The Call of the Good Shepherd

Preached at Croydon Minster on the Fourth Sunday of Easter. Readings Acts of the Apostles 4.5-12; Psalm 23; John 10.11-18 

‘I am the Good Shepherd’, says the Lord. Alleluia.

 

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At my ordination as a priest I was told, ‘Keep the example of the Good Shepherd always before you’.

 

The person who spoke those words was the Bishop ordaining me who was himself holding a shepherd’s crook, otherwise known as a crozier or pastoral staff.

 

That symbol reflects the call to the pastors of the church to be shepherds of God’s people.

 

The image of the shepherd, and associated pastoral care, is deep at the heart of the church: after all, we are referred to as ‘the flock’.

 

As St Paul says in the Acts of the Apostles to the bishops of the early church, ‘Keep watch over yourselves and over all the flock, of which the Holy Spirit has made you overseers, to shepherd the church of God that he obtained with the blood of his own Son.’ (Acts 20.28)

 

Shepherds and sheep feature throughout the Old Testament. Moses is watching over his father-in-law’s flock when he encounters God in the intense mystery of the Burning Bush. David is a shepherd and a king. The prophet Ezekiel rebukes the negligent shepherds. The psalms speak of God as our shepherd, most notably Psalm 23.

 

And shepherds feature from the beginning of the gospels, watching over their flocks by night. Called by angels they come to behold and adore the very Lamb of God, who is also their shepherd (Luke 2.8-20).

 

Jesus draws on the image of the shepherd in his parables to express the deepest care and attention that the shepherd gives to the sheep so that they are safe, nourished and alive!

 

I am the Good Shepherd. The English word ‘good’ slightly dilutes the original force of the Greek word καλοσ kalos. ‘Good’ just sounds a bit limp to us now. καλοσ translates better as ‘noble, wholesome, beautiful’. That is a shepherd with purpose a shepherd to protect, guide and nurture.

 

And the determining characteristic of this Good, noble, wholesome, beautiful shepherd is that he will lay down his life for the sheep. The good shepherd is totally invested in that care. This is in contrast to the ‘hired hand’ the one who turns up for the money but has no commitment to the wellbeing, safety and health of the sheep.

 

In this sense Jesus is not the only good, noble shepherd. King David was one too. Remember when Goliath, like a ravening wolf, threatened the safety of the flock of Israel David stepped forward to protect his people, highlighting that King Saul was like a ‘hired hand’ who would run away. The shepherd boy David stood and said to the king,

 

³⁴‘Your servant used to keep sheep for his father; and whenever a lion or a bear came, and took a lamb from the flock, ³⁵I went after it and struck it down, rescuing the lamb from its mouth; and if it turned against me, I would catch it by the jaw, strike it down, and kill it. ³⁶Your servant has killed both lions and bears; and this uncircumcised Philistine shall be like one of them, since he has defied the armies of the living God.’ ³⁷David said, ‘The Lord, who saved me from the paw of the lion and from the paw of the bear, will save me from the hand of this Philistine.’ So Saul said to David, ‘Go, and may the Lord be with you!’ (1 Samuel 17.34-37)

 

David was no hired hand. He was a good and noble shepherd. So where does that leave us with Jesus claiming to be the Good Shepherd?

 

Jesus is stretching the image of the shepherd even beyond what is good, noble, wholesome and beautiful.

 

St John’s gospel reflects this beautifully. The phrase ‘I am’ is used by Jesus a lot in John’s gospel: I am the Bread of Life; I am the True Vine; I am the way, the truth and the life; and so on.

 

Hearers will make the connection that the little words ‘I am’ - in Greek ἐγώ εἰμι ego eimi - is how God reveals his name to Moses when he was out shepherding: ‘I am that I am’. That is God’s name: ‘I am’: Being itself, all that is, visible and invisible.

 

The Name is the Name in whose power the Church brings healing and forgiveness on sins, as we heard in the reading from Acts of the Apostles (Acts 4.7-10).

 

The Good Shepherd is leading us deep into the heart of God, because Jesus Christ is the deep, loving heart of God.

