Meg Peery McLaughlin
I Am, So You Can: I am the Good Shepherd
March 16, 2025
John 10: 11-18
Prayer for Illumination
Holy God,
You are who you are.
You will be who you will be.
Right now, we pray that you’ll speak
and that by your Spirit we can quiet every other noise
so we can hear the voice that we most deeply recognize, yours, O Lord, yours.
Amen.
Jesus said
‘I am the good shepherd. The good shepherd lays down his life for the sheep.
The hired hand, who is not the shepherd and does not own the sheep,
sees the wolf coming and leaves the sheep and runs away—
and the wolf snatches them and scatters them.
The hired hand runs away because a hired hand does not care for the sheep.
I am the good shepherd. I know my own and my own know me,
just as the Father knows me and I know the Father.
And I lay down my life for the sheep.
I have other sheep that do not belong to this fold.
I must bring them also, and they will listen to my voice.
So there will be one flock, one shepherd.
For this reason the Father loves me,
because I lay down my life in order to take it up again.
No one takes it from me, but I lay it down of my own accord.
I have power to lay it down, and I have power to take it up again.
I have received this command from my Father.’
The Word for the Lord.
Thanks be to God.
Jesus says: I am the good shepherd.
I know my own and my own know me.
As one preacher puts it,
the good shepherd knows the sheep –knows them by name and disposition:
Houdini, who is always escaping through some hole in the fence;
Pegleg, who limps from the time she stepped in a hole;
Bossy, who likes nothing better than butting heads.
And the truth is the good shepherd knows us,
our limps and likes and names and nuances too.
This Lent as we move toward the cross, the tomb, the garden,
we are lingering over the seven times in John’s Gospel that Jesus tells us who he is.
The seven I AM statements of Jesus,
Are of course are an echo of God’s self-revelation in the Hebrew Bible.
When Moses is asked to lead God’s people out of slavery,
standing in his bare feet by that burning bush, Moses responds to God’s ask by saying:
“Okay, so suppose I go do this impossible-sounding thing,
and these beat-down-oppressed-people ask me who exactly sent me on this freedom mission, what am I supposed to say?”
God says, “tell them I AM WHO I AM. Tell them I AM has sent you.”
Last week we taped this very name of God in giant letters onto the parlor wall,
as a place to put our prayers.
(And let me just acknowledge the brilliance of every bulletin-board-maker-who-ever-lived, every art teacher, every math-lover who thinks in angles and numbers and precision, because even with some help, it took me 3 hours to make those 3 letters).
And let me also say I am grateful for your initial participation in this prayer project. Many of you have added your prayers in the offering plate
or glued them up on the parlor wall yourselves.
One of the first ones up is a favorite. Clearly written child’s adorable scribble, it reads:
I am a Tarheel even if we lous.
and lose is spelled lous, l-o-u-s.
There are other joyful prayers like that one
declaring goodness and trust and hope,
but many of your prayers give voice to how lousy you feel, how lousy the world feels.
You’ve said:
I am overwhelmed.
I am feeling more than words can name.
I am worried about Ukraine.
I am praying to keep my job.
I am grieving.
Church, if we take Jesus’ words as gospel,
then it means that Jesus knows —
He knows how we feel, what we fear.
He knows what we ask, what we need.
He knows what we post publicly and but also what we try to hide.
He knows the cadence of our voice in prayer, even when it cracks.
Jesus says:
The hired hand runs away because a hired hand does not care for the sheep.
I am the good shepherd.
The deduction here is that the shepherd is good because he cares.
To care about the experience of another,
to know the feelings of someone else: we have a word for that, it’s called empathy.
A couple of weeks ago, one of our government leaders said
“the fundamental weakness of Western civilization is empathy. ”
Church, I suppose what I want to say you to is – if Jesus is who he says he is –
the fundamental strength of Christianity is empathy.
We belong to One who cares–
and not just with words or sentiments, but with action.
Jesus says,
I am the good shepherd. I lay down my life for the sheep.
