1 "Very truly, I tell you, anyone who does not enter the sheepfold by the gate but climbs in by another way is a thief and a bandit. ² The one who enters by the gate is the shepherd of the sheep. ³ The gatekeeper opens the gate for him, and the sheep hear his voice. He calls his own sheep by name and leads them out. ⁴ When he has brought out all his own, he goes ahead of them, and the sheep follow him because they know his voice. ⁵ They will not follow a stranger, but they will run from him because they do not know the voice of strangers." ⁶ Jesus used this figure of speech with them, but they did not understand what he was saying to them.

7 So again Jesus said to them, "Very truly, I tell you, I am the gate for the sheep. ⁸ All who came before me are thieves and bandits; but the sheep did not listen to them. ⁹ I am the gate. Whoever enters by me will be saved, and will come in and go out and find pasture. ¹⁰ The thief comes only to steal and kill and destroy. I came that they may have life, and have it abundantly."

When Jesus first spoke these words to his disciples, sheep were everywhere, and everyone in that part of the world was intimately acquainted with the entire culture of keeping sheep. The Bible is full of sheep imagery, beginning with the Old Testament and the Psalm we just heard, but also with many metaphors in which good kings and leaders are compared with good shepherds. There is a memorable passage in Ezekiel 34 in which God chastises unfaithful shepherds and promises to take over the care of the sheep himself, and this may have been Jesus’ inspiration for the talk about the thieves and bandits. But the fact remains that a metaphor which was once a common part of daily life has become foreign and unfamiliar. I’d like a show of hands – will all of you with experience in raising sheep raise your hand?

We tried to get a sheep here on Easter morning, to celebrate the victory of the lamb. I know a man who raises sheep as a hobby and he has a couple of new lambs, born during the snows of late February, that would have been the perfect size for petting. He was willing to let us borrow them, if we could work out the details. So we put one of our most dependable church members on the job of determining how best to transport these lambs, keep them enclosed, and make sure that our children would be safe when petting them.

We discovered that all these things are a lot more complicated than they appear… Even young lambs are a little too large for a dog crate, so transportation would have been difficult. And when they are in unfamiliar surroundings, their first instinct is to run away – apparently they can really run! The owner, who lives in northern Mequon, once had a lamb escape. When it got to the railroad tracks, it took off heading south and ran two miles, all the way to Concordia College, before it could be captured. Needless to say, those are the very same railroad tracks that are out our back door, and we were warned that an escaped lamb in Fox Point might make it all the way downtown. The pen would have needed to be very substantial – which was a little out of our budget. And as to the safety of our children – do you remember the E. Coli outbreak a few years ago at the petting area of the Ozaukee County Fair? We were looking at getting professional advice to determine if signs reading "Caution: Wash hands thoroughly after petting lambs" would be sufficient to prevent the same thing happening here. Needless to say, the lamb issue became way too complex, and we decided to leave them home on the farm. I am sorry, however, that we missed that visual shepherding image so lacking in our lives today.

Sometimes when the biblical images are unfamiliar, we can substitute another image from our culture – for example, my Native American friends from Alaska say their Inupat translation of the Bible speaks of baby seals instead of lambs. What would we substitute for "shepherd" in these passages? "The Lord is my Quarterback" doesn’t do it for me. We can think about our relationships with pets that come to us when they are called by name, though that still doesn’t address the idea of being part of a flock – most of us don’t own enough dogs or cats to have them qualify as a community.

So please bear with this sheep imagery, unfamiliar as it may be. It has put down deep roots in our vocabulary, even if we no longer live with sheep on a daily basis. Ordained clergy, for instance, are often called "Pastors," and the course I took in seminary on how to walk with you in challenging times was called "Pastoral Care." But in these words of Jesus there is no mention of other shepherds, assistant shepherds, or even sheep dogs. There is only one Good Shepherd, and it is Jesus. We need to forget what we have heard about sheep being mindless and stupid. It’s not meant to be an insult. All the rest of us, whether we are paid or unpaid followers of Jesus, are part of this Good Shepherd’s flock. There is no distinction in his eyes. We are all sheep.

There are three main points to be learned from this. The first involves who Jesus is – he is the Good Shepherd. If you have been through Confirmation in this church, or in most other churches, at one point in your life you probably had to memorize the 23^rd Psalm. If you have not yet been in my Confirmation class, be warned! And if you somehow escaped that particular piece of spiritual formation, I recommend that you do some remedial work and memorize it now. It’s even printed in the Order of Worship so you don’t have to look it up. You can fasten it with a rubber band to the sun visor in your car and learn it on the way to work. You never know when you’ll need it – and when you do, chances are you won’t have a Bible handy! I can guarantee you that Jesus had memorized this Psalm himself, and had it in mind when he spoke these words.

