Acts 2: 42-47
Psalm 23
1 Peter 2: 19-25
John 10: 1-10

Ten years ago this summer I took my nephew, to see the movie “Babe” as part of his present for his 5th birthday. While he seemed to enjoy the story, when he arrived home he announced to his mother that the movie was ‘dis-gust-ing”! Perhaps it stretched the limits of credulity for a child used to handling pigs and other farm animals. You see, “Babe” is a movie about a bunch of talking animals and an ordinary piglet who learns to herd sheep, like a sheepdog, and who becomes a champion sheep-pig.

Farmer Hoggett, played by James Cromwell, enters his porcine shepherd in the sheep-dog competition under only partially accurate name of “Pig”. Babe has learned to herd sheep through politeness and respect, not force and harsh commands.

While a fantasy, the movie calls it’s audience to reflect upon the nature of leadership. The sheep have a completely different idea than the dogs do! The biblical texts for today call us to reflect on the images of shepherding as a metaphor for leadership; both that of the risen Christ and the kinds of leadership exercised within and by the Christian community. We have, in Jesus of Nazareth, an example of leadership which was very risky. He embraced his humanity and accepted the vulnerability that that brought. He knew that his way of living and preaching and acting would bring him criticism and put his life in danger. The cross is proof of that! I think that he would say it was worth it? I think that this is part of the “way of the cross”.

We are living in times of great change and we have many examples of leadership. Any leader has to decide the nature of his or her leadership. Is a good leader one who reflects common expectations or one who challenges expectations with a different point of view. Does a leader embrace change, or hold it back.

On Friday the front page of the Times & Transcript featured a political cartoon, something usually reserved for the editorial section. Premier Lord has apparently been told that New Brunswick can’t have any money unless the use of the funds is clear. Behind the Prime Minister’s chair are a large pile of newspapers exposing various phases of the sponsorship scandal. Clearly, the cartoon seeks to expose the hypocrisy of such a situation. Political cartoons do this all the time and they can work exceptionally well because, as they say, “A picture can be worth a thousand words!”

As a kind of “word picture” the image of the shepherd functions to show us the way of leadership that is offered to us by the Risen Christ. I have done a great deal of reading on this subject over the years, as I have prepared sermons on this and other passages referring to shepherds. It seems that the shepherd of Jesus’ Palestine was not at all like the shepherd of Canada or Great Britain most familiar to us. Of course, most people here who keep sheep do so with the aid of fences. Not so with Palestine in the time of Jesus. They travelled far and wide in search of food and water and were sometimes accused of trespassing! We may find it surprising to note that shepherds were not respected members of their community, for this and other reasons. They could not keep the Sabbath, they could not wash their hands before they ate and the list goes on.

However, the most striking difference, as far as I can tell is that the shepherd of Jesus day led the sheep and did not drive them or corral them with the use of sheepdogs as you may have seen in movies from Australia and Great Britain. The Shepherd called and the sheep followed. This is what is behind the line about the sheep knowing the voice of their own shepherd. When a sheep strayed, the shepherd had to go after it. The shepherd’s crook was both a walking stick and a means of extending the reach to latch onto a wandering sheep. (I believe that the theological meaning of the “crozier” used by Anglican and Catholic Bishops comes from.) Now, there is some dispute over whether or not a shepherd would ACTUALLY leave 99 sheep alone to look for a lost one, but IS clear that that is the way Jesus the shepherd describes the love of God in one of the best known parables in the Gospels.

As I continued to reflect on these passages during the week I reflected on the nature of Christian community and how we are all called to be both sheep and shepherd to one another.

The context to which the gospels and the epistles were addressed is very different than our own. The passage read today from the Epistle of Peter is writtent o shaves; both those with benevolent and kind masters and those with harsh and cruel ones. The institution of slavery was so ingrained in the fabric of the Greco-Roman world that it would have been very unwise for such a small and fledgling group as the Christian community to oppose it. Instead they are called to reflect on the life of Jesus and apply it to their own living. The reality of slavery is no longer with us and no one would condone it today. However, the life of Jesus still has things to teach us. The more we know about the Good Shepherd the more we realize that his ministry took a great deal of courage, and ultimately, led to the cross.

As a shepherd Jesus called those who would follow. From the evidence in the scriptures themselves the early Christian community embraced an amazingly diverse mix of people. Is it any wonder that slaves and people from other places were attracted to a community where there was no distinction between slave and free, Jew or Gentile. Those who were Jewish kept their ties with the synagogue. It would not be for another generation or so that they were forced out of the synagogues. The quality of life within their communities became very important which is not to say that the divisions which were apparent in the wider community completely disappeared, but they had the vision left to them by their Good Shepherd.

