SPEAKER_01: A reading from the Gospel according to John.
SPEAKER_01: The tenth chapter, beginning at verse eleven.
SPEAKER_01: I am the good shepherd, the good shepherd lays down his life for the sheep.
SPEAKER_01: He who is a hired hand and not a shepherd, who does not own the sheep, sees the wolf coming, and leaves the sheep and flees, and the wolf snatches them and scatters them.
SPEAKER_01: He flees because he is a hired hand and cares nothing for the sheep.
SPEAKER_01: I am the good shepherd.
SPEAKER_01: I know my own, and my own know me, just as the Father knows me and I know the Father, and I lay down my life for the sheep, and I have other sheep that are not of this fold.
SPEAKER_01: I must bring them also, and they will listen to my voice.
SPEAKER_01: So there will be one flock, one shepherd.
SPEAKER_01: The Gospel of the Lord.
SPEAKER_02: Amen.
SPEAKER_02: You don't need to travel far through this world to encounter things that make you feel depersonalized, abandoned, or manipulated.
SPEAKER_02: Say that you are running home in the late afternoon and you stop by the grocery store to grab a few items for dinner, and in your haste you rush up to the self-checkout.
SPEAKER_02: And the first thing that happens is that the self-checkout register says to you in its robot voice, Welcome, valued customer.
SPEAKER_02: Does anybody really think that that robot voice expresses the sincere care for your person that that store has?
SPEAKER_02: No.
SPEAKER_02: The store doesn't know your name.
SPEAKER_02: The store doesn't care for you as a person.
SPEAKER_02: What they value is the credit card that you're about to tap and the profit that they will be able to make off of you.
SPEAKER_02: Look, they have already tricked you into doing their work for them.
SPEAKER_02: You're at the self-checkout where you won't have to encounter another human.
SPEAKER_02: It's depersonalizing to realize that you are valued only as a walking dollar sign.
SPEAKER_02: But what's worse than that is that in your value as a walking dollar sign, you're also left to fend for yourself.
SPEAKER_02: About three weeks ago now, Meta, the company, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram, lost a lawsuit that's going to cost them an awful lot, about$375 million.
SPEAKER_02: The lawsuit proved that Facebook and Instagram had been negligent in protecting their users, particularly children and teens, from bad actors on their platforms, even though they were aware of the danger.
SPEAKER_02: So you could say that in this instance, these digital overlords proved that they were hired hands in a very literal way.
SPEAKER_02: They could see the wolf coming, and yet instead of doing something about it, they said, Look, it's your choice if you want to use our services, free speech, section 230, not our problem.
SPEAKER_02: Figure it out on your own.
SPEAKER_02: And now you are not merely a walking dollar sign, but also one who has to navigate through this milieu all by yourself.
SPEAKER_02: And that would be bad enough, and it would lead us to say, where could we turn?
SPEAKER_02: But then we are told, don't worry, there's always a place that you can turn, always a willing ear, ready to listen and to respond with affirmative words.
SPEAKER_02: You can always pour out your heart to the machine.
SPEAKER_02: The number one case use for Chat GPT is therapy and companionship.
SPEAKER_02: We take our lives and our burdens and we unburden them to a chat bot.
SPEAKER_02: We know that there's no person that cares on the other side, but if the illusion is there that there is care and concern, you know what?
SPEAKER_02: It's enough to form an attachment.
SPEAKER_02: And once you've got an attachment, who's to say where that's going to lead?
SPEAKER_02: You can look up the stories for yourselves about AI-induced psychosis, or you can page through the lawsuits that have been filed by the survivors of those who lost a loved one because that loved one followed bad advice from a machine.
SPEAKER_02: And then you can see how open we are in our current state to being manipulated.
SPEAKER_02: So, like I said, you don't have to travel far in this world to find things that make you feel depersonalized, abandoned, manipulated.
SPEAKER_02: And the net effect of all of it seems to me to be to cause some skepticism to rise within us or even to turn us into cynics that say, Is there anybody in this wide world that I can trust?
SPEAKER_02: Is there anyone out there who actually cares about me and not merely about what they might get from me?
SPEAKER_02: Isn't everybody else just working an angle?
SPEAKER_02: And I just have to accept that that's the way things are.
SPEAKER_02: Life feels fractured.
SPEAKER_02: I would guess that for many of us, it feels like life is all of these disparate pieces that are being blown about by the wind and scattered, and you spend your days opening your arms wide up, trying to gather as many of those pieces together as you can, and as we say, hold it all together.
SPEAKER_02: And when that's the way life feels, like you're just barely hanging on, trying to hold it all together.
