Following the voice

Acts 9:36-43
Psalm 23
Revelation 7:9-17
John 10:22-30

Thursday night, or Friday morning, depending on how you look at it, I was awakened by the telephone.  I had been fast asleep and for a disoriented moment I thought it was the alarm.  I didn’t get to the phone in time to answer it, and when I did I saw that it was 2:18 A.M.  I was hoping someone had misdialed but then I saw that I had a new voice message.  So I called the voicemail number and entered my password, with a sense of dread about what that message was going to say.

Well, it turned out that the news wasn’t that bad.  A young woman named Samantha, taking her ailing mother home to Oregon from Southern California, had spent all her money on car repairs and couldn’t go any further that night.  She said her mother was an Episcopalian and they had called St. John’s and gotten my number from the recorded greeting.  They had looked all over town for a vacant motel room and had finally found one, and they wanted to know if I could pay for it.  Some of you may not know this, but the members of St. John’s provide a Discretionary Fund for me to use to assist people in need, so I called her back, and agreed to meet her at a motel next to the freeway at the north end of town.

I’d been reading the gospel lesson for today before I went to bed that night, and as I drove up the on-ramp I thought of what Jesus says about his sheep, and how they hear his voice, and follow him.  And it struck me that this is what that looks like.  There are a lot of reasons why we have an institution called St. John’s Episcopal Church, with an office and a telephone and an answering machine.  There are a lot of reasons why we have a pastor, and a discretionary fund.  But one of the reasons is surely so that when somebody is out on the road in the middle of the night far from home, they can know the presence of the Good Shepherd in a concrete, tangible way.    

And maybe it was just because it was the middle of the night and my mind wasn’t functioning normally, but I felt joyful in that moment and grateful for the privilege of being the one to represent you like that.   Not because I was standing in for Jesus, but because I was one of his sheep.  When that call came at 2:18 in the morning it was the Good Shepherd on the other end of the line.  And I was the one chosen, in that moment, to hear his voice and to follow him.   

Jesus talks about a relationship in which the Shepherd is just as vulnerable as the sheep.  The sheep hear the voice of the Shepherd and they respond to it with trust and obedience.  But the Shepherd also lives by trust and obedience in relation to the one he calls Father.  And that is what makes the Shepherd trustworthy and good.  That is why the sheep listen to his voice and follow him, even when it means waking up at 2:18 in the morning.  That is why they follow his voice even when it means rushing toward the site of a bombing, when there has been a second bomb, and might be third.  That is why they follow his voice even into a burning fertilizer factory filled with ammonia. 

The Good Shepherd shows the sheep the goodness of the Father, whose mind no one knows, and whose face no one can see.  And sometimes that doesn’t feel like enough.  Sometimes we are like those who surround Jesus in the temple and ask, “How long will you keep us in suspense? Tell us now!”  Sometimes we don’t want to live in vulnerability.  Sometimes we don’t want a relationship of trust and obedience.  Sometimes we get tired of listening and following.  We want the complete picture, to have the last word, so we can be in control from here on out, so we can be our own shepherds.

But that urgent demand to have everything settled, that unwillingness to wait any longer for one’s own truth to be vindicated, is what leads to political violence.  When people start to say things like, “The time for talk is past.  We don’t want to hear the other side of the issue,” and “We can’t wait any longer, and will do whatever it takes to get our point across,” then watch out, because you know what’s coming—the missiles are about to fly; the death squads are putting on their hoods; the torturers are getting out their tools; someone is packing nails and ball-bearings into a pressure-cooker.

 But when people are willing to kill innocents, it’s because the cause they are fighting for is already marked for death.  Even if it is a power that stands astride the world, if you know where to look, you can already see the cracks in the foundation.  If you listen closely you can hear the wailing of the mourners, and catch the faint whiff of decay.  The setting of today’s gospel story is the Jerusalem temple, at the annual feast of the Dedication of the temple itself.  The temple was the cornerstone of political and economic, as well as religious, order in the Palestine of Jesus’ day.  And as near as we can tell, challenging the legitimacy of the temple was Jesus’ capital crime.  His enemies had him killed in order to protect the temple.   But by the time the Gospel of John was written, the temple was a blackened pile of fallen stones.

The truth that is so urgent that people are willing to kill for it is a hollow truth.  It bears the mark of death on its heart.  But the Good Shepherd speaks with a different kind of urgency, the urgent love of life.  It is the urgency of Peter rushing off to Joppa to pray for the life of the widow Tabitha.  It doesn’t need to know the final answer, or to force events to a final crisis.  It only seeks to hear the trusted voice, the one that knows who we are, telling us what to do next.  Even amidst the pressing demands of the moment, the sheep of the Good Shepherd walks in peace.  It is the peace of knowing that it is enough to hear his voice and to follow, because the Good Shepherd is one with the Father, who is the indestructible Lord of Life. 

Sometimes we might wish the voice had led us on a different path.  There are times when our pasture doesn’t feel particularly important, or glamorous or rewarding.  Maybe it’s kind of scrubby, and a little dry.  Maybe we have to walk a long way to get to the place where the cool water flows.  Maybe the howls of the wolves at night sound a little too close for comfort.  But if we learn to listen for the voice of the shepherd, I think we’ll discover that even our sheepish lives have about them a certain kind of urgency. 

We may not be called to help the victims of a terrorist bombing, but the world is not short of victims.  We may not be sent to apprehend a pair of armed and dangerous fugitives, but there are angry people everywhere.  We may not be summoned to raise someone from the dead, but there are people all around us who need a prayer and a touch and an invitation to rise.  And none of the people who did those heroic things thought they would have to do them until the moment came and the voice spoke that said “follow.”

And they did follow, and in some cases in cost them everything.  But if we were to say they were mistaken, we would be drawing the wrong conclusion.  Because in a world marked for death only one thing is certain.  Only one thing is guaranteed.  It is that God knows us and loves us and holds us in the hand of indestructible life.  That is all the Good Shepherd needed to know.  He placed himself completely in the power of that hand, and it led him to lay down his life for his friends.  But it also gave him the power to take it up again, a power that he gives to us moment by moment, day by day.  Do you hear his voice?