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Time to Choose                        John 10: 11-18                   May 3, 2009

"Stuck in a dead-end job? Daydreaming about a new career? Combing through the classifieds for your next calling? Well, what about these jobs?

Roadkill Collector: Must be able to work long hours braving oncoming traffic while picking up creatures of various size and breed and in various states of decay. Benefits include working outdoors. Strong stomach a plus.

Or, if that doesn't suit you, how about:

Catfish Noodler: In search of people who can catch potentially 100-pound catfish with their hands only. Must not mind sticking limbs in holes in search of game and getting bitten as a result."

So begins the on-line description of cable TV's Discovery Channel series, Dirty Jobs, a show that profiles people who make their living doing things that generally turn the average person's stomach.

The point of the series, writes Mike Rowe, its creator, producer and host, is to introduce the audience to "a hardworking group of men and women who overcome fear, danger and sometimes stench and overall ickiness to accomplish their daily tasks."

"Find out what it takes to make it as a chimney sweep, a charcoal maker, a sewer inspector or the person in charge of a disaster cleanup," he continues. "These are dirty jobs!"

Rowe's real purpose is a fine one - to depict hard work as noble and sometimes even fun, and to recognize, with respect, the people who do these tasks. As well we should.

I'm not sure what the First Century equivalent of the Discovery Channel would be. Maybe there is no equivalent. But if we use our imagination a bit this morning and at least try to think of a media outlet that listed the worst jobs imaginable in the time of Jesus, Shepherd would have been included for sure - somewhere near the top of the list.

That's right. Despite our modern tendency to romanticize the role of the shepherd and depict Jesus surrounded by sheep in some sort of flowing garment, holding a lamb, the fact is that in the eyes of most of the people who originally listened to or read the work of the author of the Gospel of John, the notion that the risen Lord would call himself a shepherd would be, at the very least, a head-scratcher.

Hundreds of years earlier, In King David's time, shepherding was an honorable trade, and the author of our Text was most likely thinking about that when he wrote, but by Jesus' day shepherds were largely despised.

Much of what was previously pastureland was, by this time, in private hands and turned over to crops. Crops that would be trampled by wandering flocks. So both shepherds and their sheep were unwelcome.

Moreover, to put it simply, sheep are smelly, dirty critters. And the shepherds in the countryside outside of Jerusalem worked with their sheep, up close and personal, all day, every day.

The ancient plateau that occupies much of Israel is a rough, stone-covered piece of territory. In that dusty desert country, water was scarce and precious. So the shepherds had little opportunity to bathe. And to make things worse, most likely, as they followed the animals from place to place, they rarely even changed clothes.

Keeping the kosher laws-much less the elaborate cleanliness rituals of a faithful Jew-was out of the question.

So it is not particularly surprising, then, that shepherds were near the bottom of the social ladder.

For Jesus, the respected Rabbi, to identify himself with shepherds would have been shocking to many of his listeners, the familiar 23rd Psalm notwithstanding; and for him to call himself the Good Shepherd would have been as contradictory, in most of their minds, as the notion of - say, a "Good" Samaritan.

But that is exactly what our lesson tells us Jesus did. In the portion of the Gospel that leads up to our text, Jesus describes the role of the shepherd with great respect.

The shepherd calls the sheep, Jesus points out, and they know his voice. He goes ahead, leading the sheep to green pastures. In the evening the shepherd takes them into the sheepfold, a stone-walled enclosure that provides a safe place to sleep. Entry is by a single gate, and the shepherd typically sleeps across that gate.

Jesus clearly distinguishes between shepherds and thieves. Anyone who enters over the walls is a thief and is out to destroy, but the shepherd offers abundant life.

Then, in our text, Jesus shifts gears a bit. Instead of comparing shepherds and thieves, he draws a distinction between himself as the Good Shepherd and other, false shepherds. Sheep may not be the brightest animals on the planet, but they know which shepherd to follow, Jesus reminds us. They choose the one they know, the one that leads them down the right path - the path to life, not death.

Speaking of sheep, let me be frank. I have never much liked all of the references, in Scripture and in any number of the great hymns of the church, which describe us as sheep. In all truthfulness, I resent being compared to such a docile, herd-following animal.

And I'm not alone. Prominent theologian Walter Wink points out some of the ways that sheep-like behavior has hurt the church. "Christians have accepted without resistance totalitarian rulers," he writes. "They have been submissive in the face of tyrannous hierarchies in church and state, corporations and schools. Women have submitted to battering, economic exploitation and wage inequality."

"Sheep, Bah!" Wink concludes, and then suggests that the church would be better off with goats as a role model. After all, goats are more interesting. They have minds of their own, they don't follow blindly, they are rambunctious, and they eat anything.

"Surely," he suggests, "God prefers goats to sheep."

Actually, it doesn't matter if you agree, or not, with Walter Wink's tongue-in-cheek comparison of sheep and goats. Today is "Jesus the Good Shepherd Sunday," and our text is not about goats, it is about sheep. The metaphor Jesus uses couldn't be clearer.

Fortunately for all of us goat-preferring Christians, though, the sheep Jesus describes in this text are not particularly sheep-like. They make a wise choice.

In fact, the wise choice that is made by the sheep in Jesus' example is the point of the text: Everyone has a choice to make. We can choose to follow the Good Shepherd, or not.

And as harsh as it may seem, the choice of Shepherd is no trivial matter. On the contrary, it is a matter of life and death.

Jesus is the good shepherd, the one who is willing to die, so that we may live. He was willing to die, so that we don't have to.

Some folks today believe most of all in accumulating wealth, in having a good time, or in possessions. Some choose death and race to it with cocaine or some other addiction; some adopt a posture of anger, withholding forgiveness, and nursing grudges; some even try to avoid death by exercising at the gym, but one way or the other, the wolf approaches us all.

And to all of us, the question posed by the text is simple: Who do we trust, the good shepherd or the bad? It's time to choose.

So how do we choose, and how do we invite others to follow the one we call the Good Shepherd? Do we pitch a tent, hold a revival and have an "altar call?"

Probably not. While I do not want to demean the experience of those who have made a decision to follow Christ in that context, I believe that the choice of shepherd has very little to do with such a one-time affirmation.

John, the author of our Epistle Lesson for today, in three sentences, eloquently points out what it means to choose to follow the Good Shepherd.

". . .We ought to lay down our lives for one another," he writes. Then he follows that directive with a question: "How does God's love abide in anyone who has the world's goods and sees a brother or sister in need and yet refuses help?"

And then, John delivers his punch line. He concludes with an answer to his question: "Let us love, not in word or speech, but in truth and action."

This same theme is repeated over and over again in the New Testament. Whether we listen to Jesus' teachings and observe his actions, or read the words of the evangelists who followed him, our conclusion will always be the same: it is what we do that matters; and what we are expected to do, if we are to be followers of our Good Shepherd, is to imitate Jesus' example.

All of us are expected to be Shepherds.

The overwhelming Biblical evidence suggests that Jesus went out of his way to seek out the forgotten - the ones who are in deepest need. He paid no attention to social standing, status or family prominence. He scoffed at those who sought to dominate and challenged the system that made their domination possible. His decision to call himself a shepherd is simply a reaffirmation of that same theme.

It's time to choose, Jesus says. Time to choose to follow the Good Shepherd - and time to choose to be shepherds to the world.

It's a dirty job - but it could just be the most important job of all.

                                                                             AMEN

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