What It Means to Be Who We Are

This sermon was heard at the First Presbyterian Church in Marhsall, Texas on Sunday April 29, 2012, the 4th Sunday in Easter, also traditionally called "Shepherd Sunday."

Podcast of "What It Means to Be Who We Are" (MP3)

Acts 4:5-12

Psalm 23

1 John 3:16-24

John 10:11-18

May the words of my mouth and the meditations of our hearts be acceptable to you, O Lord, our rock and our redeemer.  Amen

I just finished reading a memoir by a gentleman named Dale McCurry.[1] In the introduction he talks about his life in the Ozarks in the 1990’s. He had a good business, a lovely wife, and two beautiful children. They lived in the dream house that they designed with the big porch, bay windows, and dormers; all on 37 acres with a river bluff view. They were living the kind of life that every successful businessman wants for his family.

In the book, McCurry discusses things people have called him over his life. He laments that he never had a “good nickname” like “Butch.” He was always just Dale.  Then seven months after the birth of his daughter, he became Da-Da, soon followed by Daddy. Daddy evolved into Dad and when the kids were playful he became Daddy-O. His children gave him his next name, his grandchildren who call him Pop.

But all too soon, the good life came to an end. He uprooted his family and moved to Eureka Springs, Arkansas in 1998. He calls it a time “in exile, a refugee from a good life gone bad in Southwest Missouri.”

He fled the good life because what had begun as “a rather inventive method of raising venture capital” degenerated into a Ponzi scheme. His life went from running an environmental company to putting out little financial brush fires and bigger investigative queries.

Beginning in late 1999 McCurry was incarcerated in a series of prisons in Forrest City, Arkansas and Beaumont, Texas. Not long after he began his stints in these big houses, McCurry pitched a crazy idea to a new weekly newspaper in Eureka Springs called The Lovely County Citizen. He proposed to write columns for the paper called “Letters from the Pen.” McCurry says the intent of the column was neither an inventory of sins nor a tale of remorse. Instead he saw it as a tale of redemption, a process of self discovery. The book is the collection of these columns.

One column notes that while he was in prison he got some new names. One of them is the number that followed him from his time in the penitentiary to the half-way house and finally in supervised probation. Other convicts gave him other names. There was the generic “Dawg.” To other Ozark denizens he was “Homie.” Some of the younger convicts looked at his gray hair and took “Pop” away from his grandchildren. Since he taught GED classes in the prison library he was also known as “Teach.” Readers who could not remember his name addressed letters to McCurry as “Jail Guy.”

He also received the name “Curly MacRed,” an anagram of Dale McCurry, because federal convicts can’t have a newspaper byline. Who knew?

Each of these names parlayed a different meaning. They were the same man, but in different roles, different phases of life. Some names referred to a young man, some to an older man, some to a free man, some to a man in prison. Some names transcended life phases, others were terribly specific. Each of these names helped define who he was and what it meant to be him at any given moment. This is true of the names we all carry in our daily lives. Wonderfully, this is also true of our Lord.

We’re used to hearing “the Good Shepherd.” In this case when we hear the word “good” we have a feeling that it means more than just “average” or “adequate.” In this case, the Good Shepherd means more than “the great” or “the wonderful” or even “the stellar” shepherd. This is the exemplary shepherd. This is the shepherd par excellence. We use phrases like King of kings and Lord of lords to describe Jesus. In this same vein it is proper to call Jesus the Shepherd of shepherds.

There are few images more beloved in Christian scripture than the Good Shepherd. Of course we love the shepherd. The shepherd is the one who cares for the sheep; the sheep belong to the shepherd’s fold. And as we are told here in John’s gospel, the shepherd knows his sheep and the sheep know the shepherd.

But still, given the status shepherds had in ancient society, this isn’t much of a complement. Comparatively, in our culture, to call someone the Good Shepherd—even the Shepherd of all shepherds—is like calling someone the exemplary migrant worker.[2] In the day the shepherds were the youngest and dirtiest of the little boys. So to call someone a shepherd is to call someone a menial laborer with no status or standing, not the family patriarch. Certainly not the Son of God Almighty.

One of the things shepherds bring to mind is the Children’s Christmas Pageant. This reflection on the pageant comes from Ralph F. Wilson, Director of Joyful Heart Renewal Ministries.

Angels are clean. Angels are beautiful. They seem almost otherworldly, since girl angels always seem to know their parts better than boy shepherds do. The angelic satin stuff goes pretty well in most Christmas pageants. The problems come with the shepherdly burlap part.

Wilson continues:

Do you know what real-life shepherds were like? Townspeople looked down on them. “Herdsmen!” they’d huff derisively. Shepherds would work with sheep all day, sleep outside with the animals at night and then come into town dirty, sweaty and smelly, like the boys they were. Tradesmen in the marketplace would be polite enough. Shopkeepers would wait on them, but everybody was happy when they moved along. Burlap fits the part.

Angels get clouds and the Hallelujah Chorus. Shepherds get a stable. Maybe cattle lowing has a bit of romance; but don’t forget to conjure up the smells and the filth. This is no stainless steel dairy palace; it’s a crude cave of a barn, with good reason for straw on the floor. Not exactly the setting you'd choose for a birth if you had the luxury of planning ahead.

Angels seem appropriate to the birth of God's son. Straw and sweat and burlap don’t seem to have the same place, but they are actually more appropriate for the birth of the young boy named Jesus.[3]

As connected as we are to the imagery of the shepherd, we must be connected to not only its beloved image, but its scandalous one too. Shepherds were boys, they weren’t men. They were young and not honored. They had a very dangerous job. The pens they guarded were without gates as we know them; the boys themselves formed the gate. When a predator comes to get the sheep, they have to go through the boys first.

