Latest / Belin Memorial UMC / Rev. Tom Pietila - "The Good Shepherd"
Transcript
- Belin Memorial UMC: The Gospel lesson comes from John 10. Very truly, I tell you, anyone who does not enter the sheepfold by the gate but climbs in by another way is a thief and a bandit. The one who enters by the gate is the shepherd of the sheep. The gatekeeper opens the gate for him and the sheep hear his voice. He calls his own sheep by name and leads them out. When he has brought all of his own, he goes ahead of them. And the sheep follow him because they know his voice. They will not follow a stranger, but they will run from him because they do not know the voice of strangers. Jesus used this figure of speech with them, but they did not understand what he was saying to them. So again, Jesus said to them, Very truly I tell you I am the gate for the sheep. I tell you I am the gate for the sheep. All who come before me are thieves and bandits, but the sheep did not listen to them. I am the gate. Whoever enters by me will be saved and will come in and go out and find pasture. The thief comes only to steal. and kill and destroy. I came that they may have life and have it abundantly. I am the Good Shepherd. The Good Shepherd lays down his life for the sheep. The hired hand who is not the shepherd and does not own the sheep and runs away and the wolf snatches them and scatters them. The hired hand runs away. because a hired hand does not care for the sheep. But I am the Good Shepherd. This is the word of God for the people of God. Thanks be to God. Please be seated. want to thank Will for the kind introduction and for inviting Lindy and I here. He and Sally have been great hosts and we've enjoyed our time here with them. Of course, we are familiar with the area. We served here in 1983 to 89 at socastee And my fondest memories of this church was after the hurricane, they came down here to see Bob Morris. Some of you may remember Pastor Morris. Bob Morris was in the building across the street. The water had come all the way there across the street. Bob Morris was sitting down with flood buckets all around him, just weeping. And he was a good friend. helped a lot, but it was a terrifying time. But thank you for allowing me back into your church. Well, if you like sheep, today is your day. They're everywhere. They're everywhere in our lessons. If you do not know enough about sheep to form an opinion, let me help you. I think of all the images of Christ's relationship to humanity, few are more unappealing to me than the image of the shepherd and sheep. Here along the coast one doesn't see many sheep. I have known some goats. but no sheep. The few sheep I have seen do not encourage comparison with human beings. I must admit it's not really my favorite day in the church year, Shepherd Sunday. Maybe Will knew that when he asked me to preach. I used to give Will, when he was at Central, all the unmanageable texts in the Bible to preach. The transfiguration, 25 years, I still don't understand it. Give it to Will. Maybe this is payback. If you are from a place like Montana, maybe some of you are, you know a lot about sheep. People from places like that tell me that sheep are uniformly witless, dirty, dumb. Pigs have bigger brains. Dogs are more sociable. Cats are cleaner. On a cold winter's night, sheep will pile themselves on top of each other for warmth. smothering those on the bottom. They will walk right off a cliff, I'm told, if they are frightened. And it doesn't take much to frighten a sheep. Lambs are cuddly, I know, and cute. Matthew 25, notwithstanding, I see no particular honor in being numbered among the sheep rather than the goats. Something in me just loathes being compared to a sheep even by someone as kind as Jesus. I am the good shepherd, Jesus says. The good shepherd lays down his life for the sheep. And here I react even more negatively. than when he calls me a sheep. The thoughts of a warm, sensitive, intelligent human being like Jesus actually giving his life up for a flock of stupid sheep, what a waste. It's one thing to give one's life up for one's family or one's friend or one's nation, but to sacrifice one's life for a sheep, can such undistinguished animals be worth so much? We, some years ago, had a house on Lake Watery and word spread of an unfortunate man who was out fishing on the lake. And while the boat was moving through the water pretty briskly, his hat flew off. and inexplicably he just jumped off the boat to retrieve his hat. He never came up. And a fisherman I knew said about this, what a waste for a six dollar hat. But this is no greater waste than the thought of a shepherd literally giving his life up for a $20 sheep. Now, Will tells me, and I know this is true, that you are intelligent people. You've