Good Shepherd – By Another Road

Urgency: A Sermon

I preached this sermon on May 11, 2025 at St. Anne Episcopal Church, West Chester, OH. The lectionary text cited is John 10:22-30.

I have been told many times throughout my life (as I am sure you have been, too) that patience is a virtue. My track record with that is mixed at best.

Especially in springtime. Most years when I was growing up, right about this time, when the May afternoons become warm and breezy and filled with the scent of mown grass and flowers, I felt anything but patient—because the promise of summer felt so close, so tantalizing! Everything felt possible. Patience? Who needs it? That was something for boring old grown ups—I wanted freedom and sunshine and ice cream cones that dripped on the sidewalk and those long, campfire-scented nights when we listened to the old stories and sang the old songs. I was impatient, impatient for all of it.

And then a bit later, like some of our graduating teens whom we are celebrating today, you start to feel a new form of impatience for “real life” in the world beyond childhood, when you get to make your own decisions and mistakes and discoveries. The May of senior year of high school is sort of an icon of impatience, though usually a joyful one.

But frankly, as I have become more and more like those boring old grown ups, I’ve discovered that the whole patience thing never magically materialized with age. There are still so many things that I want–eagerly and anxiously–things I do not want to wait around for forever. Because as you go along through life, you realize the preciousness of time, the preciousness of experiencing everything you can, while you can.

And you also notice the deep needs and challenges and pain of the world around you, too, and you start wonder whether “patience is a virtue” might’ve been something coined by those who simply want the rest of us to be quiet and give up our dreams and our collective agency. In our own lives and in our common life in this world, more often than not what I really find myself wondering is not how to be more patient, but what, on earth, we are waiting for? Let’s go!

I love life too much, I love the world and the people in it too much to wait on truly being alive in it. So I think today, I think now, I think in all truth I am interested in the virtue of urgency. The virtue of loving, compassionate urgency.

Some of the personal circumstances of my life are surely shaping that feeling, but to be honest, I think I am still and always have been that kid who is eager for freedom and sunshine and sweetness, and I think most all of us are, deep down, in our own ways. The problem, the fundamental problem, is not that we are impatient—it is that we are too willing to wait. We are too willing to forestall what is truly important. We put off waking up and seeing the beauty and the goodness that we were created to be and called to build in the name of God.

So yes, I want to seek the virtue of urgency. Urgency to do something real that contributes to God’s kingdom. Urgency to love without discrimination. Urgency to listen and respond to the people around me, like Jesus did. Urgency to stand up to what is wrong and dishonest and harmful. Urgency to be the sort of person who is unashamed of the Cross of Christ and who is unabashedly confident in the promise of his Resurrected Life.

And I think that is what Jesus wants from all of us, really. Now, I know that patience is named as a fruit of the Holy Spirit in Scripture, and there are indeed times when we must slow down and seek the capacity to endure, to persist, to trust in God when we can’t see the road ahead.

But more often than not, I think Jesus wants us to get a little more urgent in our discipleship: in our living and our loving. A little wilder, a little bit more free. A little bit less like a boring old grown up and more like what we once were and still are—an open heart, running down summer sidewalks, licking ice cream cones and chasing stars.

Note this morning’s Gospel passage. Jesus is walking in the temple, a very serious grown up sort of place. He is approached by some Jewish leaders, and they have an urgent, rather insolent question for him. “How long will you keep us in suspense,” they ask. A better translation of the Greek is, how long will you keep wasting our time? If you are the Messiah, tell us plainly.

And you can’t really blame them. They have good reason to be impatient. They are not just longing for summer freedom, they are longing for true freedom—from oppression and suffering and exploitation. They are impatient for hope. And I think we all know what that feels like, we who have had too much of disappointment.

But as is so often the case, it’s Jesus’ reply that I find so compelling. You might think he’d say, now, now, my brothers, wait and see. Patience is a virtue. You’re just gonna have to be quiet and hold tight and buckle down til your salvation comes.

But that’s not what Jesus says. He is, instead, equally insolent, equally blunt. I have told you. You want a Messiah? You want salvation and liberation? I have told you all about it, and you do not believe. I’m waiting on you, my brothers and sisters!

I am standing here, I am standing here, Jesus says. I am God, standing here asking you to do something, anything other than sit around waiting for God’s Kingdom. I am asking you to live the Kingdom with me now, to build it with me now! I am God standing here, just as impatient as you are for the healing of the world. That’s why I came and why I am willing to die and to rise again. I am God standing here with my love and my life and my Spirit poured out for you like an ice cream cone melting in the summer heat, asking you to taste of its sweetness. Asking you to urgently live a life shaped by love and justice rather than patiently waiting for someone else to do it for you.