SPEAKER_02: Well, it makes you long for someone to help you, someone to guide you, someone to lead you, someone to care for you, someone to shepherd you, you might say.
SPEAKER_02: And yet, when you start looking for that someone, you find on every hand difficulties, institutional failure, selfishness, and self-centeredness, and greasy manipulation.
SPEAKER_02: Jesus knew what he was talking about when he outlined the hired hand.
SPEAKER_02: And I would submit to you that this kind of feeling you get is because this world of ours is filled with hired hands.
SPEAKER_02: The hired hand you see is only in the sheep-tending business for the paycheck.
SPEAKER_02: That is, the hired hand sees the sheep for what they can do for him, not in what they are they themselves, the sheep.
SPEAKER_02: And because, therefore, they are just the means to an end, they become ultimately disposable.
SPEAKER_02: The hired hand shows his true colors when danger presses in on the flock, and then his reasoning goes like this Well, if I'm injured or killed, then all of the money I'm making off the sheep won't do me any good.
SPEAKER_02: So it would be better for me to save my own skin.
SPEAKER_02: Sorry, sheep, figure it out on your own.
SPEAKER_02: Such is the behavior of the hired hand.
SPEAKER_02: And if you burn this picture into your mind and if you start looking for this pattern, you will find it all over the place.
SPEAKER_02: And worse than that, you will find all sorts of hired hands that are trying to get their hands on you.
SPEAKER_02: Now I understand that to a degree moving through life means that we make all sorts of contracts and business relations and things like that that are based on monetary exchange or something like that.
SPEAKER_02: There's nothing wrong with that.
SPEAKER_02: Until that is the only thing that you can see in your life.
SPEAKER_02: Until you arrive at a point where you wonder and question whether you are anything more than a user, consumer, customer, statistic, number, faceless person.
SPEAKER_02: When that's the case, well then life in this world grows very bleak and dim indeed.
SPEAKER_02: And because that is often the case, maybe it's not all that surprising that we would decide the safest place to turn with our burdens is to a machine.
SPEAKER_02: After all, the machines don't have the same capricious, selfish will that we find in other human beings.
SPEAKER_02: Where else are we supposed to go?
SPEAKER_02: Well, the answer to that, of course, where else are we supposed to go, is to Jesus, to Christ, the good shepherd.
SPEAKER_02: I want you to notice that in today's gospel, Jesus draws this strong contrast between the hired hands and he himself.
SPEAKER_02: And he drives this home by saying, not once or twice, but five times Jesus says these words.
SPEAKER_02: I lay down my life.
SPEAKER_02: Five times he says this.
SPEAKER_02: He says, look, I lay down my life for my sheep.
SPEAKER_02: That is my defining feature, my defining characteristic, my defining mark.
SPEAKER_02: And consider just how great the contrast is between that kind of attitude and what you find in a hired hand.
SPEAKER_02: Whereas the hired hand only cares about the sheep insofar as they can do something for him.
SPEAKER_02: Jesus cares about the sheep so far as to say that if death is headed their way, Jesus says, I will put myself in front of them so that death can swallow me up and they can live.
SPEAKER_02: In other words, Jesus does not come and approach you as if you are the means to serve some sort of end for him.
SPEAKER_02: In fact, with Jesus, you are the end itself.
SPEAKER_02: He says, Because I care for you, because I love you, because I want you as you are, that rich, wonderful person created by your heavenly Father, redeemed by the Son who lays his life down for you, sanctified by that Spirit who makes his dwelling within you.
SPEAKER_02: Because I want your life to flourish in all the rich fullness that I created and intended for it.
SPEAKER_02: Jesus says, Because of that, I will lay down my life.
SPEAKER_02: In other words, Jesus doesn't get anything from you other than suffering and death and a cross.
SPEAKER_02: And yet from that suffering and death and a cross, we, the sheep, receive all the benefits and blessings of that shepherd's love.
SPEAKER_02: So that if you think about this good shepherd, you find the one to whom you can turn, one you can trust, the one who's not playing some sort of manipulation game where he lays down his life so that ever after you'll be indebted to him.
SPEAKER_02: No, he just cheerly and graciously gives of himself because he cares for you.
SPEAKER_02: Because he cares for you.
SPEAKER_02: He fractures his life to take your fractured life and pull it all together and hold it there.
SPEAKER_02: So that if the hired hand stands for those who see not a person but something that can be used.
SPEAKER_02: And if this world forgets about persons and our rich uniqueness and individuality, Jesus is the exact opposite of all of that.
SPEAKER_02: He is the good shepherd, the one who truly cares for the sheep, the one who cares for you.
SPEAKER_02: Now, the wrinkle in this is that you encounter this good shepherd in this institution that we call the church.
