Preacher's Post 11.0

Submitted by Executive Direc... on April 9, 2008 - 6:45pm.

The Word: Fourth Sunday of Easter

Acts 2:42-47
Psalm 23
1 Peter 2:19-25
John 10:1-10

The Good Shepherd knows his sheep

Quotable Words:

"We cannot love what we do not know." ~ Theresa of Avila

Preached Words:

From a sermon preached after Columbine, 1999:

Darkness and light, goodness and evil, bandits and good shepherds, strangers and friends: John’ Gospel, all through, is a collection of sharp contrasts. Today’s metaphors about good shepherds leading sheep into safe pastures, images of a single gate leading to the right path are metaphors clear and simple about a time and place where good and bad and right and wrong were plain to see, where inside was separate from outside, and the boundaries were not to be crossed.

John’s community needed strong metaphors to describe the ways of the world; they lived with the threat of persecution, the threat of extinction. The world they lived in, the first-century Mediterranean world, was a scary place. The Jesus movement was still new, struggling to define itself against the threat of Rome and the threat of competing philosophies and counter claims to the truth.

The sound of John’s gospel is often exclusive, in puzzling contrast to Jesus’ voice of inclusive welcome. But John’s community was intent on defining their way. They needed to name who they were, to whom they belonged.

So John’s metaphors give them words that define. The metaphor of sheep and shepherd made sense to John’s community. In ancient Palestine, shepherds brought the sheep of the village into a common sheepfold for the night. In the morning, in order to take their sheep out to the fields for grazing, each shepherd had to separate his sheep from the common flock. Each sheep had a name, and each shepherd had a particular way of calling his sheep, so each sheep would respond only to its own shepherd. Even if another shepherd called the sheep by its own name it would not respond. It was the knowing that counted.

This bond of knowing is central to John’s gospel message—John roots his Christology, his understanding of the meaning of Jesus the Christ, in the mutual knowing and love of God and Jesus, god and creation. John says, again and again, that faith is about being in relationship. Had he written his gospel in our day and age he would have used metaphors about bonding, about community, about ecology. But the metaphor for his day was sheep and shepherd, being named, being known, being cared for, being not strangers but friends.

John tells them that the one to trust is that one who knows them.

The one who knows, this one who calls, calls them not into isolation, not to persecution, not to the culture of death all around them at this point at the end of first century, but to life, to abundant life. They would be not strangers, but friends. This One leads them to the kind of abundant life that had characterized the Jesus movement since those first Easter moments decades earlier when the community first gathered around the promises and the experiences of new life.
John’s listeners heard this story of shepherd and sheep and knew that it was their story. They knew that they belonged, that they were part of a community. They knew that they counted, they had worth. And we can hear the same thing. We can hear that we belong. We can hear that someone knows our names. We can know that someone cares for us.

Isn’t that what we all want, just like the theme song from Cheers, the hymn to the Boston bar that is the antidote to modern anonymity, the place “where everybody knows your name"?

That kind of belonging, that kind of being included on the inside, being known, is what the boys in Littleton, Colorado, Erik Harris and Dylan Klebord, didn’t have. For all that we don’t know about that situation, for all the questions we have, we can see, by all accounts, that these boys felt themselves to be on the outside. Marginalized. Excluded. Strangers.

Their targets were the ones they perceived to be on the inside.

These kids had no sense of connection, no sense of being known. They created for themselves a sub-culture, using the symbols and behaviors of a culture of death. They felt themselves to be strangers; they felt everyone else to be a stranger, a target at the other end of a gun barrel. How else could you so disconnect from feeling to launch a reign of terror on classmates and teachers, plunged their families into unending grief and guilt?

We cannot love, said St. Theresa, what we do not know. These kids, I would say, could not love, because they did not know, they did not feel themselves to be known. For some reason they, like those who stoned Stephen, they stopped up their ears so that they would not know, so that they would be strangers.

The gospel of John and the tragedy of Littleton, Colorado give us a new task. Our task—our spiritual journey, and our social and political obligation—is to know and to let ourselves be known, to make sure our kids are not strangers.

We need to make sure we are not strangers to our children, to the children we run into on the street, the children in our neighborhoods, in our homes, the children in this parish. We cannot afford to let these young people be strangers. We cannot sit back while kids pull away, pull back, from unhappy homes, from uncaring schools, from busy churches, from all of us busy adults. We cannot afford to let kids tune in to video games and tune out to real life. We cannot afford to keep losing our community’s kids. ..”

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