Easter 4 May 3, 2009

Easter 4
May 3, 2009
The King of Love My Shepherd Is

In the Gospel according to Mark Jesus goes away in a boat to a quiet place with his disciples. This was to be a break, a much-needed “retreat” from the clamor of the crowd, a time for quiet prayer and reflection. But the crowds get word of it and follow him overland.
Jesus could have asserted his right to a few days off. But he looked at them, and the Gospel says, “he had compassion for them because they were like sheep without a shepherd . . . .”
I don’t know why, but that line always grips my heart.

“Like sheep without a shepherd.”
Many of you know we raised goats for quite awhile. “Goats without a goatherd” doesn’t have the same force, because goats without a goatherd would be just fine. The “queen” goat would gather the herd and troop them off quite happily and efficiently into the woods or into the neighbors’ gardens.
But sheep left alone are—to switch the barnyard simile—like chickens with their heads cut off. They’ll panic, they’ll bolt every which way, even off cliffs
It’s the same for humans, isn’t it? In movies, when King Kong or Godzilla gets loose, the crowd scenes are always great—people running every which way. Unfortunately in real situations—fires, earthquakes, bombings—crowds in panic lose their minds, and push and trample one another in their race to safety.

3. “Like sheep without a shepherd.” The phrase brings up some deep and conflicted longings: on the one hand a desire to be independent, to “run wild” vs. a craving to be cared for, to be guided and directed, to put down my date book and cell phone and lap top and acknowledge that I am not ultimately in control..
Maybe that tension is why the 23rd Psalm is so powerful even today. As a pastor (and—did you know?—the word ‘pastor’ in Latin means “shepherd”) I use it frequently. Except for the Lord’s Prayer, it is the most powerful prayer I know.
At funerals of strangers, at least of a certain age, I know that many of those people gathered in mute sorrow in the funeral home parlor need to say something that touches their deepest selves. Sometimes the funeral director has taken me aside and let me know about conflicts that divide the families or other unhealed sorrows. The people gathered together in that room need to do something, say something together that will join them together, bring down the barriers, at least for a few minutes. What do we say together? The 23rd Psalm.
At our monthly Offenders’ Program Eucharist, we begin with silence, then a hymn, and then our congregation of damaged, socially ostracized men, the lepers of our time, say in unison: “The Lord is my shepherd, I will not want.”
Susan Andrews, a Presbyterian minister, tells a moving story about the pastoral power of the psalm. She writes: “25 years ago, St. Elizabeth’s Hospital in Washington, D.C. was a federal facility with more than 4,000 psychiatric patients, most of the poor and black. As a chaplain intern I was assigned to the cancer ward, where certain death added an extra layer to the human despair. One day I entered an isolation unit to find a wretched shell of a human being—legs and arms chewed up by gangrene, sweat pouring out of a shaking, stinking body. ‘Dear God,’ I thought, ‘what can I possibly say to this man.’
“The answer came intuitively. The words of the 23rd Psalm suddenly welled up within me. As the familiar cadence filled that putrid room, the creature before me changed. He stopped shaking. He looked into my eyes and began to speak the words with me. In that moment, he traveled back home, back into the rooms of a long-lost faith. When this child of [God] died an hour later, he had been welcomed by a loving God who had never left him.”

That family numb with grief and regret, those sex offenders who will never return to freedom, that man dying in the cancer ward of the psychiatric hospital had probably lived his life like a sheep without a shepherd, all open themselves to the grace of God’s transforming love when they breathe these words:
He maketh me to lie down in green pastures;
He leadeth me beside the still waters. He restoreth my soul.
And: Thou preparest a table before me in the presence of mine enemies,
Thou anointest my head with oil,
My cup runneth over.
Surely goodness and mercy shall follow me all the days of my life,
And I will dwell in the house of the Lord forever.

Now we’ve got to be aware that there are shepherds and shepherds.
There are, alas, managerial shepherds whose concern is for the bottom line: x number of good fat wooly sheep brought safely through lambing and kept from wolves. The managerial shepherd’s motivation is basically “success.” This sort of shepherd is strong on authority and organizational skills. He/she runs a tight ship. The sheep keep safe, sure, but unfortunately may be tempted to cull the underachievers, the weak, or the misbehavors out of the flock. If you belong to this shepherd’s flock, you probably are a sheep who’s always a little anxious, trying hard to shape up.
The Psalm and the Gospel paint a completely different picture. This shepherd’s passion is to provide for the sheep not just an adequate life, but abundant life! The sheep in the psalm sit down to a meal of oats on a fine tablecloth and lap up clear water from a silver cup while frustrated wolves look on from afar. This is a shepherd who isn’t embarrassed by the weak, the vulnerable, the hungry, the scared in his flock. Instead, this shepherd loves them best!

There two contrasting shepherds portray two very different experiences of God in the Judeo-Christian tradition. The first can be simplistically described as God as boss. God as boss is the manager, the scorekeeper. The God who keeps performance records on each one of us. A “shape up or ship out” kind of God.
This isn’t the God we meet this morning. The God we meet this morning in the poetry of the psalm and in the person of Jesus?—this God loves each of us extravagantly! This is an outrageous God who cares for each individual precious one of us. Who knows each of us by name—Susan, Paula, Matt, Dan . . . . . Loves us—weak, strong, rich, poor, profound, silly.
This is the image of God as not the boss, but the lover.
Now this is not necessarily the image of God we were raised with! In my tradition, I was not made to feel loved, to feel special in God’s eyes.
But that’s not the truth about God. God is the lover, God is the caring shepherd. As a favorite paraphrase of Psalm 23 expresses it:
The king of love my shepherd is,
Whose goodness faileth never;
I nothing lack if I am his,
And he is mine for every.