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.