May 12, 2019 Text: Psalm 23
Dear Friends in Christ,
Before worship today I help up a sign where the letters were altogether. I wonder what you saw? Many of you saw, “God is no where.” But I wonder how many of you saw, “God is now here.” Too often we focus on the negative. When things go wrong in our life we figure God is no where. We think He doesn’t care about us.
Our Psalm for today – Psalm 23 is that wonderful reminder that God does care for us. God is here for us and always will be. Sure, there are times we go our own way, drift from the Lord. But the Good Shepherd doesn’t just let us roam freely doing whatever we want. With the Psalm as our backdrop, it is a good day to ask . . .
“WANDERING SHEEP – WHO’S YOUR SHEPHERD?”
For many of us this part of Scripture is a calming influence. We hear, “I shall not want…lie down in green pastures…still waters…fear no evil…comfort me…my cup overflows…dwell in the house of the Lord forever.” Doesn’t the heart stop racing? The anxiety grinds to a halt. The nerves relax.
But why do we need this calming influence? Because we are dirty sheep. Laura Ingalls Wilder in her book Farmer Boy had a chapter called “Sheep Shearing” in which the protocol is described. First, the sheep need a good washing. What comes to us as nice, soft wool starts out as filthy and muddy. Once cleaned you better shear them right away or they are going to get dirty all over again.
That is because sheep love to wander. Sheep can also be headstrong and stubborn and not too keen on listening.
Does any of that sound familiar? Aren’t we as Christians good at picking up dirt? How often do our actions and words reflect our non-Christian neighbors? Instead of being content with our green pasture, we want bigger lawns and a nicer house on a beautiful street where all the neighbors are friendly. We value our friends’ envy above our Lord’s goodness. Instead of trusting God to vindicate our enemies, we smear them and speak evil against them and gloat when they stumble. This why we confess our sins daily and weekly in the public worship. As sheep we keep getting dirty and dirty again.
We also wander. We wander from God’s truth when influenced by friends or media or interest groups. We push God away when a hurtful death occurs or a loved one rejects us. We wander from His Word and Sacrament because we just cannot understand how this is the richest table anyone could spread before us. Wandering sheep – Who Is Your Shepherd? Isaiah said it well, “We all, like sheep, have gone astray, each of us has turned to his own way.” (Is. 53:6)
In order to solve this for you and I God had to do something radical. The Shepherd of Israel, took on flesh and became the Lamb. Jesus – the Lamb of God washed our dirt away with His blood. When we wandered away, He searched for us. His search took Him to a lowly virgin in Nazareth, to a humble cave in Bethlehem, and to a lonely Friday afternoon outside Jerusalem where the Shepherd died. He conquered our willfulness by yielding his own will to that of the Father.
The Shepherd became a lamb. With His resurrection on the third day, the Lamb has become our Shepherd. We might even say at our congregation – He is our Good Shepherd! He feeds us in the pasture of His Word. He leads us by the still waters of Baptism. Our cup runneth over as He feeds heavenly bread and the cup of life. Sheep, who could be in want, with the Shepherd providing all of this?
To think this Shepherd loves us in spite of Him knowing us so well. Our horrible thoughts, reactionary behavior and the stink of sin that surrounds our person. Pew wee! This wonderful Shepherd still feeds us and leads us and guides us through all the up and down spots in our life.
Little by little, as we feed on his love and stay with his flock, He breaks our wandering and our stubbornness. He makes us His servants who love and obey and trust in the Shepherd above all things. We give so others won’t be in want. We act as a calming agent for friend or family because of our faith. We display goodness and mercy in a world that seems to love the opposite.
Hopefully the next time you see a sign like I held up earlier, you will notice right away that “God Is Now Here.” As we come together as His flock, the Shepherd is here now. He speaks, we listen. He leads, we follow. We have His promise that He will keep leading “all the days of our life” until we “dwell in the house of the Lord forever.”
Amen.