Image: Good Shepherd mosaic, floor of Basilica of Santa Maria Assunta, Aquileia, Italy; 1st half of the 4th century.
I’d like to start with a question. How many of you remember parents, grandparents, or great-grandparents who lived through the Great Depression? How many of them had a ton of glass jars for canning or furniture in the attic that hadn’t been used since the Eisenhower administration? How many had victory gardens? How many were incredibly frugal with money to the point of being cheap? How many could never bear to throw anything away because “you might need it someday”? Our period of relative prosperity in the Western world (for many, but not for all by any means) is only about 80 years old. Few of us know what it means to go without food for an extended time or to live without electricity. Few of us know what it’s like to go without heat in the winter or air conditioning in the summer. Rather, we’re often subjected to overwhelming abundance. Abundance of food, drink, alcohol, drugs, political punditry, movies, garage sale items, and true crime drama!
But it’s not a good kind of abundance. Many of us have dependencies big and small, whether to food or substances or doomscrolling on social media or pornography or cable news. We live in a veritable world of overabundance, where you can get a Big Mac at midnight or gamble online at 3 am. A dopamine rush is only a touch of the screen away.
And to get it, we might listen to certain voices that are bad for us. Certain voices like advertisers, who promise we can have fulfillment if we only buy their product or try their weight-loss program. Or others that promise a rosy future for our country if only we vote for them or give a contribution. Or even others in the church that promise spiritual fulfillment if you only join a particular congregation! (And did we mention all the beautiful children that come here?) Perhaps the most toxic voice of all, though, is the one within our own head. When things don’t work out like we thought they would, when we aren’t spiritually or financially or personally fulfilled, we can start the classic cycle of blame. Ever tell yourself you were a complete idiot for doing something that didn’t work out? Ever tell yourself that you’re blameless and that everyone else is a complete idiot? The blaming voice, along with all these other voices, sucks away joy, leaving us both miserable and even more vulnerable to the lying voices that promise us fulfillment if we only do what they tell us to do.
It’s noteworthy that Jesus is speaking to the Pharisees in our gospel today. Pharisees, to put the best construction on it, were concerned with living out their faith in daily life. Their main question: How did God’s Word impact a faithful Jew’s life? All well and good. But like a lot of religious groups (maybe all), this question quickly attained a legalistic bent. Follow the law in the way they prescribed, and things would go well for you. Don’t follow the law in the way they prescribed, and they wouldn’t. This legalism was on display in John chapter 9 when the Pharisees could not see God’s hand in the healing of the man born blind, instead seizing on the fact that Jesus did the healing on the Sabbath. Moreover, they were hyper-focused on the man and his parents’ sins as a cause for his blindness. Jesus has just told them they remain in their sins because they willfully persist in seeing his good work as something evil. They are emblematic of the thieves that steal, kill, and destroy, all to maintain their control over other people.
But Jesus is different. His voice is not one of domination, manipulation, and control, but of love for his sheep. He is not like the bad shepherds that Ezekiel describes, the controlling shepherds of the Pharisees, or the false shepherds of our time. He has no religious or spiritual self-help program to offer us. He has no deal to broker after the way of the world. He isn’t even telling us to be better sheep! Jesus is telling us that he is the good shepherd who leads us out of certain death. He is the one who leads his sheep by his voice, ultimately laying down his life for us so that we can live. We can’t enter genuine abundant life by ourselves. And we can’t enter it by following any of the other voices that promise us the world and leave us with broken hearts and cynical spirits. We receive that abundant life by listening to Jesus’ voice and following where he leads. By hearing him whenever the Word of God is proclaimed at the pulpit or in our own Scripture study. By receiving him in Holy Baptism or Holy Communion. By being drawn to him who gives us truth, love, and life so abundantly that it overflows into the lives of others.
Jesus, our truth and life in a world bent on deceit and death, is our rescuer. Our Savior. He leads out those who belong to him. And how do you know if you belong to Jesus? If you are baptized in the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, you belong to Jesus, whether you remember it or not. I’ll follow Luther’s lead on this.
To be baptized in God’s name is to be baptized not by human beings but by God himself. Although it is performed by human hands, it is nevertheless truly God’s own act….God himself stakes his honor, his power, and his might on it….This is the simplest way to put it: the power, effect, benefit, fruit, and purpose of baptism is that it saves….To be saved, as everyone well knows, is nothing else than to be delivered from sin, death, and the devil, to enter into Christ’s kingdom, and to live with him forever.[1]
Dear people of God, Jesus calls to us. If you are not baptized, contact me as soon as possible so we can receive you into the Lord’s family. And if you are, know that you are his. So, let’s recognize the lying voices that scream for attention, and listen to Jesus’ steady voice. For only in Jesus do we find our ultimate truth and abundant life. Amen.
[1] Robert Kolb, Timothy J. Wengert, and Charles P. Arand, The Book of Concord: The Confessions of the Evangelical Lutheran Church (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 2000), 457, 459.