Who Speaks for God

Sermon by Rev. Steven McClelland on John 10: 11 – 18.  Focus on who Speaks for God and how to Know.  Check out Jody Sinkway and the choir following the sermon.

“What this country needs is strong leadership and good fiscal management.” I hear this all the time. It’s standard community talk. A.k.a.- political discourse. In the time of John’s gospel we might have heard someone say: “What Israel needs is a good shepherd. We need a good strong shoot out of the stump of Jesus.” (Isaiah 11) It was Israel’s way of saying we need good strong political leadership to take our country back from Rome. Unfortunately the shepherds Israel expected wasn’t the one God had chosen. Nor were they good.

Instead God chose Jesus who contradicted every expected expectation that was placed upon him by others. The shepherds of Israel, the political and religious leaders of their day were not caring for their folks – the sheep.

Just listen to Ezekiel 34: “Ah you shepherds of Israel you have been feeding yourselves! Should not shepherds feed the sheep? You eat the fat, you cloth yourselves with the wool, you slaughter the fatlings; but you do not feed the sheep. You have not strengthened the weak, you have not healed the sick, you have not bound up the injured, you have not brought back the stray, you have not sought the lost, but with force and harshness you have ruled them.” (vs. 1 – 4)

There are 20 more verses like this in Ezekiel and of course the shepherds of Israel knew these Biblical verses. They just chose to ignore them. Instead they focused on how great their worship services were, how righteous they were for staying separate from sinful people.

They would have said things like: “Well we have preserved the right to worship in our temple without the Roman Gods being in the temple. There are very few places in the Roman Empire that can claim that. The Romans are hard, but play by their rules and the Peace of Rome – the Pax Romana will work to our advantage. We’ve learned how to get along with Rome. Go along and you’ll get along!

This is the background that texts come from. There is talk of shepherds in the air during Jesus’ time. The Pharisees think their good shepherds and Jesus is a heretical one. They sit on Moses’ seat, meaning they believe that they alone can correctly interpret the Torah and what God requires. Hey Jesus who do you think you are? God’s good shepherd! He’s a blasphemer and delusional. That’s what Israel’s religious leaders thought of Jesus. Who is this guy who is telling us who is good and who is not. Who does he think he is?

The sheep of John’s church, ordinary folks like us, would have taken great comfort from these words in John’s Gospel and in his first letter. Jesus is the good shepherd because unlike any of the other shepherds during Jesus’s day, Jesus was willing to lay down his life for his flock. He is not some hired hand working for minimum wage that will abandon the folk at the first sight of trouble. No the good shepherd owns the flock. And he will do anything to save them from false shepherds who are really wolves dressed in sheep’s clothing.

So the question before us today is how do we live as sheep among so many wolves? How do we discern what is true and what is not? How do we see propaganda and emotional blackmail for what it is? How do we know that we are on the side of Jesus and not on the side of the Pharisees, scribes and Sadducees? Because history has not been kind to those who thought they were right because of their might.

Why do so many Christians support the use of torture? Why do so many Christians hate immigrants? Aren’t we all immigrants? Why do so many Christians spend so much time defending those in political power? Why do we love guns more than children?

John’s community lived in both fear and faith. They lived in fear because simply following Jesus could get you killed. Why? John says: “The reason the world not know us is that it did not know Jesus. But John’s community also held onto the fact that Jesus would not abandon them, that he would stand with them against the principalities and powers of their day, but not by using force. Instead they would employ a new weapon called love.

So how did they stay in Christ’s love and not devolve into the hateful culture around them? “For this is the message you have heard from the beginning, that we should love one another. We must not be like Cain who killed his brother or like those who hate their neighbors. The failure of love is a death sentence. When we fail to love something inside of us dies. And in time we forget how to love because our hearts have become hardened like Pharaoh’s.

As 1 John says: “we know that we have passed from death to life because we love one another. Whoever does not love abides in death. All who hate a brother or a sister are murderers, and you know that murderers do not have eternal life abiding in them.”

So in the face of bigotry do we hate? In the face of war do we rejoice? Or do we weep like Jesus over the fact that we have been killing God’s prophets since the beginning of recorded time? “We know love by this, that Jesus laid down his life for us and we ought to lay down our lives for one another. How does God’s love abide in anyone who has the world’s goods and sees a brother or sister in need and yet refuses to help?”

So we speak out against hateful rhetoric and political discourse that seeks to set the world afire with hate and fury. We seek to bring light rather than heat into the world we live in. How then shall we live? Where do we take a stand? How will we be remembered?

“Little children, let us love, not in word or speech, but in truth and action.” Rhetoric counts for nothing. Prayer and Bible Study count for nothing if we live our lives in opposition to God’s will and word as embodied in his son our Lord and the way he lived.

And the way we discern who a good shepherd is today in our midst is the shepherd who calls us to love rather than hate. To peace rather than war. To justice rather than anarchy. To the one who is Our Way, Our Truth and Our Life!

And when we follow Jesus’s example we find that our hearts are confident. My heart and my conscience can only be clear if I love. Otherwise I am one more sheep at the mercy of wolves, and unable to tell whom the good shepherd is. How do you want history to judge you? How do you want God to judge you?

Shall it be with anger and wrath or with the truth and love? Justice is what love looks like in society! Grace is what mercy looks like but only after we’ve been found guilty. Mercy always implies guilt! The cross of Christ is God’s judgment and the resurrection is God’s grace. Amen