So You're a Sheep, Are You? It's Not a Compliment. But It Is Good.

This sermon was preached at Trinity Lutheran Church in Burlington, Iowa, on the weekend when their pastor (and my beloved former student and friend) Ryan Cosgrove and Amanda Stevenson were married.

Let us pray. Gracious Lord God, as Handel’s Messiah reminds us, “All we like sheep have gone astray.” We give you thanks that you are loath to leave things that way and have given your Son to lay down his life for our sake. Send your Spirit to draw our eyes up from our incessant nibbling, so we might look to Jesus who knows us inside and out and still refuses to turn his face from us. Amen.

It happened again yesterday: I added to my wardrobe. Usually when I go out of town there’s an inevitable trip to Target because I forgot to pack underwear or socks. This time it was a black belt to go with the requisite gray slacks for my role as a groomsman. So my wife and I went in search of the missing item. Over spring break, I traveled to see family in South Dakota. When I got to Pierre on the way, I discovered I hadn’t packed the insulin I needed. That’s not as easy to land as a pair of boxer briefs. I wound up contacting my physician’s assistant from over 20 years ago, who in turn sent a prescription to Walgreen’s. But when I got there, Walgreen’s didn’t have the right insulin pens in stock, so they sent the scrip three hours down the road to Rapid City where I could stop at another Walgreen’s on my way to my hometown. Once I got to that Walgreen’s, the pharmacist and I discovered that my insurance wouldn’t allow a refill until a week later. That meant paying out-of-pocket and, because they don’t sell just one eighty-dollar insulin pen, I had to buy a box of five for a sweet four hundred dollars. But I wound up with insulin in my grubby little diabetic hands. Whew.

t’s that sense of going off in quest of something that we hear about in today’s gospel reading. Jesus the good shepherd is the one who goes after what his own and protects it at all costs, even when it cost him his own life. And when the one who is Jesus’ own is us, that’s going to be big voodoo. If Jesus is the good shepherd, it doesn’t take much head-scratching to figure out what we are: sheep. We’re the cute little lambie-kins, wagging their tails behind them. Who wouldn’t want to cuddle up with us?

 

From the time before our 23-year-old son Sam can even remember now and all the way through his high school years, every night we sang this lullaby to him at bed time: “Jesus, tender shepherd, hear me. Bless thy little lamb tonight. Through the darkness be thou near me. Keep me safe till morning light. Amen.” I cherish the memories of our little lamb Sam. But we need to be careful when we start thinking of Jesus’ dealings with his sheep, because, while sweet spring lambs make an equally sweet and sentimental image for little children, the reality of sheep is much different.

I grew up in western South Dakota, where my grandparents ran a sheep and cattle ranch. I can tell you that sheep are nothing like our romantic picture of them, even lambs. First of all, sheep aren’t white. At best they’re a grimy grayish yellow with cockleburs, thistles, and pieces of grass stuck in their wool. And you don’t want me to describe their hind quarters. Suffice it to say that area is a mess. Second of all, these mangy creatures are just about the most-skittish of animals around. One quick motion or loud noise and you’ve got a bolting flock on your hands, scattering to the four winds for a long day of searching and herding. Third, these are quite possibly the dumbest dang domesticated beasts in the whole cosmos. They put their noses to the meadow grass and start eating, bite after bite after bite, with no attention to where they’re going. Their immediate nibbling moment is priority one, so danger can sneak up on what the scientists call ovis aries, and before you know it you’re out looking for a clump of bones, wool, and mutton instead of a sheep.

 

Once you get to know sheep, it becomes fairly obvious that, when Jesus calls himself the good shepherd, he’s paying us no compliment. And here I thought I was such a valuable creature, absolutely worth going after. I know Jesus calls me a sheep, but I’m sure he really means that he’s the good dog owner and I’m the Yorkshire terrier whose mint green kerchief makes you go, “Awww.” I can sure understand why Jesus would search for me if I were lost. I bet he’d even put up lost dog signs around the neighborhood to get me back.

 

Yet, sadly, Jesus remains the shepherd, and we remain sheep, dirty, dung-encrusted, dopey sheep. What is it about you that you’re so in need of a shepherd? Is it that, nibble-by-nibble, you’ve found yourself unawares having nibbled your way into a tight place? Is it that your actions have made you less than white-as-snow? Is it that you live a life where you bolt in fear and spot dangers all around? People you can’t trust. Systems that discourage you. Situations in life that make you cower. Perhaps you need a shepherd because you’ve at last discovered the truth that, whenever you try to exercise you own free will, it looks nothing like God’s will and that, time and time again, your choices – even your best ones – have a sorry outcome. And we’re not even talking yet about the grave.

