“Belonging to the Flock”
John 10:22-30
The Rev. Dr. Catherine Taylor

April 29, 2007

As you can well imagine, the Interim Ministry Gathering Team has been working hard.  They are the folks with the big yellow name tags you see on Sundays.  The folks who have met with Council, hosted an AfterWord, posed questions for us to ponder at the Wednesday Lenten Suppers, and who will be meeting soon with the youth and with individual committees of the church.  You can spot them meeting with each other in the library every other week.  The work done by the Gathering Team will become the mission document used by the Pastor Search Committee, once it’s formed, to find your next senior minister.

The opening hymn we sang together is a liturgical theme song for the interim process chosen by the Gathering Team, who are not just good listeners and fact gatherers, they are also pretty good theologians.  We have sung the hymn before in worship and we will sing it again many times before this interim is through. 

The whole point of what the Gathering Team is doing is to understand exactly who First Congregational Church is at this point in time.  It might almost be said that the Gathering Team is writing this church’s confession of faith.

It has been said that the Confessions are documents that declare our Christian identity.  They tell other people who we are and what we believe in, a little like the documents in your wallet or handbag.  Take out the things in your wallet and you will see documents that say that you live in a certain place, that your hair is a certain color, that you’re not supposed to drive without your glasses, and even, if you told the truth, how much you weigh.  A person looking at the contents of your wallet might also see what organizations you belong to, whether or not you are registered to vote, whether or not you like to fish, and might be able to tell by your ACLU or NRA membership card, how you may have voted in the last election.

Identity is vital to Americans who love bumper stickers, tattoos, and celebrity brand clothing.  Identity is also important to Reformed Christians.  That’s why we have so many confessions of faith, identity cards as it were, in our history.  That’s why we asked the Confirmands to write their own confessions of faith.  If you haven’t read them, they are on the library window.  They are all thoughtful, but I particularly recommend you read the joint statement they wrote. 

Asking them to do this was not just an exercise, it’s crucial.  We are people who believe particular things about God, about scripture, and about life together as a body of Christ.  One of the primary things we believe is that we belong together, not because any one of us decided that we wanted to come to this particular church, although it might seem that way. 

What we believe is that God calls us to be together as a body of Christ.  Without action on God’s part, not one of us would be here.  We are only part of the whole body, to be sure, one flock in a body that is made up of many flocks in the country and around the world.

But we were called, each one of us, to belong to the body of Christ, to enjoy God first and foremost, and to worship and serve, and all of that is the will of God, not just some decision we made for ourselves. 

Belonging is a primary theme of our gospel lesson today, in which Jesus tells a group of anxious people that they can’t hear what he is saying because they don’t belong to his flock.

The setting is the portico of Solomon, one of the honored places in the Temple.  The Temple and the honored place where they stand are primary symbols of Jewish identity.  They can’t image that place and those symbols ever being destroyed, yet by the time John was writing his gospel, the Temple had been a rubble heap for perhaps fifty years.

The situation in the story is tense.  “If you are the Christ, the Messiah, tell us plainly,” ask the listeners who are gathered there.  It is still the season of Easter and you may not be ready to go back to stories in the middle of Jesus’ ministry like this one, where he is once again in conflict with his detractors.  Maybe you would rather I were preaching the Acts text with its obvious resurrection theme in which Peter raises a widow from the dead.  But that, too, is a little startling, at least until your heart rate slows down enough to realize that Peter is not in fact the one doing the resurrecting. 

Again, it is God, working through Peter, who brings life out of death, God who does and can do extraordinary things, and wants to do extraordinary things in the lives of people like Dorcas and her friends who are often marginalized and overlooked by others.  God can and longs to do restoring, life-giving things through anyone who is open to that kind of trust in God’s power to bring life. 

Now that’s an Easter season sermon, so why do we have to go back into Jesus’ quarrels?  Again, it’s a question of identity, of who we are.  “If you are the Christ, the Messiah, tell us plainly,” the listeners in the story ask, for themselves, and anyone here and now who is asking that question, too. 

There are many times in the gospel of John when Jesus answers questions in a roundabout way, or uses puzzling word play to rattle people or push them to think in new ways.  But this time Jesus’ answer is quite plain.  “I have told you,” he says, “but you don’t believe.  The things I have done announce who I am but you don’t believe my answer because you can’t hear my voice.”

Have you ever asked a question when what you really wanted was to confirm something you already want to be true?  “That’s the sale price, isn’t it?”  “The test is being graded on a curve, right?”  “This train, bus, plane, is headed to Philadelphia, correct?”  If your question is actually a search for confirmation it’s hard to hear an answer other than the one you already want. 

