Church of the Good Shepherd, Watertown
Robert Cotton Fite

Good morning.  And thank you to Ann for her invitation and to you for your hospitality.  I should tell you what you probably already know - that your rector has considerable courage.  When I talked with her several weeks ago I expressed a general lack of enthusiasm for this week's lectionary referring to Jesus as the shepherd and us as the sheep.  She did politely remind me that the name of the parish WAS the Church of the Good Shepherd, but she didn't rescind the invitation.

My complaint is that the passage and the metaphor has been so sentimentalized that it has been drained of its potential power.  In the church I grew up in there were pictures of these sweet little sheep, clean as a whistle with not a shred of dung clinging to their hindquarters, obediently following this blond-haired, light-skinned shepherd in a sparkling white gown with a gentle smile on his face, and a far-off look in his eye. 

As I learned and you know, sheep are anything but sweet and clean and shepherds are anything but gentle souls in white gowns.  We don't see many these days, but the shepherds I and some of you have seen in the Middle East are tough fellows, used to long days in the sun whose hygiene probably does not meet western standards.  They're skillful people who have the challenging task of keeping a bunch of dumb animals from straying onto the highway or falling into a ditch.  

When I reached adolescence and began examining the images of God I inherited from Sunday School I took special offense at these images.  Sheep are uniquely dumb animals, following anyone and anything that is in front of them, and by then I considered myself quite a bright young man and an obedient follower of no one.  I know that sounds typically adolescent, but I don't think many of our fellow citizens relish the comparison any more than I did.  Particularly men.  More than women, we like to delude ourselves that we are totally independent, self directed, possessed of greater than average intelligence and need to ask directions of no one.

As I have matured, and that may be a presumptuous assumption, I have had to modify my disdain for the metaphor of Jesus as Good Shepherd and us as sheep.  There is indeed an intimacy reflected in the verse, My sheep hear my voice.  I know them, and they follow me.   It reminds me of the imprinting that takes place between parent and child - or for that matter between most animals and their offspring.  When they were infants, each of my grandchildren quickly learned to recognize the configuration of their mother's and father's faces and the sound of their voices.  And that's how it was with my children, and probably with yours too.  There is a profoundly intimate knowing in human experience that is what we aspire to in our relationship with God.

But there is another and maybe even more important insight that comes from reflection on this metaphor that I want to commend to you this morning.  It suggests that we may be a whole lot more like dumb sheep than any of us would like to acknowledge. In a recent NYT Sunday editorial titled No One is to Blame for Anything Frank Rich took on Alan Greenspan, the Vatican hierarchy, Michael Steele, the chairman of the RNC, my former governor, Rod Blagojevich, Tiger Woods and Goldman Sachs.  You'll admit, that's pretty distinguished company.  Rich pointed out how each in their own way denied responsibility for or employed high-priced spin artists to help them manage what the public came to know as major disasters.  In what I thought was a lovely line, Rich quoted Greenspan, I was right 70 percent of the time, but I was wrong 30 percent of the time.  As Rich went on to say, If the captain of the Titanic followed the Greenspan model he could claim he was on course at least 70 percent of the time too.  Earlier, Greenspan had defended himself for his inability to spot the colossal bubble in the housing market by saying, Everybody missed it - academia, the Federal Reserve, all regulators.  What Alan Greenspan is saying is that we are all like sheep, dumb sheep who can't think for ourselves and who simply follow the crowd.  Of course, that's true ... and not true.  Everybody didn't miss it.  There were lonely voices from an economist here, a regulator there, or maybe one of you who sensed the danger.  There were people who challenged the dominant public opinion that this growth of paper wealth could go on forever.  I won't claim these people heard the voice of the Good Shepherd, but I would claim they heard someone's voice who called them to question, to challenge, to buck the tide of public opinion.  Somehow they learned to question what most everyone else considered unquestionable.

There are so many examples in which large portions of the American public, or any public for that matter, accept as truth what we later learn were obvious untruths.  The assumed inferiority of black men and women leading to centuries of discrimination and worse, the domino theory which led us into the disaster of Vietnam, the "evidence" of hidden caches of weapons of mass destruction which led us into the disaster in Iraq, the myth that Palestine was a land without people for a people without a land.

As uncomfortable as it makes me, I'm ready to acknowledge that we are often like sheep.  Not terribly bright sheep either.  The question seems to be whether we recognize the voice of any credible shepherd at all, much less the voice of the Good Shepherd.

I enjoyed Frank Rich's article as he castigated those who were seen as the brightest and best in their respective fields, or looked up to as paragons of every virtue we aspire to accumulate for ourselves.  They've been brought low, and that always tempts me to feel as though I have been brought up higher.  But the truth is, I've been no better.  As I review my adolescent years, my early adult years as a husband and father, as a young priest; as I fought for civil rights and protested the Vietnam war, I adopted a kind of group mentality and the self-righteousness that goes with it that is not all that different from Alan Greenspan or the Vatican hierarchy.  I was often uncritical of the movements with which I identified.  I'm afraid the political or religious left is no less guilty of that trait than the political or religious right.

In a little book of meditations, Barbara Crafton describes the badge of purity she wore when she entered a junior high school where the kids were much more sophisticated than the ones she grew up with in her home town.  These kids stood outside before the opening bell with telltale smoke drifting up from cupped hands that hung at their sides.  The girls at this new school wore nylons instead of the white ankle socks which identified her and her best friend as good girls.  There were some girls in her class who were even said to have gone almost all the way.   She cites her outrage when her friend came to school in nylons, but acknowledged that by the end of the eighth grade she was wearing nylons too; and lipstick.  How proudly we cling to our claim to pureness and to the truth and how easily we conform.

We all need a Good Shepherd.  One who knows us by name, whose voice we have come to recognize over the din of all the other voices who call to us to come here, go there, to buy this, buy that, to believe this, believe that.  The stimuli that appeal to us every day numbers in the tens of thousands.  And the tragedy is that when we retreat, it is often to an endless list of emails, new friends on Facebook, or television drivel that numbs us so we can finally fall asleep.

What I have begun to recognize is that when it really counts, I will never recognize the voice of this Good Shepherd unless I've been practicing listening to the voice of the Good Shepherd.  Practicing can means all kinds of things.  It can mean daily meditation, weekly eucharist with your community, studying scripture with friends, visiting the sick.  It can mean joining the struggle for justice and peace.   I have come to believe, though, that however we do it, two ingredients are necessary.  The first is silence.  I have got to become quiet enough that if there is a voice, a leaning, an emerging direction, a faint call, I will hear it.  I won't be so preoccupied with myself and my agenda that I block everything else out.  The practice of silence is, I think, central.  The other is the spiritual companionship that comes from committing with others to discerning the voice of God in our world today.  What is God up to in in my life, in this family, this parish, this friendship, this town, this country, this world?  Where are justice and peace being proclaimed?  Where am I called?  What is that voice saying and where is it leading me?

I am grateful to all of you for inviting me to celebrate eucharist with you this morning and to revisit this metaphor of sheep and shepherd which I so scorned during much of my life and now, gratefully, embrace.

Amen.