The Good Shepherd Goes for Green!
Lectionary:
Acts 2: 42-47
Psalm 23
1 Peter 2 19-25
John 10 1-10
What a great text the 23rd Psalm gives us for Earth Day, as we think of the immediate clean-up of cigarette cartons and candy wrappers in our neighbourhood, and we ponder ways to resolve the longer-term environmental problems of our planet! The Good Shepherd goes for green! He does not ask us to lie down in a mercury-contaminated estuary, nor does he lead us beside the foaming waste of a dioxin-filled spawning channel. No! The Psalmist raises a hand to his harp and softly chants:
“The Lord is my Shepherd, I shall not want,
He maketh me to lie down in green pastures:
he leadeth me beside the still waters.” Psalm 23
1-2
The pastoral theme that dominates the familiar lines of the 23rd Psalm finds a parallel in the less familiar pages of the 34th chapter of Ezekiel. It recurs again in John’s account of the teachings of Jesus, and in Peter’s first epistle. It offers a beautiful, almost a mesmerizing image. And it has inspired much wonderful music, whether the Glasgow Orpheus Choir singing “Brother James’ Air” or in the great arrangement by Nancy Price and Don Besig, which our choir presented so effectively this morning. It is easy to become hypnotized by the poetry of this passage. But we need to reach beyond its tranquil beauty, and understand the underlying message.
For starters, the shepherd does not meander around a peaceful valley. Sheep are creatures of the hilltop. Ezekiel tells us “On the high mountains of Israel shall their folds be” (34 14). In the book “I bought a mountain”, Thomas Firbank dramatizes the hard life of a sheep farmer, as he faces the hazards of lambing amid the winter storms and snows in the mountains of Snowdonia during the late 1930s. And if the flock should chance to strays down to the marshes, they become very vulnerable to foot and mouth disease. Perhaps for this reason, the Egyptians thought sheep an abomination. When Joseph wanted to settle his family in the Nile delta, he told them “When you get to immigration, tell them you are in the cattle business, and forget about the sheep” (Gen. 46 34).
But in fact, sheep rearing is one of the oldest industries in Israel. The Jewish people bred a thick-woolled, black-headed and fat-tailed variety of sheep, Ovis lati-caudatus, a creature well-adapted to the rigours of Israel’s hill-tops. The best-dressed men of the day wore a ram’s skin dyed a fetching shade of red (Exodus 25 5). The ram was the sacrifice prescribed for the trespass offering, for the new moon, and for the day of atonement, and the fat of its tail was a part of the peace offering to Jehovah. And the ewe lamb was the domestic pet for the poor Jewish child.
So it continues to this day. If you take the dusty road from Jerusalem to Jericho, you can still see small groups of men, now calling themselves Arabs rather than Jews, as they lead their sheep over the barren hillside in search of grazing. In my view, this is an important problem underlying the Israeli/Palestinian conflict. As with many of our indigenous peoples, the Arabs have no written title to their land. Whether on the hills around Jerusalem or at the Sun Peaks resort in BC, all too often the green pasture is suddenly seized to build a new road, a hotel or a block of condominiums.
When I received a phone call from Ian Kent on Monday night, indicating that Chris Burnett was unable to take our service today, he suggested that as my name was Shephard, I was the obvious person to fill the hiatus. I was tempted to tell him that more than 50% of our community have had experience as shepherds at some time in their lives, usually in a Christmas pageant or play. We had a wonderful group of shepherds on stage here in the production of “Celebrate Life” last weekend, and if you want to see some of your older neighbours playing a similar role, just take a look at the historical pages on our church web-site. But dramas and pageants sometimes give us a false image of the shepherd. The shepherd is exploited to give comic relief to an otherwise serious theme. I have memories of being conscripted as a shepherd for a Christmas Play in Salisbury and faking a rustic Wiltshire accent. My most memorable line was “I’m getting so stout, I can scarce see below my waist”. I remember also “We be but poor shepherds, Master, an’ we be fair ‘mazed by them angels an’ all”.
