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How many of you as you
were growing up, played the game, “Follow The Leader?” Most of you
probably did that; that was one of those early games that we learned
either from brothers and sisters or when we got to school; and we
enjoyed it because we knew at some point in time, we were going to
be the leader, right? You might follow the others, but you at some
point knew you were going to be the leader. The problem for that
game when we come into the church and come into faith in Jesus
Christ, is that we never get to be the leader. Jesus is the leader;
Jesus is the Good Shepherd.
Always at this time of
the year, at this Sunday after Easter, we come to what in many
traditions is called “Good Shepherd Sunday” because it has Psalms
23; it has readings from the Gospel of John in the 10
th
chapter where we talk about Jesus as the Good Shepherd. Now most of
us are not all that familiar with sheep. How many of you have
raised sheep? A few-- have been around sheep. I didn’t really have
a lot of experience with sheep until I was in seminary at work one
summer for a farmer who had acquired a lot of other businesses but
he raised about a thousand sheep; and I learned that sheep are the
not the smartest in the pen. They’re not the dumbest, but they’re
not the smartest. They are in some ways a lot like us, or we are a
lot like them, because sheep like things to be nice and
comfortable. They have very specific needs. The psalmist in Psalms
23 knows what sheep are about. You lead them to green pastures.
You lead them to still water because sheep do not like running
water. You have to find a place where the water has pooled so that
the water is still, so they will drink and be nourished. And, you
have to protect them. Sheep are very easily, not so much led
astray, as that they lead themselves astray.
It’s kind of like
taking your young child into Wal-mart or into a big shopping mall.
They get entranced by things that are happening elsewhere; and even
though you, as mom or dad, are leading the way, and you assume that
your child is following, how often do they not follow? You find them
somewhere else, or they get lost and that wonderful cry, “MOM!” and
every woman in the store turns around, you know. Some of them know
their own children’s voices, some don’t; but everybody turns because
they know that there is a child in need. We know our children;
Jesus, as the Good Shepherd, knows us. It’s not easy for Jesus to
be our good shepherd because we’re not always good followers. We
like to go our own way. Early on, a lot of times, we do follow; but
more often than not, we fall into the situation as the comic strip
this morning, “Zits.” You have the teenage young man out with his
mother running errands, and he does not want to be there. So
whatever his mother says, he will disagree, and as it goes through
the comic strip, you see his mother saying one thing and him
disagreeing; and finally at the end, the mom has quit talking and
she’s just thinking to herself. The son pipes up and says,
“Whatever you’re thinking, I disagree.” We go through those times.
We go through those times in our lives with our own families, in our
faith, and in our walk with Jesus Christ as our good shepherd; but
Jesus, as the good shepherd, does not give up on us. Jesus
continues to try to have us hear Him. It’s what is the interesting
thing about the reading in John.
We’re so used, in this
day and time to watching sheep being herded by dogs; you know you
have sheepdog trials and the shepherd is the one off on the side
giving directions to the sheepdog to get behind them and get them
all together. But in the Bible, they didn’t have sheepdogs. You
simply had a shepherd. By the time of Jesus, you had these herds of
sheep being watched over by different shepherds, but there was a
communal pen where they could come at night, if they could get to
that area. They could bring all of those herds of sheep, some
large, some small, all together. Now, how do you separate them
out? As the reading in John 10 says, in the morning when they would
open the gates, the different shepherds would go there and call to
their sheep; and the sheep who would know their voice, would come to
the sound of that shepherd’s voice. The challenge for us as
Christians, as followers of Jesus, who is the Good Shepherd, is to
become acquainted with Jesus’ voice, so that when we find ourselves
either mixed, as in a large crowd, or lost in our own wanderings,
that when Jesus calls, we hear his voice and we respond to that as
the Good Shepherd, as the voice that we are supposed to hear and
come to.
But that’s hard. We
live in a day and time when we have all kinds of voices calling to
us. We hear them around us on the street; we know that those voices
are out there on TV and on the Internet, and every other place that
you can imagine; and to hear in the midst of all of those voices, in
all of that noise, the voice of Jesus, is challenging. But our task
is to become acquainted with that voice, to be acquainted with the
Good Shepherd, so that when Jesus calls, especially in times when we
are lost and when we’re not knowing what direction to go, that we
can hear that voice, and come, come to Him and with Him and let Him
be our leader, the one who guides us through life. Our task is to
follow.