 

This Good Shepherd is the knowing shepherd. ‘I know my own’ (John 10.14). As the psalm says ‘O Lord you have searched me out and known me’ (Psalm 139.1). And the knowing shepherd calls us to know him more and more deeply and intimately: ‘my own know me’. This is the call of the Good Shepherd for us to search out and know the ways of God. It is calling us to prayer, to intimacy with God, in Jesus’ words, ‘just as the Father knows me and I know the Father’ (John 10.15).

 

St John’s told us this before. In the preface to his gospel we read, ‘No one has ever seen God. It is God the only Son, who is close to the Father’s heart, who has made him known. (John 1.18)

 

The Good Shepherd knows the Father, and knows you, as our Great High Priest. Christ calls you deeply and insistently to know the Father where you find life in all its abundance.

 

Listen. Hear the call of the Good Shepherd, the Lamb of God.

 

 

'Prepare the Way of the Lord' A Homily for Advent

 A sermon preached at Croydon Minster at the Service of Words and Music for Advent on the Second Sunday of Advent. Gospel Luke 1.5-25

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‘Prepare the way of the Lord. ‘

 

That is the title of this service of words and music for this great season of Advent.

 

It is also the opening message of St Mark’s gospel when the evangelist has announced ‘The beginning of the good news of Jesus Christ, the Son of God.’ (Mark 1.1).

 

Having made that wonderful statement, Mark goes on to quote Isaiah to say that a messenger is being sent ‘who will prepare your way’ (1.2) and that a voice will cry out in the wilderness ‘Prepare the way of the Lord’ (1.3).

 

Advent is a time of preparation, of clearing out distractions, being ready, alert so that the Lord’s way may be prepared.

 

It calls for you and me to have a posture of preparation. So what’s your Advent posture of preparation?

 

Is it the preparation of the athlete: on your marks, get set…?

 

Is it the preparation of the artist: with the canvas tight, with paint on the brush ready to make the first strokes?

 

Is it the posture of the musician, the violinist with bow poised above the strings, or singer having taken a breath, ready for the conductor’s hands to summons the music from you?

 

That moment before the starting gun, before the paint is smeared on the canvas, before the conductor’s baton moves – that is Advent, a moment held over these four weeks, and it’s a moment of expectation of what is to come, or rather Who is to come.

 

We stand, as the poet Malcolm Guite reminds us, between two comings: the coming of Christ as incarnate, Word made flesh, born in Bethlehem and the coming of Christ in glory at the consummation of all things.

 

Preparation, expectation, attention, waiting, yearning is our response to God’s initiative to come amongst us.

 

This church of all churches, dedicated as we are to St John the Baptist, should be imbued with Advent character: expectant, attentive, prepared and proclaiming.

 

John is an intricate and complex character, born of the priestly line, and therefore by heredity a priest, and yet also standing clearly in the tradition of the prophets.

 

The priest offers sacrifice to God for the people; the prophet represents the voice and vision of God back to the people.

 

Priesthood and prophecy are not at odds: Isaiah’s own call came in the Temple as the presence of God, in incense, filled the house. Likewise, Jeremiah was a prophet born from a priestly line and yet called to be a prophet too.

 

‘Prepare the way of the Lord’ is a prophet’s cry; receiving and making present the Lord is the priestly task.

 

It’s in the Temple that Zechariah encounters Gabriel, the archangel, like the prophets before him, telling him of the birth of the one who will prepare the way of the Lord out in the wilderness. Zechariah, husband of Elizabeth, is John the Baptist’s father. This news struck Zechariah dumb!

 

After John’s birth Zechariah rejoiced and burst into song.

 

Usually in the evening at Evensong we hear the Song of Mary and of Simeon, the Magnificat and Nunc Dimittis. Tonight, this service will close with a canticle usually associated with the morning, the Benedictus, the Song of Zechariah, which speaks of preparation and what is to come:

 

And you, child, shall be called the prophet of the Most High,

for you will go before the Lord to prepare his way,

To give his people knowledge of salvation

by the forgiveness of all their sins.

In the tender compassion of our God

the dawn from on high shall break upon us,

To shine on those who dwell in darkness and the shadow of death,

and to guide our feet into the way of peace. (Luke 2.7-10)

 

May we be prepared to meet the one who comes.

 

 

 

 

 

 

A sermon preached for the Fourth Sunday of Easter

A sermon preached on the Fourth Sunday of Easter. Readings: Acts 2.42-end; Psalm 23; 1 Peter 2.19-end; John 10.1-10

The image of Jesus Christ, the Good Shepherd, is one that many people hold dear.

