A Fourth Church Sermon by John Wilkinson

May 14, 2000 | 9:30 and 11:00 a.m.

The Spirit of the Shepherd

John Wilkinson
Executive Associate Pastor, Fourth Presbyterian Church

John 10:11–18

“I am the good shepherd. The good shepherd lays
down his life for the sheep.”

John 10:11 (NRSV)

We trust in Jesus Christ, fully human, fully God. Jesus proclaimed the reign of God: preaching good news to the poor and release to the captives, teaching by word and deed and blessing the children, healing the sick and binding up the brokenhearted, eating with outcasts, forgiving sinners, and calling all to repent and believe the gospel.

from A Brief Statement of Faith
Presbyterian Church (USA)

Prayers of the People by Dana Ferguson

Under the list of scary but true affirmations is this one—we are all theologians. We are all theologians, invited, in this Presbyterian priesthood of all believers, with the word of God wide open to us and planted firmly in the world God created and called good, we are invited, all of us, to think about God, about our faith, about its relationship to the world and then, theologically, to live our lives as if all this stuff really matters.

It’s OK, and perhaps it’s even a good thing, that we don’t walk around discussing things like substitutionary atonement and prevenient grace and double-predestination. But we do walk around talking about big questions of life and death and right and wrong and meaning and belonging. They are theological questions and we are theologians.

We will welcome 16 young theologians into the life of this church in a few moments—our 2000 Confirmation Class. One Confirmation Class exercise was to write a statement of faith, portions of which which will be shared at this evening’s service. Becky Rogers, speaking with the voice of all 16 young people, wrote several lines that I have hijacked this morning to serve as our subtext: “I believe that the church is God’s home. Since things that come from the church are good and filled with love, the inside of the church is full of peace and happiness, where friends last forever, even though you only see them usually once a week, and don’t get to talk to them until coffee hour. But they are still your friends and they will always be there for you if you need them.” That is good theology.

Imagine for a moment those places where you have found true community. Simply imagine. Perhaps through athletics. Perhaps through a work group or a professional guild. Perhaps through a circle of friends. Perhaps through a hobby or recreation or the arts. A fraternity, a sorority. Perhaps, even, through a church committee.

Community, true community, is elusive gift and precious commodity. It is also at the heart of God’s best aspiration for us. God creates us and invites us to move beyond ourselves into relationships with others, relationships that make us full, complete, authentic.

Now, in those same imaginings, think for a moment longer about the elements of that community, and what made it true. Vision, perhaps, or leadership, or meaning, a powerful common experience through which you and the ones with whom you shared it could never be the same again.

Sports teams can become good examples, though not always, and not necessarily winning ones. Parenthetically, I have won and I have lost and losing, unless you are the Chicago Cubs and guaranteed a sold-out Wrigley Field regardless of competence, losing is not nearly as fun as winning.

In my sixth grade year—a year fraught with challenges after our family moved, taking me away from familiarity and friends and landing me in strange and unknown territory—I went out for the soccer team. I had never played a minute of soccer before. I could catch and throw a ball, dubious soccer skills. But the coach put me in goal, offered to me a little success, we won a few games, and that always interesting pre-pubescent journey was made a little more bearable.

Later in college, following a profound disappointment, a choir director invited me to join a choir, a choir whose musical skills far exceeded mine. He worked with me, welcomed me, and soon, again, I was made to feel at home.

Now sports teams and choirs seem trivial pursuits in the face of the larger theological issues of estrangement and fragmentation, but in fact as we are able to discover and create and celebrate true community, find home, they are nice entry points and help us to become better theologians.

Jesus says to us today, “I am the good shepherd. The good shepherd lays down his life for the sheep.” It is an extraordinary affirmation for us, coming so soon after the events that marked that very life laid down.

For many of us, the only sheep we encounter are at the Lincoln Park Petting Zoo. And yet we get the dynamic behind the earthy metaphor. The sheep and the good sheep, at the heart of who we are and at the heart of who Jesus is.

