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Home , Saint Peter

The Rev. Kathleen Liles & Stephen’s New York City

May 11, 2014 The Fourth Sunday of Easter Year A :42-47; Psalm 23; :19-25; :1-10

In the lexicon of Christian , the image of as the is one of the most beloved and enduring. You may see it depicted in the center window of our chapel, if you like, or walk across the park to see how it appears in numerous paintings and sculptures, prints, drawings and windows at the Met. If you walked upstairs you would find the Good Shepherd in numerous storybooks for children in the Day School’s Bowden Library. It is by far the most popular image for Jesus among children – the animal population of ’s Ark is the only thing that even comes close to offering any competition.

Children love the Good Shepherd.

Each year, when a new Day School Nursery class enters the church for their first chapel service, they walk indifferently past with his robe of animal skins and with his slingshot and head right for the shepherd carrying the lost lamb. This archetypal image seems to speak to a deep and innate human longing to be saved. From an early age, we want to be that lamb, carried so gently in the arms of our savior, brought home to all that is familiar.

I remember being a little girl in a flower print dress sitting next to my grandmother on a summer Sunday in a sweltering country church down South where I grew up. It must have been a hundred degrees. Grandmother would stir the breeze with a cardboard fan attached to a wooden stick that had a picture of the Good Shepherd on it. I would lean against her and watch the shepherd and lamb swaying back and forth as we considered the exuberance of the preacher and wondered how long it would be before he got as hungry as we were.

The power of this image to serve as a balm for human longing – or for all the various wounds we receive from life – is as old as the church itself. You can the see the Good Shepherd in the dimly lit corridors of the ancient Roman catacomb of Priscilla or in the carved reliefs of sarcophagi, which washed clean the bones of early believers.

But we are reminded by himself, in the brief passage from his letter today, that these early followers did not sentimentalize the image of Jesus as shepherd. For them, Christian believing meant spending their days dealing with the prejudice and fear of their neighbors. They lived as outcasts – and sometimes lawbreakers – suffering from the injustice of a society that ostracized them. Their lives were turned upside down by their faith in this shepherd. They understood about thieves and bandits that threatened the flock; they had fallen victim to bad shepherds and hired hands and knew what it was like to fear the voice of strangers.

We live in a very different world and yet much is the same. We do not break the law when we gather on Sundays or need to fear that civil authorities will insist on our allegiance to other gods. Yet there remain many things from which we need to be saved. All these years later we still need the good news of the shepherd. But how can these images of sheepfolds and shepherds and gates speak to those of us who live in a world of concrete, high-rise buildings and taxicabs?

Let’s look more closely at the metaphor John gives us.

In the days of Jesus a sheepfold in Palestine was a large pen with walls about five feet high. The sheep were gathered into this pen at night to be protected from wolves or mountain lions. The doorway was an opening about two feet wide and, while you might think it would be secured by heavy wood, surprisingly, it usually had no door at all. The shepherd slept in the doorway in order to use his club and staff to fight off any animal that threatened the sheep.

But have you noticed that whenever we speak of shepherd, we also speak of sheep?

When Jesus says he is the gate to the sheepfold, he is describing an image that is intensely relational. Unlike other metaphors John uses for describing Jesus – living water, the – the shepherd image has no meaning at all without the sheep. The image, therefore, reveals who Jesus is in relation to those who follow him.

Whether it is the good shepherd who searches for the lost sheep and bears it home, or goes before the sheep to lead the way, or serves as the gate to keep predators away, these images are about the saving activity of God. In other words, they are about the lengths God will go to in order to save us.

That is why you will find the image of the shepherd in the . The realization that no matter what happened God would intervene to save and redeem them was what emboldened the early believers in the face of the numerous threats they lived with, even death. That is what it is to live an Easter life.

Therefore, even in the midst of those hardships, the early followers of the shepherd had their moments of reverie, times when it seemed they could create themselves by living in a way that echoed the teachings of Jesus. We glimpse their passion for the ethical teachings of Jesus in our passage from Acts. We see what a love affair we Christians can experience with one another when we allow ourselves to be released from our insecurities and the grasping of material things. That desire, that hungering for “stuff,” is the result of a life in which we fail to trust in God’s provision.

But Peter’s letter reminds us that the early Christians did more than lie around and wait to be saved. They understood the teaching of Jesus to mean that they were called to follow in the steps of the shepherd. Hearing these stories, we may be comfortable with the shepherd who seeks us when we are lost and guards us while we safely graze, but what about this image of the shepherd as the gate? Here the sheep come in to rest and go out again to pasture. The implication is that we are gathered and comforted in order that we may go out again.

Living an Easter life is more than lounging in the sheep meadow on a beautiful afternoon – as appealing as that is today. It is encountering the world for the sake of Christ and sharing in his shepherding of the lost and lonely, the grieving and the hungry. The shepherd assures us that, when we follow where he leads, he fills us with grace upon grace until our cup runs over with abundance of life, not just for now, but for world without end, where he lives and reigns, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Amen.