21 April 2013

“Oh, you’re just a shepherd …”
Revelation 7:9-17 / John 10:22-30
Easter 4C
21 April 2013


The 23rd Psalm.
Hymns and praises sung in heaven.
Jesus walks in the Temple during the festival of the Dedication, otherwise known to us as Hannukah.
What could these texts possibly have in common?
ABSOLUTELY MUTTON!
Mutton? Get it? Sheep?
It’s Good Shepherd Sunday!
Alright … yes, on first read, the texts do seem rather disjointed this morning, and the only thing they appear to have in common is sheep and shepherding.
Not a hot topic of life today around here.
Or is there something else here for us who have come here today to hear a Word, catch a glimpse, of the Holy, the eternal and everlasting … that which is set apart from the insecurity of this life, this world?
That’s actually it, you know.
In the Gospel text … here we encounter Jesus in Jerusalem, well before the events of his Passion, before Maundy Thursday’s Last Supper, before Good Friday’s arrest and trial, torture and death on the cross, burial in the Tomb … and before Easter’s Resurrection … here, before all that, Jesus is walking on the sheltered, weather protected side of the Temple in December, at the time of the festival of Dedication … what we today call Hannukah.
And the religious leaders are gathered around him and asking if he’s the Messiah.
What irony.
But maybe not for most of us Christians.
Because most Christians don’t know a lot about Hannukah, or what it represents … which is, the finishing off of the Jewish revolt in the first century BC against Antiochus Epiphanes IV, the Seleucid king who forcibly imposed his Greek ways upon the Hebrew people, corrupting their religion, and destroying their Temple in Jerusalem. The Maccabees – Jewish zealots – rose up and threw off their tyrannical invaders, and rebuilt and rededicated the Temple … that started the festival of the Dedication.
Now … in Jesus’ time … new invaders, the Romans, rule Jerusalem and the Jewish people once again. So these religious leaders around Jesus are wondering, could this Jesus be the new Maccabee? Could Jesus be the new one who is to rise up and deliver them from the Romans and their Caesar, just as they were delivered once before from another evil king?
But Jesus isn’t going to be this kind of a king – Messiah – military/ political deliverer.
No – he’s going to be a Shepherd.
Which probably left these religious leaders … stunned.
This 10th chapter of John’s gospel, in it, Jesus gives three different word-images for how he is going to be Messiah. In our three year lectionary cycle, we read from this chapter of John every year on this 4th Sunday in Easter – Good Shepherd Sunday – and we get all three image / answers:
• I am the gate for the sheep;
• I am the Good Shepherd;
• And, this year, the Good Shepherd says, “My sheep hear my voice.”

“Shepherd” doesn’t sound like a very glamorous description of leadership … and, certainly, it wasn’t in Jesus’ time. The shepherds were at the low end of the power and influence spectrum of their time. Men, boys actually, who lived in the fields with their flocks, who didn’t have learning or influence or power or prestige.
And you know, it’s still that way today.
Though we don’t have many shepherds around in this country any more … this model, this image, of shepherding one’s flock … it doesn’t rank high on the “leadership and influence” spectrum.
Take the conversation I heard a while ago from a couple of my colleagues. The topic was “what kind of pastoral leader are you?” and the answer had to come – Biblically enough – from the five-fold ministry that Paul puts forth in Ephesians:

The gifts he gave were that some would be apostles, some prophets, some evangelists, some pastors and teachers, to equip the saints for the work of ministry, for building up the body of Christ ...

