Good Shepherd Sunday

[00:00:00] Grace, mercy, and peace be to you from God our father and from our lord and savior, Jesus Christ. Amen. [00:00:08] You know, by saying that, I'm saying I come to you on behalf of God, our father and Lord and savior Jesus Christ. [00:00:16] I'm saying that I'm here to speak in his name, to be his messenger. And actually, that's how John, the. The gospel writer and the writer of revelation, the apocalypse, that's how he refers to pastors in revelation two, as sometimes it's translated angels. The word angel itself means messenger, messengers of God, to speak in his name, to act on his behalf. [00:00:50] And that's what you and I all are. [00:00:53] We are ambassadors of Christ, right? People called to speak and act on behalf of God. This is what we talked about a couple weeks ago, meditated on Jesus breathing on his disciples, giving them his breath, his spirit, so that they are thinking and speaking. [00:01:20] God is thinking and speaking through them by his spirit. Do you remember that? Well, that makes them his messengers, his ambassadors. [00:01:30] You look at them and hear what they say, and you see them speaking, and you recognize God is speaking through them. God is thinking through them. [00:01:44] We see it in our epistle reading this morning. But if anyone has the world's goods and sees his brother in need, yet closes his heart against him, how does God's love abide in him? [00:01:57] The opposite is true. You see someone not caring for a fellow human being, and you say, wait a second. [00:02:06] God's not thinking or speaking or acting through this person right now. You see what I mean? [00:02:16] So as christians, we are emissaries of God. We are ambassadors of Christ. We are the embodiment of his will, by his grace, as we live by faith, led by his spirit. [00:02:36] Sheep are a great image of this. So, sheep. Sheep, well, they don't. I mean, so let me just first say I've never kept sheep. I didn't grow up on a farm, a ranch. All right, so correct me later. All right? But I think we can just think very, very broadly, very generally about this until somebody fills me in, and then we can get really specific. Next year on good shepherd Sunday, that's an invitation for, you know, really. So, sheep, you know, you see sheep crossing a road, all of them together, and are you thinking like, wow, what interesting behavior? I didn't know sheep did that, right. No, you're thinking there's somebody behind them, driving them across the road all at the same time when there are no cars coming. [00:03:29] We would see that from time to time when we lived in the mountains, drive down a road, and, oh, got to wait for the sheep. [00:03:35] All right, so the sheep are being driven by somebody. And without even seeing the shepherd, you recognize these sheep are being led because they're manifesting, they're embodying meaning and purpose that they couldn't on their own. [00:03:52] You see the sheep acting a certain way and you say, oh, you know, you infer the shepherd, you recognize something you can't even see necessarily. But they're manifesting the will of somebody and not just one of them. I mean, you might think that if one sheep crosses a road, thinking, I'm hoping this is a shepherd, you know, or else another car is going to hit it, right? One by itself. You wouldn't necessarily say, there's a shepherd behind this sheep, but if you see a hundred of them doing the same thing, you're probably going to say, there's a shepherd behind this sheep. [00:04:25] It's like if, you know, if you looked at the world and there was just like a little tiny bit of order in it where you said, well, these things seem to be like this is working. Well, maybe there's a creator. Well, when you see the entire thing working harmoniously together and you learn of its complexity and you see, wow, these things are, are ordered and meaningful, then you say, there's somebody driving this thing. There's somebody behind this design. [00:04:54] Or, you know, again, think of your body and the way it all works together. [00:05:00] And when you see me moving, you're not thinking that my body parts are all separate and are just happening to, you know, you see me moving in a coordinated way and you say, there's a mind behind that body, okay? That's driving it. [00:05:17] There's a, well, central intelligence working all these things together. [00:05:25] That's what a shepherd does with sheep. It brings order and meaning that the sheep couldn't achieve on its own. [00:05:34] And the sheep then manifests the will, make visible the will of put into practice, embody. They embody the will of the shepherd. [00:05:45] Now, this is just the way reality works, like we just said, right? We