
about sheep, or at least we talk a lot about shepherds, and a shepherd isn’t a
shepherd without sheep. We just heard Psalm 23. It’s most everyone’s favorite
psalm, and it’s possibly the favorite Bible passage for most Christians. It
famously begins: "The Lord is my shepherd." The Lord in that line
isn’t Jesus, it’s the Jewish God Yahweh, but that’s OK. It means God is our
shepherd, and God is indeed that. The Gospel lesson we just heard has Jesus
saying "I am the good shepherd." Jesus is such a good shepherd that
he is willing to lay down his life for the sheep, that is, for us.
The Good Shepherd is a
much loved image of Jesus in the church, and the church calls people who
perform functions like mine here "pastors." Webster’s New World
Dictionary defines "pastor" as "originally a shepherd, hence a
clergyman...." Now, if my being the pastor means I’m a shepherd, then, it
would seem, you all must be sheep. You in fact are often known as sheep. Once
not long before I wrote that old sermon with the same title as this one, I was
doing the New York Times crossword puzzle. One clue was "flock, so to
speak." The answer was "laity". That’s you. You’re the flock.
That is, you’re sheep. Moreover, if the Lord is my shepherd too, and he
is, then I must be a sheep too. We must all be sheep. Right?
Now, although the church
calls me pastor/shepherd, I don’t know much about sheep. I had a college
roommate who grew up on a sheep ranch in Central Oregon. He knew a lot about
sheep, and mostly what he told me about them is that they are very stupid
animals. They are famous, or infamous, for the way they just follow wherever
they are led unthinkingly and unquestioningly. I certainly have that image of
sheep myself. Whenever I see people unquestioningly following a leader, whether
it’s a church leader, a political leader, or any other leader without thinking things
through for themselves, my response is often so say: "Baa!" Indeed,
the dictionary gives one meaning of the word sheep as "a person who is
meek, stupid, timid, defenseless, submissive, etc." Now, meek might be
alright, as in "blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth."
The rest of those things, however, are not how I think of myself and not how I
think of you. So, if the Lord is our shepherd, are we really sheep? Do we want
to be sheep? I mean, if being a Christian means being "stupid, timid,
defenseless, submissive, etc.," I’d just as soon not be one, thank you
very much.
And yet there is no
denying that our tradition has made the image of shepherd and sheep one of its
central metaphors for the Christian life. Now, that image may be part of our
tradition, but I have always thought that we need to be prepared to reject
those parts of our tradition that we find to be unfaithful to the Gospel of
Jesus Christ, and there are lots of those things. I do not believe, however,
that we should ever reject something that has been important to our tradition
lightly, without careful and prayerful consideration. So let’s take a closer
look at that ovine imagery that the tradition seems to love so well and see if
we can find a way to look at it that has meaning for us.
Our reading this morning
from the Gospel of John gives us a good starting place for doing that. The
really good part of this passage is contained in the very first verse: “I am
the good shepherd. The good shepherd lays down his life for the sheep.” This
passage is why Sunday School rooms around the world are decorated with pictures
of Jesus with little lambs. Jesus here goes on to say that unlike a sheep
tender who is merely a “hired hand,” the true shepherd cares for his sheep so
much that he will even give up his own life to save the sheep. Being a shepherd
in the Christian sense, then, means caring so much for the people of God that
one will even sacrifice one’s own life if that is necessary to protect God’s
people from harm. That, the Christian tradition says, is precisely what Jesus
did for us. If we approach the sheep metaphor from the side of the shepherd
rather than from the side of the sheep, then, we do indeed find a valuable,
valid image. It is an image of Christian love and compassion, an image of
self-giving love for the good of the people of God.
Well, OK. But both Psalm
23 and our passage from John make us the sheep not the shepherd. It’s all very
well for God to be our shepherd in the sense of our passage from John, but that
side of the image doesn’t really deal with us as sheep. It still leaves us as
those “stupid, timid, defenseless, submissive, etc.,” creatures that we don’t
want to be and don’t think that we are. Or does it? Let’s take another look.
What does it mean for us
that our Good Shepherd would even lay down his life for us? It means lots of
things. We start with the fact that there is more to being a sheep than being a
dumb follower. Sheep are creatures who are cared for by the shepherd. They are
fed, watered, given shelter when needed and protected from predators. At least
in the Biblical imagery of the shepherd reflected in our Scripture passages
this morning the sheep are so dear, so beloved, that a good shepherd will guard
the sheep as his dearest treasure. He will even risk his life to protect them
if that is what it takes. The sheep are such precious creatures that no
sacrifice by the shepherd is too great to protect the precious flock. Just so,
this image tells us, our Good Shepherd guards us as His dearest treasure. We
are Christ’s sheep because he cares for us. He protects us and makes us to know
that ultimately, in the end, no matter what happens, we are safe with Him. We
are safe with Him because he will do whatever it takes, up to and including
sacrificing his own life, to keep us ultimately safe. To be the sheep of the
Good Shepherd means to be the dearly beloved of God. In that sense I am
perfectly happy to be one of God’s sheep.
I’m happy to be one of
God’s sheep in this sense, but here’s the thing. Such love as our Good Shepherd
has for us requires a response. We cannot, or at least we should not, simply accept
the love the Good Shepherd offers us without responding as He would have us
respond. The response to which we are called is to live as God’s sheep. That doesn’t mean be mindless followers of
some church leader, or of some book, or of some tradition, although much in the
history of the church might lead you to believe that that is what it means.
Rather, it means that we should indeed live like people whom God the Good
Shepherd loves beyond measure, people of infinite worth for whom Christ made
the ultimate sacrifice. That means we should treat both ourselves and all other
people, indeed all of God’s creation, as creatures of infinite worth because we
all are the reason our Good Shepherd laid down His life. Living the Christian
life means treating others as Christ treats us, that is, as creatures of
infinite worth. It means being tender and forgiving, patient and accepting,
with and toward everyone, including ourselves and especially people we find
hard to love that way, because that is how God treats us. It means seeing
ourselves as part of the flock, that is, as part of God’s vast creation apart
and separate from which we cannot survive. It means knowing that we do not live
by and for ourselves but with and for God’s world. It means knowing that the
most fully human life is the life of the Good Shepherd, that is, a life of
self-fulfillment in self-giving love for the others of the flock. That is our
call as Christians.
So there are a couple of
sides of the image of us as God’s sheep. It means God cares for us infinitely,
but it also means that we are called to care for people and all of creation the
way God does. That’s far from easy of course, but God has never limited God’s
call to God’s people to things that are easy. We are cared for and we are called
to care. That’s one important way in which God is our shepherd and we are God’s
sheep.
And so let us indeed say
"Baa!" Let us indeed be God’s sheep. Because God loves us, God does
not want us to be "stupid, timid, defenseless, submissive, etc." That
isn’t what being God’s sheep means. Because God loves us we are called to be whole,
fully developed people in body, heart, spirit, and mind, that is, to be the
creatures God intends us to be. We are called to strive as we are able to treat
ourselves and everyone else as the Good Shepherd treats us. We aren’t, after
all, the sheep of just anyone. We are the sheep of the Good Shepherd. So let’s
be sheep. Let’s be really good sheep, OK?. Baa!. Amen.
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