John 10:1-10
This Sunday is known as ‘The Good Shepherd’ Sunday – almost everyone knows some variation of this parable: the shepherd who knew all the sheep's names, the one who left 99 sheep to rescue one, and gathered them into the sheepfold to be safe.
Here is another image of the shepherd - this time from astronomy. As you look up into the night sky, Saturn is the brightest celestial object after the moon, that mysterious planet with its rings. We learned from the first Voyager probe that Saturn has moons and that the ring is a collection of these moons. The astronomers who identified these moons and their function in the ring dubbed them "shepherd moons."
The shepherd moons bring order from chaos, harmony and beauty from disorder. They ‘shepherd’ millions of particles - some as big as a bus and others as small as a speck - into the Saturn rings.
The shepherd moons are a metaphor for God. They bring together and hold different particles into relationships. Shepherding, in this sense, gathers us as persons and as communities. The shepherd moons represent God, who unites things we often see as unrelated in beautiful, symmetrical harmony. The rings of Saturn are an image of our varied, complex, pluralistic world, with many different perspectives, which form a unit by the shepherding care of God.
The shepherd in this image is the one who brings and holds together different parts of our world. Shepherding creates an identity, a person, and a community. It is to make clear that God brings together those things we often take apart. We live in a pluralistic reality, with many different groups, but they are all cared for by God.
God gathers the different particles – that’s us! - together. Diverse experiences make us who we are: our past, our families, our faith, and our self-reflection of ourselves. We create a new reality from those things we find around us. God attracts single units into one reality. In our liturgy and worship - our tradition - we carry the seeds of meaning that keep getting revised. Jesus sums up the past images and breaks open new ones.[1]
Jesus can be a shepherd for our life in the same way. He is guiding us out of confusion by sheltering us. We have nothing to fear; all we must do is answer His voice.
God's love is always here, despite our waywardness. This love comes to us unmerited, there for the asking. It is unlimited love, confronting evil in love. Like Martin Luther King, the good shepherd, and his followers put themselves in the path of danger and are willing to pay the price.
The Good Shepherd challenges us to find the love of God in the world around us, to look for God in unexpected places, unanticipated events, and unconventional faces. It tells us to look for the grace of God where we least expect it. The bottom line is that God's unlimited love is there for everyone.
How we feel and see this unlimited love grounding and directing us is the question. In the church, we learn the meaning of Jesus as our shepherd. The sheep know the shepherd's voice, and He knows the individual needs of those within his care. There are real wolves and thieves out there - people who do not have the best interests of the common good in their hearts. The good shepherd will do everything needed to protect them.
The church's job is to offer support and teach us. We are in webs of relationships; we choose the best of the gifts offered to us. We must imitate this unlimited love. Ultimately, it is up to each of us to make sense of our faith.
How many of you here would like a fresh start in your life?
How many would like to be in the fold of the Good Shepherd?
This morning I want to share a formula for starting over, regardless of failures in the past. The method is known as ‘S. T. A. R. T.
S. T. A. R. T.
S – Stop making excuses.
If we want a fresh start, we must stop making excuses for our failures and blaming others. We’ve got to stop seeing ourselves as victims of our circumstances.
Other people can hurt us, other people can harm us, and other people can scar us. We have a choice - we can determine how we respond to those hurts. Nobody can destroy our life without our permission. The only person who can ruin our lives is ourselves.
T - Take An Inventory Of Our Life
We must take an inventory of our lives. That means we must evaluate all our experiences and discard those failures. We must take stock of our life experiences and learn from them.
Failure can be our friend or foe - we determine which. We can choose to learn from failure or choose to repeat it. If we learn from it, then it can be our friend. However, it is our foe if we don’t learn from it. We must learn from our mistakes.
As we take inventory of our life, we must ask ourselves three questions.
1. What have we learned? If we don’t sit down and think it through, we’ll repeat the same mistake because we didn’t learn from it the first time.
2. What have we got going for us? Have we got our health? Have we got our freedom? Have we got some friends? Have we got a church family? What do we have that we can get a fresh start with?
3. Who can help us? We need somebody by our side – a friend, a partner, a support person, or a support group. Find someone that can help you. We need somebody else to walk along with us, enabling us to get a fresh start in life. Jesus will be there; He will help us pull our lives back together and ensure we get started on the right foot.
A - Act in faith
We have to go out into new territory. The Bible says that the key to changing anything is faith. If we want to change our circumstances, it takes dedication. If we change anything in our lives, we have to have faith.
To start acting in faith means we must stop having pity parties. We’ve got to stop feeling sorry for ourselves. The more time we spend regretting our past, the more we waste our future. We set ourselves up for more failure by focusing on past failures. Whatever we focus on, we tend to create in our present life.
R - Refocus
If we want to change our lives, we must refocus and rethink our thoughts. How we think determines how we feel, and how we feel determines how we act.
Let me give you an example:
A beggar sat daily on a street corner across from an art studio. An artist had seen him for days and decided to paint his portrait. When the artist completed the picture, he invited the beggar into the studio. The artist said, "I've got something I want you to see."
Inside the studio, the artist unveiled the portrait. At first, the beggar did not recognize himself. He kept saying, "Who is it?" The artist just smiled and said nothing. Then suddenly, the man saw himself in the portrait -- not as he was in his dismal state, but as he could be. Then the beggar asked, "Is that me? Is that me?" The artist replied, "That's who I see in you." Then the beggar said, "If that's who you see in me, then that's who I'll be."
T – Trust
We must trust God to help us succeed. Depend on Him; we don’t need to depend on ourselves. We’ve already proven that we can’t do it on our own. That’s why we’ve failed. They stumble and fall, then get up and say, “I’ll just try harder!” It’s like you go up to a wall and bang your head against it, and the wall doesn’t fall. You try it again, and Bang! Again. You keep doing it thinking, “Maybe it will fall over this time.” That’s the definition of insanity – doing the same thing repeatedly and expecting different results. We will get the same result if we keep doing the same thing. We cannot change who we are; only God can do that. I am not speaking about the outward man but the inner man, the person of the heart. Success is not trying harder but living smarter and giving God control of our lives.
The good news this morning is in Isaiah 43:18. God says,
“I want you to have a fresh start in life; I want you to have a new beginning, I want to do something new in your life. ”
Aren’t you glad God wants to do something new in our lives? Doesn’t it excite you that God desires to give us a fresh start, a new beginning in life?
The Lord says, `Forget about what has happened before. Do not think about the past. Instead, look at the new things I’m going to do.
Listen to what God is saying in this verse. He says we mustn’t think about the past. Forget about what’s happened before. It’s over, done; we can’t change it.
We must understand that God is far more interested in our future than in our past. That’s where we are going to spend the rest of our lives. He says,
Forget about your past. Forget about the former things. Don’t think about it. Look at the new thing I’m going to do.” (Isaiah 43:19)
How can we have a fresh start?
We can have a fresh start by:
S. T. A. R. T.
• Stop making excuses
• Take an inventory of our lives
• Act in faith
• Refocus our thoughts
• Trust in God
Will you have a fresh start in life?
Will you have a new beginning?
It’. Is. Your. Choice.
[1] Adapted from Rev Dr George Hermanson, United Church’s Five Oaks Retreat Centre, Ontario, Canada
Delivered at Saint John’s Episcopal Church, Columbus, OH; 30 April 2023