Today is often known as ‘Good Shepherd’ Sunday because of the Gospel reading of the day, and is associated too with prayer for vocations to the priesthood because each priest is charged by the bishop at ordination with these powerful, inspiring and humbling words, ‘keep the example of the Good Shepherd always before you’. That is the charge to pastoral care.

The ordination rite is peppered with shepherding images.

Some people find the imagery of the priest, or bishop, as shepherd to be unhelpful or even patronising, because of the inference that they, as part of the flock, are somehow dumb, bleating and stupid creatures like sheep. It’s worth noting though that the word congregation comes from the Latin con meaning ‘together with’ and gregis meaning ‘flock’. We come together as a flock even if sometimes we have dumb, bleating or stupid shepherds at the head of the flock!

It is though an image Jesus uses liberally, including charging St Peter with care of the flock, saying ‘feed my sheep’ (cf John 21.15-17) and in our second reading, ‘for you were going astray like sheep’ (1 Peter 2.25a)

Pastoral care is something bishops and priests are particularly charged with – bishops carry a shepherd’s crook, after all – but pastoral care and contact, within the Body of Christ, the flock, is the responsibility of everyone. I hope that you are using this lockdown time to keep in touch with those people you know from church, encouraging them in endurance, faith and hope.

Pastoral care is about being connected in the Body of Christ. And the role of the shepherd is sometimes about showing compassion; sometimes about showing direction; sometimes about nudging or cajoling the stubborn onwards to good pastures; sometimes about making huge sacrifices for the flock, after the example of the Good Shepherd, not like a hired hand, but as a priest, passionate about the safety and well-being of his flock, as today’s gospel implies.

The first letter of Peter speaks of the flock going astray. Flocks go astray when individuals are cut off in some way. And don’t we know that feeling now. The flock is dispersed. We can’t come to be ‘together, with’. We are like sheep scattered across hills and valleys not able to be in the sheepfold of our temple.

Yet Peter also speaks of the scattered flock returning ‘to the shepherd and guardian of your souls’ (1 Peter 2.25b). The return to the shepherd and guardian of our souls is the promise held out that the flock will congregate again, and will be able to know the promise of the Good Shepherd: ‘I came that they may have life, and have it abundantly’ (John 10.10).

What a promise. In times where our lives are impaired and limited, because we can’t congregate, the promise of the fulness of life, abundant life, is one for which we yearn, hanker, desire and long.

And this is the great gift of Psalm 23, the Lord’s my shepherd. That deeply loved psalm is like a compass that will guide us on the path to abundance of life. It narrates for us our predicament, sets the bearings of our route out of this and sets our sights on our destination.

Of course the opening line causes some confusion: ‘The Lord’s my shepherd, I’ll not want’ can all too easily be interpreted as ‘I don’t want the Lord as my shepherd’, when of course it means, ‘Because the Lord is my shepherd there is nothing I can lack, I shall not be in want for anything’. That in itself is a powerful message of assurance.

And I shall not be in want because he helps me rest in green pastures and leads me on my journey beside still, rather than turbulent waters.

One paraphrase of the Bible renders it like this:

God, my shepherd!

    I don’t need a thing.

You have bedded me down in lush meadows,

    you find me quiet pools to drink from. (Psalm 23.1-2. The Message)

That’s all very well at the moment as we are locked down, locked in and socially isolated. I can’t go into a park, whether a lush meadow or not and lie down, and if I wander around at Waddon Ponds for more than an hour I’ll be moved on.

But there’s something even deeper, ‘he revives my soul’. At the moment many people know the feeling of another psalm, psalm 42 (which begins by describing the desire to drink from living water): ‘why are you so full of heaviness, O my soul, and why are you so disquieted within me?’ (Psalm 42.6 passim). Our souls need reviving, ‘like a dry and thirsty land where there is no water’ as another psalm puts it (Psalm 63.2).

Reviving, literally means bringing back to life, and that is a huge flag waving to say this is about resurrection. Christians are people brought back to life through the silent pools of the water of baptism, with souls revived.

And here is the compass for thirsty travellers: ‘he guides me along the right pathways for his name’s sake’. This is the job of the shepherd with the shepherd’s trusty staff bringing strength and protection.

