United Methodist Church Hyde Park, NY

THE VOICE OF THE SHEPHERD
John 10:22-30
 
A shepherd is herding his flock in a remote pasture when suddenly a brand new BMW advances out of a dust cloud towards him. The driver, a young man in an Armani suit, Gucci shoes, Ray Ban sunglasses, and Yves St. Laurent tie, leans out the window and asks the shepherd, “If I tell you exactly how many sheep you have in your flock, will you give me one?”
 
The shepherd looks at the man, then looks at his peacefully grazing flock, and calmly answers, “Sure.”
 
The young man parks his car, whips out the latest communication device, and in a series of actions I don’t even begin to understand, calls up a GPS satellite navigation system, scans the area, and receives an ultra-high resolution photo. Finally he turns to the shepherd and says, “You have exactly 1,586 sheep.”
 
“That’s right. Well, I guess you can take one of my sheep,” says the shepherd. He watches as the young man selects one of the animals and bundles it into his car.
 
Then the shepherd says, “If I can tell you exactly what your business is, will you give me back my sheep?”
 
The young man thinks about it for a second and answers, “Okay. Why not?”
 
“Clearly, you are a consultant,” says the shepherd.
 
“Wow! That’s correct,” says the young man, “but how did you guess that?”
 
“No guessing required,” answers the shepherd. “You showed up here even though nobody called you. You want to get paid for the answer to a question I already knew. And you don’t know anything about my business. Now give me back my dog!”
 
One thing that is made very clear in the tenth chapter of John’s gospel is that Jesus is not a know-nothing consultant; he is a shepherd, the Good Shepherd.
 
We’re familiar with the image of the biblical shepherd – crook in hand, flowing robes, and Middle-Eastern head covering. We recall the stories of a young David, tending his father’s flocks alone in the cold, battling lions, and bears, writing psalms under an open sky.
 
But consider the modern shepherd in New South Wales, where cutting-edge technologies are being applied to this age-old industry. Ranchers attach tiny GPS transponders to the ears of baby lambs, and as these sheep grow up, they can be “watched” from a computer monitor.
 
 
 
Throughout the day, sheep move freely from grazing areas to drinking areas to sleeping areas. As they pass through narrow channels between areas, their transponders alert the shepherd to where they are going and when. Electronic scales within each passage can weigh each sheep as it passes by. Side gates open to send a fully grown sheep to a yard for those animals headed to market, a pregnant ewe near birth weight to a prenatal area. Some day, remote vaccination shots will be given and diseased animals will be detected and quarantined for treatment. All from a distance. All without human contact. All electronically.
 
Noting that twenty-first century techno-culture metaphors are light years away from biblical, agrarian culture metaphors, consider John 10:22-30. Here, as elsewhere in the gospels, Jesus uses a metaphor his audience will understand: he’s the shepherd, and his followers are the sheep. But we have a modern, non-agrarian knowledge of sheep, so to understand what Jesus wants us contemporary listeners to understand about the Good Shepherd and his relationship with the sheep, we must unpack and translate what this imagery means. In a sermon, Barbara Brown Taylor gives this lovely explanation. 
 
Sheep seem to consider their shepherds part of the family, and the relationship that grows up between the two is quite exclusive. They develop a language of their own that outsiders are not privy to. A good shepherd learns to distinguish a bleat of pain from one of pleasure, while the sheep learn that a cluck of the tongue means food, or a two-note song means that it is time to go home.
 
In Palestine today, it is still possible to witness a scene that Jesus almost certainly witnessed two thousand years ago, that of Bedouin shepherds bringing their flocks home from the various pastures they have grazed during the day. Often those flocks will end up at the same watering hole around dusk, so that they get all mixed up together – eight or nine small flocks turning into a convention of thirsty sheep. Their shepherds do not worry about the mix-up, however. When it is time to go home, each one issues his or her own distinctive call – a special trill or whistle, or a particular tune on a particular reed pipe, and that shepherd’s sheep withdraw from the crowd to follow their shepherd home. They know whom they belong to; they know their shepherd’s voice, and it is the only one they will follow.
 
In John 10:27 Jesus states simply: “My sheep hear my voice. I know them, and they follow me.” Jesus, the Good Shepherd, is not like the impersonal techno-shepherd. He is no shepherd who engages his sheep remotely. This Good Shepherd maintains intimacy and proximity in order to meet the needs of his sheep. He is always at least within voice distance.
 
For intrigued sheep then or now, a natural question arises from this text. How do we hear our Shepherd’s voice? Is it like Moses who heard from God audibly at Sinai? Is it like Elijah who heard the sound of sheer silence as God spoke? Or is it like pastor, author, and video series creator Rob Bell describing his call to preaching: “I heard a voice – not an audible, loud, human kind of voice – but inner words spoken somewhere in my soul that were very clear and very concise. What I heard was ‘Teach this book, and I will take care of everything else.’”
Jesus says his sheep hear his voice and he knows them and they know him. They’re in the fold just on the basis of hearing his voice. We are gathered here in his name because we have heard the voice of Jesus, and we have come into the fold. Somehow we have heard something that sounded in some way like the voice of Jesus inviting us come forth and be part of his flock. And that’s enough, says Jesus, for him to keep us, to keep us for good. To be in his flock is a reassuring word. The comfort is that he says he won’t let his sheep go. He will keep us. He will not let us go. He will keep his sheep safely in the fold. Nobody and nothing will snatch his sheep out of his hand. And it is his voice that keeps drawing us to him, eternally. And we give thanks to God that it is so.