+John 10:22-30
Here is today’s million dollar question: When was the last time you saw a king as a shepherd; or vice versa, when have you seen a shepherd become king?
Well, if you were reading Wednesday morning’s edition of the New York Times, You would have seen a king/shepherd right before your eyes, well at least a future-king and shepherd. There, front and center, above the fold, even, was a picture of Prince Charles, Prince of Wales, standing crisply in a Barbour jacket and neck-tie; holding his shepherd’s crook; affably and shyly smiling for the camera. In that picture he is standing in his cattle pasture, proudly showing-off his prize-winning herd of Ayrshire cows. From the bucolic setting in rural Gloucestershire, England’s future king presides over Home Farm, an organic farm devoted to the preservation of wildflowers, rare domestic farm animals, and providing for the world a model chemical free-farming. In that picture, the future king of England presides as shepherd over a ‘Temple’ devoted to the hope that Our Earth can become God’s garden once more. From Home Farm, the Prince/Shepherd prophesies about a world in great peril and destined for awful times, unless we listen to the signs, and read-into the voices crying around us. In this scene of a royal shepherd, we get a virtual look at works that provide proof and actions that testify to glorious truths.
Let’s move on to another Shepherd king, perhaps a little more germane given our gathering this Sunday morning. Of course, it’s none other than our Risen Lord and Saviour Jesus, the Good Shepherd. In our Gospel, Jesus stands on the Temple steps in Jerusalem on the Portico of Solomon, the only remaining portion of the original Temple of Solomon [FYI: our Gospel lesson has taken us back to before Jesus’ death and resurrection]. Jesus reminds both his critics and us, of the power of actions. He reminds us that actions done in God’s name testify to the sovereignty of God, and as our lesson from the Acts of the Apostles shows us, that sovereignty given to Jesus has now been given to us, look at Peter’s raising of Dorcas from death to life. And we testify to that sovereignty by our actions. To be a shepherd is to be a person of action. And no shepherd that I know of, no cattle farmer or hog farmer that I’ve ever known ever has had an easy life. It is a vocation of constant tweaking and perpetual care. It is a lifetime of thankless tasks of whose benefits are rarely noticed except by the animals in their care. The life of the average shepherd requires actions over words.
Jesus also tells the people gathered around him that God’s gift of eternal life, a gift given to Jesus, is greater than all else. By extraction and extrapolation, this planet this good earth given to us by our God and Creator, is a gift given to us that is, itself, greater than all else. We have been given the gift of eternal life in Jesus, but we have also been given an eternal gift of life in our stewardship of our planet.
Even as we lie in the rich, verdant pastures of God’s abundance, secular and sacred prophets are crying out to us, as voices in the pastureland, that our green valley will become a dry wasteland, or worse yet, will be flooded by the evils of our own ignoring. Those same modern-day prophets also say that our abundant table of refreshment becomes more and more narrow, with fewer and fewer places set at it. They tell us that we have a table set before us is in the presence of our enemies, and the sad, sad news is that we are both guest and enemy.
But there is hope; there is good news…. We have the skills and power at our hands to shepherd our Earth back to health. Jesus’ gift to us is that we will continue his kingdom on this Earth. We have been imbued with memory, reason, and skill for the purpose of cultivating this garden, this Temple, to the best of our abilities.
By now, most of you know that I grew up on my family’s farm in southern Indiana and the pride I take in that fact. My favorite place to escape-to, my favorite place on all of our acres, was a small pasture. Surrounded by acres of corn and soybean fields bolstered and propped-up by herbicides and pesticides, this pasture had remained un-plowed and un-planted since my ancestors first came by covered wagon in the 1850s. This small pasture is witness to my family’s story of birth, death, and vitality as visibly demonstrated by the headstones, apple trees, and ruins of barns long-abandoned that pepper field. There is a small stream that runs through it, as well as, a spring that has been running as living water for hundreds of years as evidenced by the many Indian arrow-heads in the surrounding fields. This small green pasture, my family’s playground for generations, revives my soul, standing as a ‘Temple’ to one small family’s story.
Where is your temple? Where is your green pasture that revives your soul? Find it. And when you have found it, shepherd it. Guard it. Tend it. Lie down beside it. Surely the goodness and mercy that your own green pasture has given you will inspire you and allow determination to run-over for the sake of our Earth’s preservation.
You don’t have to hug a tree to save a forest. And you don’t have to live on an organic farm to preserve the green pastures of our Planet. Don’t let our sins of today snatch this fragile planet out of the very hands of our children. Be one more shepherd, a royal steward, of this bounteous planet: God’s gift to us and our gift to our children to come.
May Jesus, our Good Shepherd King, guide us to green pastures.
AMEN.
