I wrote the rough draft for this lesson on January 18th — of 2018, that is. When we learned that Darren wouldn’t be here today, I was still ruminating over Dawnielle’s sermon on the Good Shepherd. So I pulled this up and made the final revisions.
In last week’s sermon we looked at Psalm 23 to see how the Bible describes a good shepherd. When David wrote this Psalm, it resonated with his listeners who lived in an agriculture-based society. Even if they were craftsmen living in the city, they were familiar with shepherds and shepherding. This is not so much the case for us today.
Now, I married a country boy who grew up with a pasture full of sheep, so he knew a bit about these things. But I was a town girl who lived by the highway and the railroad yard. I’d never really been around sheep. So when in 2006 a friend called me up and said, "I have three orphan lambs. Would your daughter like to raise one on a bottle," that was the beginning of my education as a shepherd. The next 15 years of my kids raising 4H lambs brought me a deeper appreciation of the scriptures that mention sheep.
Since we looked at the role of the good shepherd last Sunday, this morning we are going to look at the other half of the partnership: good sheep. While the shepherd carries a great responsibility for his flock, success also requires certain responses from the sheep. When a shepherd leans on the fence, looks out across the field at his flock, smiles and says,"Those are good sheep," what does that mean? What constitutes a "good" sheep?
The primary responsibility of a shepherd is to nourish the sheep by leading them to fertile pastures. Once the flock is in the pasture, one would reasonably expect the sheep to eat on their own. The shepherd doesn’t stuff the food into the sheeps’ mouths or chew it up for them. If a sheep has no appetite, something is seriously wrong. It may have an infection or a fever or a bad tooth, but whatever the cause, a sheep that won’t eat is unhealthy.
Our spiritual shepherds are tasked with leading us away from false teaching and into sound exposition of the word of God. They primarily do this one or maybe two days a week. If we are unwilling to receive and take in the nourishing word of God on our own during the other six days, it indicates that we are unhealthy. As a shepherd probes his sheep to search for the tender spot that indicates trouble, so we need God, our Good Shepherd, to probe our hearts for the wound, the hurt, the arrogance or the sin that suppresses our appetite for His word.
When a healthy sheep grazes, she doesn’t gulp her food down whole the way a dog might; a sheep, like a cow, is a ruminant. She swallows her food and stores it in the first section of her stomach, the rumen. Throughout the day, she brings back up a bit at a time and re-chews it, going back over it to break down the grass fibers to eke out as much nutrition as possible.
A shepherd can feed his sheep a steady diet of grain, which is easily digested and does not need to be processed nearly as much. The impact of this "soft" diet results in a sheep who does not chew the cud enough. When this happens, too much acid will build up in his gut. The sheep will become bloated from the imbalance, and then he will die. For the sake of a sheep’s health, he must graze on food that requires him to chew the cud.
A good spiritual shepherd, then, should not let a congregation subsist on easy teachings and feel-good sermons. He needs to nourish the us primarily with teachings that will challenge us, lessons that we will have to chew on and think about for a while. If we are healthy spiritual sheep we will rise to that challenge, growing and thriving as a result.
In a healthy flock, as the sheep mature they naturally start to take an new interest in each other, seeing each other in a new way, interacting on a different level. The shepherd does not need to supervise or assist in this process. Much of it happens over the course of the day, unobserved by the shepherd. Initially, these interactions may not seem to have had any impact; the sheep don’t look any different for months, until, sometimes with only a few day’s notice, new life springs forth, the fields are filled with lambs boing-boing-boinging around, and the shepherd looks on with joy as the flock nurtures and protects its youngest members.
As a shepherd is not expected to personally produce lambs, so a human flock cannot expect a spiritual shepherd, a pastor, to carry all the responsibility for the congregation’s spiritual growth and rebirth. We are responsible for interacting with others in ways that encourage mutual growth and maturity of the believers. In our normal daily routines we have opportunity to share Christ with others whom our spiritual shepherds do not encounter. We may not see evidence that our interaction has impacted them. But one day the gradual, unseen change that has been happening within them will reveal itself as a newborn faith in Christ Jesus, and as that lamb joins this flock we will rejoice and come alongside to encourage and strengthen his faith.
In David’s time, shepherds led their flocks through a series of rocky paths, grazing along the way on the young grasses sprouting at the base of the rocks, watered by the moisture carried in from the Mediterranean on the wind each night. The shepherd carried a short rod that was thicker or knobbed on one end. He could lightly toss it to the ground in front of a wandering sheep to redirect it back to the safety of the flock, or throw it hard overhand to strike any predator that tried to attack.
At our house we couldn’t sit around all day watching sheep graze, so when our daughter decided to keep the orphan lamb after it was weaned off the bottle, we ran fence around the pastures. Eventually we kept a dozen or so sheep out there. The fence protected them from dogs and coyotes and kept them from wandering into the pond and drowning, pulled down by the weight of their wet wool. We walked the pastures regularly to check for toxic plants and to be sure the fences were secure. ThIs system worked very well—until the day we brought home a jumper.