talked about a body. We talked about. We could have talked about a country or, you know, and the government or whatever, on any level, okay, of organization. Things are organized by something, right? So it's the same pattern in all of these examples. Now, sometimes we want to get away from being a sheep, like a part of an organization. Maybe like that's, american culture is a little bit like that. Have you heard somebody derisively call people sheep? Like they're just sheep, right? And it's because they're following without thinking like, they're not. They're being led just to wherever because they're not maybe analyzing the motives or intentions or the purpose of the shepherd that they're following. So they're just sheep. [00:06:40] The thing is, we are sheep. We can't get away from following and manifesting patterns that are above us. And you see it even in once football season hits. [00:06:54] I don't know. Do we get excited about the broncos? [00:06:58] I mean, I lived for nine years outside of Colorado and a bunch of that in Packer territory. And, boy, those Packer fans, when you see green, people are wearing green and sitting around a tv, like half sitting, and then they're all shouting at the same time. And they're all. When you see the. The liturgy of Packer football going on, you recognize something, like a higher pattern that they're all embodying. [00:07:33] So Packer fans are embodying something above themselves. You see all those Packer fans moving in the same way, and you say, there's something behind this. [00:07:45] They're doing this in the name of the packers. You could say. [00:07:51] So just on every level we follow, we have to. Now, here's another way to think about it. [00:08:00] When you see somebody manifesting bitterness or resentment or worry or fear, when you see someone fretting, these are all common human experiences. [00:08:17] I mean, it's not like you're the only one who's ever experienced them. I hope you know that. [00:08:24] Okay, so just the fact that all human beings share these things, it's like you're actually. You're manifesting something above yourself. Like a pattern. Right? And so when you give in to anger, when we give in to anger, we should recognize that we're manifesting a pattern. [00:08:46] We're participating in something beyond ourselves by giving in to that. [00:08:56] And when you experience Christ's love, when you see someone embodying Christ's love, recognize that they are participating in something above themselves as well. [00:09:11] We are sheep. [00:09:13] We participate in patterns. [00:09:17] But the question is, what pattern are we going to embody? The scriptures are full of warnings against false shepherds, warnings against participating in the wrong patterns. [00:09:32] Jesus says, I am the good shepherd. [00:09:38] One way to think about these patterns is that we participate in them. We embody them as we pay attention to them. [00:09:47] And that's what faith is. You want to embody Christ, pay attention to him. You want to embody the will of the shepherd. [00:09:56] Pay attention to him, to his voice, listen to him. That's what it starts with. [00:10:03] That's faith. [00:10:04] The word faith in Greek, it occurs more than you would realize in scripture, because it's translated a few ways. [00:10:18] So, for example, there's a place in the gospel of John where Jesus says, where John, the gospel writer says, and many believed in Jesus, but Jesus didn't entrust himself to anyone because he, you know, that kind of thing. Like those are the same word. [00:10:37] So anyway, so faith. Faith is looking to Jesus, paying attention to him, faith in Jesus, paying attention to him in order to manifest him, right? So we look to him, and then by faith, we're united to him. We are incorporated into his body, and as his body, the body of him, the head, we become the expression of him. [00:11:03] The word faith can also be translated like, to entrust yourself to somebody, to believe in Jesus is to entrust ourselves to him, that is, to give ourselves to him. We're giving ourselves up to Christ in order to embody him. Just like Jesus says, you know, not my will, but yours be done to his father. And like we pray in the Lord's prayer, thy will be done on earth as in heaven. We're giving up this earth. We're giving up our. [00:11:35] Well, everything that we are, to something higher than ourselves, to Christ, in order to embody him. [00:11:43] By this we know love that he laid down his life for us, and we ought to lay down our lives for the brothers. [00:11:52] But if anyone has the world's goods and sees his brother in need, yet closes his heart against him, how does God's love abide in him? [00:12:03] So we should really