We are in the flock and fold of one who gets involved,
walks toward suffering, chooses connection at every turn.
But I will say as a Christian, this empathy is worth our examination.
And church, I hear you already doing this, faithfully.
Just this week I got an email asking pastor, how much news should I watch?
The pain of others, suffering of the globe, cry of creation. It’s making me angry, anxious.
It’s too much if I take it in all the time. I think I need to moderate how much I take in.
It was a wise reckoning on how to stay engaged with the world God asks us to love,
but not sink into a mire from which you cannot function.
This week, another one of you told me you were going to keep dancing.
Remembering the darkest days of the AIDS crisis,
you said that you buried your friends in the morning, protested in the afternoon,
and danced all night.
What these UPC friends are wrestling with is faithful.
Our deep connection to others does not have to disconnect us from ourselves.
Our knowledge of what others feel does not have to make us forget what we know to be true.
Our care of others does not mean we stop caring for ourselves.
Our broken hearts do not mean we break our conviction.
Our empathy lives alongside our leadership,
our leadership in this world.
It must.
It must. Especially now.
And it seems to me Jesus shows us how.
This one who knows the sheep, cares for the sheep,
is not stuck in their brambles, is not laying down in their mess,
he’s leading them—and doing so willingly
not out of any angst or guilt, not out approval-seeking or fear.
Jesus says
I am the good shepherd.
I lay down my life of my own accord.
I have power to lay it down, no one takes it from me.
It is a picture of determined leadership that goes all the way.
I wonder how many of you grew up with a farming backing,
how many know how sheep move around.
Being mostly a city girl, I had to be told that there is a difference in how a flock of sheep and a herd of cattle move.
Cows get pushed. Prodded from behind.
Sheep on the other hand must be led.
They will not go anywhere that someone else—their trusted shepherd—
does not go first, to show them that everything is alright, that they can do it.
The sheep must be led by the shepherd’s voice out in front of them .
I don’t know about you, church,
but I am needing a strong voice to lead me through these days.
This week I spent a delightful morning at the NC Museum of Art,
and at one point my magnificent docent pointed out a pastoral background
in a renaissance painting of the infant Jesus.
The term “pastoral” comes from the Latin, pastor, meaning “shepherd.”
And as you well know a pastoral scene is one of
green grass, rolling hills, dreamy skies, serene looking light,
maybe some gentle looking animals.
And it’s beautiful alright—
so peaceful it makes me want to tie up a hammock between two of those happy little trees and nap the afternoon away.
But with this text in my mind, the scene felt incongruous.
It’s not that the sheep don’t actually graze on green grass or rest beside still waters,
but it’s more that this text starts with fear, with the threat of violence—
There is a hired hand, who doesn’t care,
wolves ready to snatch and steal from the flock.
When we paint in our mind a picture of the good shepherd,
I’d guess it’s shaded in pastels, Jesus with a lamb on his shoulders,
not included in the painting are the gnashing teeth of a wolf,
or hind parts of the hired hand abandoning the flock.
Maybe it’s time to be more realistic Christians.
Maybe it’s time for us to wake up to what we’re being led through.
Even in that most beautiful 23rd Psalm, the shepherd psalm we call it,
remember that the shepherd leads us
through the darkest valley
and sets a table in the presence of our enemies .
Friends – I’d love to tell you that it’s nothing but pastel skies
and gently rolling hills ahead, but you know as well as I do that just isn’t so.
But we have this flock. Each other.
And we have a shepherd —-
who knows each and every prayer we glue up on that parlor wall
and the prayers we are too sad or ashamed or stubborn to write.
We have a shepherd who is deeply empathic and
unimaginably strong in taking the lead.
Like that beautiful meditation some of you may practice,
our shepherd has a soft front and a strong back.
Jesus shows us how to do this—
be both caring and capable, connected and convicted.
It is possible, don’t let anyone tell you otherwise.
This is fundamentally who we are
in the name of the great I AM.
Amen.