The Gate

 

I don’t know about you, but I sometimes find the cultural assumptions in the Bible very difficult.

We don’t really know about sheep here in London, other than as curry mutton or a half-leg of lamb such as we enjoyed on Easter Sunday.

But for sheep farmers, they are an essential part of the economy, as, indeed, they have been for millennia.
As they were in first-century Palestine.
Jesus’ first hearers would have known exactly what he was talking about, exactly what image he wanted to conjure up in their minds.

As it happens, I do know a little about sheep and sheep-rearing, as my brother was a sheep farmer until he retired last year.
Obviously, many of the methods he used were very different from those used in the Bible – but sheep don’t really change.
Shepherds still use dogs to round up the sheep and move them to a different field.
Electric fences and quad-bikes have replaced sheep-folds and people on foot, in the South of England;
but in other areas, like the Yorkshire moors or the Scottish Highlands, sheep are still at liberty to roam pretty much where they will.
In fact, they are what’s called “hefted” to their local area;
it is imprinted on them, so they don’t go far away.
In some areas, they are brought back to the farmyard at lambing time, or at shearing time, but otherwise they live freely on the hill.

Back in the day, in Southern England, sheep would also roam fairly freely on the South Downs.The shepherd would be with them, and often had a little caravan-type hut, on wheels, where he could keep his stuff, and, if necessary, sleep at night.

At night, the shepherds would make a large pen for the sheep, often using hazel hurdles, and close them in, to keep them from straying in the dark, and to keep them safe from predators.
There haven’t been wolves in the UK for many centuries now, but the sheep are kept from getting lost, and it gives the shepherd a chance to check them over for parasites, sore feet and so on.

Anyway, the point is, that’s the sort of sheep pen that I think Jesus was talking about.
We know that in Palestine there were plenty of predators that the shepherds had to be alert.
Do you remember how David, when he heard about Goliath’s challenge, volunteered to go, and when Saul asked him how on earth he thought he could beat a professional solder, said that he was accustomed to fighting off lions and bears when he was looking after his sheep.

So the shepherds had to be alert for lions and bears, and, Jesus said, for robbers, too.
Sheep were, and are, a pretty valuable commodity, and need to be kept safe.
So they were enclosed at night, and apparently the shepherd would often lie down in the gateway, so that any predator or robber would have to get past him, and, conversely, any sheep who felt minded to stray would have to do so, too!
And sheep do stray!
The grass, as they say, is always greener on the other side of the fence.
Hence Jesus’ story of the lost sheep, with the shepherd grabbing his coat and staff and going off to look for it.

And it’s also true that the sheep know their shepherd.
These days, they are more likely to recognise the shepherd’s quad bike or car than the actual person.
When my brother farmed sheep, if he, or a shepherd in his employ, drove into their field, they would cluster round the vehicle, expecting that there would be supplementary feed coming.
But if an unfamiliar car, or even an unfamiliar person, were to go into that field – perhaps we would be driving around to look at the woods – they would run away, bleating loudly.

But what on earth does this have to do with us?
The nearest most of us are likely to get to a sheep is the meat aisle in the supermarket!
Or a woollen jumper, of course – sheep give wool as well as meat, although that is far less profitable these days.
Not like a few centuries ago, when England’s fortunes were derived from wool, and everybody knew how to spin, and carried a spindle around most of the time.
But not today, except for hobbyists.

It’s about being kept safe, I think.
About being able to trust God to keep us safe.
About trusting that it will be as Isaiah says:
“The Lord will make you go through hard times, but he himself will be there to teach you, and you will not have to search for him any more. If you wander off the road to the right or the left, you will hear his voice behind you saying, ‘Here is the road. Follow it.’”
Which makes it sound as though God is our satnav!
Hmmm, that might be an interesting theme to follow up.
“The Lord is my Satnav, therefore shall I never get lost.
He leads me beside still waters….” and so on.
It works!
After all, we don’t know much about shepherds, but we do know about satnavs! Although the analogy only holds so far, because you always have to check your satnav to make sure it isn’t taking you on some most peculiar route, whereas you can always trust God to lead you in the right way.

But then, how do we know the Shepherd's voice?
Well, he speaks to us;
and we listen to him.

He speaks to us.
Well, in one sense that's somewhat of a no-brainer, as the Americans so graphically put it.
We are told, from our earliest days as Christians,
that God speaks to us through the Bible,
and through other people,
and even, although we must be careful, through our own imaginations.
But being told it and knowing it seem to be two different things!
Of course, there are times when we hear the Shepherd's voice so clearly, times when we know we are his, held in his arms –
or, indeed, round his neck, the way shepherd today will still carry a young sheep.