There are times when
Jesus designates us as, you know, as pastors and others to be
leaders for a time, or for a segment of the journey; but we always
are following the Good Shepherd, the one who has set out the path
before us. That’s challenging, because we like to lead. Sometimes
even, we are misled by our leaders. That was part of the problem
that the disciples in the nation of Israel had, and that Jesus
commented, and the prophets did as well, to say that God had
appointed you as shepherds to guide the people as shepherds, and you
have misled them. The king, the ruler, was supposed to be the
greatest and best shepherd, the one whose concern was for the people
and their needs and their concerns; but it didn’t happen often. When
we bring it forward to today and say that well, our mayor, our
governor, our president should be the one most in tune with and
watching over our needs, we might not be real sure that they’re
doing that at all levels. We are not always that trusting of those
who are our leaders; but we are called to look around us and see
those who are following the Good Shepherd, find direction from them,
find and hear the voice of our Good Shepherd, of Jesus, himself. We
know when people that we are following are following Jesus. It’s
not just following the voice; it’s not just following in Jesus’
footsteps, which we are supposed to do; and even the disciples had a
difficult time with this. They kept saying, “Well Jesus, we would
like your footsteps to lead to all of the nice homes, to all the
nice hotels, to all the places of power.” Jesus kept saying to
them, “No, that’s not where I’m going. I’m going to the sinners; I
am going to the places where people are in need; I’m going to the
places where you actually have to work and witness in my name.” And
they kept saying, “No, we want those seats of honor where we get
served and waited on.” And Jesus kept saying to them, “That’s not
where I’m going”.
We are called to
follow where Jesus leads, and also called to follow in the example
of our Good Shepherd, because Jesus is the one who came to serve,
and not to be served. He is the one who came to challenge people at
times to get them to think, by asking questions, by telling stories
that got people thinking, and got them into the mode of saying, well
how could things be somewhat different. How could what we’re doing
impact God’s mission in our place and in our time? How can we be
followers of Jesus, and disciples, and by our lives, lead others to
follow that Good Shepherd. How, by our lives can we set the example
that says, “This is what it means to follow the Good Shepherd?”
We still love the
axiom of “Do what I say, not what I do”. Jesus says, “Do what I
say; do what I do; follow where I lead; and he challenges us as
followers, as ones who are called to follow, but also to lead, and
shepherd God’s people to say, “Allow our lives to follow in Jesus’
footsteps, to allow our lives to show by our example, what it means
to be sheep—followers—disciples—believers in that Good Shepherd in
Jesus Christ”. We are called to follow and to show by our lives who
it is we are following, and what it means to be living a life that
follows that example in the way we walk, in the way we live, in the
way we witness, so that others may be drawn to follow Jesus.
Christ.
That’s challenging for
us. We know we have the right things in the Bible; we know we have
been taught right, but it’s hard to live that example. It’s so easy
to be distracted by other things and to be lead astray; we have to
hear Jesus’ voice calling us back, to following the Good Shepherd,
to following the one who has come, who gave his life for us, who
said, “I will be here to protect you, to guide you, to show you, to
provide all the things you need; except you just have to have your
eyes and your lives focused on me, all of the time. And, if you’re
lead astray, I will help you come back”.
Sheep need a leader.
I mentioned earlier that I worked with this farmer who had raised
about a thousand head of sheep. This was in western Kansas. We had
a major, major blizzard, and at the end of that blizzard when we
were finally able to get out and help him find his sheep, he had
lost about half of them, not because they had wandered away, but in
some sense, because they wouldn’t get out. They stayed in the pen;
and one of them would find a nice safe spot and would lie down and
would be safe. The next one would come along and say, “That’s a
nice safe spot” and lie down on top of you, and the next one on top
of them, and the next one on top of them. They didn’t know enough to
get to real shelter. Those that stayed a little bit away,
survived. But, we dug them out of the snow, we dug them out of
where they had been feeding. They didn’t hear a voice telling them
where they could go; all they heard was the wind; and without a
leader, they kept following one another, yes, to places that seemed
safe for a while, but not secure.
It’s challenging for
us because we like those nice safe spots along the way. Part of the
reason we have the reformation and churches of both the Lutheran and
Presbyterian tradition is because Luther, one of those who was
training to be a leader, when the storms came, in the thunderstorm
in Germany, went to hide underneath a tree, in the midst of thunder
and lightening. You know, the tree got hit by lightening. He
wasn’t hiding in the right spot. But fortunately, out of all of
that, he heard in his own heart and mind the need to say, “Well
Lord, if you save me, I will become a pastor”. And one of those few
times in which people actually fulfill their vows, he did. And we
today are part of that heritage.
God comes to us,
Jesus comes to us as our Good Shepherd, at times to hit us over the
head, to have us hear His voice and come to Him so that we may
indeed be followers. We are called to follow the leader, to follow
the Good Shepherd; but have to hear His voice, to know His voice,
and to follow where our Good Shepherd leads. That is our challenge
today and always, to hear the voice of our Good Shepherd and to
follow where he leads. Amen
One of the places that our good shepherd does
lead us, is to gather together in His name, gather in worship, to
gain strength from one another as we fellowship and worship
together, as we hear God’s word, and now as we affirm our faith,
together, I invite you to affirm our faith by joining me in the
Apostles’ Creed.
I believe in
God the Father Almighty, Maker of heaven and earth
and in Jesus
Christ, his only Son, our Lord;
Who was
conceived by the Holy Ghost, Born of the Virgin Mary
Suffered under
Pontius Pilate, was crucified, dead, and buried.
He descended
into Hell. The third day He rose again from the dead
And ascended
into Heaven, and sitteth on the right hand of God, the Father
Almighty
From thence he
shall come to judge the quick and the dead.
I believe in
the Holy Ghost, the holy catholic church, the communion of saints,
The forgiveness
of sins, the resurrection of the body, And the life everlasting.
Amen
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