Jesus is Calling

May 15, 2011
Easter 4A
John 10:1-10

“Jesus is Calling…”

A couple years back, a short video surfaced on the Samsung website and later on YouTube. The video was taken by some Welsh shepherds who seemed to have a little extra time on their hands. So they got a life time supply of LED lights, a camcorder and recorded what they called “extreme shepherding.” If you haven’t seen this video, it is worth taking about five minutes to go online and google LED sheep to see it. If you do, you will see these shepherds spending hours hooking their sheep up to these LED lights and then shepherding them around so that on camera you see a game of pong being played, fireworks going off and, in their most pain staking task, the creation of the Mona Lisa through the arranging of the sheep in various patterns with the colored LED lights. It was quite the advertising piece for Samsung, but it also demonstrates the ability of sheep to follow the voice of their shepherd…in this case, with the help of sheep dogs.
Here’s another story. There is a village in Africa that was visited by a missionary. One evening, the missionary overhead two of the men in the village talking about the whereabouts of someone…after hearing the concern in the first man’s voice in regards to the female he was talking about and assuming it was his daughter, he went out to ask the men who they were talking about. It turns out that one of the man’s sheep had gone missing and the two men were out looking for her. The missionary later learned that in that village all the sheep had names and everyone in the village knew the names of the sheep and who the sheep belonged too. And when the shepherd called the name of his sheep, they would know it and come to him.
“The sheep follow him because they know his voice” Jesus said.
Have you ever found it strange that in the Revised Common Lectionary, the set of reading that we use for Sunday mornings, there is one Sunday set apart every year in the Easter season for Jesus, the good shepherd, and yet, in this day and age many of us know very little about sheep or the practices of shepherding sheep? Growing up in Suburban Detroit, the closest I got to sheep was at the petting farm at the Detroit Zoo. I knew nothing about them except their wool made really nice sweaters and that lambs were very cute. Then in seminary, when we were studying a similar text from the Gospel of John, my friend Josh shared with the class that many of the sheep farmers that he knows in South Dakota do not like the sheep/shepherd imagery because sheep are stubborn, smelly and pretty dumb. This information, plus the fact that I think that lamb tastes pretty good, is about the extent of my knowledge of sheep…so I’m not going to pretend that I understand this metaphor that Jesus is using.
I appreciate, however, Jesus’ attempt to reach the people that he was talking to, living in an agrarian culture where many of the people he interacted with probably were shepherds. So Jesus would have had a working knowledge of the shepherd’s life. He also would have known that in those days, the sheepfold would have been constructed out of a cave with rocks and brush and soil to shelter the sheep and keep them safe from thieves and wild animals. Sometimes shepherds would share a sheepfold and multiple flocks would have stay together at night before being called out by the shepherd in the morning. The other thing that Jesus would have known is that many times, the shepherd would lie across the gate and actually act as the door so that the sheep would remain safe and so that anyone who was thinking about coming and taking the sheep would need to rethink his strategy if he thought he could sneak through the gate.
Knowing these things, Jesus begins his teaching in Chapter 10 of John by using this figure of speech about the Shepherd versus the thief. For some reason, however, the people who were listening to Jesus didn’t get it. So, Jesus tried another way of going about things, using the gate metaphor…saying that he was the gate and that those who entered the sheepfold by him will be saved and come and go to the pasture. We’re beginning to make more sense here, but Jesus’ form of speech is still a bit complicated. And we never do learn if the people finally get what he is talking about…and honestly, in the Gospel of John it’s hard to tell if anyone really gets Jesus because he speaks in metaphor a lot. I am the vine, I am the bread of life, I am the good shepherd, I am the way, the truth, the life. No wonder so many people have a love/dislike relationship with the Gospel of John…if only John’s Jesus would speak to us in everyday Aramaic! (or English!)
As complicated as Jesus’ metaphors in the Gospel of John have a tendency to be, there is still a lot of good news to be gleaned from this text and others like it. But first the bad news…the shepherds in South Dakota might not like it, but humans have many sheep like qualities. We are stubborn, we prefer safety and sometimes, regardless of level of education, we can be dumb. We have fallen victim to this epidemic called “complacency”…as long as the status quo is held and we feel safe and secure, we’re good to go. The problem when stubbornness and preference of safety and stability meet complacency is that the possibility arises that we can become a people who merely exist instead of a people who live. We like the safety and security that the sheepfold provides, we like our things and we like the financial security…but there is no food in the sheepfold…but there are thieves and robbers and wild animals outside of the sheepfold…do we risk it?
Enter the good news. Though we are stubborn and prefer the safety and stability of the sheepfold and the status quo, and though there are thieves and robbers and wild animals outside of the sheepfold, we have a shepherd who will not settle for letting only those of us who dare go out into the pasture. Our shepherd is the kind of shepherd who is willing to fight the most stubborn of us and yank us out of our safe place so that we don’t just exist, we thrive and flourish and have abundant life. He does this because he knows and he wants us to know that life cannot be defeated, life cannot be stolen away from us because our life is with him and it is forever. And so Jesus will yank us out of our safe places and then lead us out to pasture by still waters, even and especially when it means walking through the valleys of the shadow of death to get there.
Our shepherd rose from the dead and in that moment, death was defeated and life conquered. We are free to exit the sheep fold and go out into the pasture and live abundant lives confident in the knowledge that our shepherd is guiding us, that he will lead us through the valleys of death to the still waters and banquets of love where our cups will over flow with peace, joy, love and life.
Listen for the shepherd’s voice. He is calling you by name…Do you hear him?