Gospel Text: John 10:22-30

These days I’m working as a chaplain intern at Harborview. Because Harborview is a Trauma One hospital, we encounter death nearly every time we come in for a shift, so as a part of our educational process, we took stock of our own histories of grief and loss. We wrote all of the losses of our life down in the form of a Loss History Graph. And to get us started in the exercise, we were asked to mark the beginning of our lives by identifying our “dawn of conscious memory”—the first memory we could recall.

I love mine. It’s a simple memory: I am a very small child, perhaps three or four years old, and I’m resting my head on my mother’s lap, in church, looking up at an intricate wooden light fixture. I’m in church, resting in the lap of someone I trust completely, looking at the light.

And now that I’m pushing forty—and pushing it pretty hard—I think sometimes that my whole life seems to be an effort to get back to that moment. My mother died in 1996, and I’m certainly finding myself in church quite a lot, looking for the light, whatever that might be. I’m looking for … what? Well, for many things. And one of them, I think, is that state of perfect trust, and lovely security. That feeling that all is well, all is well.

And so, despite my skills and abilities and ambition—for I do have a lot of ambition!—I am also a sheep looking for a shepherd, like a small child who wants so much to rest in his mother’s lap and look up at the light.

“No one will snatch them out of my hand,” Jesus says in today’s Gospel, referring to his followers, his beloved ones. What a curious image of God! Often enough it is easy for us to imagine God as a mighty warrior, a rock, the tallest of trees. But in this image, we are clutched in God’s hand, and no one can snatch us out.

To open this up a bit, and lead us into a question for reflection, I want to bring us in our imagination to New Orleans, that great and troubled city. For nearly five years now I’ve been haunted by a photograph taken a few days after Hurricane Katrina—a photograph of a person who had been killed by the flood, lying face-down in the water, up against the edge of a curb. I have often thought, “No Christian can look away from this image without reflecting on it. What sense can be made of this tragedy? Where was God?” And today—Good Shepherd Sunday—I wonder this: “How was this person snatched from God’s hand? Where was her Good Shepherd?”

And I have three answers. First, as Christians, we hold that in Jesus God has experienced suffering, abandonment, and death. We place at the center of our faith the image of a dead innocent: on the cross, God in Jesus identified completely with our mortality, our fragility, our vulnerability to injustice. So answer number one is this: the hurricane victim’s Good Shepherd lies face-down with her in death, holding her not only when she lived, but even in her most terrible and mortal hour. Oscar Romero, the martyred bishop (that is, shepherd) of El Salvador who gave his life for the liberation of his people, said it this way: “The shepherd does not seek [his own] safety before he secures [safety] for his flock.”

Second, as Christians, we hold that God—understood most often as God the Father, though we can also call her God the Mother—that God is not unmoved by human suffering. God saw the suffering of the Israelites in Egypt, and sent Moses to rescue them. God saw the suffering of Jesus on the cross, and was moved to raise him from the dead. God is engaged, concerned, even agitated when God observes human suffering, and God responds to that suffering by sending God’s grace into the world. So answer number two is this: the Good Shepherd stands alongside you and me as an observer who cannot look away from this victim, who responds to this tragedy somehow. By holding our sister in remembrance, we—with God’s help—participate in God’s unfolding grace in the world. We can prevent further tragedy. We can hold innocent victims in prayer. We can live lives that are responsive to injustice. In all of this, the countless innocent dead can rest in God’s lap, and see the light.

Finally, as Christians, we hold that God the Holy Spirit moves like wind, like fire, through the world, and in this case, we can see the work of the Spirit in the response of so many good citizens to this tragedy. Katrina—and the Haitian earthquake, and so many other disasters—these are global events, events to which the Spirit responds by moving hundreds of millions of people into action. We cannot save this victim, but in her memory we can restore her city to life, and right the social wrongs that made the poor and marginalized citizens of her region—and the poor and marginalized across the globe—so much more vulnerable to catastrophe.

So my question for us this evening, for our reflection and your responses, is: how have you experienced the grace of the Good Shepherd? How have you rested in God’s lap, as it were, and looked up at the light? Or how have you seen that grace moving in your life, if you yourself have been a caregiver, a parent, an animal companion, a partner? (Can you hold your partner this way, or be held by your partner this way [“to have and to hold…”]?) And how do you think God is calling you into this close relationship? In short, how do you experience being held in God’s hand, being in a place where no one can snatch you away?

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