Just look at our first reading, from Acts.

The believers were going through one of those times when God was so close to them, when new believers were coming in all the time, when life was simply ideal.
They ate together, they shared everything in common.
It was idyllic, and, of course, it couldn't last.
Ethnic tensions crept in between the Jews and the Greeks;
there was that dreadful time when Ananias and his wife pretended they'd given their all to the church, when they hadn't at all.
It wouldn't have mattered –
nobody was making them give anything at all, never mind all they had –
but to lie about it?
They paid a fearful penalty.
The community was wonderful while it lasted, but it didn't, couldn't, last.
I wonder whether they felt they were failures when it all broke up, when they started to be persecuted, when things basically went wrong –
or did they accept that things happen, and that God still loved them?

We have all known times when we hear the Shepherd's voice so clearly,
but, of course, we have all known those other times, too;
times when God seems far away, when our prayers go no further than the ceiling, when, so far from hearing God's voice, we wonder whether, in fact, our whole faith has been based on a delusion!
I'm sure we've all been there and done that, too!

Now, it's traditional to be told that when those times happen, it is our fault.
We have stopped listening, we are told, we have gone our own way,
we have sinned.
And, of course, some of the time that is exactly what has happened,
even if some preachers do make it sound like God isn't talking to us any more because we've offended him!
I think, rather, it is we who cannot hear the voice of God when we are uncomfortable in God's presence.
But usually when that has happened we know that is what the matter is,
and sooner or later we admit this to ourselves, and to God,
and things come all right again.

But some of the time, with the best will in the world,
we know we have not sinned,
and it really doesn't seem to be our fault.
Times when everything goes pear-shaped,
and you wonder where on earth God is in the middle of it all?
And part of you knows that this is exactly where God is –
in the middle of it all –
but that part is operating on sheer faith.
You can't sense God's presence, or hear the Shepherd's voice at all,
no matter how hard you listen.
It happens to all of us, probably more often than we care to admit.
Again, preachers have various explanations for it,
and you've probably heard them as often as I have.
That God is testing our faith, as though God didn't know how strong our faith actually is.
Actually, of course, God does know, but we don't necessarily,
and it can be a salutary shock to us!

The thing is, of course, that we don't understand, can't understand, why these things happen.
God is God, not just another person like us, and it's not possible to understand.
We don't know why we suddenly seem to lose the ability to hear God's voice, and why, even worse, we suddenly seem to lose all sense of God, and seem to simply be going through the motions.

Years ago now, there was an epidemic of foot-and-mouth disease, and the government issued movement restriction orders.
The sheep had to stay in the same field for weeks on end, and they hated it!
They had eaten all the grass, and were reliant on supplementary feeding, and they longed and longed to be moved elsewhere, as normally they would have been.
So they would run after any car that went into that field, on the off-chance it had come to move them. But you try explaining that to sheep!

And since God is even further beyond us than we are from real sheep, how could we be expected to understand what constraints He has?

The fact that it's almost universal, that almost every Christian goes through it from time to time must mean that it is normal.
But I don't know why it happens,
and I don't altogether accept the explanations as to why.
I think it's just "part of the human condition", or, if you prefer, "part of the mystery of faith", and we must accept it as such.

We, of course, behave like sheep from time to time.
We think we do not hear the voice of the Shepherd, so we rush after any and every passing thing that looks as though it might be the Shepherd.

The most recent seems to be this vile, racist so-called Christian Nationalist movement, which is basically White Supremacy under another name.
Just as my brother's sheep ran after another car,
hoping that we were coming to move them to a better field.
Is this the right Shepherd, we ask ourselves, rushing to find out.
And sometimes, in the process, we get ourselves badly lost.
We find that the better field was no such thing.

But remember our Lord's story about the lost sheep?
When we do get lost, we can trust the Good Shepherd to pull on coat and boots, forthwith, grab a crook, and head out to find us.
"No one will snatch them out of my hand," Jesus said.
So even if we, or someone we care about, has gone off down the wrong track and got lost, we can trust the Good Shepherd to come and find us again.

Because the Good Shepherd, Jesus tells us, is come "that they may have life and have it abundantly".
Abundantly.

So when we get to a time where we seem not to hear His voice,
a time when we look round and He seems to have vanished, let's not panic.
Let's not assume it was all our fault –
it might have been, but not necessarily.
Let's not abandon all idea of Christianity, of churchgoing, of being God's person.
Instead, let's sit and wait, calling out to God in prayer, but accepting the silence, trusting that one day the Good Shepherd will come and find us, and say
"There you are!
Come on, I'll take you back to the rest!" Amen.

Going to Emmaus

 Although this is very similar to sermons I have preached in earlier years, I did change it a bit so am reposting the full text.

