“Who you calling a sheep?”
The Sermons At Calvary
By The Reverend Rhonda Lee
4 Easter Year B
7 May 2006
Ezekiel 34:1-10, John 10:11-16,
Acts 4:23-37
Who you calling a sheep?
Interpreting ancient texts like the
Bible for a modern audience can be a challenge. Partly that’s because those texts were written in a society so
different from our own that it seems like a whole other world. The biblical writers inevitably used images and metaphors that were deeply rooted
in their own culture, economy, and physical environment. We do this today. The relatively new term “information superhighway” wouldn’t make
any sense to us if we didn't first know what a highway, and then a superhighway,
were. The “bullet trains” we hear about
in Europe wouldn’t mean anything if we didn’t, sadly, already know what a
bullet was. And if we didn't know how
fast a bullet moved, Superman wouldn't get any respect at all.
There are no bullets, no trains,
and no superhighways in the Bible.
There are a lot of deserts – dry land where it’s hard to eke out a
living – and so water is a symbol of life.
There’s a dry season and a rainy season, a good climate for cultivating
vineyards, and so the vine is a symbol of prosperity and well-being, and wine
is a symbol of joy and celebration.
When you and I read the Bible, we struggle to translate the ancient
symbols and stories into terms that help us to hear what God’s call to us might
be today. We twenty-first-century
people can probably relate to water as life, and wine as joy. But the pastoral metaphors, all those
stories about shepherds, sheep, and goats, are more of a stretch for us here in
Louisville, Kentucky in 2006. We can’t
get away from them, though. At one time
or another, Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Moses, David, and Rachel all kept flocks of
sheep and goats. In Luke’s Gospel,
angels announce Jesus’ birth to shepherds in the field outside Bethlehem, and
the shepherds are some of the baby’s very first visitors.
The prophet Ezekiel takes the
pastoral imagery in a different direction: for him, God is a shepherd, the
shepherd, the good shepherd. Ezekiel wrote at a time when the people
needed a good shepherd: the kingdom of Babylon had just conquered the kingdom
of Israel, destroyed the Temple in Jerusalem, and deported much of the
population away from their homeland.
Ezekiel was among the people who had been forcibly removed to
Babylon. He prophesied in the middle of
this disaster to reassure the people that even in these terrible times, God was
with them and would guide them. When
they couldn’t rely on earthly rulers anymore, they still could rely on God, and
God would – at some point and in some way – establish justice and peace for the
whole world.
The early Church believed that they
saw God the good shepherd incarnate in Jesus Christ, the one who died for his
flock and even promised to feed his sheep with his own body. Generations of Christians have known that
when everything we’ve relied on is in ruins around us, when we have nowhere to
turn and no one to turn to, Jesus the good shepherd promises to stay with us,
to protect us, and to help us find our way home. Children get it right away that Jesus is the good shepherd. It’s one of the first images they can latch
onto, to understand who Jesus is and what he does for us. And we keep that image with us as we get
older. We understand that the metaphor
of Jesus as good shepherd means that we can rely on him to feed us, guide us,
and remind us who we are when we start to stray from one another and from him.
So we accept Jesus as our
shepherd. But if he’s our shepherd,
does that mean we’re sheep? Who wants
to be a sheep? After all, when you and
I think of sheep, we think of following mindlessly behind others, not thinking
for ourselves, being passive. We laugh
at that old Far Side cartoon where one sheep stands up on her two back legs and
yells to the rest of the flock, “Wait! Wait! Listen to me!...We don’t HAVE to
be just sheep!” Her companions keep
right on munching grass, head down, eyes closed. Being called a sheep is a challenge to our strength, our
individuality, our intelligence – all the qualities we value in our
twenty-first-century North American culture.
If you call me a sheep, are you saying I follow orders blindly, keep my
head down, and stay happy as long as I have enough green pasture in front of
me? Who you calling a sheep?
Being called a sheep is a challenge, but it’s a challenge
that comes to us from the Scriptures, from the story of people’s interactions
with the God who constantly surprises us and subverts our understandings of how
the world works, what is expected of us, and what a well-lived life looks
like. So if Jesus is our good shepherd,
and we are the sheep who know his voice, what might the shepherd’s call to us
be, in our own time and place?
Our Old Testament and Gospel
lessons give us a clue. Both Ezekiel
and Jesus contrast the sheep, God’s people, with the wild animals – the wolves
and the jackals – who attack them when they get the chance. Sheep are safer when they stick together;
when they’re scattered, the wolves take advantage of the situation and devour
the lost ones. Worse, Ezekiel’s
prophecy talks about the shepherds taking advantage of their power and position
and eating the sheep themselves. Who
wants to be a sheep if that’s what’s going to happen to you?
Being a sheep may not sound like a
very attractive proposition to you and me today, but both Ezekiel and John’s
Gospel send a clear message: we who call ourselves the people of God are not
wolves. We do not prey on the weak, we
do not seek out the lost to devour them, and we do not stalk the wounded who
can’t run away. We don’t wait until the
shepherd’s back is turned to pounce. In
today’s world, what might that mean? It might mean we disclose everything we
know about the car we’re selling, even if that means we get less money for it.
It might mean we don’t charge usurious rates on money we lend to people who
can’t get regular credit. It might mean we don’t take the fact that someone has
passed out drunk to mean that person has consented to sex. Each of us can think of ways in which the
biblical call to be sheep, not wolves, might resonate in our own lives, in our
families, and in politics. Today’s
reading from the book of Acts tells us that some first-century Christians
thought following the good shepherd meant they needed to hold all their goods
in common and provide for everyone in the community, so that “there was not a
needy person among them.” The Far Side
cartoon I mentioned earlier tells us we don’t have to be just sheep. The prophets, the Gospel, and the apostles
tell us we don’t have to be wolves.
The prophet Isaiah says that one
day, when the reign of God is complete, the wolf and the lamb will lie down
together. Sometimes we misremember
Isaiah and talk about the lion and
the lamb, but it’s the same idea.
Either way, we know that’s not how this world works – yet. I think it was Woody Allen who said, “The
lion and the lamb will lie down together, but the lamb won’t get much
sleep.” Ezekiel, Jesus, and our
ancestors in faith knew just as well as Woody Allen, just as well as any of us,
how brutal the ways of this world can be, but they also knew something
else. They knew that God’s creative,
healing, self-sacrificing love is always breaking into the world wherever and
whenever it can, through us, in us, and in spite of us. They also knew that to be converted means to
let more and more of that love fill us, and flow from us to others, over time. When you and I follow the good shepherd, we
don’t walk along blindly with our head down.
We keep our eyes and ears wide open, knowing whose sheep we are and
praying for the grace and strength to hear our shepherd’s call and to follow
it.