What Makes the World Go Around

I am the good shepherd.
John 10:11

The 23rd Psalm, "The Lord is my shepherd," is frequently used at funerals, perhaps because the King James version of this psalm includes the phrase "the valley of the shadow of death" (verse 4). Good Shepherd Sunday is our patronal feast day, and it is certainly not a funereal occasion. However, Christian celebration should not aid and bet that pervasive tendency in our culture to deny the ever present reality of death. Easter is the celebration of Christ's victory over death, not an opportunity to pretend that death does not exist.

An early Christian text declares:

Light and darkness,
life and death,
right and left
are brothers of one another.
They are inseparable.
Gospel of Philip

Life without death is as impossible and meaningless as right without left. Christ himself, who appears in today's gospel as "the good shepherd" (John 10:11), appears in the Book of Revelation as "the lamb that was slain" (5:12), for his role is not just to herd the sheep but to protect and defend them, and, in so doing, he lays down his own life.

Our epistle tells us:

Christ suffered for us,
leaving us an example,
that ye should follow his steps.
1 Peter 2:21

Christ's example of loving service is our inspiration and encouragement. Christ, the Good Shepherd, is lord of both the dead and the living and is thus our link with those who have gone before us in the service of this church. The celebration of love, contained in "The Song of Songs," declares that "love is stronger than death" (8:6), and the love of the Good Shepherd binds us all together, the living and the dead, in what the creed calls "the communion of saints."

Today is also the opportunity for us to reconnect with those separated from us not by death but by relocation and geographical distance. It is a "homecoming" for those who have grown up in this parish and who retain a warm spot in their hearts for the Church of the Good Shepherd.

Your love for this church reflects the Good Shepherd's love for his sheep. In each case, it is a love based on personal, reciprocal knowledge: "I know mine, and mine know me" (John 11:14). This abiding, personal love for the Good Shepherd is what has kept this parish going. It is epitomized in the hymn we all love to sing:

We love the place, O God.
Wherein thine honour dwells.

This precious love has something important to teach the wider church. To be sure, "no man is an island," and no parish can be an island. We are part of a diocese, just as our diocese is part of the national church. But love is what makes the world go around, and it is much harder, sometimes, to love a diocese or a national church than it is to love our church, the Church of the Good Shepherd.

The German poet Schiller's rapturous exhoration, "Be embraced, ye millions!", may be beautiful poetry, but, taken literally, it is quite absurd. No one can embrace millions. An embrace is always between two people. The Church of the Good Shepherd puts a human face on our church, a face that we can know and love.

Whatever praiseworthy efforts our national church may be involved in, without the motivation of love, we all succumb, sooner or later, to "compassion fatigue." The warmth that we experience here is not simply that of a social club. It comes ultimately from the Good Shepherd's love for his sheep.

I pray that through this church and its members others who are not yet of this fold may come to know the love of the one who laid down his life for us, that we might have life, and have it more abundantly (John 10:10).

May 4 , 2003