Thanks be to our urgently loving God.

And with all due respect to patience is a virtue, I do not want to be patient for the things of Jesus—the things of truth and beauty and goodness in this world—and I don’t think you should be either. If someone comes through our red doors, let them come away saying, wow, those people are not waiting around on the Good News. They’re running with it! They’re doing it! They are living with compassionate urgency and my God, what if all of us did that? How different things could look.

And if we are going to be the sheep of the Good Shepherd, then let us be the wild unruly sort, the kind who are utterly impatient to run through summer fields and to bless the earth as we stumble along through the flowers. Let us cause a stir for love’s sake. Let us make a bit of a mess for righteousness’ sake. And when people tell us to be quiet and shut up about love and to just be patient for the Kingdom, let’s do what all good sheep do—let’s not listen. Let’s chase it, right now. Let’s help it spring up, right now. Let’s never stop.

And sure, maybe we all start to look like boring old grown ups after a while. And I definitely can’t eat ice cream like I once did. But oh, oh, in here, in my heart, I am still trembling at the promise of springtime. I am still wanting to huddle in close to the firelight and hear the old stories and sing the old songs. I am still wanting to chase the stars and make my own discoveries and for all of us to be free. All of us, together, with Jesus, our Shepherd, leading the way.

So if patience is a virtue, I am still looking for it. Maybe I’ll find it some day.

But in the meantime, you’ll find me out there somewhere, running towards summertime. Running towards love. Running towards the God who is always, always running back towards us.

It is May. Everything is possible. And we’ve all had enough of waiting. So let’s go.

Shepherd/Lamb: A Sermon

I preached this sermon on Sunday, April 21, 2024 at St. Anne Episcopal Church, West Chester, Ohio. The lectionary text cited is John 10:11-18, Jesus speaking about the Good Shepherd.

I don’t remember the first time I saw an illustration of the Good Shepherd, but it’s one of those images that, even if you grow up with only a marginal relationship with Christianity, you just sort of know about. It’s been depicted in so many formats, in visual art, in music, more so than almost any other image of Jesus, other than perhaps the Nativity or the Cross.

In the little Lutheran church in Michigan where my grandparents belonged and where I’d venture as a boy on summer mornings, there was a massive, colorful stained glass window above the choir with an image of the Good Shepherd, and if you close your eyes you can probably imagine it: the green trees and billowing clouds; the smiling shepherd and the snowy flock of lambs.

As a young child, looking up at this image, bathed in the dappled sunlight that streamed through the window, I assumed that this is who God must be: a protector and guide; he of the watchful eye and gentle heart, the one who will not leave us, the one who is soft light and green grass and a warm, safe place to fall asleep when night falls.

But it’s difficult, because as time goes by, we are faced with reminders that life is not a stained glass window. Wolves still prowl the landscape, just out of the frame of those gauzy, glowing images of the Shepherd and his lambs, and sometimes they pounce.

And when this happens, when the ones we love are snatched away, when we are scattered, and when we feel lost, suddenly the whole proposition of a shepherding God who hovers protectively behind us, ensuring our safety, preserving us from barren places, might feel like a cruel joke.

If you have ever asked or been asked by someone, “where was God when ____ happened?” you know what I am talking about. In such moments, those stained glass images can lose their luster, and feel more like a fantasy than a promise kept. We would be lying to ourselves and to God if we did not admit that this is sometimes the case. And it’s ok to ask those questions, because God knows we have all had our share of dark nights and howling wolves at the door.

This week, St. Anne lost a beloved member of our own flock far too soon. This is not the first time our community has faced such a loss, but it is also true that when someone like our dear friend Spencer Pugh is taken away so suddenly, without any opportunity to say goodbye, it can feel disorienting, and all of our words about the God who protects and watches over us can feel a bit hollow. How could such a thing happen? Where was God when we needed him?

But all of us must grapple with these questions eventually, because these questions are what emerges when we get honest about faith, when stained glass windows can’t tell the whole story, when platitudes are no longer adequate to address the complex mixture of grief and joy that deep love and deep relationship require of us.

We ask these hard questions when we grow up and realize that anodyne images of the Good Shepherd tending a flock of placid sheep do not tell the whole story of God’s presence and activity in our midst, nor do they fully capture the way of life that Jesus has offered us.

