Easter 4, Year C
O God, whose Son Jesus is the good shepherd of your people: Grant that when we hear his voice we may know him who calls us each by name, and follow where he leads; who, with you and the Holy Spirit, lives and reigns, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.
(I preached a version of this sermon on Good Shepherd Sunday last year. The continuing refugee crisis moved me to keep at it again this year for my new parish.)
When I was a little girl, my parents
bought me a gerbil—a boy gerbil, supposedly, whom I named Barnabas, after the
Vampire hero of my favorite Dark Shadows
TV show. Imagine my 7-year-old shock when I woke up one morning and peered into
the cage, only to find my dear Barnabas as cold and stiff as a board, and a
litter of hairless pink gerbil babies huddled in a corner under the shavings. While
I cried and poked Barnabas’ lifeless body, my mother ranted about the pet
store’s gender deception. But my father—he took it upon himself to save the
orphaned babies. Leaping into action, he brought an eye-dropper back from the
NASA chemistry lab. He set his alarm clock to go off every four hours, even at
night, so that he could carefully squeeze drops of milk into the tiny round
mouths. And you know what? These gerbils survived! They did grow up rather
misshapen, suffering malformed bones from the cow’s milk, probably. But they
pretty much lived happy little gerbil lives ever after.
Psalm
23 makes me wonder what those orphaned gerbils thought about my father’s
caring, pursuing hands—big hands that were always there; strange,
incomprehensible hands that grabbed them suddenly and yet fed them tenderly. I
bet my gerbils would have written the psalm like this:
“The big hands belong to my master.
They take care of my every need. When I’m hungry, they bring a tunnel of warm,
sweet milk to my lips, milk that dribbles down over my chin, more milk than my
throat can hold. When I’m cold and shivering in a corner of my glass cage, the
hands caress my back, urging and guiding me back to the huddle of my brothers
and sisters. The hands bring back my life to me. I know that they will be there
when I’m hungry. I know that they will warm me when I’m cold. Even in the dark
of night, the hands are there. O hands of my master, you rub soothing salve
onto the itchy wounds that my nipping brothers inflict on my back. When my
stronger sisters push me away from the water bottle, you scatter them with a
flick of your fingers until I’ve had my turn. When it’s time to eat, you pursue
me around and around in the cage, never giving up until you cradle me in your
warm palms. May you always pursue me like this, all the days of my life. May I
always dwell within reach of the hands of my master.”
Psalm
23 is all about the connection, the intimacy, of loving care. It’s about a
caregiver who is in control, yet utterly merciful. We read it at sick beds and
at funerals because the psalm’s descriptions of rest and nourishment, its
reassurance of protection in moments of hardship and despair, are a universal
balm for which we all long. Recently, my 4th grade Biblical
Narratives students at Louisville Classical Academy were studying the Hebrew prophets
and the psalms. Some of these children don’t attend a church. They’ve never
heard most of the bible stories before and are unfamiliar with the images that
seem old hat to us. Not one of them, even the Christian ones, claimed to have
heard Psalm 23 before. And yet, when I asked them to draw their favorite image
from a varied sampling of Hebrew poetry, every single child drew about God as a
shepherd. These are 21st century American city children. They know about sheep only from Huber’s petting zoo,
and they certainly have never met a shepherd before. And yet, like us today,
they are drawn to an image of God as loving caregiver: God as One who faithfully
guides and nourishes us, with hands that Jesus promises us in our Gospel today
will never let go. “No one will snatch [my sheep] from my hand,” Jesus boldly declares.
In
John’s Gospel, when Jesus refers to himself as the “Good Shepherd,” he is
purposefully calling on the imagery of Psalm 23, imagery that he knows from
singing this psalm himself in worship. A better translation of the Greek,
however, is, “I am the Model Shepherd.” Here, Jesus describes himself as the
sound and right model of shepherding care: one that he intends for us to
imitate. Here, the language of individual comfort found in Psalm 23, expands.
Not only am I the precious, comforted creature, alone in the merciful hands of
God. I am also a creature in community, a community of beloved creatures, a
community larger than I can imagine. With Jesus as our model, we have a
responsibility toward our fellow creatures. Following our model shepherd, we
must be willing to give selflessly to those entrusted to our care, even at the
risk of our own lives. We are to connect with them intimately, knowing them by
name, caring for them individually.
How
interesting it is that Luke includes the detailed story of Dorcas in his
account of the early Church, the story that we heard today in our first reading.
We are given this woman’s name in both Greek and Hebrew, as if Luke wants to be
sure that we take note of it. We learn in detail about her death and the
immediate attention that Peter gives to her. But why? Dorcas’ deeds of charity
are small and simple. Her death is an ordinary one. Why do we remember over
2000 years later that she, of all people, was raised to new life? Precisely
because she provided the thorough shepherding care that Jesus models for us.
Indeed, Dorcas is the only woman in the whole New Testament who is called a “female
disciple” of Jesus.[1] In
the simple acts of clothing, soothing, feeding, and loving the poor widows in
her community, she is, herself, a good shepherd. Her hands reach out humbly to
those in need. And at her death, Peter reaches out his hand to her, “and raises
her.”
I
saw a video of Pope Francis raising up a sobbing girl at the Syrian refugee camp
in Lesbos, Greece, just this weekend.[2]
She is crouched at his feet, pleading and crying, as if she knows that he is
her last hope. Pope Francis, like his forefather Peter, takes her by the hand,
and lifts her up. A nameless child. A child without a home. A child
rejected by the rest of the world. A child caught in a living death. It made me think. I could picture the vast
throng of refugees, pursued relentlessly by war, pursued by hunger, pursued by
poverty, and chased by oppression, all flowing shoulder to shoulder like a huge
flock of sheep across continents. I thought of the unscrupulous wolves in
shepherds’ clothing who profit from their distress. I thought of the “valley of
the shadow of death,” in which thousands of people find themselves, corralled
into the holds of rickety ships and into the barren wastelands of refugee camps.
On
the one hand, I pray that they can feel the hands of their God cupping them in
that darkness. I find comfort in Psalm 23, for
myself, for these refugees, and for all who suffer. But on the other hand, I
clearly hear the challenge of our “model shepherd,” prodding me, pursuing me, to love the stranger, to
care for the refugee. As Jesus raises us, the unnamed, ordinary Episcopalians
of Louisville, Kentucky, to new life this Easter, he asks us to follow him as
loving, caring shepherds to all of those sheep who need his care. If my father’s
hands could doggedly care for a passel of orphaned rodents, trusting that they
have lives worth saving, shouldn’t I have the same determination to reach out
my hands in love to God’s displaced children?
