Dear friends in Christ: Grace to you and peace from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ. Amen.
Please join me in prayer: Prepare our hearts, Lord, to receive your Word. Silence in us any voice but your own that in hearing we may believe and in believing we may obey your will revealed to us in Jesus Christ. Amen.
I want to begin by telling you the story behind my sermon title, “Shirley, Goodness, and Mercy. It comes from the childhood memory of a friend we met at seminary. Ron grew up in a devout family—regularly he went to worship, Sunday School, Vacation Bible School … basically, if the doors of the church were open, Ron’s family was most likely there.
As a result, certain Bible passages, stories, and songs were very familiar, one of which we read today: Psalm 23. Another fact about Ron—his mother’s name was … Shirley! So, he spent his childhood confident in a couple of important truths. He knew for certain that (1) his mother’s name was in the 23rd Psalm (Shirley, goodness and mercy shall follow my all the days of my life…); and that (2) throughout his life, he would be followed around by Goodness and Mercy—and his mom Shirley!
Now, few of us have such an intimate connection with this well-loved psalm. But most of us, I would wager, can find a laundry list of intimate and spiritual connections with God in the words of its few precious verses.
My focus today is on the fifth word of the psalm: shepherd. I’m guessing that, for most of us here in Anchorage anyway, our closest connection with sheep, to say nothing of a shepherd, is that we wear clothing made of wool and, at some point in our lives, we’ve eaten lamb or mutton.
And yet, we all have, at the very least, a working knowledge of the duties of a shepherd. At a basic level, caring for sheep is about the same as caring for any other animal…including children! Provide for, protect from, and pursue after, seem to be the three basic elements of a shepherd’s job description, the three basic elements of any parent’s job description!
So it comes as no surprise, I’m sure, to hear that in the Old Testament, the title shepherd is most often applied to the leaders of the country—priests, prophets and kings. The problem is that all too often these very same leaders failed miserably to live up to their calling.
In today’s lesson from Jeremiah, those whom God has called as shepherds to God’s people are about to experience the fire of God’s wrath, the anger of the Almighty, the inferno of heaven’s fury…because they are not acting like shepherds to God’s people—are in fact, doing just the opposite.
What does Jeremiah tell us is God’s solution?
The Lord clenches his fists in frustration, reads his shepherds the riot act, and casts them out of his presence. Then he says these incredible words: I myself will gather…my flock…I will bring them back to their fold…I will raise up shepherds over them…and they shall not fear any longer, or be dismayed, nor shall any be missing (Jer. 23:3-4).
All the personal pronouns in God’s diatribe remind me of a famous phrase:
“If you want something done well, you have to…
do it yourself!
That’s exactly what God seems to be saying here…
it’s exactly what seems to unfold in our Gospel lesson for today.
Jesus and the disciples have been going non-stop: healing the sick, building up the broken-down, and strengthening those who feel weak.
Also, they have been speaking good news to those caught in bad, making whole hearts out of those that are broken, raising the dead to new life, and welcoming in those who have been turned away.
This has made them very popular, so much so that they can’t even escape from the crowd for a moment’s peace and quiet. When their attempt at retreat is foiled by a mob of admirers, how does Jesus respond? With compassion…for the people were like sheep without a shepherd.
What God has wanted to happen among the shepherds of his people, Jesus demonstrates in word and deed. In short, God does it himself for us in Christ—who he is, what he does, and how he does it—fit exactly the pattern we see portrayed in the 23rd Psalm.
It is simple, yet substantial; down-to-earth, yet inspired; picturesque, yet powerful in its portrayal of the Good Shepherd who leads us sheep—providing for, protecting, pacifying us in the presence of our enemies; putting us on the right track; and pointing out that God’s peace is not only a possibility, but a probability with the Lord as our shepherd.
Now, here’s the bad news: you and I are free to go about our lives and mind our own business. That’s not bad in itself; it’s just that it does nothing to get good people, God’s people, engaged in society. And that allows heaven’s enemies to leave destruction, despair, and death in their wake.
But here’s the good news: simply living our lives as God’s shepherd to the sheep of our pasture—our family and friends, co-workers and neighbors, strangers we meet as we walk through life—simply by focusing our eyes on The Shepherd who provides for, protects from, and pursues after us, surely we leave behind us a path of God’s goodness and mercy.
And that brings us back to my friend Ron and his mom, Shirley. How he heard her name in the 23rd Psalm is a cute story…but, it’s also an incredible legacy to bestow on a child.
God’s promise that goodness and mercy would always follow Ron was as real as the presence of his mother. What an incredible word of assurance!
It is both profound and profoundly simple at the same time. As you and I go about our lives loving God and loving God’s people in our simple and simplistic ways, we leave in our wake not a path of destruction, but construction, not of hatred but forgiveness, not of hopelessness but hopefulness, not of indifference but love.
The story is told of two Christian men back in the 19th Century who were hiking in the Welsh Mountains. One day they happened upon a young shepherd boy; shared their meal with him and also shared how important the image of a shepherd was to their faith in God. The men then taught him the opening words of the 23rd Psalm using his fingers to represent each of the first five words—The Lord Is My Shepherd.
Five years later, the men returned to the same mountains. Stopping in a nearby cottage for a drink of water, they noticed a picture of a boy over the mantel and thought he looked familiar. The woman confirmed that he was her son and explained that he had been killed the previous winter while attempting to rescue a lost sheep. He had fallen over a cliff and died before he could be rescued.
They shared with the woman that they had met her son years before on a hike. She looked at them and explained that when they found the boy’s body, he was strangely grasping the little finger on his left hand. Then the men shared with her how they had taught her son the opening words of the 23rd Psalm: The Lord is my shepherd.
Surely goodness and mercy shall follow us all the days of our lives as we live as loving servants of the Good Shepherd, our Lord Jesus Christ. Amen.
Pastor Scott Fuller