All these years later these passages can give us much food for thought; both in terms of leadership and the nature of Christian community. It seems to me that part of the purpose of Christian community is to embrace the various differences that people come to us with and work to make those differences of no consequence. That is not to say that they are erased, by no means, but that they are not a determining factor in a person’s life and liberty. We have come a long way in this country in terms of rights for minorities, but we must always be vigilant against discriminatory practices. The call of the shepherd demands no less.

Some United Churches and churches from other denominations have become involved in the Sanctuary movement, housing refugees in church buildings and trying to save them from deportation until a fair hearing is given into their refugee claims. While the early Christians could do nothing about the prevailing acceptance of slavery around them, we as Christians live in a time an place where we have a certain amount of power and influence and we can, and should use at least some of that, to make the lives of the helpless and homeless more bearable. Our Shepherd would expect no less from us.

We are called by the example of our Shepherd to shelter and protect the hurting and the vulnerable, even if that means we are hurt or made more vulnerable by that action. Much of the political rhetoric in North America tends to focus on what the government can do for us. I think that we as churches need to try and focus the debate on what we, as Canadians, can do for others, and for those unable for whatever reason to benefit fully from living in such a wonderful country. In the election which seems to be around the corner we need to ask these kinds of questions of the candidates. What kind of Country do we want to live in? What does our Shepherd say to us about how we form our lives in community and Province and Nation?

The past couple of weeks we have been hearing a great deal about leadership, and not just from Ottawa. I am thinking in particular about the highest office in our sister denomination, the Roman Catholic Church. They have said goodbye to a much beloved spiritual leader and the College of Cardinals are about to enter the secret and sequestered conclave to elect one of their own to succeed him. Who will be the most appropriate leader for their church in the years ahead? Due to the nature of the office this man will have the power to form the very nature of the Catholic church and influence the course of human history. Only they can decide but many have strong opinions and many of these opinions are in conflict with one another. In the end the new Pope will have to lead a very diverse flock form virtually every country in the word and inspire in them faith and discipleship. Those charged with this awesome responsibility need our prayers at this time.

So let us all recognize our role as sheep and as shepherd and let us pray for God’s guidance so that our leading and following will reflect the call of that Great shepherd, Jesus of Nazareth.

Amen.

Acts 7: 55-60
Psalm 31: 1-5, 15-16
1 Peter 2: 2-10
John 14: 1-14

Today might be as good a day as any to break out into a verse or two of “Good King Wenceslaus”. Of course it’s a Christmas Carol, and it is tied to the “Feast of Stephen “ which is celebrated in more liturgical churches on December 26. Most of us call it ‘boxing day’ whose origins, interestingly enough, go back, not to shopping, but to the tradition of wealthy families boxing the Christmas leftovers for the servants and the poor.

We sometimes get the idea that controversy is new to the church and that there was a time when everyone agreed on matters of practice and theology. Such is certainly not the case. As the early church communities began to grow there arose no small amount of dissatisfaction over the distribution of the aid collected for the widows and orphans. Seven men were given the task of overseeing this work and one of these men, and the best known, was Stephen. We can also assume that he continued to preach and teach about his faith, and it was this teaching that led to his martyrdom.

It seems that one of Luke’s reasons for telling the story of Stephen is to draw a comparison between Stephen, the preacher, prophet and martyr and Jesus of Nazareth.

While it can be very dangerous to talk of suffering and martyrdom as a Christian ideal, it is important to look at the lives of those who suffered ridicule, physical torture or even death because of the gospel. But we do not look at them because of the suffering itself but because of how the Spirit of God was working in and through that situation in order to effect the spreading of the Good News.

Stephen, as I said, was a teacher and apostle who was appointed to a board of directors to oversee the early church’s version of ‘Meals on Wheels’. In the style of the prophets of long before he accused them of being unfaithful to their heritage. He equated their rejection of Jesus with a supreme spiritual blindness. There is no question in my mind that the speech as Luke has recorded it was almost guaranteed to make a group of strict pharisees very angry. They dragged him out of the city, threw off their outer garments and stoned him to death. As he was dying, he had words of forgiveness on his lips. This is a clear parallel to the words of Jesus and is Luke’s way of telling his readers that Jesus’ followers are strengthened by the Spirit to be like him in forgiving those who would harm them for the sake of the gospel.