So this first point is a familiar one: Jesus is the Good Shepherd. One of the earliest images in Christian art, found painted on the walls of the catacombs, is that of Jesus tenderly carrying a young lamb draped over his shoulders. He knows his sheep and calls us by name. He knows about every moment of our day. Even when we forget about him, he is watching over us. He takes care of us and knows our needs before we know them ourselves. He provides us with food and drink and refreshes us along the way. He restores our souls. He is sitting among us, even now, in these pews, holding us in his arms. Jesus, the Good Shepherd, is the source of our life, the one who makes life possible.

But there is more to this passage than who Jesus is – it also tells us what Jesus does. The second point to be made here is that Jesus acts to lead us to abundant life. Beginning in verse 7, he makes it clear that he is not only the shepherd; he is also the gate, and we sheep must go through that gate in order to know the abundant life he has planned for us. In the words of the Psalmist, he leads us through the valley of the shadow of death, and safely out the other side. Jesus himself has experienced death and has come out safely on the other side! He is more than a teacher, more than an example, more than a caregiver. He is the one who shows us the way to eternal life, who loves us so much he was willing to die for us. We are still in the season of Easter, celebrating Christ’s victory over death. He has shown us the way to abundant life, and that way is through his overwhelming love.

If the first two points are about who Jesus is and what he does, the third point has to do with who we are in relationship to Christ. The identity and actions of Jesus, the Good Shepherd and the gate to abundant life, are lovely in their own right, but don’t make a lot of sense without the presence of the flock. Jesus is the Good Shepherd who shows the way… for the sheep. Without him, we are lost. With him, we have abundant life. The identity and actions of Jesus are inextricably linked with the identity and actions of his followers, his community in the church, his flock of sheep.

As I pointed out before, in these words of Jesus, Karl and I are not your shepherds. Your assigned Deacon is not your shepherd. Those other meanings of the shepherding imagery are found in other places in the New Testament, but they are not found here. According to these words of Jesus in the Fourth Gospel, every single one of us in this room, regardless of whether or not we get paid or sit on a board or have even formally become a member of North Shore – every one of us is a sheep. All who follow Jesus are members of the same flock, listening to the same voice, called to the same promise and the same love. This has particular meaning for us on Compassion Sunday, when we consider who the other members of this flock may be.

I support a Compassion child in Ecuador, Miriam Guanath Quishpi. Her letters arrive in Spanish, with an English translation, but the Spanish isn’t in her own handwriting, and I suspect it is translated before that from Quechua. She lives in the highlands of Ecuador, and her parents support her family by working whenever they can on farms that belong to other, wealthier people. When I send extra money for her birthday or Christmas, I get a note thanking me for the sweatshirt or pair of shoes. I started supporting her because I was inspired four years ago on Compassion Sunday by Cindee Re’s testimony on how much the Compassion children had meant to their family.

Like many of us here in the comfortable suburbs, I had resonated with the idea that the LeFeber family had money to spare, and that only $32 per month would help a poor child to go to school and live a better life. What a bargain, I was told. I could make a huge difference in her young life. But what no one prepared me for was what a huge difference she would make in my life. A few months ago, when the snow was deep and the days were dark and my Seasonal Affective Disorder was at rock bottom, I received a letter from her that began with the promise that she was praying for me and my family, and was asking our dear Lord Jesus to keep us all well.

Her letters all begin that way, but this time, probably because I felt so miserable, her words brought me great and unexpected comfort. This child, living in poverty in the highlands of Ecuador, was praying for me, holding me up to OUR Lord Jesus and asking for his love and mercy to surround me. And in that moment I experienced the power of her prayers and knew that the love of Jesus is so much larger than any of us can imagine. Miriam and I are sheep of the same flock, following the same shepherd, and though I may have more money than she does, our prayers carry equal weight. She has as much to teach me about the love of our Lord Jesus as I can ever hope to teach her.

And that is what it means to be a part of Jesus’ flock. If we live the abundant lives of the sheep of Jesus, our identity as those who belong to Jesus is acted out and lived in the world, in all we say and do, and in all we write in our Compassion letters across the globe. Who we are as the flock, Christ’s church, cannot be separated from who Jesus is and what he has done for us.

He is the Good Shepherd, caring for us, loving us, and watching over us. He is also the gateway to abundant life, willing even to die for us to make that life possible. But he also calls us by name, his sheep, to live faithfully in our flock, loving one another in ways that only he can make possible. In gratitude for all he has given, let us live and love and show compassion as true members of the Good Shepherd’s flock. Amen.