B. Easter 4. 2009                                                                Christ Church, York

It is an amazing place, sitting as it does on the top of the hills above Elmira, New York. Surrounded by more than 1,000 acres of rolling fields, orchards and woods, it is that place where I love to go so that I can walk and think and pray and find again the spiritual center of my being which sometimes gets pushed aside or even lost in the rush of daily living. This is Mount Saviour Monastery where I go on retreat when I can, to join in prayer with the monks there, to sing the offices each day with them and to sometimes work with them in the fields. For while this is a place devoted to prayer and reflection, it is also a working farm and the main business of the monks at Mount Saviour is sheep. And I don’t mean just a few sheep – I mean hundreds and hundreds of sheep. In fact when I was there last October, one of the brothers told me that they had more than 800 sheep in various pastures scattered all over the hills around us.

 Now most of you know that I have had horses for much of my life and in the past I also worked on a cattle farm, so I am used to moving a herd of beef cows around. So when Brother Pierre asked me a few years ago to help move some sheep, I thought that this would not be too much of a problem. Brother told me that he wanted to bring the sheep in from the field to the barn and sort them out into various pens. He would be the one to go out into the field. I would be the one in the barn to do the sorting into pens. Not a problem…or so I thought. But very quickly I found that sheep are different from either horses or cows. Words like stubborn, ornery, cantankerous, rambunctious and reprobate all came to mind as I tried to coral those sheep into their pens…all to no avail. But then Brother Pierre came in from the fields where he had been herding the sheep toward the barn and within the space of just a few minutes he had them all in their right places. With a gentle word here, a whistle there, a name called over beyond, the same sheep who for me had proved to be so stubborn, became compliant and did that which the shepherd asked of them. But then he was their shepherd and they were his sheep. He knew them and more importantly they knew him and that really is the heart of our Gospel story this morning.

This image of Jesus as the Good Shepherd, which is always celebrated on the 4^th Sunday of Easter each year, this image is so ingrained in our minds that it is perhaps hard for us to grasp that this image has its roots back in the Old Testament where the prophets Isaiah and Jeremiah both spoke of God as a shepherd while Ezekiel warned the kings of Israel that they were not to exalt themselves too highly, for the Lord would come as a shepherd and scatter His sheep. But the most famous of the Old Testament texts is Psalm 23 known as the Good Shepherd psalm which we heard in our sung version this morning. So it’s not surprising that Jesus picks up this image and uses it in His own teaching, calling Himself the shepherd and the gate to the sheep pen. And it’s also not unexpected that the early Christians kept the same image, painting pictures on the walls of the catacombs where they were hiding for fear of the Roman authorities, pictures of Jesus as the shepherd tending His sheep. And as generations of Christians followed it is also not surprising that they also kept that same image, drawing comfort and consolation from the picture of Christ the Good Shepherd anxiously seeking out the lost sheep and carrying it home on His shoulders.

 But the image of the Good Shepherd as all beauty and light needs to be tempered by the images of danger and fear, elements that exist in our world today and even invade the placid hills of Elmira. For in those same hills doted with sheep lives the coyote – not that nice and sometimes hapless cartoon character but rather a tough, difficult and dangerous animal who will stop at nothing to come and attack the sheep in a manner not unlike those wolves of which Jesus speaks in our Gospel story this morning.

Jesus knows that there are many wolves in our lives, attacking us, tearing at the fabric of our being and circling the outskirts of our families. These wolves come in many shapes and sizes. There is the wolf of sorrow that appears when a life long friendship is broken or when a spouse is taken from us by death. There is the wolf of terror who shows himself when our company has been downsized, when we find ourselves without work and when there is little or no money left in the bank. There is the wolf of pain when disagreements happen within families, when brother is set against brother or children against parent. The wolves are all around us and perhaps some of them are already in the sheep-fold. We are surrounded by wolves both within and without. And the greatest wolf of all is the one with the jaws of death who snaps at our heels throughout life and who will one day come to claim each of us in God’s good time.

It is because Jesus knows of such wolves in the midst of our living that He speaks today of the Good Shepherd. None would be immune from the attacks of such wolves not even Jesus Himself, for the wolf of death will, in due time, try to clamp his jaws even onto Jesus Himself although he would not be able to hold on and in the end would be beaten and defeated by God. And having defeated that great wolf, Jesus now turns to protect those who know Him and follow Him. We know this Good Shepherd through the relationship we have with Him, the same sort of relationship that Brother Pierre had with his sheep, a relationship that enabled him to speak to them and guide them. And it was obvious that such a relationship was not something new. Rather it had been developed over time and in great familiarity so that there was an intimacy between sheep and shepherd that could not be replicated by one such as I who stepped in from the outside to try and tell those sheep what to do. It is such intimacy that we need to develop with our Good Shepherd, Jesus the Christ. Through the use of prayer, we will grow to hear His voice. Through the listening with our ears we will be guided by His call for our lives. By being gathered together with all the other sheep in communities of faith such as this we share in fellowship with each other and together feel His warmth and His love for us, especially through His Word spoken to us and His Body and Blood shared with us.

 In the intimacy that this Good Shepherd has with us we grow in intimacy with each other. Jesus had an intimate relationship with this One whom He called Abba, Father. And we have an intimate relationship with this One named the Good Shepherd. So now our Gospel calls for us to live that same intimate relationship with each other. The call upon every baptized person is to bring to the community the love that the Father when He made us His own children. And as children of the same heavenly father, as sheep together in the same fold under the care of the Good Shepherd, we are called to live together in love and peace. No one of us is the shepherd over the others, for the role of shepherd belongs to Christ and to Christ alone. But in and through the love that the Shepherd has for us, we too can share that love with each other.

For we do not forget that this love which the shepherd had for us was so great, that He was willing to lay down His life for His sheep. This is love unbounded; this is love supreme. And for that reason alone, we are called to trust the Good Shepherd and to live as one flock. So on this Good Shepherd Sunday let us once again heed the call of our shepherd, to grow in faith and trust and love of Him and to live together in love as one flock. Today the Good Shepherd comes once again to call His sheep and we, His flock are called to listen to His voice. The wolves wait in the world around us, circling the flock and waiting to pounce on the weak and the unsuspecting. But in listening the voice of the shepherd we will not live in fear of those wolves. Rather we will rest secure in the knowledge that by offering His own life for us, His sheep, we now live under His care and protection until that great day when even the beauty of the sheep doted Elmira hills will be lost in the beauty of the great flock of Christ gathered from the four corners of the world into the safety of His eternal sheepfold where we will graze forever at the great banquet feast of the Lamb. Amen