There are many bad news stories in the paper and on the television every day. Victim impact statements have become a part of the sentencing process in many jurisdictions. Out of the prevailing attitude that the courts have gone soft on crime, the reporters seem to crave the interviews with the hurting and angry families and victims who are looking for long sentences or the imposition of the death penalty, or here in Canada, bringing it back!

In sharp contrast to this we see the occasional story about those family members who call for mercy or understanding, and who are able to publically forgive the attacker.

Perhaps the most celebrated case is that of the 1981 shooting of Pope Pail II. A Turkish man by the name of Mehmet Ali Agca shot and seriously wounded the pontiff. The Pope forgave the shooter two years after the shooting and visited with him in prison. In 2000 the pope requested that the Italian government pardon the man. This was done but Agca is still in prison in Turkey for previous crimes. You may recall that he applied for but was not given permission to attend the Pope’s funeral.

In July of 1987 24 year old Scott Everett was shot and killed by drug dealer Mike Carlucci. At his sentencing hearing Scott’s father told of the pain of losing a son and Carlucci said that he was sorry. On the anniversary of his son’s death, Scott’s father, the Rev Walt Everett, a United Methodist Minister from Hartford Connecticut wrote to his son’s murderer and forgave him. Everett had said, “My anger was destroying me. It was keeping me from relating to people as I ought to, keeping me from doing my work, and I began to ask, ‘Is this what the rest of my life is going to be like?’ Everett began the letter by describing the “extremely difficult” year since Scott was killed and then wrote, “I do accept your apology and, as hard as these words are to write, I add: I forgive you.”

These words were the beginning of a tremendous change in Carlucci and were Everett says that he was able to forgive because of God’s prodding and that the changes that had come abut in Carlucci were God’s work as well. He also said something which was very interesting, when he is asked how he could forgive the person who killed his son he says, “If it’s something small, I say, ‘You broke it, now you fix it, and then we’ll be even,” But with something too big to be fixed, the only thing left for healing is forgiveness.” read the story at http://www.umc.org/interior.asp?ptid=2&mid=7026

One of the other things that we could easily miss in the story from the book of Acts is that we are told the angry mob piled their coats at the feet of a young Pharisee named Saul, and it is noted that he approved of what was happening. Later in his life, he himself reflects on the change that was about to take place. Clearly, the Spirit of God is working and has begun to work when Stephen knelt, dying from the blows of stone after stone.

It becomes clear that another of Luke’s reason for telling the story is for the very purpose of introducing Saul, the Pharisee. Saul would soon come to have a great reputation for viciously eradicating the synagogues of these heretics who followed the teachings of a rabbi from Nazareth. The Romans had killed him but his followers were proving to be harder to bring in line than had first been thought.

Yet, one day soon, on the road to Damascus, that same persecutor of the Christian communities, would come face to face, as it were, with the Risen Christ and would come to be the most prominent Christian apostle. The young man who witnessed the stoning of the first Christian martyr, would himself become a martyr many years later. No doubt the death of Stephen began to work on Saul’s heart and soul and the Damascus road encounter was just a dramatic step in a journey of faith that had already begun, even though Saul might not have realized it.

I think that one of the things that we can say these passages teach us is the we should never underestimate the power of the Holy Spirit. We must never say that something is impossible because God’s Spirit could very well go out and prove us wrong.

The people who were closest to Jesus of Nazareth were very dependant upon him and his presence for advice and for strength. As he prepared them for his immanent death he tried to assure them that they would not be alone in the times ahead. We usually hear this passage in the context of funerals, but this house of many rooms is one in which we too can live, here and now. In this house we are called to live as fully as possible the Christian life to which we have been called and into which we have been baptized. If Christ is the way for us then Christ needs to be the way in which we truly live, not a “good idea” or a “matter of conveneince”; he needs to be truly, “The way, the truth and the life” for us. Through the power of the Holy Spirit we can share communion with him and with one another. Through the power of the Holy Spirit, we are enabled to be the hands and feet of Christ doing the will of God in the time and place in which we find ourselves living and serving.

As God’s people we are called to take, not the easy way, but the way of faith. We are called to rise above the prejudices of the day; above the self-centeredness that is always in danger of overshadowing the call to self-giving. The call of the prophets of long ago still rings out. Follow God with all that we have and are and can be. Live up to the best of what we have been shown in Jesus of Nazareth. We must rely upon the grace of God and the power of the Holy Spirit at all times, and most especially when we cannot possibly do it on our own. And the good news is that we are not expected to and don’t have to.

So let us go forward, confident of Christ’s presence through the Spirit and trusting in the overwhelming grace which makes our lives of faith possible.

Amen.