“Pastor” in today’s hipster-church-leadership language gets translated as “shepherd,” by the way.
So anyway, this conversation was going on, about what kind of leader are you, and the one colleague was talking about how he was a prophet, or an apostle, certainly, he wanted to lead his people clearly, authentically, into the future with and for Jesus.
The other colleague started talking, and describing her ministry … full of pastoral care, listening and simply being with a congregation who had been hurt by a couple of painful pastoral transitions … until the first colleague cut her off with the rather disparaging, “Oh! You’re just a shepherd!”
That’s what I meant by saying “shepherd” isn’t high on the “leadership and influence” spectrum these days. It’s not glamorous, it doesn’t get big headlines, to listen to hurt people, to simply be with them, to bind up their wounds and care and pray for and with them.
But sometimes it’s precisely what is needed.
And it’s where Jesus meets us.
And guess what … all those other functions, activities of ministry … being prophetic (speaking out for justice and peace), apostolic leadership (leadership which raises up leaders), evangelists (those who go out and tell and live the Good News into the world so that others can hear it), teachers (helping us learn more about faith, life, ourselves, and Christ) … all those skills are part of shepherding, too. Because they all have to be done with the love, the care, the presence, of a shepherd, in order to be authentic, to be real, to be “right” for the ministry of the congregation.
That’s what Jesus means when he says, My sheep hear my voice. I know them, and they follow me.
Of course, that doesn’t happen immediately. Jesus has to die on the cross first, and rise again … living shepherding, servant leadership, in his own flesh and blood.
But his sheep do hear and follow him.
Mary hears his voice at the empty tomb … calling her name … “Mary!” … and she turns, and hears, and believes, and goes and tells the other apostles.
The apostles hidden away that same evening, in fear … Jesus comes in among them and announces Peace Is Here! … he says, here, catch my Spirit … and they believe, and receive, and go and tell others.
A week later, Thomas sees and hears and believes when Jesus appears to him.
And all the apostles, home in Galilee, fishing and waiting, hear and see and believe when they meet Jesus on the shore, as he feeds them, as he calls them to follow me.
They all follow Jesus … as prophets, apostles, evangelists, teachers … all shepherds, whose sheep know their voice, their voice speaking in the voice of the Good Shepherd, the one who gives eternal life … eternal life, because life in this world is fundamentally insecure.
It was so during Jesus’ earthly lifetime, this time in our Gospel text when the religious leaders were looking for an earthly Messiah, a political deliverer, one who would save them from Caesar and restore their earthly kingdom of Israel to its former glory.
And it was also fundamentally insecure during the times represented in our New Testament reading from the book of Revelation.
Actually, throughout the entire book Revelation … the word which soaks through and permeats all the words there … is that life is fundamentally insecure; and in the midst of this the only security one can count on is the Lamb at the center of the throne.
Now, one brief word of explanation … any preaching on the book of Revelation without a lengthy teaching exposition of the book is going to be problematic. And that teaching, as those of you who were part of the class we had in 2010 on Revelation here know, needs to be long and thorough because the book is so rich and multi-layered. That 2010 class was 10 weeks long … two weeks ago at Kent Lutheran, I led a three hour class on Revelation, and was just able to touch on the main points without going into much detail at all.
That being said, though, I’ll attempt to offer a concise explanation of our text from Revelation for today.
Chapter 7 of Revelation is one of the “heavenly interlude” chapters … it falls right between the Four Horsemen roaming the earth in chapter 6, and the opening of the Seventh Seal and its subsequent earthly plagues in chapter 8.
Remember – for those of you who have been part of that Revelation class – that the way we are to read the Book of Revelation is as a Word of Encouragement and Hopefulness for All Times – not just one time in the first century AD., and certainly not just for the time of “The End,” and moreover, never using the book as some kind of Almanac to find that time of “The End.” It simply doesn’t work.
Thus the Four Horsemen, the Seventh Seal, and the woes they bring to earth … political instability, war, famine, disease, natural disasters … those woes have, do, and will happen as part of life on earth … in any and all times. In the time of the original hearers of Revelation, when Caesar Domitian claimed to have “everything under control” and so he told the people “just trust in me to deliver you,” those woes were a constant threat to humanity.
Just as they are today.
