The Good Shepherd — It Matters the Chief

Father Aaron preaches from John 10, Psalm 23, and 1 Peter 2 on Good Shepherd Sunday. Every other ship will take on water. This shepherd has already walked through the worst of it — and he is calling you by name.

Transcript

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Good evening and welcome to North Word, the Word, the North, your week a daily podcast from St. John's Fort Smith in collaboration with the Anglican family. Tonight, we're going to take a listen to my sermon from this morning at St. John's for Good Shepherd Sunday. What does it mean to follow the Good Shepherd? I was having tea in Bannock with an elder, and we were discussing the church, and I've had various questions for him about different things, and I wanted his advice on how to do certain things. And he said something very interesting to me. He said, It doesn't matter the tribe, it matters the chief. It doesn't matter the tribe, it matters the chief. We are a tribe of people, followers of Jesus. We are sheep. And Jesus is our shepherd. And this morning, as we began our worship, as we begin every morning worship, we began with the confession of our sins, and the confession of our sins paraphrases Isaiah. All we like sheep have gone astray, we have turned everyone his own way. Now, sheep is not a flattering image. I mean, they are cute and cuddly, so to speak, but if you look at sheep in their characteristics, not necessarily a flattering image for us, it is an accurate one. But sheep are stubborn. For one, they are very stubborn, they follow the herd without thinking. They follow the shepherd, follow the herd, they they mentality of movement. They panic when they are isolated. So when it's just, they really, I read a whole article about sheep, they can't stand being alone. Has to be three or four. They really just start to get very anxious when they're by themselves. And and they need direction, and in the absence of a shepherd whose voice they recognize, they're really quite in trouble because they want to scatter, but they can't be alone. So they start to follow things that they shouldn't follow. They struggle without their shepherd. If you look around at us, it's a very good description of humans. And we all feel it. There is something wrong with us. There is something wrong. Not just with politics, not just with institutions, but with us, with the whole human project, there is a problem. And we search, and we search to find a solution to the human problem. So we find a philosophy that seems to explain it, or a political party that promises to fix it, a movement, a leader, a system that finally has the answer. And all of these, for some time, do ultimately work to correct some problems. Nonetheless, they all ultimately fail. Now, those people, those very wise and smart professors who study the movements of society, have a theory about this, and they say that any organization, no matter how idealistic its origins, eventually consolidates its power to a very small group of people who are focused on taking care of themselves ultimately. Religion, government, political movements, nobody is immune from human fallacy. That's what we call original sin. But here's the thing, though. None of us are going to abandon the ship once it starts to sink and just start swimming through the water independently. No, we're gonna look for a new ship to solve our problem. We're gonna look for a new ship to get to that beautiful shore. And so when the water starts rising, every society, every civilization does the same thing. They look outside the failing institution for someone who stands apart from the corruption, someone who can actually set things right. You see, we as people, we are wired for something that no institution can provide. And therefore we never stop looking for it until we can find it. But here's the truth: we don't have a better institution, we don't have a superior philosophy, we have the actual shepherd. In this morning's gospel, Jesus says there is a thief, one who comes only to steal, kill, and destroy. This is every false shepherd. This is every system that promises life and delivers control. But then he says this I have come, that they may have life, and that they may have it abundantly. That they may have it abundantly, not survival, not managing, not coping in the chaos, but abundantly. Now, if we look at our psalm this morning, Psalm 23, the most fitting psalm to read, of course, on Good Shepherd Sunday, it doesn't say the shepherd takes you out of the valley. Listen closely, it says, even though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil. Even though I walk, the shepherd doesn't take you out of the valley. The chaos doesn't disappear, but something changes in the middle of that chaos. You know that feeling? We've all experienced it. The low grade sense of something is slightly off in our lives. Not a crisis necessarily, just an unease that