The metaphor of sheep and shepherd is a ripe biblical one. Handel’s Messiah captures it perfectly. Building on words from the prophet Isaiah, Handel asks the chorus to sing “All we like sheep have gone astray.” And almost to the point of needing over-caffeination, the chorus travels the musical highway on the word “astray”—“melisma” is the musical concept—over many measures until we clearly get the point. We go astray. We do know that we wander, drift from our moorings, stray, stray from being the people we would hope to be, stray from being the people God intends us to be, stray from the community God offers us.

“The people wander like sheep,” the prophet Zechariah wrote, “they suffer for lack of a shepherd.” (Zechariah 10:2) And one time Jesus saw a gathered crowd and had compassion on them, “for they were harassed and helpless, like sheep without a shepherd.” (Matthew 9:36) Harassed and helpless are not trivial notions—they are descriptive of our world, I believe, which seems bent on scattering and fragmenting and isolating.

This faith of ours, if it is to be true and if it is to make a difference in the world to which God calls us, might have its personal moments, but it can never be private. This faith of ours, if it is to be true and if it is to make a difference in the world to which God calls us, can never accept the individualism and self-centeredness that defines life in the twenty-first century. We are called to be different than that, more than that. We are called into community. We are called into connection. We are called into the body of Christ. We are called into the flock.

In his classic book The Company of Strangers, Parker Palmer writes that “religion. . . has to do with unity, with the overcoming of brokeness and fragmentation, with the reconciliation of that which has been estranged. The very root of the word religion,” Palmer writes, “means to ‘rebind’ or ‘bind together. . .’” (p. 22)

I am the good shepherd, Jesus tells us, and we wrestle with needing the shepherd’s guidance, the shepherd’s care, the shepherd’s shepherding. And yet we wander.

Elsewhere, Jesus tells a beautiful story about a shepherd who leaves ninety-nine sheep un-attended to track down one lost sheep, and rejoices over the one found more than over the ninety-nine that didn’t get lost. That is dubious business practice and extraordinary theology.

Raymond Brown’s monumental commentary on the Gospel of John reminds us that what is new here is the fact that this shepherd will lay down his life for the sheep. (p. 398) And so this day know that the heart of the gospel is this good shepherd’s unprecedented relationship to the sheep, sheep that are prone to wander, this good shepherd’s invitation to the sheep to come back home, and when the invitation is not accepted, to follow the sheep even into the darkest valleys to the point of losing his life.

That is our story, all of it, and though we do not always get the earthy metaphor, we know it to be true. This is about salvation, about our wandering and never being able to come back unless the good shepherd tracks us down over crags and through ravines and across the wide expanses of our living and hoists us up and throws us over his shoulder and welcomes us back to the flock, that our lives may be complete and expressed fully with others.

It is about you, it is about me, but only in that it is about us. It is about the flock, the community. A flock that is nothing if it is not about justice. A flock that is nothing if it is not about peace. A flock that is nothing if it is not about hospitality and welcome. Community that is not trivial but fundamental, community that transforms the world because the spirit of the shepherd compels it, mandates it, to search for that lost sheep and to welcome it home.

The flock is counter-cultural, counter-individual. It moves us beyond ourselves into something better; it goes beyond the insularity of the self and even the church into all the world; the flock evangelizes not to proselytize but to witness and share; it engages in mission as true service which transforms those who receive and even more so those who give. And so the flock to which we are called is only the flock when it gathers in the spirit of the shepherd, the good shepherd, who loves us and seeks us and gathers us in when we stray and welcomes us home, not into nostalgia and sentiment but into true community.

We gather in the spirit of that shepherd when we baptize babies, when we welcome young men and women into the church, when this church endeavors to develop programs that reach in as well as reach out, when we teach our children, when we gather in fellowship groups and support groups, when we stand with those and pray with those whose bodies ache, whose minds suffer, whose spirits hurt, those who grieve, those who are anxious.

This week I was reminded of the “Madres,” the Mothers of Plaza de Mayo gathered in the public square in Buenos Aires, gather still in the spirit of the shepherd, to protest silently the disappearance of thousands of young people in Argentina, beginning in the mid 1970s. Several of the women visited Fourth Church two years ago in a deeply meaningful visit. One mother wrote that “solidarity in pain was born and the unceasing search for children brought us together.” The unceasing search for children. One journalist nicknamed the group the “Crazy Mothers,” because they loved their children so much that they risked their own lives in public protest.