Here’s what I mean. Think of that image of the Good Shepherd again. Call it to your mind. Ask yourself: where is God in that picture?

Who is God in that picture?

Who are you, in that picture?

When we start out, as I did as a kid in that Lutheran church, this seems pretty obvious. God is the Shepherd, we are the sheep. And this is partly true.

Because long before Jesus even came into the world, God was a shepherding God. When Jesus says, I am the Good Shepherd, as he does twice in this passage from John, notice that he is using the same name for God that was uttered to Moses, the unspeakable name usually translated as I AM WHO I AM. I AM the Good Shepherd.

I AM, the ancient and eternal God, is the Good Shepherd, because God, from time immemorial, has always been the one hovering over creation, tending and watching and calling us by name, seeking to guide us through wilderness places and call us back even when we are stubborn or foolish or lost like sheep, stumbling under the weight of our waywardness and loneliness and our unanswerable questions.

But that’s not the whole story. That’s not all there is to this image. Because there’s something different about God in Jesus. Something surprising.

What I have come to realize is that in the image of the Good Shepherd, Jesus is actually, ultimately, the lamb in the picture. He is the lamb who was slain. He is the lamb who lays down his life. The lamb who bears the wound of our waywardness and our loneliness and our questions. The lamb who gives himself over to the wolf. The lamb who takes away the sin of the world. The lamb who dies and yet lives again, so that all of the rest of us might do the same.

So where does that leave us in this picture?

I could not have understood such a thing as a child, when I simply needed a God who would always lead me beside still waters. But now, with every twist and turn in the stream, with every loss and hard question that comes along, I have come to see what I did not, what I could not back then:

That there is something far more serious and yet also more hopeful in this image of the Good Shepherd than platitudes about a God who will always keep us safe, when we know all too well that life and love are not always safe or certain.

Instead, we discover that in Christ, in our baptism, in our particular living participation in the aliveness of Jesus, God has done a new thing: he has traded places with us. He has made us the Shepherds, now.

And he, God, has entered into the small and the weak and the vulnerable parts of creation, he has become one with the lambs and the lost and he has now said to us, my children, my own precious heart, you will be saved, but not by means of a stained-glass window sort of faith. Not by easy answers and ever-gentle paths.

You will be saved by the love of the least of these. You will be saved, day by day, by the care YOU give, by the protection YOU provide as a shepherd, as a guardian, as a companion and a friend. You will be saved by the number of small things you learn to call by name. You will be saved by taking your share, now, in the shepherding that God has always offered.

You will be the one who says, now in Christ, I AM the Good Shepherd. And I will stand up to the wolf at the door, and I will help tend to this fragile earth and its fragile creatures, and I will lay down my life for you, my sibling, my neighbor, my friend, because salvation is not a pursuit free from danger, but is the unfolding of a love stronger than death. And now we have been given a Shepherd’s heart, and the Lamb who is God is the one we carry with us on the road, and together, we pray, we will all get where we are going, and no one will be lost because we won’t abandon them.

People like Spencer lived their lives as shepherds like this. And even when they’re gone from our midst, they serve to remind us all of our shared calling, our responsibility to be part of the answers to those hard questions we ask, and to labor in the hope of that world first glimpsed in stained glass: the one with the green trees and the billowing clouds and the dappled sunlight, where the promise of life everlasting is not a cruel joke, where justice is realized, where love reigns, and where the wolf no longer prowls.

Are you ready for that work? Are you ready for that world?

As God once said, and as we are now invited to say back: I am.

Both Shepherd and Sheep: A Sermon

There is so much I could say and need to say about the experiences of the past few weeks, but I just don’t have the words at the moment. In the mean time, here is a sermon I offered yesterday, April 23rd, at my placement churches: St. Mary’s Mirfield and St. John’s Upper Hopton. The text is John 10:11-18, wherein Jesus describes himself as the Good Shepherd.

As many of you know, I have been given the privilege of living and studying in the UK for the past few months as part of an exchange program between my seminary in California and the College of the Resurrection here in Mirfield. Getting to know the people and the landscapes of West Yorkshire has been a joy, but when we were given a break after Easter, I was eager to go a bit further afield. And so I boarded a train to Scotland, determined to see as much as I could in a week. And sightsee I did—I saw medieval cityscapes, glorious cathedrals and museums, Highland lochs, the holy island of Iona in the Inner Hebrides….and sheep. Lots and lots of sheep.

