The Shepherd's Voice (John 10:1-10)

From numerous scriptures to countless hymns and sacred songs, “The Good Shepherd” is one of our Faith’s most comforting and enduring images, but did you know that bad shepherds play an important part in our story, too?

When Jesus said, “I am the good shepherd” he wasn’t merely being clever. He was claiming as his own a title of rich historical significance.

Biblical authors often used the image of a good shepherd to make their points.

So, for example, when David wanted to sing of God’s goodness and mercy, he turned to this image.

The LORD is my shepherd, I shall not want. He makes me to lie down in green pastures; he leads me beside still waters; he restores my soul. (Psalm 23)

Likewise, when the writer of Psalm 78 wanted to recall fond memories of King David’s reign, they, again, turned to this image.

[The LORD] chose his servant David, and took him from the sheepfolds; from tending the nursing ewes he brought him to be the shepherd of his people…With upright heart he tended them, and guided them with skillful hand.

The connection between shepherding and kingship is, in fact, very strong, and it’s not unique to the Bible, either.

Ancient cultures from Mesopotamia to Egypt and beyond used the vocabulary and images of tending livestock to describe how well those in power lead, guided, and protected their people.

And just as there were good shepherds and skilled and benevolent kings, there were also fools who had no business leading a flock of animals, much less a nation.

Bad Shepherds show up all over the Old Testament, particularly in the books of the prophets.

Lamenting how the nation’s leaders had become indifferent to the people’s suffering, the prophet Zechariah remarked, “Their own shepherds have no pity on them.” (Zechariah 11:5)

The prophet Jeremiah expressed similar concerns when he preached, “[The LORD says,] “It is you [shepherds] who have scattered my flock and have driven them away, and you have not attended to them. So I will attend to you.” (Jeremiah 23:2)

And then there’s Ezekiel.

Ezekiel’s condemnation of bad shepherds is the most expansive in the Bible, and it’s really quite telling.

His words read like a performance review that’s gone horribly wrong.

To the shepherds—thus says the Lord God: Woe, you shepherds of Israel who have been feeding yourselves! Should not shepherds feed the sheep? You eat the fat; you clothe yourselves with the wool; you slaughter the fatted calves, but you do not feed the sheep. You have not strengthened the weak; you have not healed the sick; you have not bound up the injured; you have not brought back the strays; you have not sought the lost, but with force and harshness you have ruled them.

“You had one job,” the Lord God seemed to say, “and you failed miserably.”

Ezekiel continues,

So [the sheep] were scattered because there was no shepherd, and scattered they became food for all the wild animals. My sheep were scattered; they wandered over all the mountains and on every high hill; my sheep were scattered over all the face of the earth, with no one to search or seek for them. (Ezekiel 34:1-6)

On a day like this, a day on which we focus on what it means to call Jesus the Good Shepherd, I find Ezekiel’s indictment of poor leadership to be particularly useful.

It’s useful because by so vividly describing what poor leadership looks like, he helps us understand more clearly what the goals of good leadership are in the first place.

To enrich oneself, to satisfy selfish cravings, to regard those being led as rubes to exploit or roadblocks that just get in the way—these are anathema to Spirit-inspired leaders.

Unmoored from God’s love, absent God’s grace, these shepherds lead scattered flocks and build fractured communities.

“If Ezekiel were among us now,” wrote theologian Walter Bruggemann, “he might well conclude that the emergence of the "99%" is a scourge from God that intends to expose and bring down social policies, practices, and institutions that are out of sync with God's will for shalom.” (ON Scripture, 11.16.11)

Less we hear Bruggemann’s words through the lens of toxic partisanship, it’s worth noting that he made that observation during the Occupy Wall Street protests fifteen years ago, a reminder that God’s desire for how we order our lives is so much more than the promises of our political parties and economic theories.

Bruggemann continued,

The promissory nature of Ezekiel's oracles articulates what good leadership looks like...in government, in corporations, all through the private sector. That rule consists in,

Seeking the lost,

Bring back the strayed,

Binding up the injured,

Strengthening the weak,

Feeding the hungry.

In a word, good leadership consists in the restoration of the common good so that all members of the community, strong and weak, rich and poor, may live together in a common shalom of shared resources…What is envisioned (and required) is the formation of a different leadership that has in purview all members of the community. Ezekiel knew that is the only way to have a future that does not replicate the failed past.

Ezekiel’s vision is just as relevant to our understanding of Jesus as the Good Shepherd as the more pastoral images that we find in the Psalms because the One who takes us to green pastures and leads us beside still waters doesn’t take us there alone.