pay attention to what patterns we're manifesting. And this is, I don't know, this is maybe like highway, I don't know, complicated way of speaking about a really simple thing. [00:12:17] Like when you're angry about something you shouldn't be angry about, recognize I'm manifesting the wrong pattern right now. [00:12:24] Well, in whose name am I being angry right now? Like, in whose name am I fretting about what I'm so worried about? [00:12:32] In whose name am I speaking negatively all the time, you know, or tearing people down? [00:12:45] He who is a hired hand and not a shepherd, who does not own the sheep, that's not my body, it's not my flock. So I don't care. [00:12:57] Sees the wolf coming and leaves the sheep and flees, and the wolf snatches them and scatters them. [00:13:05] You don't want to manifest the order, the pattern of being by some false shepherd that doesn't care, doesn't care about the flock. Like Satan, he's the father of lies. He doesn't care one bit for those who are manifesting his pattern manifesting his will. He doesn't care. He just wants the whole thing to fall apart. [00:13:31] He who's the hired hand, who's not the shepherd sees the wolf coming and leaves the sheep and flees, and the wolf snatches them and scatters them. [00:13:43] We want to be careful what patterns we're manifesting. In whose name are we thinking and speaking and acting? [00:13:55] And that's just faith, and that's our life together as God's people, united in Jesus, incorporated in his body and manifesting him our head. [00:14:07] So there's opportunity on the other side to look to Jesus and to manifest him, and that takes attention. [00:14:18] We got to wake up to the seriousness of this. Manifesting the wrong pattern, that's sin. So what do we do? You know, you recognize, wait a second, I'm manifesting the wrong pattern here. [00:14:31] In whose name am I doing this? I wasn't doing it in Jesus name. What do you do? [00:14:37] You repent. [00:14:39] So we repent daily. And so another pattern of Jesus embodying him is forgiveness and bearing with one another. Okay, so you weren't thinking or speaking in Jesus name, and the Holy Spirit just hit you and you repented. You know, forgiveness, father, forgive them, for they know not what they do. He appears to his disciples, peace be with you. Right? [00:15:07] He bears with humanity and sticks with them even to the point of dying for his sheep. [00:15:14] Now, that's the good shepherd. That's the pattern that we manifest, the pattern of forgiveness and love, self sacrifice, not of division or bitterness or envy or strife or any other kind of sin or divisiveness. [00:15:37] We manifest the pattern of Christ our shepherd, and that means life. [00:15:48] Order. [00:15:50] Good order means life. So a shepherd sort of pulls sheep up into a higher purpose and into meaning, right? That they couldn't achieve on their own. [00:16:05] That's the story of, like, everything that exists. [00:16:10] It's a bunch of parts that come together into a whole and are guided according to order. This is what our creator has done in this world and with us. And living in that order, living according to God's will. It's not just like, ah, well, I really wish I could live this way, but I'm a Christian, so I have to, you know, I have to follow. I can't do everything I actually want to. [00:16:34] Oh, well, it's worth it or something like that, you know? No, it's like God's order is good. What God wants for your life, well, that's really life, you know, listening to our creator is actually like, I mean, that's the good life. [00:16:51] And then sort of the mystery of it, all right? The thing to chew on is that that's true even for Christ. I mean, Christ sacrificing himself for the sheep, laying down his life for the sheep, like that's the good life compared to, you know, giving in to pressure and saving his own skin or something like that. Like, that's not life, right? Obedience to God and living according to his will, even if it means physical death. Now, that's the life. [00:17:24] That's the life. So we offer our bodies as living sacrifices, pleasing and acceptable to God. [00:17:30] You know, it might not be fun in the moment. What kind of fun are we talking about, though? Ultimately it means love and joy, peace, patience, goodness, kindness, faithfulness, gentleness, self control. Those are the fruits of the spirit. [00:17:43] And it means eternal life, because Christ, who sacrificed himself for the sheep, well, he took his life up again, and he lives. [00:17:53] And you see the apostles doing things in his name. Jesus, he's alive, and we're doing things. We're living and speaking and acting in his name. [00:18:05] Thanks be to God. In Jesus name, amen.