SPEAKER_02: And you know, without me telling you, that the church has very often failed to live in this pattern of the Good Shepherd, this kind of selfless giving love, this kind of focus upon the person that says, you are most important.
SPEAKER_02: This is something where the church has often stumbled and falled.
SPEAKER_02: And to some degree, of course, we should understand and expect that this would be the case because this Christian church is not made up of perfect people, it's made up of sinners.
SPEAKER_02: People like you and me who have these wills and this self-centeredness, this drive to serve ourselves that sometimes expresses itself in hurtful ways.
SPEAKER_02: The fact of the matter is, if you spend any time at all in a Christian congregation, sooner or later someone is going to say something that hurts you.
SPEAKER_02: That's a reality.
SPEAKER_02: I think that we can acknowledge that.
SPEAKER_02: I think that we can take whatever steps we possibly can to ensure that people within the church are not manipulated or abandoned or depersonalized.
SPEAKER_02: I think we can accept the failures without letting it drive us to sort of skepticism or cynicism that would say, they're all just a bunch of hypocrites there.
SPEAKER_02: Where am I supposed to turn?
SPEAKER_02: It's still within this church that Jesus Christ comes with his good shepherd's care.
SPEAKER_02: And if we open up our eyes, we will find it here, among us.
SPEAKER_02: We have to gather together here, and here, everything that we do bespeaks our Good Shepherd's care for us.
SPEAKER_02: So you don't come here to a self-checkout register and a robot voice.
SPEAKER_02: We come here and we meet face to face.
SPEAKER_02: Look, we even set aside the screens for an hour so that we can direct our attention to listening to our good shepherd's voice as his word is read and proclaimed.
SPEAKER_02: And we need that kind of attentiveness.
SPEAKER_02: For if we attend to what this Good Shepherd is up to in our midst, we will see marvelous things taking place before our eyes.
SPEAKER_02: Pay attention, the next time that baptismal font is open and water is poured out, and you will see the most incredible thing happening.
SPEAKER_02: Here is that good shepherd lifting up another lamb in his arms and saying, You are never merely a user or a statistic to me.
SPEAKER_02: No, you are one of my own, my flock.
SPEAKER_02: One whose life is so important that I laid down my life for it.
SPEAKER_02: One whose life matters so much that I took my life up again.
SPEAKER_02: And now I draw you to myself and embrace you with love that will never let you go, that will never let you down, that will never leave or abandon you.
SPEAKER_02: We attend to that and recognize in our Savior, our Savior, in that action of water and the word.
SPEAKER_02: Well, that is powerful indeed.
SPEAKER_02: And powerful in reminding us that we too are his baptized and so belong to him and are under his personal care.
SPEAKER_02: What's more, we need to recognize and see one another.
SPEAKER_02: For Jesus brings us together into a body, into a family, where we, following his example, learn to see others not as those who might be able to do something for me, or those from whom I might be able to get something, but but rather as true brothers and sisters.
SPEAKER_02: That is, those who I will care for simply because of who they are, not because of what sort of advantage I might gain from them.
SPEAKER_02: He knits us together and he says, Here, you see, here is your church family, and so here is a place where you belong.
SPEAKER_02: Here is a place where you have others to walk with you, to care for you.
SPEAKER_02: Here is a place where no one is left alone, but we walk together.
SPEAKER_02: You know, if you spend any time in a Lutheran church, sooner or later somebody's gonna drop a casserole off on your front step.
SPEAKER_02: Because that's the way that Lutherans show love to one another.
SPEAKER_02: And the fact of the matter is, someday you'll be the one putting the meal together and shipping it off as well.
SPEAKER_02: Because that's what we do.
SPEAKER_02: And in so doing, this good shepherd continues his care for his sheep.
SPEAKER_02: He continues caring for us, making sure that every one of us is seen and valued as that rich, unique person redeemed by the blood of Christ, that we are.
SPEAKER_02: He sees to it that we don't have to carry our crosses and bear our burdens all by ourselves, but we walk side by side, helping each other along the way.
SPEAKER_02: This is the way that this good shepherd comes and continues his care for the sheep, so that in the midst of a world where it's easy to become nothing more than quantified data, still you have a place where you are known, and you have a shepherd you can trust, one you can follow.
SPEAKER_02: For Christ will never let you go, he will never abandon you, he will never use you, but he will lift you up because that is what he does.
SPEAKER_02: He holds our lives together when we can't hold them together ourselves.
SPEAKER_02: And so we come together with our frantic lives, our wearied hearts, our addled minds.
SPEAKER_02: And Christ the Good Shepherd is here to speak peace into it all.