The gospel reading for the 4th Sunday after Easter speaks of Jesus as the Shepherd and the sheep gate, a very pastoral image. Yet, the image is unsettling for while the sheep are content to just follow we are far from being pacific. We think we know what's best for ourselves and are also easily swayed away from what is important in life by the temptation to do what is convenient and merely pleasurable. Despite this, Jesus continues to call us. There are four themes that present themselves:
1. My sheep hear my voice.
2. I know them
3. They follow me.
4. They are safe with me.
They seem to be self evident but what do they really mean.
Hearing and Understanding God's Voice:
One of the most difficult questions I am asked and which I ask myself on a regular basis is what is God telling me to do? Is what is going through my head really God's message to me of am I just fooling myself into thinking I know his voice.
Among my various tasks is helping individuals discern whether they have a call to priesthood. In my own case, I cannot say that I heard the message so unambiguously that I knew immediately that I should seek this office. I suppose that over time it just felt right like trying on a suit of clothes and knowing that they fit and felt good. But, is that God's calling or just finding a job I liked? The only way I seem to know what this is what he wants of me is to experience the response of every person whom I've served in the past 32 years. Yes, people laugh at my jokes and defer to the Roman Collar but it is much more than that. I am often amazed that people will come up to me years after I have celebrated a wedding or preached at their church and they will recount to me how something I said changed their lives. I am simply amazed that God chose me to touch someone's life in some way that they recognized His voice and felt safe.
How do you know God's voice in all the madness of the world? I suppose listening consciously, deliberately and wisely for his voice in the depths of our hearts is where we need to start. We need to listen to his voice in the love and joy, pain and anguish, cries for mercy and justice of those around us. And, hearing that voice, act on it.
I Know Them:
Probably one of the most frightening things is to hear in scripture that God knows us intimately. One of those odd Irish sayings seems most appropriate here, God knew you when you were just a twinkle in your mother's eye. For God, there are no secrets. He knows us in our waking and in our sleeping, in our doing and in our failure to do, he knows us in the very recesses of our hearts. I don't know about you but that scares the bee-jeeber's out of me. There are things that I've thought and felt about myself and others that are not so nice, not anything that I want God in particular to know about. Just like each one of us had our secrets from our parents, teachers, bosses, and whoever, we would be both embarrassed and shamefaced if they knew about these hidden things. Yet god knows and he still loves us with an intensity that is nearly impossible to believe.
My wife served as a minister of care at one of our local hospitals bringing communion to people once or twice each month. She and her mother went from room to room and held a little prayer service and said the Our Father before giving folks the sacrament. She told me it never seemed to fail that many begin to sob during the prayer and confess their unworthiness for God's love. Yet, when they receive the sacrament they seem to change from estrangement to joy. God knows them and loves them especially at that moment when they hear his voice and respond.
They follow me.
Following Jesus is the challenge we take on at baptism. Hearing his voice throughout our lives we hopefully find comfort in the fact he knows us and cares about us. While it is too easy to look back and say that those early Christians, like the Apostles, had it made that may be seeing the past with rose colored glasses. The Acts of the Apostles and the epistles are filled with admonitions on how to live as followers of Jesus. It was no simple task. Jesus didn't lay out a careful game plan. He just told the disciples "Follow Me," do what I do. Don't worry about the details, act according to the needs of the people you meet.
How are we following God's plan as Jesus tells us? Are we open to all who come to us? Do we, like Paul and Barnabas, challenge the status quo in the lives around us? Do we look into our own lives for ways to grow in the love of God, not just reacting to the needs we see but anticipating them?
They are safe with me:
Probably one of the biggest issues in today's world is safety. Turn on the evening news or read the morning papers and what you find is murder and mayhem. We are told that we need to go through elaborate screening at airports and public buildings to be safe. Most recently students, faculty and parents remembered the day a 23 year old man killed 32 others before killing himself in a hateful rage. Half the globe away suicide bombers in Iraq, men, women and children, blow themselves and others up in protest over perceived wrongs. How are we safe?
Safety, Jesus tells us, is in Him. The gospel writer tells us that Jesus will give us eternal life and we shall never perish.
Life we understand. Eternity is beyond us but we get the general idea. However, not perishing is a very interesting term. To perish doesn't mean not to die, it literally means not to de-compose, come apart. For some folk, death means the end, there is nothing after this. For others, it is means a melding in some giant globule of creation, losing our individual identity and becoming part of a greater whole. Jesus tells us differently, not just in words but in what happened to him.
There is nothing that can happen to us that will take us out of the loving care of the Father. He is greater than any and all things that can happen. They may think that by dieing we are destroyed or merged into some cosmic mass but that's not the case. We will be one with him just as Jesus is yet remain who we are as individuals, just better.
Our safety is not inbeing shielded from those things we cannot control but in knowing that that who we are will remain the same, always. That's real safety.
So, today we hear his voice, aware that we are known and loved, respond by acting as he asked us with the knowledge that no matter what we are safe in him. Believing this we can go forth from this place and let others know that same message.
