ON SHEEPISHNESS
Psalm 23, John 10:11-18
When we say a person is sheepish or acting sheepishly, we normally mean that they are awkward or bashful in the company of other people, usually among unfamiliar people. We also use the word in the sense of being fearful, timorous of unfamiliar situations. One might, for example, use the word sheepish to describe me during the fellowship hour following the worship service. I huddle to the edge of the room, acutely aware of the risk of engaging with strangers--one has to offer one's presence to the presence of another (a scary business!)--and I grip onto familiar turf: the table with the coffee, the chairs set out on the periphery, the handful of folks whom I've come to know over the past year. "Don't be sheepish," I can hear my supervisors say during these moments of self-preservation, moments of staying safe in my own flock, wrapped in my own fleece.
We're invited this morning to play with this metaphor of shepherd and sheep. To stretch it out and to see where it breaks down. Here are two stories to warm us up, both stories straight from the newspapers.
A few years ago in Istanbul, a group of Turkish shepherds left their flock to graze for a moment as they ate breakfast together. As they sat away from the flock, they saw one sheep run toward the edge of the cliff and plunge to its death. And then, immediately after it, almost 1500 sheep followed. Over the edge. A total of 450 sheep died; the rest--about a thousand--survived because the accumulation of sheep below provided a vast wooly cushion to soften their fall.
Here's a second story: Last November in Valley Stream, New York, a throng of more than 2,000 people, having gathered all night to be the first to grab day-after-Thanksgiving bargains, shattered the glass double-doors of a Wal-Mart with the collected weight of their impatience and surged inside. Stampeding for the sales, the crowd trampled to death a 34 year-old temp worker who was trying to hold the doors. Most of the people continued shopping, until they were all finally forced to leave until later in the afternoon.
Can we trace similarities between these two stories? They both deal with a herd of mammals, both deal with what might be called a flock instinct, and in different ways both deal with death and destruction. Now, it's easy to dismiss both events as the unnatural outbreaks of a crazed mob. But is there something between the lines of these stories that hits close to home and gestures toward that sheepishness we'd rather not be linked with?
What drives a sheep off a precipice and brings the whole flock after it? Without a shepherd, a sheep will wander, grazing, rarely lifting its head to take in its situation. Thus we say sheep are dumb, easily led astray. Sheep are also a prey animal, with eyes farther to the sides of their heads with a visual range of about 270 degrees. When they sense danger, they flock together, cramming to the center of the herd to avoid immediate exposure to the threat. It seems to me that, despite popular opinion, sheep are not stupid creatures. Rather, as prey animals they're charged with anxiety. So, to speculate why a flock will plummet off a cliff: perhaps, oddly enough, as an instinctual act of self-preservation. One sheep senses, "Oh, it would be better for me to go over here," and the rest follow. And had a shepherd been there, the whole mess would've been avoided. In most cases, a simple whoop or a click could've calmed the flock and reoriented them. But the shepherds were having breakfast.
Now, what drives a flock of people through a heavy closed door over top another human being so as to be the first to snag the good bargains? Crowd control couldn't stop the stampede. What voice called them to squeeze so passionately through that door? Was it another kind of self-preservation? An instinct that said, "I need to get this flat-screen while it's marked down. I need to get this Wii, or else it'll be sold out everywhere tomorrow?" Perhaps it was the voice of the hired hand that Jesus speaks of in our passage this morning, the voice of the one who doesn't really care for the sheep, only for his wallet. "People flocked to the stores"--that's a common image in contemporary news. You hear it all the time. I've read retail advertising strategies that basically characterize consumers as sheep. Have we forgotten that branding is a term associated with livestock?
I don't want to get into the psychology of the American consumer, but I do want to engage this metaphor and hint at the ways the human brushes up against the ovine, the sheep-like, in order for us to see the startlingly different picture of sheepishness in this morning's scripture.
The Lord is my shepherd. As we read Psalm 23 a few minutes ago, I could see that many of you did not have to refer to the text in your bulletin, suggesting to me that this psalm, so familiar to so many, has become your own. To call the Lord your shepherd implies that you are a sheep, but, let's not think of that negatively in terms of helplessness and utter dependency, but positively as utter receptivity. For here is where our situation differs from the cliff-jumping Turkish flock: our Shepherd never leaves for a moment, but is ever there and vigilant. The shepherd's voice is always calling, and all the sheep have to do is listen. From anxious self-preservation, the self turns outward, toward the Other whose voice never ceases to reveal itself.
In its short 6 verses, Psalm 23 (I'm using the KJV) presents a deep intimacy between the speaker and God. The divine name opens the psalm in verse 1 ("The LORD is my shepherd") and closes it in verse 6 (I will dwell in the house of the LORD forever), suggesting that God's name frames the utterance, that God's name is the beginning and the end of faithful human response. And in the middle of the psalm the pronoun shifts from the third person to the direct second-person. Thou art with me...thy rod and thy staff, they comfort me. Thou art with me. How can we come near to the passionate unbashfulness of the psalmist? There can be no lack in the presence of the Shepherd. Thou art with me: that's the other side of saying I shall not want. To be the sheep is to be full of confidence, to be all ears, nothing but a living knot of listening.
But what happens when the voice of the Shepherd is the voice of the Incarnate One before you who says, "I lay down my life for the sheep." As a disciple, one following the Shepherd, how do you hear all this talk of laying down one's life? Moreover, how do hear him say, "I have other sheep that do not belong to this fold. I must bring them also, and they will listen to my voice?" On the one hand, you hear of the greatest love, of the one who lays down his life for his friends; yet on the other hand, you hear the greatest challenge, to love and be one with the Shepherd. Later in the Gospel of John, Christ will exhort Peter, who stands in for the Church, saying "If you love me, feed my sheep." See, this is the mystery: The good shepherd is also the Lamb; and now the sheep must become the shepherd. This is what we hear in a passage from 1 John, a lectionary text that we didn't read this morning: "We know love by this, that he laid down his life for us--and we ought to lay down our lives for one another. 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 to help?"
Whenever I would bug my mother to buy me something that my friends had or for permission to do something that my friends were doing, after refusing, she would ask that rhetorical question that I'm sure most of you are familiar with: "If you're friends jumped off of a cliff, would you do it, too?" I'm suggesting this morning that, in a way, Christ leads us off the edge, but this leap does not lead to our destruction but rather to our flourishing--the one who loses his or her life for my sake will find it. Christ shepherds us from the corrosive sheepishness of self-interest to the life-affirming risk of self-donation. From wrapping up tightly in our own fleeces to shearing ourselves to clothe the world. From trampling others to picking them up.
I know my own and my own know me, Jesus says in John. I've thought a lot about what it means for a sheep to hear the voice of the Shepherd, the one it recognizes. The way it ceases doing what it was doing immediately and wholly reorients itself to the exigency of that voice. There's no time, not a second, between call and response. The Shepherd's voice is so near to you, it acquires palpability; it's so immediate it becomes a touch, it comes over you. The Shepherd's voice envelops you like a room envelops you--it creates a space, its prolonged vowel a pasture for you to dwell in. As long as it's calling, the sheep abide in that Voice; they move and have their being inside its sonorous walls. The psalmist understood that. He lived inside that vocal envelope. Thou art with me. I will fear no evil. The Voice was so close it was a table spread before him even in the midst of his enemies. He had transformed himself, turned himself inside out, into unreserved listening.
Why did you come here to this room if not to inhabit that Voice? It is all around us; it is the table spread right in front of us. May we listen to it, leap into it. Amen
May 3, 2009
Jake Willard-Crist
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