And so a million moms will gather this day, in Washington, in Chicago, in cities across the nation, and gather in the spirit of the shepherd, because one dead child is one too many, because children shooting children in Cabrini-Green, anywhere, is unacceptable, because the voices of mothers joined in righteous anger will cut through rhetoric and politics and economics, we pray, because the shepherd knows the sheep and loves the children, because the shepherd sees the wolf coming and does not run away, because this shepherd’s life will be laid down in the name of peace.

These mothers, these million moms, like the Madres de Plaza de Mayo, like the good shepherd, like the mother who would never abandon her nursing child, will not rest until we know true community.

Handel’s Messiah offers a counterpoint to the frenetic “strayness” of the sheep and the sobering spinning apart of our world, as Isaiah’s words are put to music: “He will feed his flock like a shepherd,” an alto and soprano sing, and soon, again, voices blend together, beautiful music is made.

Like a playground ballgame where no one is picked last. Like a tapestry where everyone’s thread—a quilt where everyone’s patch —is crucial to the beauty and integrity of the whole, a gleaming, shining river where baptism makes everyone, whole and welcome and included, a divine coffee hour even, where all are friends, all gathered in the spirit of the shepherd—who will seek us out and welcome us back, who will walk in the valley of the shadow of death with us, who will go to the cross for us, and in whose house we shall dwell forever.

Worthy is the Lamb that was slain, to receive power and wealth and wisdom and might and honor and glory and blessing. Amen.

Prayers of the People
Mother’s Day, Psalm 21
Dana Ferguson, Associate Pastor

Good Shepherd, who makes us lie down in green pastures, who leads us beside still waters, and who restores our souls, your faithfulness is no accident. Your patience is a match for your understanding. You understand the pain that drives us to despair, the child who goes another way, the parent who will not let the child grow up; the spouse who separates; the friends who drinks to ruin; the companion who suffers, the partner who dies. You understand, O God. And you are the one who brings new hope out of despair, resurrection out of defeat, and new life out of death.

God of Sarah and Rebekah, Leah and Rachel, Mary and Elizabeth and countless others of the generations, we give you thanks on this Mother’s Day for those who have long loved us, for those who have mothered us, those who have befriended us, and for those who have taught us. Thank you, O God, for those who loved to play and work by our side; who have caught us when we have stumbled and praised us when we stood; who touched us in trying times, and waited with us through silent nights, who believed our dreams and treasured our hopes, who taught us to have tough minds and tender hearts, who like you clearly have seen our weaknesses and loved us despite them. We give you thanks, O God, and we remember. We remember those who have longed to love a child and for those who long for mothers now past. Greet them with your comfort and your embracing love.

On this day filled with bright construction paper greetings and popsicle stick gifts, we pray for those who are in places we’d rather not think of. For those who can only love their children from behind bars and for those who cannot love their children from drug or alcohol induced lives. And, we give you thanks for those who assume the duties of parenting - for aunts and uncles, for grandparents and cousins, for the many who labor in halls of juvenile justice across this city and across this country. For those who have opened their hearts and their homes to provide foster care and to adopt children.

We would not forget this day, the mothers who mourn - who grieve lost children and children lost to the streets, lost to warfare, lost to political abuse of power. We pray, O God, for mothers who long to feed their children but can find no food. And for mothers who cannot find their children.

We pray that you would inspire us, O God, to serve the cause of justice for these many and more who have not been heard. Just as you have been a faithful shepherd to us, enable us to be faithful to those who walk in the shadow of death, to those who sit at table with enemies. Give us gentle voices and courageous ways to live and work that young people and old people alike might know your loving ways.

Give to all your people, O God, the hope, the confidence, and dignity that comes from being children of God. In Jesus Christ you defined family on the basis of grace and made us all members one of another, members of your family, of Christ’s body. And so we ask that you hear us now as we join together with those in Christ’ household to pray the prayer he taught saying, Our Father. . .

(Portions taken from Litanies and Other Prayers, Phyllis Cole and Everett Tilson)