The people standing with Jesus in the place of their identity are trying to confirm a deep hope that he is the Messiah who will overthrow the Romans and establish an earthly kingdom.  They are not hoping for a Shepherd Messiah and certainly not one who will lay down his life for his sheep. 

The whole situation is in fact very dangerous.  Immediately before the part of the story we read today, the Jews are divided in their reaction to Jesus.  Some think he is out of his mind and won’t listen to him at all.  Others are grudgingly impressed.  Yet after they ask him to say plainly if he’s the Messiah, and he tells them his actions clearly say so but they can’t hear his voice; immediately after that they all agree that he should be stoned to death.  So, ironically, they too can be known by what they plan to do.  Their plans will soon reveal that they are not able or interested in hearing Jesus’ voice.

The ones who do hear are Jesus’ sheep, he calls them.  Sheep are vulnerable creatures, easily preyed upon and snatched from a shepherd’s hand.  But this will not happen to his sheep.  Jesus says this twice, once about himself and then again about God – “Nothing will ever snatch them out of my hand”…”No one will ever snatch them out of the Father’s hand.”  “My sheep hear my voice,” Jesus says, “and I know them, and they follow me.”

My friend Laura Mendenhall, president at Columbia Seminary, is from Texas, where there are rodeos and cattle and cowboys and flocks of sheep and shepherds.  She tells about a shepherd friend of hers named Tom who herds sheep in West Texas.  Tom is a conscientious shepherd who seldom leaves his flock.  He does not appreciate sheep jokes, and while he knows that sheep are not smart enough for a game of fetch or a Frisbee toss, they can generally figure out where the food and water are. 

On the other hand, if Tom doesn’t keep the sheep moving they will over-graze, so Tom and his dog stay with the sheep every day leading them to green pastures.  To encourage them to move on to other pastures, Tom can’t go charging in front of them shouting orders.  If he did they would turn and go in the opposite direction.  Instead, Tom talks to himself out loud at times so that the sheep overhear.  He speaks to them the way people speak to babies, Laura says, not expecting them to understand but wanting them to hear his voice.  Sometimes he sings to them because Tom likes to sing.  What he doesn’t do is raise his voice.  He is never angry or disparaging.  And they follow him, not because of his authoritative directions or commands, but because they trust his voice.  They know his voice and are reassured by the sound of it talking gently or singing, usually behind them, directing those who cannot find food, helping the ones who stray.

Just as with Tom and his flock, Bedouin shepherds in Palestine can bring their flocks to the same watering hole around dusk, where they all get mixed up together.  “Their shepherds do not worry about the mix-up, however.  When it’s time to go home, each one issues his or her own distinctive call – a special trill or whistle, or a particular tune on a 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.”  (Barbara Brown Taylor)

“You do not believe,” Jesus tells the people at the Temple, “because you do not belong to my sheep.”  Belonging comes first, not believing.  Belonging comes first.  Now, I know most of us like to see things the other way around.  We take our Christian principles very seriously.  We like thinking that belonging depends on how well we do the believing part.

Barbara Brown Taylor says Christians often hold beliefs about believing over their heads “in a place just high enough so that no one can ever reach [them].”  “There is the belief that believers are never at a loss for words.  They can say what they believe and why, and speak about their faith in ways that move and convince others.  That they are never embarrassed to be asked what they believe, or shy to answer, and that they are always articulate, eloquent and wise.  Then there is the belief that believers are in constant touch with God so that they understand what happens to them every day, or at least have enough faith to accept it gracefully.  Consequently, believers are never doubtful or afraid.  They live in total confidence that they are in God’s hands, and when they say their prayers at night, God talks back to them.  Another popular belief is that believers always find worship meaningful.  They act on what they hear from the pulpit, they mean every word of the creed, their hearts are strangely warmed when they take communion.  They never lose their places in the [bulletin], never feel bored, or cranky, or left out.  They have an unfailing sense of belonging to God and to one another.”

Beliefs such as these about believing often exile people from the flock.  But Jesus never says that believing comes first.  Listen:  “You do not believe because you do not belong to my sheep…My father, who has given them to me, is greater than all, and no one is able to snatch them out of the father’s hand.”  Membership in the flock and even leadership in the flock, even leadership like Peter’s, isn’t up to us.  It’s up to God.

Look around you.  This is the flock, and you are here.  Here, where the word is preached and the sacraments are administered; where the communion table stands ready for the next feast and still waters rest in the baptismal font.  You are here, in the sheep fold, and how you got here does not depend on how good a job you do of believing from one day to the next.  That isn’t what brought you to this point, or what keeps you coming back.

If you have been straining to hear the shepherd’s voice from time to time, that’s okay.  There is bound to be someone in this room who is hearing loud and clear, and we are in this together.  AMEN.