Rather, the prophet knew the truth that Jesus would embody–that we are members of the shepherd’s flock, part of God’s community, and the gracious blessings imparted to each one of us must fundamentally transform how we relate to, look out for, and live with one another.

Sitting this week with how the Bible talks about shepherds, I’m struck that despite the need for good shepherding, the marketplace for bad shepherds continues to be vast and growing.

We give our time and energy to online platforms that have a vested interest in keeping us angry, then wonder why we’re so mad.

We open our minds to unserious and unvetted sources, then suffer the consequences of lacking understanding.

We make peace with violence and accept that scarcity leads to prosperity, then wonder why no one trusts anybody and why people are so lonely.

We surround ourselves with clowns, then act surprised to find ourselves living in a circus.

The voices of bad shepherds are as loud as they’ve ever been.

[But the good shepherd] calls his own sheep by name and leads them out. When he has brought out all his own, he goes ahead of them, and the sheep follow him because they know his voice. They will not follow a stranger, but they will run from him because they do not know the voice of strangers." (John 10:3-5)

The voices of bad shepherds are as loud as they’ve ever been, but Jesus says we don’t have to listen to them and we certainly don’t have to go where they would lead us.

The Good News is that Jesus is the Good Shepherd of our souls and our lives, and through the lessons and example of his life, death, and resurrection he is teaching us how to tend to one another….

To seek the lost,

Bring back the strayed,

Bind up the injured,

Strengthen the weak,

And feed the hungry.

May we be found attentive to his voice and faithful to our calling.

The One who takes us to green pastures and leads us beside still waters doesn’t take us there alone, but makes us members of the shepherd’s flock, part of God’s community, where we find blessings that transform how we relate to, look out for, and live with one another.

Thanks be to God. Amen.

Image: Latimore, Kelly. Good Shepherd, from Art in the Christian Tradition, a project of the Vanderbilt Divinity Library, Nashville, TN. Original source: Kelly Latimore Icons, https://kellylatimoreicons.com/.

Easter Hacks the Algorithm (Colossians 3:1-4)

Chances are, over the past few years, you’ve heard it said that someone was being “gaslighted” or was “gaslighting” someone else. Maybe you’ve even said it about yourself.

“Gaslighting” has become a way of describing manipulative behaviors that aim to trick people into thinking that they can’t trust their own memory or perception of reality or the truth.

“Gaslighting” is about coercion and gaslighters rely on tools like lying, lying about the lies they already told, and denying that they ever lied about anything to hone their craft.

The term comes from a movie released in 1944 called “Gaslight.” That story centers around a murderous con man’s devious scheme to get away with his crimes by tricking his wife into believing that she was, in a manner of speaking, “losing her mind.”

He gaslights her by moving items around the house so that she couldn’t find them, placing items in her possession to make her believe she stole them, and, even though his clandestine work in the attic was causing the gaslights in her room to dim for no apparent reason, to tell her that everything was fine and that she was just imagining things.

Such were the cruel man’s machinations.

“Gaslight” was a blockbuster. Audiences loved it, the movie made a lot of money, and Ingrid Bergman won an Oscar for her performance as the gaslighted wife.

The movie also gave writers, scholars, and the public a new way to talk about manipulation, and every few years or so the phrase “gaslighting” would pop up in an article or a scholarly paper. There was even a psychology book in the 1990s called “Gaslighting,” but the term has never before found the traction and staying power that it’s experiencing in our era, and I think it’s worth wondering why that is.

What is it about the times in which we are living that made us take hold of this way of talking about malign efforts to distract, disorient, and manipulate people?

As tempting as it is to label a single event or individual as the source of what ails us, the truth, it seems to me, is more complex.

On one hand, we’ve lived through a series of massive institutional failures and betrayals and scandals have shaken to the core organizations that we once looked to as stabilizing forces.

The Church, the Government, the Market—all have had their commitments to the common good challenged and have been exposed as wanting.

On the other hand, as we’ve watched these institutions and others that we inherited experience cataclysmic moments of reckoning, we’ve also seen the new stalwarts of society–the Internet and social media, for example–fail to deliver on so much of what they promised.

There was a time when we were told that we would have libraries of information at our fingertips, and we got that. But we also got casinos at our fingertips, and porn, and torrents of misinformation, and the same platforms that allowed us to share laughs with friends and reconnect with former classmates became hotbeds of rage, deceit, and division.

Combine all this in a cultural pressure cooker where we’re conditioned to hate what we see in the mirror, spend less time with real people, and to believe that we can buy our way to happiness, and you have a recipe for unhappy, unsettled, isolated people who are easy marks for the gaslighters among us.