You might need a shepherd because you’ve found yourself in a pen watched over by a hired hand. Oh, those hired hands, they look the part. These things seem like saviors and protectors: things like status and success or diets and financial investment seminars, or even religion or piety – they all present themselves as the things that will take care of you and assure your future. A quick drive from my house to the nearest mall will get you into the thick of these hired hands who promise to look after you. In my classrooms I see college women who’ve ventured to the mall to give themselves over to those faithless hired hands. You can tell, because you see them wearing short shorts they purchased at Victoria’s Secret with the word “pink” arrayed in block letters on their backsides. Or it’s the guys in the Abercrombie or Hollister or American Eagle t-shirt. Or the student athletes in the UnderArmour hoodie with guns and a six-pack under there to show off. They all come under the sway of the hired hand called consumerism who promises that, if you not only acquire enough stuff but also the right trendy stuff, your life will be set.

For those of us of an earlier vintage, the hired hands look like a five-bedroom, three-bath house in the suburbs, or tenure as a professor, or a hefty 401k, or an Apple iWatch, or regaining the less flabby body we had at 25. And for those of us in the church we look to the hired hands of numbers of people worshiping, of Bible study and prayer that we can offer as evidence of our godliness, of regaining the congregational presence we had in the community 60 years ago.

All our hired hands confidently offers us assurance that they will keep us safe from the lupine enemy, the wolf that prowls around the sheepfold, looking to devour us. These hired hands have nothing to protect you from jaws of death, our greatest and last enemy. For when it comes to grave’s power, every one of those things in life that has promised safety and security is revealed as a full-frontal fraud and must run away, lest it be caught up in God’s judgment and wrath as well. For in the face of death, the truth about all of these false friends comes to light: status, success, piety, fashion, politics, and even pious religion care not one whit about you. Their goal is to have you serve them and provide ongoing life for them. But ultimately, in the presence of death they neither know you nor care for you. They hear your crying voice and respond with a resounding, “Meh.”

And yet there is one who does know you and your cries, who has a heart for your benefit, who has a voice you can listen to and believe. Jesus, the good shepherd, calls you his own, calls you from afar, and calls you into his pen. He goes after you, not to force you into some arbitrary moral system or religious hierarchy, not to perniciously take your freedom from you, but to protect you and preserve your life. If the hired hands of this world run for the hills when the grave’s certainty comes clear, the good shepherd does no such thing. Jesus promises to lay down his life for you. When the possibilities of every other object and “ism” in this world are depleted and when your own power is at an end, Jesus remains there, crucified for you. He’s done it of his own accord. That’s how far his mercy and his commitment to his sheep extend: the very limit of endurance, and the greatest disaster and degradation are his, for your sake.

And the irony is that if you are to be his own and know his voice calling for you, the only way to do it is to recognize your own sheepliness, to see with utter clarity your great need that’s come with your unwitting nibbling at substitute sources of life, to know your blindness to all save yourself, to dive into your own limits, your own disaster, your own degradation. The deeper your sense of your own sin, the more good your shepherd becomes. That’s when you find yourself protected within the sheepfold of Christ’s love and mercy. The only way to be a sinner escaping death as the wages of sin is to confess “I am a sheeply stray and the wolf justly snaps its jaws at me.”

When you can confess that, then you will also know that being called a sheep is not Jesus dissing you. Instead it’s a sign of the one true fact about you: Christ has given his life for you whose own life is lost, and the life you now have is hid in him. Then you will desire to be no lap dog for Jesus, even if the dog is a Yorkie who lives in a parsonage. No, you will say, “Let me be his sheep.” You can revel and glory in it, because the more ovine you become, the dopier you are, the more danger you’re in, the deeper your need, the greater Jesus’ glory, the deeper Jesus’ mercy, the quicker he is to use his shepherd’s crook to pull you back from the abyss.

