The week after Christmas, Kati and I went to visit her parents in Dallas.  We did a lot of shopping and exploring and we went to a hockey game, but I had a side trip I wanted to take. I heard from a friend that there was an exhibition of Christian art in Fort Worth, so Kati, her family, and I all went to see it.  The display was titled, “Picturing the Bible: The Earliest Christian Art”.  It was a display from the first six or seven centuries of Christianity. The gallery was pretty busy as a few hundred people looked in room after room of art.  I learned at least three things from this exhibition: 1) Not much art from the first six hundred years of Christianity survived, 2) of what did survive most was either small carvings on stones (about this big) or was a sarcophagus, a big stone coffin, with carvings on it.  And I don’t have to tell you that once you have see one small stone and one great big coffin you have seen them all. 3) the image that was carved most often on those little stones and on almost every single sarcophagus was Jesus as the good shepherd.  In fact, the most important visual image in the early church was Jesus depicted as the good shepherd.  In the months since I visited that art gallery, I have had time to reflect on why that image appeared so much.  I think that when you live in a time when it is culturally as well as legally against the rules to be Christian you latch on to any image of security and protection you can.  When you are being persecuted like the early church was, you want to believe that the one in whom you invest your faith is going to take care of you.  This story of the good shepherd is just that type of image.

          The popularity and power of this story is not isolated to the early church, I don’t think.  We run across it all the time too.  For the first ten years of my life, I slept with a picture of Jesus followed by a little sheep on my wall.  Often church’s will have a similar painting.  The good shepherd is one of those beloved stories we teach to children.  We even go so far as to name churches ‘The Good Shepherd Presbyterian Church’.  The church that I worked with in Castanos, Mexico was El Buen Pastor, The Good Shepherd.  While we largely do not face persecution and Christianity is for the most part culturally and legally acceptable, we still grasp onto this image.  It is evocative and emotional for us.  It is one of the primary and valuable images of God’s care in this world. 

          And it is for all those reasons, that I think it is very dangerous.  Yes, dangerous because our passage warns us of thieves and bandits that would like to come steal that from us. In the context of Jesus’ story and time, the shepherds were not looking out for the proverbial “wolf in sheep’s clothing”, but for thieves and bandits that would come to try and steal their flock either one by one or all of them together.  At night time, the time when the sheep were the most vulnerable, the shepherds would herd their sheep into sheepfolds.  A sheepfold is large enclosure, a kind of fenced off area, usually made of stone four to even eight foot tall. It did not have a proper door, however.  The shepherd would sleep across the threshold of the enclosure, so that nothing could get in or out without the shepherd knowing it.  That is unless, the thief or bandit was able to get over the wall. In which case, they would try to steal the sheep.

          What are the thieves and bandits of our day trying to steal from us?  The point of stealing something is to claim as your own something of value.  The robbers who have been hitting all these homes in the Quail Creek area and now Nichols Hills lately have been taking televisions and electronics, valuable things, and leaving everything else behind.  If we are the sheep locked safely away in our little enclosure, what are they trying to steal from us?  I think it is that very safety and security, the new life and hope.  We live in a broken world.  Crime, divorce, broken families, the economy. In the midst of all that though, we have faith in a risen Christ who, as it says in verse 10, ‘came that we may have life and have it abundantly.’  We believe in something that is often times the exact opposite of what we see.  We believe we have hope and security because of Christ in the face of everything.  To so many people outside the church that is incomprehensible. And in spite of that, honestly, they want that.  They want the safety and security and hope and life and everything else, but they want it without going through the door, without going through Jesus Christ.  There have been more and more people in recent years who join the church as a social club or to make business and political contacts or for whole host of other reasons that have zero to do with Jesus Christ.  They want the fruits of faith without faith itself.  They want to steal the good life like a thief and robber.

          What they do not realize is that we are not here by our choice.  We are here because we are called.  Christ called us by name like a shepherd with his sheep and leads into the green life-giving pastures and then back home to safety of the sheepfold.  We are here because we responded to that call, to Christ’s voice.  Notice in the passage that the shepherd leads the sheep.  He does not prod them or drive them.  This is not the image of so many John Wayne westerns, where the herd of cattle runs out in front of the cowboys as they hoot and howler.  Jesus is not a divine cowboy.  Think of that image made into and art display. He does not force us from the sheepfold and he does not force our faith, but he does call to us.  And we respond to Christ’s call into a loving, life changing, life saving relationship.

          One of the things that makes that response so difficult in our modern American society is that there are so many other voices calling to us, as well.  We are bombarded with voices today.  Radio, music, television, movies, newspapers, the internet and every one of them has a message or something they are selling right to you.  And we respond like the sheep or a flock of sheep hearing an unfamiliar voice; we run and scatter to the four winds.  We have the capability today to connect and interact with one another in a plurality of ways because of technology and the internet and yet we are increasingly disconnected because those same technologies allow us to connect without being in the same place.  We are more and more an individualistic society. We are scattered today because of all the voices we hear calling to us and the one we do not hear.

          We do not hear Jesus’ invitation to new life and life abundant.  And what a life it is.  That life is the life we heard about in the book of Acts that Cathleen just read.  This is the first generation of believers who responded to Christ’s call after his death and resurrection.  They learned and had fellowship with one another.  They ate meals together and said prayers together.  The Holy Spirit worked marvelous wonders and miracles through them.  They praised God together.  This is one of the fruits of faith.  This is that life abundant that Jesus talked about.  Fellowship and relationship with one another across every division Jew and Gentile, male and female, and whatever else.  We are called by name by Christ and gathered together.  He says, “I am the gate.”  A gate is a natural gathering point.  As you go in through the gate you congregate there inside of the gated area.  It is as if Christ has invited us in and then wrapped his arms around us.  Martin Luther, the man credited with starting the Reformation, wanted to do away with calling churches churches.  He thought the name did not fit.  He wanted to call them congregations because the church is the place we go to connect and gather together.

          And don’t we need more places like that today?  Places where the old and young, the black, the white, the rich and poor, and everybody in between can come and be together in Jesus Christ.  If we really are getting more and more scattered by the voices of our society, shouldn’t the church be the one gathering place.  The church in America has been going through a crisis lately, a crisis of meaning.  Who are we?  What should we be doing?  We should be doing what Jesus the good shepherd is already doing: gathering people together in fellowship and love.  Connecting and reaching out.  Calling the sheep by name and bringing them to the safety and comfort of the sheepfold.  And then we too should lay ourselves across the gate of the enclosure.  We should protect the good life to make sure that no matter how scattered, individualist, disconnected the rest of the world is, the church, as the body of Christ, is not.  That we can learn and teach together. We can have meals and fellowship together.  That we can see miracles done in our midst together.  And that we can praise God for all of that together.  Listen for the voice of Jesus Christ the good shepherd calling to you and follow where it goes.