In our Gospel reading it is Easter Day still.
And all of Jesus’ disciples and friends are confused and sad –
many of them haven’t really heard about the resurrection,
or believe it if they have heard it.
Everybody is scared –
will they be next?
Will the authorities clobber them for being part of Jesus’ retinue?

Anyway it’s all over now.
The Teacher is dead.
And something weird has happened to his body.
Maybe it’s time to go home, to get on with their lives.
Cleopas certainly thinks so.
He doesn’t live very far from Jerusalem –
only seven miles.
High time he was going home.
So he and his companion –
who may well have been his wife –
pack up and go home, sadly, tiredly.
And Jesus comes and walks along with them, but they don’t recognise him.

But they start talking and he asks why they are so sad.
What has gone wrong?
And when they say, “Crumbs, you must be totally out of the loop if you haven’t heard;
what stone have you just crawled out from under?”
he goes through the Scriptures with them to show them that this wasn’t disaster, it wasn’t the end of the world, but, quite the reverse, it was what had been planned from the beginning of the world.

And when they get home, they invite this stranger, this wonderful person who has brought them hope, to stay for supper.
And part-way through the meal, he takes the bread and blesses it –
and they know who He is.
It is Jesus!
And then he is gone.
But they know.
And they know they must tell the others, too,
so as soon as they’ve finished eating, they get up and go back to Jerusalem.
Seven miles;
a couple of hours’ walk.
Not so bad early in the day, when they were fresh –
but after supper, when they were tired?

And when they get to Jerusalem, they hear that Simon, too, has seen the Lord, and that he is really risen.
And they share their story, too.

---oo0oo---

In a lot of ways, this story poses more questions than it answers.
Who were Cleopas and his companion?
Have we ever heard of them before?
Why didn’t they recognise Jesus?

I don’t know who Cleopas was;
but it’s possible that the companion was his wife.
Certainly a former minister of mine thought so, and would use the text “Jesus himself drew near and went with them” whenever he preached at a wedding.
But I noticed awhile back, when reading John’s Gospel that one of the few women named is a Mary, the wife of Clopas.
Clopas, Cleopas?
Same person, do you think?
So is he walking with his wife, Mary?

I think it’s significant that they weren’t in the main group of disciples;
Cleopas wasn’t part of “The Twelve”, still less part of the very close group around Jesus.
But they were followers, fellow-travellers.
The wife was one of the group of women who kept the whole show on the road, I expect, probably seeing to it that everybody ate,
and that nobody got too dirty
and everybody had a blanket at night,
if there wasn’t a convenient place to stay.
But they weren’t in the close group.

Which, I think, shows us that Jesus was and is anxious for all his followers, not just the big names!
Sometimes it feels difficult, doesn’t it –
there we are, small churches in a small circuit,
in a country that doesn’t “do” God very much,
and is apt to be a bit frightened of those who do...
but Jesus himself draws near and walks with us,
even if we don’t always recognise him.

I wonder why they didn’t recognise him?
The text says “their eyes were kept from recognising him.”,
as though it was done on purpose.
Did the risen Lord look so very different from him as they’d known him before?
Or was it just that he was out of context, as it were –
look how it isn’t easy to recognise someone you only know slightly,
your hairdresser, for instance,
or the guy who shoves trolleys around at Tesco’s,
if you meet them on the bus.
You know you know them, but you can’t think where from,
and what is their name?
Or had he the hood of his cloak up, so they couldn’t actually see his face?
But eventually he does something so familiar,
the taking of the bread and blessing it,
that they can’t help but recognise him.
Of course, they may not have been present at the Last Supper –
as far as we know, it was only the Twelve who were –
but they would have seen Jesus do this at almost any meal they took together.
It was a part of a normal Jewish evening meal,
especially the Friday-evening Sabbath meal.
It would have been well familiar to them.
And so they recognised Jesus, knew it was true –
he had risen, he wasn’t dead any more –
and then he wasn’t there any more, either!

I wonder, too, whether when Jesus opened the Scriptures to them,
he wasn’t opening them to himself, just as much.
He had told the disciples, frequently –
although often only the smaller group –
that he was to rise again, but it must have been well scary for him.
We saw him in the park that awful night, absolutely dreading the whole prospect of death on a cross,
one of the most painful deaths a person could suffer,
with no real assurance that God would raise him.
He knew, he believed –
but what if it wasn’t so?
What if he really were just deluding himself?
We all get moments of doubt like that, don’t we?
What if the whole God thing is just a delusion,
dreamed up by human beings to help us cope with the nastinesses of life?
But Jesus was vindicated.
He had been raised.
And maybe, just maybe, when he opened the Scriptures to Cleopas and his wife, he was reminding himself, too!
Yes, this was what it said, and this was what it meant!
How lovely to know for certain!