This is where comparing the shepherds to migrant workers falls apart. The migrant is a hired hand who moves on to the next crop after the harvest. Putting your life on the line is not expected of the hired hand.

Fighting off the wolf at the door is not mercenary territory. If the workers are in it just for the denarius, they won’t be willing to put themselves on the line when crunch time comes. Someone working for coin can never be expected to put their life on the line. When the demon is at the door, you don’t want the butler to answer, you want family. This is the importance of the son as the shepherd. This is the importance of the Son of Man as the Good Shepherd.

In biblical times, many different shepherds would pen their sheep together overnight.  When it came time to separate the flocks to take them to their grazing areas, the shepherd would call out and his sheep would follow. The sheep wouldn’t follow a shepherd they did not know. The Good Shepherd tells those with ears to listen that they are not the only sheep in his fold. He tells them “I have other sheep that are not of this pen.”

Jesus the Good Shepherd, the image is forever in our minds, but it’s time to look beyond our idyllic vision and see that it means more. Jesus tells the world that he is here to care for, not to be cared for. Jesus protects and defends his flock, not vice-versa. His work involves getting dirty, not being put on a shelf or worse a pedestal. Where in fact shepherds call their own sheep, in truth Jesus calls all of the sheep to his pen, the single pen that is not too small to hold the world. This is who Jesus says he is. To Jesus, this is what it means to be the Good Shepherd.

So who are we? Well let’s begin with something that might be disturbing to Christians, Jesus was not talking to “people like us” in our reading today. The people Jesus is addressing are named in John 9:40. With his discussion of the Good Shepherd and the sheep fold, Jesus is responding to the Pharisees. Israel is the sheep who know the voice of the Good Shepherd. The people who are Jesus’ own are the Jews, not us. 

So often as Christians we think of ourselves as the Lord’s first love, and we are not. We are the “other sheep that are not of this pen,” at least that’s who we are right off the bat.

We aren’t the first, but with thanks and praise to the wondrous loving faithfulness of our Lord, we are next. It is together, not as separate peoples or different denominations but as the assembled children of God that we hear the voice of the Good Shepherd. When we hear the voice of the Shepherd we come together as one flock. 

And it is for the shepherd’s love for his flock that he lays down his life. Every time the shepherd fills the gate, he protects the sheep from predators, predators that would think nothing of a skinny little boy before getting to the fat sheep. From the Easter story, we too know how this pertains to us. On his own accord, with his own power and authority, Jesus lays down his life for us and picks it up again three days later.

We sing to the wondrous loving faithfulness of the God who comes and walks among us as a simple man; the God who voluntarily empties himself of his glory and takes upon himself the dangerous work of the shepherd; the God who not only lays down his life, but picks it up again for us. God incarnate lays down and picks up his life again voluntarily. He does this as the father has commanded. The Son of God and the Son of Man does as the lowliest shepherd boy, he does as his father commands, even unto death.

The Hebrew word for the love of God is hesed. Hesed is bold and unpredictable. It is unorthodox and unbound by convention and culture. It is a love which only God is capable; it is a love we are called to imitate and follow. We are called to be immersed in the hesed of the Lord. Only by first being immersed in this wondrous loving faithfulness can we share it with others.

Biblical scholar Carolyn Custis James writes hesed is “driven, not by duty or legal obligation, but by a bone-deep commitment—a loyal, selfless love that motivates a person to do voluntarily what no one has a right to expect or ask of them.”[4]  By the wondrous loving faithfulness of Jesus Christ we are saved; saved by who he is and what being who he is means.

Our reading from 1John reminds us that as Christ laid down his life for us, we ought to lay down our lives for one another. Our response to God’s hesed, God’s wondrous loving faithfulness, is expressed by the Reverend William Sloane Coffin who said “duty calls only when gratitude fails to prompt.”[5] We are to faithfully respond to the love of God in thanksgiving.

A review of “Letters from the Pen” begins, “[This book] has nothing to do with correctional facilities or the experience of being held in a correctional facility. It is about being held as a prisoner, but the prison can be constructed of anything that ails us.”[6] Dear friends, we are all trapped in our own little prisons of what ails us. The only way to escape the penitentiaries of our own making is to listen for the voice of the Good Shepherd who calls us from our self inflected pens, and upon hearing the voice following.

That’s another important thing to remember: Sheep are led by a shepherd who goes before them. Jesus is the exemplary shepherd which means there is no one else worth following. We are the sheep and that means we are the followers. Let us follow the shepherd who knows and calls us by name, because only in Christ can we ever know what it truly means to be who we are.

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[1] McCurry, Dale, “Letters from the Pen.” Eureka Springs, AR: Boian Books, LLC, 2007

[2] Feasting on the Word, Year B, Vol. 2, David L. Bartlett and Barbara Brown Taylor Eds.  Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 2008, pages 448-453.

[3] Ralph F. Wilson, "Burlap, Boys, and Christmas," The Joyful Heart, December 23, 1997, www.joyfulheart.com found at HomeliticsOnline.com, http://www.homileticsonline.com/subscriber/illustration_search.asp?item_topic_id=1661, retrieved May 2, 2009.

[4] Custin James, Carolyn, “The Gospel of Ruth, Loving God Enough to Break the Rules.” Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2008, page 115.

[5] Coffin, William Sloane, The Collected Sermons of William Sloane Coffin, The Riverside Years, Volume 1, Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 2008, page 354.

[6] Krotz, Dan, review of “Letters from the Pen” found at the Boian Books website review page, http://boianbooks.com/reviews.shtml, accessed April 28, 2012.