In fact, as our reading from 1 John puts it, calling yourself a sinful sheep is to have an uncondemned heart, to have boldness before God, as if to say, “Yeah, that’s right God. You sent your Son to be my good shepherd, not some pitiful substitute, but the real thing. He’s promised to grab hold of me and even snatch me from the jaws of defeat, despair, and death. He’s put me in your pen and kept me there with his own blood. I can’t escape being a sheep. Don’t let me ever escape being a sheep in your fold. Lord, fire those hired hands who skitter and scatter, and in turn keep sending my good shepherd to enfold me with the gospel on the lips of a faithful preacher, in the haven of your church, with every nibble at your table. I just want to be a sheep. Take my wool and let it be, consecrated Lord to thee. Baa. Baa. Baa. Yes, joyfully, baa.”

You, my friends, are allowed to bleat your need to Jesus the good shepherd, for your every need affirms his goodness. So let your “baa, baa, baa” be your confession of sin and your faithful reliance on him. Say it with me, “Baa. Baa. Baa.” You’re his. You’re in the pen. Amen.

New DNA from the Lord

This Maundy Thursday sermon was preached April 2, 2015, at Grand View Lutheran Church at a joint service with Luther Memorial Church.

I’ve signed on to teach one of Grand View’s freshman seminars next semester. Students in my course will examine the various patterns in their lives, from time management to the paper-writing process to their family history. As part of the class, they’ll have a DNA test done in order to learn more about what the pattern of their genome says about their ancestry. In order to know exactly what kind of information students will learn, I sent in a vial of my own saliva to see what it said about me. I got the initial results back this week and learned that I belong to two distinct genetic streams called haplogroups, one traced through all my male ancestors beginning with my father and the other through my female ancestors. It turns out that I’m the product of a genetic mutation on my paternal side that happened in southern France about the time of the Ice Age, and on my maternal side things go way back to early human migrations from Africa to southern Pakistan.

Wild, huh? But that’s the least of it. Doing a DNA test from 23andMe will also give you information about how much Neanderthal DNA you carry in you. I’m proud to say that the preacher standing before you today is made up of 3.2% Neanderthal genes – more than 98 out of 100 other people have. So I have that going for me, and if you wonder why I can verge on the earthy and boorish, there’s good reason.

Your preacher tonight, this part-Neanderthal named Ken Jones, is the product of thousands of years of ancestors from whom I’ve inherited my very being. My eye color, the fullness of my beard, the shape of my toenails, my lima bean ear lobes, my propensity for weight gain, and all kinds of genetic markers that may indicate a likelihood for cancer or Parkinson’s disease, all of these have come to me unbidden through 22 pairs of chromosomes. I chose none of it, and I have to live with it, all thanks to an ancient woman in Pakistan and a mammoth-hunting progenitor in southern France, not to mention a Neanderthal that hooked-up with a human partner. It’s my millennia-long inheritance.

All of this DNA and genome business comes to the fore for me tonight because of a word Jesus used at the Last Supper when he instituted the sacrament of Holy Communion. It’s right there in the Words of Institution: “On the night in which he was betrayed our Lord Jesus took bread and gave thanks. He broke it and gave it to his disciples, saying, ‘Take and eat. This is my body given for you. Do this for the remembrance of me.’ Again, after supper, he took the cup saying, ‘This cup is the new…’” And there we hit that word. In Greek it’s diathēkē. “This cup is the new diathēkē in my blood.” Our current permutation of hymnal translates the word as “covenant.” Jesus is giving a new covenant. An ancient covenant was a legal and binding agreement between two parties, and covenant language is strewn across the 37 books of the Old Testament. God had made a covenant with the ancient Israelites, which, of course they had a mighty hard time upholding. Now in the sacrament of the altar given to you by Jesus, he makes a new agreement with you.

The problem with thinking of the Lord’s Supper as a covenant is that it implies that we’re a party to the covenant and have some say in it. You’d never go through the elaborate ritual of name-signing in a house-closing if you didn’t see yourself as an equal partner with the home seller. But the sacrament doesn’t work that way. There’s nothing for you to do here. If you could contribute in any way to what the Lord’s Supper offers, there would be no need of it to start with. Here’s Jesus’ body and blood given and shed for you, all on account of your inability to get your act together, fully follow the Commandments, or desire God’s will.

So if we miss something by calling what Jesus offers to us tonight a covenant, there’s another way into understanding what our Lord has to give us. The other way to translate diathēkē is will or testament. When Jesus says, “This is my diathēkē,” he’s saying that this sacrament tonight is his last will and testament. We know how that kind of thing works. When our son Sam was born, a member of our congregation who was a lawyer drafted a will for us that’s now been in place for over two decades. Our will dictates exactly what our beneficiary receives. Sam gets it all. Our last will and testament declares it. His inheritance comes not by being good enough, not by accomplishing a single thing, not by meeting our expectations. Our diathēkē will come to him as sheer gift.

