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.
By Another Road 