Even walking through ‘the valley of the shadow of death’ evil is no longer to be feared, not viruses not nothing. ‘Perfect love casts out fear’ (1 John 4.18): perfect love is abundant life and fear has no hold there.

And then the destination is in sight. Not for the Christian light at the end of a tunnel, for we walk as children of the light, with the light of the Risen Lord, in this Easter Candle, illuminating our way: ‘for once you were children of darkness, but now in the Lord you are light. Live as children of light…’ (Ephesians 5.8)

The destination and fulfilment of the promise of life is found at a table, the table of the Lord. Here is the anointing, healing love of the Good Shepherd, here a cup is poured to overflowing: this is the abundant life of Christ the Bread of Life, Christ the True Vine.

Psalm 63 says ‘so would I gaze upon you in your holy place, that I might behold your power and your glory’ (Psalm 63.3). That is our yearning - not simply to be in a magnificent building; not simply to enjoy fellowship with one another; not simply to enjoy the splendours of our choral tradition – but to be in our holy place, our place of encounter where the Good Shepherd becomes again the ‘Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world’

We yearn to gather at that table, our altar, once again for it is where abundant life and hope is brought to us and it points us to a deeper hope beyond, that we might dwell in the house of the Lord all the days of our life.

O God, our sovereign and shepherd,

who brought again your Son Jesus Christ

    from the valley of death,

comfort us with your protecting presence

and your angels of goodness and love,

that we also may come home

and dwell with him in your house for ever.

Amen.

'So simple; so deep' a sermon

First preached as a sermon at Croydon Minster on the 17th Sunday after Trinity. The readings were 2 Kings 5.1-3,7-15c (the healing of Naaman) and Luke 17.11-19 (the healing of the ten lepers)

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It’s all so simple and yet so deep.

Receiving the healing love of God is simple: God’s unconditional capacity to heal, when it is sought, is simply there.

Receiving the healing love of God is also deep: God’s healing brings us close to God’s overwhelming grace, mercy and love; it is a deep healing.

Receiving the healing love of God is the Holy Spirit’s gift - given in the name of Jesus - pouring out the creative, healing of our loving heavenly Father.

That simplicity and that depth, heals, anoints and soothes the deepest and darkest parts of our nature so that we are freed and released to be the people God made us to be in God’s image and likeness; the deep identity we find in Christ.

This story of the ten lepers is simple and deep, as is the account of the healing of Naaman. Healing for Naaman is as simple as going to that particular river right here, and not a grand river faraway: just a simple Israelite river with no magical properties; a river that is deep and healing.

The gospel story of the ten lepers sounds like a bit of a morality tale to encourage us (or make us feel guilty) to say ‘thank you’. And indeed saying ‘thank you’ and showing gratitude is really important in human society; it soothes and eases relationships and creates a culture of gratitude. And when one person starts saying ‘thank you’ the other nine are more likely to as well.

That’s the simple lesson of this encounter with Jesus: say thank you, make that a habit in your life.

But also the gospel the story of the ten lepers is a meditation on deep healing, glorifying God and finding the place of true worship.

Let’s look at each of those three features.

Deep healing. Deep healing touches every part of us, throughout our bodies and minds to the end of each tiny nerve. What does that mean? When we pray for healing for ourselves or others what are we praying for?

Deep healing is the healing of body, mind and spirit; not just of the outer person, but in their depths, at their very core. Indeed some of the most ‘healed’ people can be those who bodies or minds are wracked with pain.

And that is hard to say, because we don’t want to live with pain or discomfort. It is the mystery of the words that say of the Crucified Lord, ‘by his wounds you have been healed’ (1 Peter 2.24). The healed leper prostrated himself, literally laid down his own body before Jesus: what a joyful posture of gratitude that is in response to deep healing.

Glorifying God. The joyful posture of gratitude that the healed man showed was his glorification of God in Jesus Christ: praise of God and the response of gratitude were intertwined and inseparable as water mixed with wine, as Christ’s humanity and divinity.

The pagan Naaman and the Samaritan leper both praised God, Naaman declaring, ‘Now I know that there is no God in all the earth except in Israel’ (2 Kings 5.15b). That God is the God and Father or our Lord Jesus Christ.

Finding the place of true worship. The young girl in the story of Naaman directed this great military commander to the prophet of God in the backwater of Israel and there he found the God of all Creation.