doesn't go away, a purposelessness underneath the busyness, an emptiness that you can never quite fill. That feeling is a sheep without its shepherd. Jesus has come to heal that. Not to give you a better set of ideas, not to recruit you into a better institution, but to actually heal the woundedness that has left us wandering in the desert. Peter in this morning's epistle puts it like this. He says, in the very, very last sentence that we read in the epistle this morning, you were straying like sheep, but now returned to the shepherd and overseer of your souls. That word overseer, the bishop of your soul. That's the invitation. Not a program, not a membership, a shepherd who knows your name and is calling you back into the fold. But following the shepherd is not simply a transactional thing. We go and we follow him. He calls us and we follow him. Peter is very honest about that. He says, when you join the herd, when you join Christ's sheep, Christ has left you an example, a way of life that you are called to live. And here's what the way of life is. When you're attacked, what did Christ do? He didn't retaliate. So when you're attacked, you don't retaliate. When he suffered, he didn't threaten. He kept entrusting himself, Peter says, to the one who judges justly. That is what following him looks like. Not a life without valleys, a life with something solid at the center. And Peter says this by his wounds you were healed. Isaiah already prophesies that long, long before Christ, that by his wounds you would be healed. And then Peter says, by his wounds we are healed. The shepherd who asks us to walk through the valley has already walked through the worst of it. He's not asking anything of us that he hasn't already experienced for us. So what does that look like? What does it look like when we get to a Monday morning? What is the practical application of this text? How do we take Good Shepherd Sunday and apply it to Good Shepherd Monday? And I'm going to use the analogy of a garden, because a garden doesn't grow by accident. It takes attention, it takes showing up. The Christian life is the same. It is a life of learning to hear the shepherd's voice, and that takes cultivation. So think about the four movements that we have when we're gardening. Move one is to dig if the snow ever melts. Move one is to dig. Move two is to plant. And then move to dig. Move three is to water, and then move four, and Tim is shaking his head. He'll fact check me after the sermon. Dig, plant, water, and it will grow. So dig. Get honest. Name one thing you have been following that isn't him. One place where you in your heart have been looking for the wrong shepherd. Do plant. Get into the word. Read John 10. It's not enough to hear me read it on Sunday morning. Live in the Word. John 10, Psalm 23 this week. Let that voice, the voice of Jesus, be familiar to you. Water. Pray. Once you become familiar with the voice, you can have a conversation with that voice. And then finally, we want to grow. You cannot, and I'm gonna stress this you cannot be a healthy sheep alone. You cannot be a healthy sheep alone. You must show up to be a healthy sheep. Community is not optional, it is necessary, even with, and let me let me say, even, especially with the flock of broken and failing and sinning sheep. Which we all are. But to grow, we must be together. And so that elder, he was right though. He was very, very right when he said to me, It doesn't matter the tribe, it matters the chief. Because every other ship will take on water, every philosophy, every movement, every institution, they will all take on water eventually and start to sink. But this shepherd, he has already walked through the worst of it. He has been through the valley and he came out on the other side for you. Just the way you are today, a broken and a sinful sheep. And he's calling you by name to be part of his herd. And what he is calling you into goes beyond the confines of your wildest dreams. It's stability and chaos, it's peace in the storm, an anchor when the waves of the world are crashing around. And when you step back, and if you're very honest and you step back and you look back at your life, you look at the road that you have been on, as long or as short as that road has been, and the storms you've weathered and the valleys you walked, you will see you were never alone, not once. Not in the darkest valley, not in the hardest year, the shepherd was there. And that is the invitation this morning, not a program, not a set of rules, a shepherd who knows you by name, who has walked every road you are walking, and who is not finished with you yet. So come and follow him because he is calling you. Amen. Well, thank you so much for joining us this Sunday evening on Good Shepherd Sunday. We'll be unpacking this topic all week long. So make sure to join us. Episodes get dropped every morning at 5 a.m. Mountain Time. And until tomorrow, God be with you.