Because life – this life – is fundamentally insecure.
And so as we settle into chapter 7’s heavenly interlude of worship and praise … full of the words of some of the great hymns of the Church … Blessing and honor and glory and might … Who is this host arrayed in white? … and what we get here, in comparison to the insecurity that reigns on earth, is the Lamb who is the shepherd.
The Lamb is the One who brings fundamental security to life.
But the security he brings is not as the world craves, desires, or says that it gives.
For the Lamb … the worldly weak one, the one who willingly goes to his own suffering and death on the cross … The Lamb, Jesus the Christ, brings fundamental security to all life on earth as it is in heaven, because he is the Shepherd.
For first century Christians, living in a time of increasing threats; political threat of invasion from East of the Empire … economic threat, the boycott of Christians by the Roman government, who saw Christianity as a dangerous superstition, dangerous because it was unpatriotic (in a world where “Caesar is Lord” was the compulsory word about the empire … Christians uttered another word, “Jesus is Lord!) … for those first century Christians, they needed a word of real security, real hope, real peace. And so it came for them, from the One who walked in among the fearful disciples on that first Easter and proclaimed, Peace Is Here!
The Lamb who is the Shepherd.
The One who rules from the throne of heaven reigns as a servant-leader, serving unto the giving of his own life, laying it down, and taking it back up again because God willed that it would be so …
Not as the Domitian Caesar of that first century world or as the Caesars of the world who have bombasted their way to earthly thrones throughout the ages … liars who have claimed security through warlike strength, life filled with materialism, and salvation by protection of the state alone, wealth alone, earthly power alone. Liars of every time … including our own.
To them … of them … the Lamb who is the Shepherd sits as witness, on the throne of heaven, bringing true comfort and hope, life and salvation, to those who have suffered, are suffering, will be suffering at the hands of the sham-leaders of the world.
Which gives those of us on earth hope. Hope that is real Hope … not homeland security, not private, individual security or publicly legislated security, not stocks and bonds and gold and paper traded securities … for all those are, are different ways of marking and masking the fundamental insecurity of this world and this life.
No … now … Our Hope Is In the Lamb Who Is The Shepherd. The One Who Leads Through Serving, Who Shows Strength Through Suffering, and Who In Dying, Brings Life … for you, for me, for all the world.
So that we who are his, through the Water and the Word, the Bread and the Wine, the Forgiveness and Love We Can Never Earn, but Which Are God’s Great Gift Of Love For You … so that we, now freed from the first and last great worry and fear of this life … … what happens to me when I die … now, we who have been given the freedom of Life … we can live in this fundamentally insecure world of bombings and shootings, industrial accidents and plane crashes, yes BUT IT IS A WORLD FULL OF LIFE WHICH GOD LOVES AND SO WE’RE CALLED AND FREED AND SENT TO GO FORTH INTO IT AND LIVE IT FULLY … FULLY FREED, FULLY FREEING, FULLY HOPING AND WORKING AND SERVING IN THE SERVANT-LEADER STEPS OF THE GOOD SHEPHERD, THE LAMB WHO IS THE SHEPHERD, WHO RULES AND REIGNS WITH A SPIRIT OF HOPE AND PEACE AND LIFE.
Last week I began the message with words of great tragedies which had happened recently during the month of April … not knowing that we’d have more in the week between then, and now. But I didn’t list one notable one … on April 6, we commemorate the martyrdom at the hands of the Nazis of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, German Lutheran pastor, theologian, reformer of the Church, a Luther for us today most certainly.
Imprisoned for the final years of his life by the Nazis, Bonhoeffer, I believe, saw and wrote of this freed life which Christ gives to us to live into the world God loves. In his “Letters and Papers from Prison,” he wrote of it thusly:

To be a Christian does not mean to be religious in a particular way, to make something of oneself (a sinner, a penitent, or a saint) on the basis of some method or other, but to be a person – not a type of person, but the person that Christ creates in us. It is not the religious act that makes the Christian, but participation in the sufferings of God in the secular life. This is metanoia – (repentance, turning around and turning toward the call of Christ): not in the first place thinking about one’s own needs, problems, sins, and fear, but allowing oneself to be caught up into the way of Jesus Christ. It is only by living completely in this world that one learns to have faith. Jesus calls people, not to a new religion, but to life.

Jesus calls people, not to a new religion, but to life.
Life in a world that is fundamentally insecure, but lived, fully, securely, IN CHRIST.
“Follow me,” Christ calls.
Will you?