21 April 2013              “The Voice of the Shepherd”                     John 10:22-30

   There are questions that matter. Why would someone bomb and kill and injury innocent people at the Boston Marathon? Why would a fertilizer plant in the town of West catch fire, explode, and kill and injure scores of people? Why when 90% of the American people want expanded background checks on gun sales would our elected officials act against those wishes? Why are we having life threatening illness, changes in life we did not expect  and do not understand? Where do we turn? To whom do we find comfort? We struggle to find answers.

 On the other hand, we have clear answers to some of our questions. There has been grace extended as health has been restored, as grief has received comfort, as time has healed, as blessings to family and friend have been realized.

  On the one hand we ask questions that leave us shaking our heads, dazed and confused. On the other hand answers jump out at us. This world and it’s questions defy simplicity and cry for relevancy.

 What do we do with this tension between the horror and despair and cries to God, “Why, Lord?” and the way we believe the world should rightly be, mixed with comfort and joy, hope and peace?

 Many before us have weighed in on the conundrum between our days of hell and our days of holy joy. Where might we find a wise heart to parse our fears and feelings this morning for our world is at it again. Creating worry, fear, pain, sorrow, and anger at the injustices.

 Thomas Merton, the well-known and gifted American Trappist monk, has written of his desire for such a wise heart. On a holy day in December he wrote of his effort through his rediscovery of Lady Julian of Norwich. I shared one of her best known quotes in last Sunday’s sermon.

   Julian wrote of her revelations; first experienced, then thought, then lived simply as she explains being saturated in the light she had received all at once.

  One of her central convictions is what she calls her  hidden dynamic progress which is at work already and by which she could say, “all manner of things shall be well.” This “secret,” this act which the Lord keeps hidden, is really the full fruit of the Parousia, a term used for the coming of Christ, most usually focused on the second coming or future advent as indicated in the Nicene Creed: “he . . . will come again.”

 For Julian, It is not just that Jesus comes, but Jesus comes with a secret to reveal. He comes with his final answer to all the world’s anguish, his answer which is already decided, but which we cannot discover (and which, since we think we have reasoned it all out anyway) we have stopped trying to discover.

 Julian’s life was lived in the belief in this “secret,” the  “great deed” that the Lord will do on the Last Day. Not a deed of destruction and revenge, but of mercy and of life. All partial expectations will be exploded and everything will be made right. It is the great deed of “the end,” which is still secret, but already fully at work in the world, in spite of all its sorrow, the great deed “ordained by Our Lord from without beginning.”

 So our tension between the way the world is and the way we wish the world to be, whether in Boston or the town of West, or the quiet of our own home: is settled in the “wise heart” that beats strong in times of hope and in times of contradiction, in sorrow and in joy, fixed on the secret and the “great deed” which alone gives Christian life its true scope and dimensions! The wise heart lives in Christ. The great deed is God’s son made man. Jesus Christ our Messiah.

 The wise heart, Jesus, lives in the tension between what we cannot understand and the grace evident in our lives. We live him, there in between the horror and the hope. This truth, as David Johnson points out, is primarily an honest and sober self-analysis as a response to grace, made in the assurance that there is healing and hope.

 Jesus came into our world with a secret to reveal. He spent his life teaching and performing miracles that we might learn his secret. But we are slow and suspicious learners.

 The Jews, for their part, asked Jesus in the midst of his obedient life, “How long will you keep us in suspense?” Like us, they want to know, “If you are the Messiah, tell us plainly.”

Jesus’ answers like the exasperated parent, “I have told you, and I have told you and still you do not believe. The works that I do in my Father’s name testify to me; but you do not believe, because you do not belong to my sheep.”

  In Palestine today, Bedouin shepherds bring their flocks to the same watering hole their forefathers used. There is a certainty about this scene – the sheep know when and where to go when their shepherd calls them. Once there they look for him, find him, take comfort, and settle into their life. Safe and reassured.

 This is the image Jesus uses as he is walking in the portico of Solomon, the oldest and most sacred part of the Temple of the Jews. They ask Jesus the question burning in their hearts. Who are you? They were not confused, they had heard about his life, they knew of his teachings and his miracles, they simply did not believe his answer!

   Jesus knew their question was loaded. He knew they were really trying to pick a fight, to argue with him and accuse him of lying. They believed the Jewish King to come would be a warrior king, a political messiah. Jesus did not meet their expectation.

   So, Jesus answers their question by speaking the truth about who they are. He tells them they do not believe because they have no real relationship with God.

