Sermons from St. Paul’s Episcopal Church

The Fourth Sunday of Easter, 2007
The Lamb is the Shepherd
Deacon Richard Buhrer

Alleluia, Christ is risen. The Lord is risen indeed, alleluia.

“…The Lamb at the center of the throne will be their shepherd, and he will guide them to springs of the water of life, and God will wipe away every tear from their eyes.”[1]

We live in a world of horrible violence. This is not news, I know. Virginia Tech, Iraq, daily we are assaulted with news of new suffering and death, where the least of the sisters and brothers of the Lord are lost, sacrificed for ends not their own. There seems to be an endless river of tears to be wiped away. Into just such a time as ours, the Lord came as one of us. Jesus came to redeem the world

The images of shepherd and sheep are scattered throughout the Old Testament. “For he is our God, and we are the people of his pasture, and the sheep of his hand. O that today you would harken to his voice!”[2] Granted the pastoral roots of the Hebrew people, sheep were a very familiar, even omnipresent experience. Through selective breeding from the Stone Age onward, sheep have been, if you will, created by humankind, for our convenience. Bred to have little initiative and to instinctively flock together in a group, they are easy for human beings to control and to exploit. They provide a renewable source of meat and milk and clothing for the tribe. They are also a source of sacrificial victims for the demands of the Law of the Old Testament.

In the Gospel of John, John the Baptist is the first to call Jesus “the Lamb of God.” This Lamb is the sacrificial victim par excellence, the one who takes away the sin of the world. He is also the shepherd of the sheep, who hear his voice and follow him. The shepherd enters by the sheep gate, that is, he comes in as one of the sheep, as one of us. The sacrificial Lamb is, in fact, the shepherd of the sheep.

What does this mean for us as lambs of his flock? In part it means that we are safe, spared from sacrifice; none of us will be lost forever. The Book of Revelation often frightens us with its vision of cataclysmic doom and destruction, obliterating the stars of heaven and the air and water of the earth, bringing this world too a violent end. We easily wonder if our fundamentalist sisters and brothers are right in reading the signs of the times as signals of the immanence of this catastrophic end.

But the book was written to be both a challenge and a comfort to the churches in seven cities in Asia Minor during the reign of Nero Caesar. The challenge was to not be co-opted by the cultural imperialism of Rome—to retain their integrity as Christians in the midst of a hostile world, to resist without resorting to violence the incursion of values foreign to the Kingdom of God. The message of comfort is that all will be well with these Christians in spite of conflict and persecution. Today’s reading from Revelations is an example of this:

After this I looked, and there was a great multitude that no one could count, from every nation, from all tribes and peoples and languages, standing before the throne and before the Lamb, robed in white, with palm branches in their hands.[3]

“Robed in white” means that they were dressed as priests in the Temple and “carrying palm branches” means that they are celebrating the cosmic feast of Tabernacles—the ultimate fulfillment of the prophetic expectation of salvation for God’s people.

Then the receiver of the vision asks for an interpretation from one of the participants:

Then one of the elders addressed me, saying, “Who are these, robed in white, and where have they come from?” I said to him, “Sir, you are the one that knows.” Then he said to me, “These are they who have come out of the great ordeal; they have washed their robes and made them white in the blood of the Lamb. For this reason they are before the throne of God, and worship him day and night within his temple, and the one who is seated on the throne will shelter them. They will hunger no more, and thirst no more; the sun will not strike them, nor any scorching heat; for the Lamb at the center of the throne will be their shepherd, and he will guide them to springs of the water of life, and God will wipe away every tear from their eyes.”[4]

In the Gospel today, Jesus reiterates the same message:

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. My sheep hear my voice. I know them, and they follow me. I give them eternal life, and they will never perish. No one will snatch them out of my hand. What my Father has given me is greater than all else, and no one can snatch it out of the Father’s hand. The Father and I are one.”[5]

It’s amazing to me that when Jesus says “What my Father has given me is greater than all else.” We he says that he is, among other things, talking about us. We are supremely important to Jesus and to the Father.

We are utterly and completely loved and cherished and we are ultimately, completely safe—protected from any enduring injury from evil and death. Since we have access to the water of life in Jesus and are heirs of eternal glory, we have really nothing to lose, nothing to fear.

Because of this we can afford to risk everything in the service of the world should God call us to this witness. As sheep of his pasture we share with him in this service of the world as sacrificial victim—we are called by our baptismal vows to pour ourselves out for the salvation of the world.

How do we do this? I’m sure you’ve all heard the phrase “Commit random acts of kindness and senseless beauty.” I went looking on the web for the story behind this phrase: It turns out that Dr. Chuck Wall, a professor of Educational Administration and Marketing Management, was looking for an assignment to give his Human Relations class at Bakersfield College in California when he heard a local radio announcer talking about yet another random act of senseless violence. "I remember thinking, 'Is this the new definition of the news?'" he recalls. "A group of kids doing wonderful things ... sadly, that isn't news."

That phrase - "random act of senseless violence" - intrigued Wall, who imagined turning the negative message into a positive one just by changing one word. When he returned to the classroom the next day, he shared with his students their next project: Commit one random act of senseless kindness. At the time, Wall had no idea what the efforts of his class would bring. Nor could he know that his minor change in verbiage would result in a catchphrase that would spread across the country - and the world - like wildfire. "You would have thought we discovered human kindness -- that no one had ever come up with the concept of being kind to another," he says.

The fact is, however, that social mores have changed, and even the simplest gestures, such as holding open a door or helping someone with their bundles, have taken a backseat to a more guarded - and more isolated - way of being. The beauty of Wall's concept is that it has a ripple effect. Like a tiny pebble cast into a lake, that initial 'ping' fans out far and wide. "One person can make a difference," says Wall, now President of his worldwide organization, Kindness, Inc., Random Acts of Senseless Kindness. "I'm the living proof."[6]

The story of Dorcas the widow in the Book of Acts which we read today is an example of this practice of kindness. Widows were utterly expendable in the culture of the ancient Middle East. Without male relatives they were left to starve or sustain themselves through prostitution. In the midst of the Christian community, a cadre of widows formed. They lived lives of prayer and service, protected within the heart of he church from the indifference of the surrounding culture. We read of this group in today’s story. Dorcas’ fellow widows, mourning her death, show Peter the cloth she wove and the garments she made to be given to others (random acts of kindness and senseless beauty). Peter prayed with her body and restored her to life (another random act of kindness).

We are more than surfeited with random mad acts of violence like Virginia Tech. But the answer is simple beyond belief—we just go through our lives a step at a time attending to our sisters and brothers and being kind to them. No big deal. No great effort. This will create in us habits of kindness, so that kindness becomes simply what we do, who we are. Then if we are challenged to acts of heroic love, we will have become strengthened by our practice and will be able to enact the kindness of Christ in ways that we cannot now imagine. This is what happened to Peter. This is what can happen to us.

So we (like Dorcas and her sisters and like Saint Peter) are called to cast these pebbles of love into the waters around us and using these tiny ripples, to start a wave of change in our sin-sick world. We are called to rest in the green pastures into which the love of Christ has led us, to drink deep of the still waters. This way we can traverse the valley of the shadow of death without fear, we can embrace the rod of discipline and the staff of security, and extend the love of Christ throughout the world in the tiniest interactions of our daily lives.

The Lord is our shepherd. We shall not be in want.