Within a day she realized that the fence was a little lower on the east side of the lamb pasture, and she jumped it. This was bad business on several counts. First off: Modern commercial sheep are bred to be wide, thick and muscular; they are not deer who can clear a fence easily and safely; they can get hung up on a fence and hurt themselves badly. Secondly: Sheep are highly sociable animals who tend to follow a lead sheep, which can often make life easier for the shepherd. But if the rest of the flock looked to our fence jumper as the lead sheep, and they all jumped the fence, the resulting chaos would endanger the entire flock. Thirdly: This behavior brought a lot of extra work for the shepherd - me - and a bit of danger of my own as I hunted her when she went AWOL late one Sunday evening.
She had jumped the fence earlier in the day and I found her that afternoon in the neighbor’s horse barn. I figured she’d gone back there again, but it was 10:30 in the evening, and knowing that my neighbor was armed, I didn’t want to go poking around the stable unannounced. My neighbor had been recently widowed and lived alone now. I could see through the window that she’d fallen asleep in a recliner in front of the TV. I knocked gently so as not to startle her, and when she didn’t wake, I knocked a little louder. Alarmed, she jumped up and dashed back to the bedroom for The Judge: a compact, snub-nosed handgun that takes a .410 shotgun shell or a 45 cartridge. Now I was scared. As she approached the door I waved my hands and tugged on my pink fleece hoodie, calling out, "It’s me, Lisa! Your neighbor!" I was truly concerned that this sheep was going to get me shot.
In His word, God has graciously given us boundaries to protect us. Some of these proscriptive in nature; warning us what we should not do. Consider the 10 commandments: have no other gods before me, do not steal, do not lie, do not covet, do not commit adultery. Other are affirmative, exhorting us about what we should do: bear with one another in love, keep the unity of the Spirit, let your speech be gracious, be kind to one another, speak the truth in love. When we are good spiritual sheep, when we respect and honor these boundaries, we protect ourselves, each other, and our spiritual shepherds. When we disregard these fences and jump over them, we can bring harm to all of us.
In recent years we’ve seen on the news stories about domestic sheep that have gone rogue and run wild, hiding from their shepherds. Maybe they jumped a fence. One notable example is Chris, a Merino ram who was captured after having gone wild in Australia for about 6 years. His unshorn fleeces grew to a prodigious size and he looked impressive. His shorn fleece weighed nearly 90 pounds. A fleece that size, if the wool were in good condition, would yield enough yarn to knit 70 sweaters or more than 500 socks.
But Chris’ wool was not in good condition; it was matted and broken, tangled with dirt and sticks. Shearing revealed that he was malnourished and severely underweight from carrying the burden of all that extra fleece. A typical full-grown Merino ram should weigh about 170 pounds, including 20 pounds of wool; after shearing, Chris only weighed 97 pounds. Laden with excess wool equal to their own body weight, unshorn sheep die of heatstroke or starvation. The wool on their heads spreads out until it resembles a hood; shepherds call this wool blindness, because it limits their vision, making them susceptible to attack by predators. Flies will lay eggs in the filthy, matted wool, resulting in a horrible condition called flystrike. If an unshorn ewe manages to breed, her newborn lambs, trying to nurse, will often suckle a dirty wool tag by mistake. This is just plain gross. A deeper concern is that the day-old lambs will not get any of the ewe’s colostrum and the immunities it provides.
A good shepherd shears his sheep, harvesting the wool while it’s usable and keeping the sheep strong and healthy. In my experience, sheep respond to shearing in one of two ways, and the response is partly influenced by the maturity and experience of the sheep, and partly by the sheep’s personality. Younger, flightier sheep tend to fight the process. Sometimes I have had to lay my full weight against a sheep to keep it still long enough for my daughter to clip it. By the time we’re done, both sheep and shepherd are hot, sweaty and stressed. Older, calmer sheep are more relaxed. They understand that these noisy clippers mean that they will soon feel cool and light, and they lay quietly to be shorn.
How do we respond to our Good Shepherd when He tries to remove the excess wool, the dirt and debris from our lives? Do we fight Him as He works to give us clearer vision, or do we rest trustingly on His lap despite the noise involved in the process?
We had one sweet ewe, Emma, who once got so relaxed that she fell asleep with her head in my daughter’s lap as I worked the clippers. She was such a good sheep.
That ewe had had a bumpy start. She was one lamb in a set of triplets whose ewe didn’t have enough milk for them all, so we raised her on a bottle, and she adapted very well. Unlike our ram who poisoned himself when he reared up on his hind legs to pull toxic red oak leaves from an overhanging branch, she was content to graze on grass, supplemented by oats and corn. She regularly produced twins and was gentle with her lambs and everybody else’s. She didn’t bully the other sheep; instead her presence had a calming influence on the rest of the flock. She didn’t jump fences, and she was the easiest sheep to lead when we had to load them into the truck and move them. I’d take a whole flock like her. She was such a good sheep!
God has designed us to be good sheep like Emma: gentle with each other, responsive to our Good Shepherd, willing to be led by Him, hungry for His good word. He wants to remove from our lives the tangles that weigh us down. Where we are wounded, our Shepherd desires to heal us in His gentle care. Through our natural daily interactions He wants to draw others into life with Him and grow His flock. We are vulnerable to the predator who seeks to bite and devour us with sin. But through the power of the Holy Spirit, our Good Shepherd enables us to humbly recognize and honor His boundaries for our own well-being and for the well-being of those around us. We can have peace as we rest trustingly in our Good Shepherd. We can have confidence that He is able to continue the good work that He has begun within this flock until the day of Jesus Christ. Amen.