In Jesus’ day lepers lived in quarantine at a distance from society, ritually unclean, unholy, outcasts from the people of God. This group of ten were all sent back to the Temple, to the priests to signify that they were no longer excluded from worship. The man who was healed had been excluded on two grounds – he was a leper and a Samaritan. And on being healed he turned around: this is where God’s presence is to be found: found in Jesus Christ the true Priest; the true Temple of God; the Great Physician. Jesus told all ten to go to and show themselves to the priests and effectively only one did!

So we see the simplicity of the healing and depth of what it means. We see that healing, glorifying God and gratitude go hand in hand: that’s why there is close proximity between healing and holiness. The truly holy person, the saint, knows themselves still to be human and still flawed and also to be healed.

All this prompts us to consider our grateful response to the love of God. Like Naaman we have been bathed in simple yet deep waters; the waters of baptism. We are in receipt of the healing and deliverance of God. Do we adopt a posture of gratitude? Do we offer back tokens of gratitude through the church in our giving of time, giving of our talents, giving of money?

A tenth of the group turned back to give thanks. It is the Biblical principle of the tithe; the offering of a tenth of who we are and what we have back to God who gave the gift of life in the first place.

To paraphrase the prayer of David at the consecration of the Temple (1 Chronicles 29.10-14): all things come from you, O Lord, and we’re simply offering back what you have given us: our sacrifice in response to your sacrifice; our healing in response to your holiness; our love in response to your love. Amen.

THE PRIEST AS GARDENER

‘Priests are to be servants and shepherds among the people to whom they are sent…They are to be messengers, watchmen and stewards of the Lord’.[1]

The language of the Ordinal gives familiar images of the priest, replete with Biblical allusions and imagery.[2] In his reappraisal of the work of Archbishop Michael Ramsey’s classic The Christian Priest Today (1972) in an anniversary lecture, Rowan Williams adds a new image, that of the priest as weaver, one who interprets and draws together the stories that form and shape the community that the priest serves. In this blog I want, humbly, to suggest and explore another image, that of priest as gardener. As it continues I have written on the basis that the word ‘gardener’ can be replaced by the word ‘priest’, and ‘garden’ be replaced by ‘human spirit’ or ‘church’, such are the parallels.

It reminds me of a story when I started my second curacy, before I was licensed and no one knew who I was. A woman came into our new garden as I was chopping some overgrown things down. She was clearly looking for someone and said to me, 'Are you the gardener? Can you tell me where the keys to the church hall are?' Nice to be mistaken for the gardener.

Of Gardens

Gardens feature in the Bible as locations that are, and represent, a place of proximity to God in God’s creative and redemptive purposes. In the Old Testament, the Garden of Eden is the place where Adam and Eve dwell, initially in harmony with God, before fracturing that relationship (Genesis 2.15 ff), and it is also a place where the man and woman hide from God (Genesis 3.8); the garden in the Song of Songs is a place where the loved purses the beloved (Song of Songs 6.2). In the gospels the Garden of Gethsemane is where Jesus bears the weight of the fallen creation to reverse ‘Adam’s fall’ in saying ‘yes’ to the Father (John 18.1); and in the Garden of Resurrection, which is in such close proximity to the place of crucifixion (John 19.41), Mary Magdalene’s tear-filled search for her Lord sees her find the beloved (John 20.15).

These gardens interconnect typologically: Adam and the New Adam; the lover’s pursuit in Song of Songs, Mary Magdalene’s in the garden of resurrection. In Eden and the Garden of Resurrection the true gardener is God.

Of Gardeners

The task of a gardener is to cultivate, tend and nurture a garden. The gardener does this to (co)create something beautiful and that grows, not to the gardener’s glory, but as something for everyone to behold and for God to delight in. The garden is an offering beyond itself and is subject to forces beyond the gardener’s control. So then, the garden, like the human spirit or church community is a microcosm of the world; or, is it the world, the Kingdom, in embryo? Like the trees of the field the plantings of the garden will ‘clap their hands’ (Isaiah 55.12), or in the words of the canticle Benedicite, omnia opera, ‘O all ye Green Things upon the Earth, bless ye the Lord: praise him and magnify him forever’.[3]

The gardener intercedes for the garden. The prayers of Rogationtide are perhaps more agricultural than horticultural, but the same principle applies: the gardener asks God’s blessing on the garden.[4] The gardener knows, like St Paul, that whilst planting and watering it is God who gives the growth (1 Corinthians 3.6). The tending of the garden is a work of trust on the part of the gardener and one in which grace is bestowed.