When Jesus talked about the Good Shepherd, he seems to have been in Jerusalem, celebrating the Harvest Feast of Tabernacles. He had just faced a stinging criticism from the Pharisees, after healing a man who had been blind from birth. And I don’t believe he was thinking of the shepherd as a weak-kneed buffoon who was afraid either of angels or of hypocritical pharisees. Rather, he drew on the literary patrimony of the Shepherd-King, seeing a real outdoor person; a leader; someone who could brave the highest peaks through snow and ice, looking for a lost sheep; someone willing to defend the flock with his life (John 10 11); a man who could rescue “from the mouth of the lion two legs, or a piece of an ear” (Amos 3 12).. So, in his imagery, Jesus lampooned the Pharisees as blind and faithless shepherds. In contrast, early pastors of the church were seen as faithful Shepherds of the flock.
Jesus told his listeners “I am the door of the sheep” (John 10 7). This verse conjures up memories of my boyhood in North Wales, of summer days spent roaming the barren moorland, and of eating a quick sandwich as we sheltered from the savage wind in a crofter’s fold near the peak of our climb. Often, we rested behind no more than a one metre wall of naked shale and rock, with just a narrow gap where we and the sheep could enter or leave. I suppose Jesus must have tramped the hills of Judaea, finding shelter in just such a structure. Because there was no door to the fold, the shepherd himself was forced to guard the flock against brigands and prowling beasts by sleeping across the entrance way throughout the hours of darkness.
Notice that Jesus says the good shepherd leads his flock both into and out of the fold. Most of the trails around Squamish are pretty well-worn and easy to follow. But on a hillside where sheep have been grazing, little paths lead in every direction. Without a good shepherd as guide, it is very easy to wander astray; as Jeremiah puts it (Jer 50 6-7), .”..from mountain to hill they have gone, they have forgotten their fold.” and “all who found them have devoured them.”
Jesus wants to lead us into the safe, protective fold of his church on a regular basis. But in the secular environment of post-Christian Squamish, there are so many little side paths that compete for our attention at 9.30 on a Sunday morning. There are children to take to hockey or to soccer. After a week of commuting to Vancouver, it is tempting to sleep in and have a leisurely breakfast, or even to get away for the entire weekend. And every other day of the week, there is again so much that competes with our commitment to Christ- our drive for success, our desire for material things, the expectations that we have for ourselves and for others. These are the thieves of our twenty-first century that steal faith and kill the wandering sheep. Do we listen to these distracting voices from our secular world, or do we make the time to follow Christ into the fold of the church, where we can find strength from the Shepherd and comfort and warmth from other members of the flock?
There is not too much to eat in your average sheepfold, so each morning the Shepherd must lead the flock out to pasture. The opening verses of the Twenty Third Psalm suggest we are going to have it pretty easy, as we are taken to green pastures, and are led by still waters. We feel a warm glow as the Psalmist goes on to sing about restoring our souls and leading us in the paths of righteousness. After five days of meeting office deadlines, and beating the traffic on the Sea-to-Sky highway, we could use a bit of restoring. And who doesn’t enjoy a quiet feeling of righteousness? So I was very struck with the translation of “paths of righteousness” that I found in the Jerusalem Bible: “sentiers de justice”. The Good Shepherd is not leading us down the road that leads to the good times of a Harris-style “Common-sense revolution”. Rather, with more success than Pierre Trudeau, he is pointing us along the narrow pathway to a Just Society.
Here, we begin to see the link to our reading from Acts. The early church is filled with the spirit and excitement of Pentecost, as it embarks on the wonderful experiment of creating a just society. The idea was simple. Since we are all equal before God, we must put our possessions into a common pot, and draw from this resource as members of the flock have need. One expression of this limitless sharing was the Agape, the great love feast of a pot-luck supper that accompanied the communion celebration. Now you may object that, in essence, this was communism, and the last fifty years have taught us that communism doesn’t work. And in a sense you are right. Things went along just fine for a while. Then two of the new converts, Ananias and Sapphira, began to worry- “What happens if the money runs out before the Lord returns?” (Acts 5 1). So they trotted off down to their financial advisors and got a few solid investments tucked away before giving the small change to the apostles. And in other churches, the love feast degenerated into a drunken orgy, with some of the congregation eating all of the food before others arrived. Paul described the church in Corinth with despair: “one is hungry, another drunken” (1 Cor 11 21).