We can’t know for certain yet, and we often doubt.
That’s okay –
if we knew for sure it would be called certainty, not faith!

But so often, when the awful times come,
when God seems far away and maybe summer and daylight will never come,
then Jesus himself draws near and walks with us.
We don’t always recognise him, of course;
in fact, very often we don’t even know that he is there.
I don’t know about you, but I’m very bad at recognising Jesus!
But sometimes a friend or even an acquaintance will say something, and you know that it is from God!
Don’t ask me to explain how you know, you just do!
Been there, done that?
Yes, I thought some of you would have!

And there are times, too, when we don’t recognise Jesus at the time;
things are just too awful for that.
And yet, when we look back, we see that he was there, all the time,
just that we didn’t recognise him.
Maybe he was there in the tissue a friend offered us to mop up with, the shoulder offered to cry on, the hand-clasp in the darkness.... but he was there.

I think, too, that Jesus is walking with us during this dreadful time of uncertainty,
when the world seems to be on the brink of another global war; when energy prices are out of control;
when we don’t know how we are going to cope –
or even if we are going to still be around to cope!
Jesus is walking with those in America who fear deportation or worse, with those who wonder –
both there and here –
how the frightful travesty known as Christian Nationalism could possibly be mistaken for Christianity….
Jesus is there, even though it doesn’t seem possible!

Remember how Jesus wept at the tomb of his friend Lazarus,
even though he was about to raise him from the dead?
There are times, I think, when all God can do is to weep with us, or to share in our frustrations, or even to act as a receptacle for our anger.
But at least he is there doing that.
I remember when the daughter of an acquaintance was killed in a dreadful accident some years ago now, her father said at the funeral “Thank God for a God to be angry with!”

Jesus himself drew near and walked with them.
It’s not just in the bad times, of course –
them too, but in the good times, too.
And perhaps in the indifferent times, the time when life goes smoothly and the days slip past too fast to count.
Jesus is there, I think, in a piece of music that lifts our spirits,
like the Hallelujah Chorus or some other favourite piece.
Jesus is there when we are getting ready to go on holiday,
or share a family celebration.
When we are looking forward to things, when we are dreading them.

Jesus himself drew near and went with them.
If we are Jesus’ people, then we need to learn to be aware of his presence with us.
It’s not always about feeling –
we don’t always feel his presence, and that’s as it should be.
As I said, if we were certain, they wouldn’t call it faith.
But if we believe that Jesus is present with us all the time –
even when we’re in Tesco’s, even when we’re at the office or washing-up the supper dishes –
then how are we going to live?

Once upon a time there was a monk who served God in a community of brothers, and he was called Brother Lawrence.
And he learnt over the years that God was just as real and there whether he was washing the dishes in the community kitchen, or whether he was on his knees in the chapel.
He wrote about it, and developed a correspondence with other people who wished to find this out for themselves.
You may have come across his writings yourself;
he was called Brother Lawrence.
As he explains, staying aware of God’s presence is far from easy, but it doesn’t matter if you make a nonsense of it –
you just come back to remembering as soon as you realise you have forgotten.
The Jesus who walked along the road to Emmaus with Cleopas and his wife also walks with us while we’re doing the washing-up or reading our e-mail.

So –
do you stay aware of that?
I know I don’t, not as much as I should!
Maybe we should all make more of an effort to stay aware of God’s presence with us at all times.
Even when we can’t see Him, even when it feels as though all trace of him has totally vanished from the universe.
There are all sorts of methods you can use to help with this –
making a point of a quick prayer when you put the kettle on, for example, or whenever you get up to go to the loo at work.
Even just “Lord, have mercy” or “Into Your hands”.
A couple of years ago there was a discussion on one of the book groups I belong to on Facebook about the amount of times a day children at boarding-schools were expected to pray –
space for private prayer in the mornings,
Grace before and after every meal,
corporate prayer in Assembly, probably twice a day....
and so it went on.
Not that the children probably appreciated it at that age –
I know I didn’t –
but if you think about it, a routine like that does structure pauses into your day to be aware of God.

Jesus himself drew nigh and went with them.
Two ordinary Christians –
well, they weren’t even that, of course, as the name wouldn’t be coined for awhile, but you know what I mean.
They weren’t part of the inner ring, they weren’t special.
They were ordinary people, people like you and me.
And Jesus himself draws near and walks with us, too.
Hallelujah.
Amen.

Jesus and Thomas

 

The text of this sermon is substantially the same as this one, preached in 2023.