There is nothing the gardener enjoys more than to perambulate around the garden. The poet George Herbert interpreted the ‘beating the bounds’, the traditional Rogation procession, ‘as a means of asking God’s blessing on the land, of preserving boundaries, of encouraging fellowship between reconciling neighbours with the reconciling of differences, and of charitable giving to the poor’.[5] The gardener knows that whilst boundaries are in the mind of the gardener: bees, birds, butterflies and dandelion seeds do not observe boundaries. In gardens boundaries are trnagressed. There is cross fertilisation, literally. The gardener has to live with and accept this graciously.

Biodiversity is crucial to support the ecosystem of the garden. Plants that may not be desired by the gardener nourish and support the life of other deeply valuable aspects of garden life. The caterpillars that are a nuisance become the pollenating butterflies. Even 'weeds' (insert names as applicable) have a place in a healthy garden. That which is deemed a weed by the gardener can be a thing of beauty; it can be redeemed and seen as a blessing to the garden.

The gardener has to be endlessly patient. There are many pressures to short-circuit patience. Planting of rapid growing shrubs or ground covering plants and those that provide instant splashes of colour are easy to do. But they will need to be replaced season by season. We do not plant many oak trees any more. In the eighteenth century Lancelot ‘Capability’ Brown changed landscapes with a patient vision knowing that neither he nor his aristocratic employer would see instant benefits. The landscape would look its best when trees had matured and lakes had reeds around them. And that would be long after his day.

The gardener has to take particular care in transplanting. Seedlings are delicate and do not always take root in new soil. Indeed the gardener has to attend to the whole garden but know that some plants are more self-sufficient than others. The gardener’s task is inter-generational. The youngest plant can bloom and be beautiful as can the mature plant; each will need different treatment.

The gardener can only work with the garden that has been entrusted. So it would be impossible to create the gardens of Sissinghurst into the Australian outback. The gardener has to pay heed to the soil conditions of the garden as well as the local climate and conditions, what the French viticulturists would call the terroir. A gardener is on a hiding to nothing in attempting to replicate the planting of a garden from elsewhere and to not pay attention to the realities of the terroir of their own garden.

Like the vine grower, the gardener has to prune (John 15.1-2). Pruning helps healthy growth, can increase fruiting and cuts away disease. On first sight pruning looks brutal or harsh yet it is profoundly necessary. Furthermore pruning can benefit other plants as well as the pruned one. Pruning enables light to get to dark places to allow those plants growing in the shade of others to flourish, although some plants are shade loving and the gardener needs to honour that. The full sun will impoverish those plants.

From time to time the gardener has also to tie up and support those plants that cannot stand by their own strength. The trellis is needed to ‘bind up and heal’. Gardeners also need to feed and nourish the soil. Feeding is a task of the gardener. The need for patient digging in of nourishment and nutrients, watering in drought but knowing some plants draw from deep down and not just at the surface (cf Jer 17.7,8).

‘You cannot bear the weight of this calling in your own strength, but only by the grace and power of God…Pray earnestly for the gift of the Holy Spirit.[6]

This is a profoundly Trinitarian vision into which the gardener is bound. In the gardener’s task we see the Triune God: the Father, the source of all being and life, the Creator, who spreads the garden before us; we see the Son, in the redemptive capacity with the Father, to recreate the garden as the New Adam; the Holy Spirit in the Spirit’s boundless creativity, sustenance, beauty and diversity of gifts, the Spirit which enables even ‘the desert [to] blossom and burst into song’ (Isaiah 35.1).

© Andrew Bishop, 2016

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[1] Common Worship: Ordination Services, Study Edition, p. 37.

[2] Common Worship: Ordination Services, Study Edition, p. 37. This edition gives biblical references for these images.

[3] Book of Common Prayer, p. 9.

[4] Common Worship: Times and Seasons, p. 610.

[5] Common Worship: Times and Seasons, p. 597.

[6] Common Worship: Ordination Services, Study Edition, p. 39.