   So how will Jesus answer our questions this morning? Does he sense our questions too are loaded. We know who Jesus is, this is 2013 and we have been believers for a long time. But we want to know about Boston, and exploding fertilizer plants, and political decisions that leave us angry.

 For our part, we do firmly believe Jesus to be the world’s Christ, the firm and final Messiah. We do believe. But the world blows up and people die. The world is filled with disease and hate and hurt between people. We do believe, but “Why, Lord?”

  We belong to this human race and today it seems the hand of God is someplace else. We feel like we are the lost sheep with no shepherd to guide us home. We feel like we are just another number in the mixed up flocks this world offers.

   The world offers so many flocks to choose from. Many flocks with very appealing things to offer. Ways to make us look healthy and well-tended to. Flocks for the better bred where we might be in better company with better surroundings. All sorts of different flocks looking like they belong and they are not confused or mixed up about to whom they belong. They belong to this world. With safe and satisfying appearances. Join them and we will be safe for all times.

   Then comes the time to go home and the shepherds of sin and greed and selfishness and envy and power call their sheep. And we stand unmoving. We wait for the moment when we might recognize our shepherd.  For surely our life is not dependent on one of these other shepherds. But on days like today we do not see our shepherd. We see fear and hurt and pain. Yet we cry, “Which one is mine? Where do I belong? What do I believe?”

   Jesus said, “You do not believe  because you do not belong to my sheep.” Do we not belong to God? Is it our doubt, our sticking points, our questions which seem to have no answers that separate us from the Good Shepherd? Who keeps us out? Is it God, or do we do it all by ourselves?

   Christian literature is filled with all sorts of claims about what it means to believe. Some say that believers are never at a loss for words. We know what we believe and why and do not struggle to profess our faith. We say that believers are in constant touch with God. So, we are seldom in doubt or afraid and we live with the confidence that we are in God’s hands.

 We say that we worship God in all sorts of places and all sorts of ways and find worship a meaningful experience. We say that we live like Jesus lived and show the world our faith every moment of every day in the words we say, the way we treat one another, the certainty we have about how and where and what it is God wants our lives to be like.

  Are these really your beliefs? Is this what you think it takes to belong to the flock of the Good Shepherd? If so, please stop!

 Please stop exiling yourself because beliefs like this are so unrealistic. If we believe our separation from God is because we do not pray enough, or witness enough, or read enough theology, or visit the sick, or even come to church often enough. If so, please stop!

 We must stop exiling ourselves from God and allow ourselves to belong simply because God says we do.

   This truth is here in this morning’s Gospel. Jesus does not say that we are in or out of the flock because of anything we do or do not do. Or because our world seems to be falling apart. Our presence in the life of Christ has not one thing to do with our ability alone to believe or belong based on whatever moves us this morning or not.

 In fact, Jesus says that our ability to believe depends, not on us, but on whether we are already chosen, by God alone, to be in God’s kingdom as children of the flock of the Good Shepherd, Jesus Christ.

  There is every reason this morning to believe that we are such chosen children, if only because we are sitting right here.

  And let it be said, there are no perfect sheep here this morning. There are no perfect sheep anywhere. That is why we need Jesus as our good shepherd.

   With this truth before us we should add another answer to our questions about believers; We can say this morning, as many before us have said, that the way true believers believe is the way most of us believe; valiantly on some days and pitifully on others, moving mountains some days and not moving enough on others to even get out of bed.    Most of the time the best we can do is to live “as if” it were true and when we do, it all becomes truer somehow.

   God does know what is in our hearts, sometimes even before we know what is there. You see, that is what a relationship is like. About matters of the heart and where the heart is so goes our lives.

   Our true belief, our wise heart tends to show up in our actions more than in our words. How we live our lives and with whom and where, doing some things and not doing others, who we include and which choices we make matter.

   Yet life is life and some days we feel firm about our faith and some days we are like lost sheep. Some day’s sadness stops everything but our tears. But God is certain of us all the time and there is nothing on earth we can do to change that.

  So, let us be patient with ourselves, and with those around us too. Above all, understand that you belong here, as part of this flock. For whatever reason, God has brought us to live in the life of this good shepherd, Jesus Christ.

 Because we believe in him or want to believe in him, because there is something about this good news that he brings to the world that has attracted us to him there is evidence that each of us belong to God’s flock of dependent sheep.

 And we hear his voice on occasion, and he knows us, and we follow him, and he protects us, and guides us, and keeps us out of lasting harm’s way, and offers us eternal life, and we shall never perish, and no one will ever snatch us out of his hands.

  And all things will be well.

In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit, one God, now and forever, Amen.                               

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