Abundant Life Together

Psalm 23; Acts 2: 42-47; John 10: 1-10  (Easter 5A)

The use of sheep and shepherd as a description of us, and of Christ, can be found throughout the New Testament. And, of course, the 23^rd Psalm (which the choir sang so beautifully today, and) which reminds us of all the ways that the Lord is our shepherd, is just one of many places in the Old Testament where the people of God are compared to sheep, and the Lord is the shepherd.

There are way more intelligent animals to which we could be compared. In fact, relatively speaking, sheep are really quite stupid. They are utterly dependent on the shepherd for their survival. They are easy prey for wolves. There are stories of sheep standing around, watching, while a wolf eats a lamb right in the midst of them. They don’t know enough to run away from danger. They do fare better when they are together rather than separate,   but that’s only because there is typically a shepherd there to protect the whole lot of them. They want to go out on their own just as much as the shepherd wants to keep them safe in the flock.

And when they do get out, they will run off and often get stuck in a crevice or a crag in a mountainside where there is a bit of grass to be eaten. And the shepherds know that there is no point in going after them until they have eaten all the grass that is there, and they are starting to get too hungry and too weak to run away. Because if he pursues them one minute sooner, they will just jump off the crevice, and likely fall to their death. So the good shepherd waits until they are sufficiently weakened, and then goes after it, and it is lifted onto shoulders and gently carried back to the fold.

A good shepherd keeps the flock together, in order to keep them safe. The shepherd is who the sheep rely upon for everything in their lives – for abundant green pasture, and deep cooling water. For rest and safety, away from the wolves and other predators.  In order to provide this, the flock and the shepherd are not able to stay in one place, but must move from place to place, to continue searching for the next sources of food and water. They sometimes must go through valleys where there is great risk of predators.  The sheep’s lives are dependent on the protection of the shepherd. And protection comes not only through use of the rod and the staff, but also in the way the shepherd serves as a gate for the sheepfold.

When Jesus says, “I am the good shepherd; I lay down my life for the sheep”, he is describing the way the shepherd literally lays down at the entrance to the sheepfold, and becomes the gate, so that nothing can pass through and endanger the sheep.

One writer compared the care of a shepherd for the sheep to that of a mother’s love – fierce, ready to lay down one’s life for the child’s sake, the sheep’s sake.

How can we relate to this, in this day and age? What does this have to say to us today? This was a great analogy to use back in Biblical times, because there were sheep and shepherds all over the place.

Everybody understood immediately what it meant to have Jesus as the good shepherd, to have their human tendencies to go off and try to make it on their own be so accurately compared to sheep.

So for us, this description fits when we begin to acknowledge that we, too, want to take matters into our own hands, to take care of ourselves, and not to turn ourselves over to the care of our Shepherd Lord.

But life on our own terms is not abundant life. For abundant life, we must trust Christ, and follow where he leads.

David Lose, who is a professor at Luther Seminary in St Paul, has this to say:

“I suspect that authentic abundant life demands that we be more vulnerable than we're prepared to be. So much of our life is about protecting ourselves: giving the impression that we really do have it all together and in this way guarding ourselves against vulnerability. The difficulty, though, is that we cannot experience abundant life without exposing those very vulnerabilities we want to hide.

Think about it: so much of our life is caught in a double-bind. We want honesty in our relationships –with each other and with God – and yet we simultaneously hold back, not taking the risk to expose ourselves fully to others, for fear that they may reject us.

It seems like a legitimate fear, because people have rejected us in the past. And so we wrap ourselves in emotional armor, hoping to protect ourselves from hurt, perhaps all the while knowing that as long as we are not honest about who we are we cannot trust the love and acceptance others would offer us. After all, would they accept us, we silently ask ourselves, if they really knew us?

But through the incarnation, Jesus knows who we are. Jesus, the good shepherd, knows his sheep, and as sheep we know him, we know his voice.

Jesus knows our deepest fears and insecurities and has embraced them all.

And in his resurrection, he comes bearing the peace he has offered all along, accompanied with the promise that his love is greater than fear and that his new life is greater than death."

This is how Jesus shepherds us, (as we sang earlier), beyond our wants, beyond our fears, from death into life.

But then what we need to do is to claim this promise for ourselves.

And it is a promise!

Abundant life is a promise; it’s not something to earn or achieve, save up for, budget, buy or barter for.

Rather, it is a gift, the sheer gift of a God who loves us enough to lay down his life for us.

There are so many thieves and bandits in this world who would rob us of life, who would cheat us of abundance, who would convince us to live lives of scarcity and fear.

But into the midst of that, Jesus comes as the gatekeeper and good shepherd, the one who knows his sheep – intimately and truly – and who calls us by name so that we can not only hear the first difficult truth about ourselves and our utter inability to create abundant life on our own, but that we also may believe and receive the second and wonderful truth about God's great and victorious love for us all.

 So with this promise of abundant life, let us come together as a flock, let us trust in the Good Shepherd who lays down his life for us, let us worship and learn together just like those of the early church, and let us listen as one people, one congregation, for God’s plans for us together.

Let’s listen together as the Good Shepherd calls us by name, calls us from death into life, calls us on the path that leads to green pastures, to still waters, to restored souls.

Come, let us listen together.

Reference: WorkingPreacher.org May 2011