Of course, Sam has already received a prior gift from us, and that’s his genetic structure. His haplogroups aren’t exactly like mine, because half his genes were handed on by his beloved mother. But every single gene is all his, including whatever bits of Neanderthal DNA he’s inherited. It belongs to him without his behest. He’s the living embodiment of a first inheritance and of another that awaits him when we die.

And that’s exactly what happens for us in the sacrament tonight. When Jesus says, “This is the new testament in my blood,” he means exactly that. He’s giving you the inheritance that is first his as the Father’s only-begotten Son: forgiveness of sins, life, and salvation. That’s what he’s come to give. In the sacrament he gives his last will and testament that declares that his gifts are for you. There’s nothing for you to do. He’s not much interested in being a role model or an arbiter of piety, so that you can be all you can be. Frankly, he knows how awful you are at hewing closely to him, committing to God, or being devoted to a spiritual life. Instead he lays it out in the sacrament in a way that is legal and binding. He is righteous and faithful for your sake, all the way to the cross. He does it all in order that you might live. That’s his bequest.

When we hear the words of institution spoken from the altar, the pastor functions like an attorney will one day when Mary and I die. Gathered in some lawyer’s office, our heir will be present for the reading of the will. And it will be explicitly declared what is now his: Mary’s earrings and assorted jewelry, shelves full of books, the bed my grandfather was born in, the art on our walls, dishes and silverware, and whatever toilet paper is still under the bathroom sink. When you hear the words of institution, you hear exactly what you have coming to you.

The irony is that if you’re at all honest about yourself, you know exactly what you justly have coming to you from God: nothing at all at best and damnation at worst. But Jesus is no just Lord. He’s not into issuing contracts and holding all parties to the letter of the law. He likes flaunting the law on your behalf and breaking the bonds of every demand. He’s got an eternity of forgiveness, life, and salvation in his back pocket and he’s champing at the bit to make sure you get it.

But here’s the rub: just like our own last will and testament, there’s one thing that has to happen for it to come into effect. Someone’s gotta die. When Jesus institutes the Lord’s Supper, he knows exactly what’s coming. He will be betrayed and arrested. He will be tried and adjudicated as an out-and-out sinner. He will suffer scourging and mocking. He will be crucified. He will die. And your inheritance can’t be proclaimed without it. That means that tonight, Maundy Thursday, isn’t just a reenactment of the Last Supper or a kind of remembering that puts the pieces of Jesus broken body together again so we can, in turn, break them in our ritual. No, but Jesus’ own actions and command are the proclamation that what happens on Good Friday and Easter are indeed for you.

When you take and eat and take and drink, what happens to Jesus’ body and blood is the same exact thing that happens when you eat a B-Bop’s burger or drink a glass of the best pinot noir. Jesus’ body and blood go down your gullet, only to be broken down, so that the nutrients of his forgiveness and mercy can be sent via your bloodstream to every single cell of your own body. Because of this sacrament you will carry around Jesus’ death and resurrection in each of those cells – nerve cells, ear lobe cells, calloused heel cells, left gluteal cells, liver, spleen, and pancreas cells, eyeball rod and cone cells, salivary gland cells. Each of your cells will carry Jesus in the same way that they carry your DNA.

In fact, Jesus is already at work in you, creating a new person in you, unbound by your past, your present worries, your weights and woes. He even promises that all that DNA, both human and Neanderthal, is bound for an end and new beginning. He’s the first-born of the Resurrection and aims to take you up with him and give you, too, a new body. For a stocky guy who has his grandmother’s genetic predisposition toward weight-gain and a sinner who’s inherited my brokenness and death from my first parents in the Garden of Eden, that’s extremely good news. And the promise stands true for you, as well. In Jesus’ forgiveness, salvation, and eternal life, the old you is coming to an end and new life is coming to you like some divine somatic gene therapy.

So steel yourselves, my friends. Let the sinner in you gird its loins, as if it’s going to do any good. For the Lord himself has died to give you your inheritance in this sacrament. And this is not your own doing, but it’s given by the free will of the only one we truly can say freely wills what God intends. It’s his will that he die that you might have life. It’s his testament that you own everything that is his. Thanks be to God. Amen.