| May 6, 2001 Acts 13:14,43-52 + Revelation 7:9,14-17 + John 10:27-30 |
| It’s not about sheep nor shepherds. It’s about knowing and being known. It’s about relationships, mutuality, and the “art” of maintaining, nurturing, and building relationships that are lasting and life-giving. It’s about making our relationship with God through Jesus Christ the model and normative for all our relationships, which means of course, that our relationship with God is as important as our relationship with anyone else. |
| Without an agrarian experience providing the image for this day’s Gospel, we have to work a little harder to get the point, and we can’t stop and settle down with sentimental pastoral images of wooly lambs that individualize and privatize the image – we must also keep this image in the context of the flock. |
| To those without experience, all sheep look alike, and the prospect or really knowing one from another when there’s a large number of them is a challenge. At night, shepherds brought their flocks together, and take turns with patrol and watch through the night. They bang their staff and rattle things to keep away predators and make thieves aware of the vigilance. When day break comes, each shepherd has a special call which then disentangles the larger flock. The sheep know their shepherd, just as much as each shepherd know which sheep are his. There’s the point – mutuality |
| Every sheep is known by it’s shepherd, and eveiy one of the sheep knows which shepherd to follow. Those sheep know their shepherd’s call. They hear his voice and recognize it above all the other sounds and distractions around, and therein lies the challenge of this gospel and its invitation. The call is there, the voice is there. |
| Telephones ring; beepers summon us, e-mails arrive; spouses, children, careers, make endless demands on our time, energy, attention, dedication. We have homes to clean or to repair, meals too cook, newspapers to read, children to take to endless sporting events, and there are other demands we might not want to think about like drinking, gambling, drugs or the computer serving of pornography Then there’s eating, shopping, television, all of which are our little addictions adding to the cacophony of voices that drown out the Voice. It is so easy for us, unlike the sheep, to run to another call, or become so busy and distracted that we heed nothing but the noises of the sheep all around us a miss the call of our shepherd. |
| We are so quick to expect God to hear our call when there’s trouble, and we have every right to live with that hope, given the price that was paid for us, but perhaps the one who calls would like things to be a little more mutual, and for that reason, he speaks to us the words of this days’ gospel. For it is God who speaks these words to us, God who calls us, God who wants us. |
| In an endlessly busy world that does not slow down for a moment, a world in which even blessing over food before we eat can seem a rather quaint and uncomfortable custom, it is not surprising that it is all to easy for us to lose the capacity to pause, to reflect on who we are and whose we are, and above all else, ceaselessly, gladly, joyfully, listen. Yet, that is all that is asked of us, that we listen, to listen to the endless call to the water, to follow where ever he leads. That’s all he asks. Listen. |