studied your Bible. You've been to Bible studies. And you're thinking right now, wait, you can't be fundamentalists about this thing. Jesus is speaking metaphorically here. Jesus is speaking figuratively. But even, I mean, even as hyperbole, a shepherd dying for a sheep? Really now. And yet, there is no doubt here is a central, the central biblical image. The Good Shepherd lays down his life for the sheep, for sheep. For whom did Jesus die? Who were the recipients of His sacrifice on Golgotha? Well, on Palm Sunday, you remember the crowd shouted, Hail, King, come on, bring it on. And then that same band of admirers a day later became the mob who yelled, crucify Him, kill Him on Good Friday. His twelve best friends, the ones whom he had trained and loved and cared for. Well, they forsook him and fled. In a stampede of cruelty, fear, bigotry, and sheep-like cowardice, they, shall I say we, killed him. We like to think that we're better than they are. We'd like to think that if we were there, we would have been Jesus's courageous defenders and not his crucifiers. Because we're so much more intelligent and advanced and sensitive. We have higher education. We are enlightened. We have evolved morally, we think. A young man told me of an incident he had while riding his bicycle down the mountains in North Carolina. He was on this winding road and as he was going down this winding road, he heard this car behind him begin to speed up and he looked around him to see the car and the car was coming right at him. And so he rode his bicycle into the guardrail and hit the guardrail, flipped over the guardrail, face first, sprawling to the ground. And the driver of the car, he said, slowed down just enough to see what happened and then sped off. And he said to me, you know, that really surprised me. I said, yes, it's hard to believe that some other human being would be so mean and evil as to aim their car at you and almost kill you. He said, no, that's not what I was talking about. What surprised me was my reaction. The moment I hit the ground and got my bearings, I scrambled around. I was looking for the biggest rock I could find or a board because if that man came back, I was going to bash him right over the head. Me, said. I've been to college. I'm a sensitive person. I don't have a ⁓ mean bone in my body. I know better than that. We want so to believe that we've made progress, have morally evolved upward and onward, getting better and better every day in every way. I know better. But history always proves us wrong. Stupid, witless, cowardly, following the herd, doing what others tell me to do, huddling close to the crowd, go with the flow, just obeying orders. Don't you see? I'm one of the sheep. You are one of the sheep. The sins for which the shepherd died, the eagles which hung him on the cross are not particularly dramatic or even horrible on my part. They're the little, witless, sheep-like, cowardly sins. I don't mean to do evil. I don't. Nothing's planned or premeditated about it all. I just somehow get caught up in the stampede following the leader. All like sheep have gone astray, says the prophet. All like sheep. And so I get it through my head once again, we're the sheep. We are sheep who aren't good enough even though we aspire to goodness, who do the wrong in spite of our best intentions to do the right, who dumbly follow the crowd up to Golgotha or anywhere else it's going. deserve only to be led to the slaughter we have made for ourselves. We are the ones to whom these words are spoken. I am the Good Shepherd. The Good Shepherd lays down his life for the sheep. Early in my career, I was the director of Greenville Urban Ministries in Greenville, South Carolina. Hard job, lots of troubles and problems. I had a friend who is serving in the same capacity in a ghetto in Chicago. She had literally given her life, 20 years of her life, to urban ministry. She had forsaken the career that her parents had planned for her to be a doctor, graduated, and she went and lived with people in Chicago, in the ghetto. I was there when they buried her. She was buried at 38, a victim of overwork and over-caring. And a friend of hers and mine, we were outside the funeral and he whispered to me, he said, you know, what a waste. she could have done so much with her life. It could have been easy for her. What a waste. Are sheep worth so great a price? Somewhere, Paul says, it is not as angels that he has loved us. not as intelligent, rational, doing the best we can, sensitive, brave folk who are making our way up to Jesus. No, that's not us. Therefore he has made his way to us. for us, to do for us what we sheep as we are cannot do for ourselves. It is a sheep that he's first loved us and died for us and claimed us as his own, as sheep.