Scottish sheep really have it made, as far as I’m concerned. They are free to roam across those dramatic Highland landscapes, munching on wild grasses and heather, disturbed only occasionally by the odd passing tourist gawking out of a train window. And while I was gawking at them, I noticed something interesting, which perhaps you have seen, too: the sheep are all marked. They have splashes of color painted onto their fleece, some green, some blue, some red. I looked this up later, and I learned that these colors all have a practical purpose—they are called “Smit Marks”, and they are used by the sheep farmers to keep track of which sheep belong to them. Since the countryside is open, and the sheep can roam wherever they like, these markings are a quick means of identification when it’s time for them to be gathered back in for shearing, etc.

The Scottish sheep, with their vibrant Smit Marks, were lingering in my mind’s eye as I pondered this week’s Gospel passage from John, in which Jesus describes himself as the Good Shepherd caring for his flock. It’s such an evocative image, isn’t it? One that is deeply ingrained in our idea of relationship with God—through the recitation of the beloved 23rd Psalm, in church art and in hymnody. It is an image of protection and guidance and self-giving love: the Lord is my Shepherd, I shall not want. The Good Shepherd lays down his life for the sheep. For us.

And we are marked, too, are we not? Not with a streak of color on our backs, of course, but we have our own Smit Marks, indicating to whom we belong—they were placed on us in the water of baptism and the oil of anointing. As it says in my favorite line in the service for Holy Baptism that we use in the Episcopal Church, we are “sealed by the Holy Spirit…and marked as Christ’s own forever.” No matter where we wander, no matter how far we stray into shadowy valleys or foreboding wilderness, we bear the mark that tells us who we are, and by Whom we are guided—Christ, the Good Shepherd, who stands on the brow of the hill at dusk and calls us home. It can be hard to see and the path is often rocky, but His lantern is lit for us to follow—it burns in the sanctuary of every church where his Eucharistic presence is encountered, and it illuminates every place where we, the people of God, pray and minister in His name.

It’s remarkable what you can discern from looking at a field of sheep!

There’s a catch, of course. If we were to simply bask in the image of Christ as the loving Shepherd and ourselves as his beloved flock, we’d only be getting part of the picture. Because Jesus is more than a model of a capable guardian and overseer; in fact our faith depends on the fact that he is much more than this. As Saint Augustine asked, “What sayest Thou, O Lord, Thou good Shepherd? For You are the good Shepherd, who art also the good Lamb; at once Pastor and Pasturage, at once Lamb and Lion.” In the mystery of his death and resurrection, which we continue to marvel at this Easter season, we cannot forget that Jesus the Shepherd is also, paradoxically, the paschal lamb who was slain, who was given, if you’ll allow me to stretch the metaphor, his own Smit Mark by the Father to fulfill the plan of human salvation, and who was called home through the valley of the shadow of death in his glorious rising to new life.

This is the One whom we encounter in sacrament and prayer and service. The Shepherd who is the Lamb. The Lamb who is the Shepherd. Whose death was, in the light of the Resurrection, not a demonstration of God’s failure to care, but proof that God will do anything to gather us close into a merciful embrace.

If we follow this train of thought, though, there is one missing piece. Because if Christ is both the Good Shepherd AND the Lamb of God, then we, as people who share in his life, also share in this dual identity. We cannot merely see ourselves as sheep to be protected. As much as I envied those Scottish sheep in their pastoral idyll, I knew I had to continue on my journey, that I could not linger in the field. There was much to see, and much yet to be done. So it is for all of us. If we believe, as St. Paul claims, that it is not we who live but Christ who lives in us, then the Good Shepherd is the One who lives within us. The One Who must guide, and seek out, and yes, even lay down their life at the feet of those whom they serve. He is the one who animates our very beings. In the same moment that we are the beloved flock, you and I are also the brave, good shepherds of God’s mission. We were marked as such on the day of our baptism, when we were knit into Christ’s body, and it is an indelible mark. It cannot be undone. It is our vocation, each and every one of us.

So as we approach the table to take part in the banquet feast of the Lamb who was slain for us, let us remember the deep bond that has drawn us here, the bond of a Good Shepherd calling his flock back to him for rest and renewal. But let us remember, too, that by taking Him into ourselves, we have been transfigured by His abiding presence into shepherds. And so we, too, must seek the flock. We too must measure the worth of our lives by the amount of love we are willing to risk pouring out. We, too, must walk the landscape, lighting the way to guide others into safety.

The world is vast, more vast even than those Highland valleys, and there are many who are seeking home. Let us take up our staffs, light our lanterns, and call out. And may the Good Shepherd within each of us provide the words to pierce the silent gloom, to bring near those who wander towards the light.