Sermon Delivered at Church of the Good Shepherd
Fort Lee, New Jersey,
Easter IV, May 8, 2022, at 8:00 and 10:00 a.m.
By the Rev. Stephen Galleher
THE GOOD-EST SHEPHERD
“…him, who calls us each by name.”
(Collect for Easter IV)
“I give them eternal life, and they will never perish.” (John 10:22-30)
God, the shepherd, or, as John’s gospel declares God, the Good
Shepherd, is about as caring and as close as God can get to us human
beings, affectionately known as “sheep.” Shepherds keep a wary and
devotional eye on their sheep. When one wanders off, the shepherd
doesn’t hesitate to go after it and bring it back to safety. And this
shepherd, according to the prayer, calls us each by name. We are not just
a number in the flock. We have names, particular names. This is just
how close the shepherd is to each member of the flock.
Why do you suppose that is? Of course, we know that farmers
raise sheep for a living. It’s in their economic interest to keep tabs. But
calling sheep by names evokes a sense of affection. This shepherd not
only raises sheep for a living, but he loves his sheep, each one of them.
Jesus loves us, this I know
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Because the Bible tells me so.
But let’s hope it is more than that, more than just you’ve read it in the
Bible, or you think you’re supposed to believe it. Do you believe that
Jesus loves you? Let’s put it more broadly and more squarely. Do you
believe that God loves you?
And if you hesitate to say yes, why do you hesitate? This is a very
important question, for it determines the level of your enjoyment of your
life and the level of what you think about yourself. If you don’t love
yourself as God claims to love you, you’re hung up on all the drama in
your life. Of course, all of us get involved in drama. I call this drama the
fretfulness trap, the things that take our eyes off the prize, the prize of
basking in the knowledge of God’s presence with us personally. And by
being all wrapped up in drama, we wind up thinking about ourselves too
much and really becoming quite indifferent to those people around us
and pretty much the rest of the world. Perhaps one way to begin to live
into the love of God for us is to stop thinking about ourselves so
intensely, dourly, pessimistically, dramatically. In other words, let’s
forget about ourselves to find ourselves.
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I want to get at this love that the shepherd has for us another way.
I have been asking people quite a lot lately to answer a simple but
perhaps, at first, overwhelming question. And the question I ask is this,
“Why are we here?” “What is the point of your life?”
I want to pause a moment for us to reflect on this.
[Now I want to ask you to speak out and answer in your own
words.]
The almost unanimous answer I have been getting when I ask this
question—“What is the point of our life?”—is, “We are here to love one
another.” C.S. Lewis puts it a bit differently in his book The Great
Divorce. There the question is “Why were we born?” and the answer is
“For infinite happiness.” And Lewis adds, “You can step out into it any
moment.” Isn’t that wild and wonderful? You can step out into it at any
minute! Our perpetual happiness is just that close. I’ll leave it to you to
answer just why we don’t all do just that, step out into it.
And another friend’s answer to why we are here was this. “We are
here to learn lessons.” Ok, I answer, but what are these lessons for?
What’s the point of the lessons in life? Surely, they are placed in our
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lives for us to learn how to love. This is a lifetime’s task, and it may not
always be so easy, right?
I know, I know. We put up all kinds of arguments as to why love is
not the reason for our existence, the whole point of living. “Love” has so
many meanings, we argue. And there are levels of needs. Having food
and shelter and a living wage seem to take priority over loving. Who
thinks of loving when he’s broke and homeless?
All good questions, but the business of loving still permeates and
informs just how we meet this hierarchy of needs. There is a wonderful
love song about the complexity of love. Yes, love is complex and multi-
layered, but as the song is titled, “But beautiful.”
Love is funny, or it’s sad
Or it’s quiet, or it’s mad
It’s a good thing or it’s bad
But beautiful
Beautiful to take a chance
And if you fall you fall
And I’m thinking I wouldn’t mind at all
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Love is tearful, or it’s gay
It’s a problem or it’s play
It’s a heartache either way
But beautiful
And I’m thinking if you were mine
I’d never let you go
And that would be but beautiful I know
,
But beautiful
and I’m thinking if you were mine
I’d never let you go
And that would be but beautiful I know
Isn’t this what the shepherd is about, never letting us go? Just as Christ
loves us, so ought we to love one another. As they greet one another in
the East, the Christ in me greets the Christ in you.
And as for the Good Shepherd, I heard a Good Shepherd story
from a retired clergy friend of mine this past week. It seems that as a
child my friend suffered from quite severe dyslexia, though they didn’t
diagnose it well back then. One night, he was stuck on his geography
homework lesson and started crying as he was unable to read it clearly.
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His father downstairs must have heard him and came up and sat in a
chair beside his desk. He said, “Don’t cry, son. Let me tell you about
myself.”
And the father went ahead to tell him about his own history of
struggling to read. He concluded by saying, “And one day the light will
burst in your face, and you will see how to do it. In my case,” he
continued, “it started as a glow and the light just got brighter and
brighter through the years.”
The king of love my shepherd is. And we must praise this shepherd
who has been present with us in so many people throughout our lives.
Amen.