I think we started talking so much about “gaslighting” in recent years because we needed a vocabulary and a space in which to express our confusion about what’s happening in our lives and our discomfort with what we’re feeling.

As people of faith, we welcome Jesus into that same space to be our sure foundation and to point us in the ways that we should go.

Inviting Jesus into our confusion and discomfort is the substance of Saint Paul’s message in his Letter to the Colossians.

Now, of course, the Colossians didn’t know what gaslighting was, but I think they would understand if we could explain it to them because they definitely knew what it felt like to be the target of someone’s or something’s self-interested and manipulative schemes.

Paul describes a situation there in which competing worldviews and truth claims were pulling the people in every direction, leaving their steps unbalanced and their faith and confidence shaken.

Paul addresses all this in the passage just prior to where we picked up the story in our first reading.

There, in chapter 2, Paul starts calling out some of the forces that were pressing, pulling, and coercing the Colossians.

Watch out that no one takes you captive through philosophy and empty deceit…[but remember Christ] disarmed the rulers and authorities and made a public example of them, triumphing over them in [the Resurrection.]” (Colossians 2:8, 15)

And as he continues, Paul works himself up into one of his characteristic rhetorical runs—encouraging the people to remain steadfast in the face of those who would "condemn" them, telling them to reject whatever had “an appearance of wisdom…but [was really] of no value,” empowering them to resist anyone who would tell them they weren’t good enough or acceptable to God or anyone else for that matter.

He said, “Do not let anyone disqualify you [because they’re] puffed up without cause by a human way of thinking.” (2.18)

I love this section of the letter because Paul’s warnings to the Colossians resonant so clearly today.

Beware of “empty deceit”!

Watch out for those who have “[only] an appearance of wisdom [but add no real value]’!

Just stay clear of those who are “puffed up without cause”!

It’s like someone handed Paul their smartphone and he’s just scrolling through it in horror at what he sees.

But Paul also understands that the Risen Christ hacks the algorithm to set the people free from all these disorienting forces, what he elsewhere calls “the principalities and powers”–free from manipulation, free from exploitation, free from systems, institutions, and leaders that are only in it for themselves and not the people’s wellbeing.

As one commentary on Colossians puts it, Paul is clear that “no part of human existence remains untouched by the loving and liberating rule of Jesus.” (The Bible Project: Colossians)

Loved by Christ, liberated by Christ, and set free by Christ, we are, therefore, able to be our true selves.

Paul’s run reaches its crescendo in chapter 3.

So if you have been raised with Christ, seek the things that are above, where Christ is, seated at the right hand of God. Set your minds on the things that are above, not on the things that are on earth, for you have died, and your life is hidden with Christ in God. When Christ who is your life is revealed, then you also will be revealed with him in glory. (3:1-4)

To be clear, we should understand that the promise here is so much more than “Easter means that we get to go be with Jesus in heaven when we die.”

It’s so much more than that.

The promise that we call Good News is that, because of what Jesus accomplished in his life, death, and resurrection, we are not bound by this world’s gaslighting plots and schemes, but are elevated and empowered to stand firm on solid and holy ground.

“Seek the things that are above,” said Paul, “Set your mind on the things that are above.”

And as we keep reading we find out what that’s all about.

Those who “seek the things that are above” leave behind harmful and destructive ideas and practices–things that degrade and harm the Creation, their neighbors, and themselves.

They overcome vice with virtue.

They build communities in which old and divisive barriers and labels are cast aside because they know that God’s love has no end or limitations.

They clothe themselves with love, let the peace of Christ rule in their hearts, and they are thankful. (Colossians 3: 5-15)

“If you have been raised with Christ, seek the things that are above, where Christ is,” because Jesus knows and cherishes the real you—not in order to control you, or exploit you, or to sell you something you don’t need—but “to give you a future with hope.” (Jeremiah 29:11)

The Risen Christ hacks the algorithm of death, destruction, lies, and violence so that we can be free.

We started talking about “gaslighting” in recent years because our communities are filled with a lot of unhappy, unsettled, and isolated people and we needed a vocabulary and a space in which to express our discomfort with so much of what we’re feeling.

As people of faith, we welcome Jesus into that same space to be our sure foundation and to point us in the ways that we should go.

And he is faithful to come into that space, to see us and hear us.

So “if you have been raised with Christ, seek the things that are above, where Christ is,” because Jesus knows and cherishes the real you—not in order to control you, or exploit you, or to sell you something you don’t need—not to gaslight you, but “to give you a future with hope.” (Jeremiah 29:11)

Christ is risen! Alleluia! Amen.

Image: Theatrical release poster