Over the years, other idealists have tried to create just societies. And unfortunately, they have encountered similar problems. In the early 1800s, the nine-year old Robert Owen began work as a cotton spinner. Somehow, he prospered amidst the satanic darkness of the early industrial revolution, until he became owner of the New Lanark cotton mills. He decided to buck the trend to exploitation of child labour; he suggested it would make good business sense to think of the welfare of his employees and their children. So, he kept his mills in good condition, he built model communities for his workers and their families, and he set up schools for their children. However, the British government turned a deaf ear to his pleas for more “villages of cooperation”. He left for the United States, built a model community there, and was disillusioned and bankrupt within two years.
In more recent times, we have seen Marx, Lenin and Engels, with their visions of state-and police-imposed equality. But anyone who visited Russia during the communist years will have seen the reality of this vision- the Ananiaskoviches and Sapphiraskas of the elite enjoying their large houses and large limousines, while the ordinary population waited 15 years after marriage to be given a tiny, 100 metre2 apartment. During this era, a friend who lived in Prague said to me “Communism would be a great idea if men were angels. The trouble is that they are not”.
I think my friend had diagnosed the key to all of these endeavours- if a change in social environment is going to work, there must also be a change of heart. Initially, the communal living of the early church was a wonderful success, because the whole congregation was filled with the vitality, the infectious hope and the enthusiasm of an Easter people. Other revolutions have inspired such slogans such as liberté, fraternité and egalité. But for the early church, the big, powerful word was koinonia, or fellowship- a tremendous sense of togetherness, cemented in a common meal. The sharing of possessions was no state-imposed communism. E.J. Bicknell commented that we libel the early Christians if we suggest that their generosity was driven simply by a belief in the early return of their Lord. This was the spontaneous impulse of a people so filled with the Holy Spirit that they truly loved their brethren as they loved themselves. The most remarkable feature of the newly founded church was the place it gave to charity or love. In an abundant display of fellowship, the church was bringing to life the characteristic behaviour of Christ Himself. The sharing was marked by the joy and glad fearlessness of a group that were a “new creation”, at one with themselves, their fellows and their Lord. They were no longer afraid of running out of cash, nor did they fear the valley of the shadow of death; they knew that God was going to prepare a table for them, even in the presence of their enemies (Psalm 23 6).
We often talk of the need for social justice during our “Minute for Mission” here in Squamish. On Earth Day, we are reminded that the need for such community goes beyond the sharing of our meat and potatoes. We are stewards of the whole earth, and its resources must be shared equitably and responsibly if our planet is to survive. It is easy for us to criticize as poor stewardship the current construction of 2 million dollar holiday homes at Whistler, to be used only one or two weeks in the year. But if we walk the talk of social and environmental justice, our message will impinge the lifestyle of everyone in North America. It it is not just the greed of the ultra-rich that is destroying our atmosphere- the problem arises from the ever-growing material demands of ordinary people in Canada and the US. In the words of Isaiah 56 11-12
"The dogs have a mighty appetite; they never have enough. The shepherds also haveno understanding; they have all turned to their own way, each to his own gain, one and all. “Come,” they say, “let us fill ourselves with strong drink, and tomorrow will be like this day, great beyond measure.”
The 23rd Psalm ignores one part of Ezekiel’s message that seems relevant to our current environmental concerns. The verse in question almost foretells the intensive sheep-rearing practices of modern New Zealand, as it points to the consequences of our relentless search for more:
“Is it not enough for you to feed on the good pasture, that you must tread down with your feet the rest of your pasture; and to drink of the clear water, that you must foul the rest with your feet? And must my sheep eat what you have trodden with your feet, and drink what you have fouled with your feet?... Behold, I, I myself, will judge between the fat sheep and the lean sheep.” Ezekiel 34 18-20.
If we are to get beyond the quest for more and more good pasture to trample, as we njoy the so-called “good life” and systematically destroy the beauty of our world, we must first know the joy of new creation. We must become an Easter people, filled with an urgent desire to share our space on this planet. Only then,
"The tree of the field shall yield her fruit, and the earth shall yield her increase, and they shall be safe in their land, and shall know that I am the Lord..." Ezekiel 34 27
May the Good Shepherd lead us to that reckless joy where we stop counting the cost of environmental accords, and learn in love to share the whole of your wonderful world.
AMEN.