Stealing Sheep
Acts 2:42-47; John 10:1-1

April 21, 2002


We have a sheep problem in the Christian Church. It should be evident today after all our scriptures mentioning sheep prominently and even our special music and hymns. It’s deja vu all over again for me. The sign leading west out of Westport in County Mayo, Ireland, said “Louisburgh - Scenic Route.” After the road narrowed down to barely a broken down bike path, the only scenery we saw was sheep trying to fondle our rental car as one of their own.

Sheep have become our ecclesiastical mascot and totem. There are numerous references to sheep and shepherds in the Old and New Testaments. The 23rd Psalm is perhaps the most pervasive, and reputedly it was written by David, the young shepherd who became king. Jesus is not only the good shepherd; he is also the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world.

More recently, it has become common to hear the denigration of sheep from those lovely cute animals which bleat “baa” down to not very nice animals, rude and spitting, and not terribly smart when you think of it.

I know our university football team is the Regina Rams, and the Los Angeles and St. Louis Rams have been Super Bowl champions at various times, but I frankly never have heard of a sports team called the Sheep. Just doesn’t resound normally. The Sheep trample the Lions.

Let’s keep our perspective. Who are these Biblical and ecclesiastical sheep? It’s you and me: we are the sheep. Yes, I am called sometimes a pastor, a sheep herder. But Jesus is the real shepherd from whom all models are drawn. Yet, being a shepherd was considered quite lowly on the socioeconomic scale. Nasty animals, even with that nice wool. David, after all, was the youngest son, a true lad, when he was shepherding. No mature man would admit to being a shepherd as his professional occupation.

Jesus is saying something remarkable about how we perceive our relationship with God and with our fellow sheep - we are at the last just sheep. We are not lions or tigers or bears - or even giraffes or deer or moose. Our son is going on a school camping trip and the students have been divided into groups of animals - foxes, white tailed deer, bears, and prairie chickens! Sheep doesn’t sound quite so bad.

Remember a few weeks back the story about the man born blind who was healed by Jesus? Eventually, the former blind man was thrown out of the Temple because he dared to state the obvious to him, that Jesus was a person from God. The Pharisees confront Jesus, asking him did he think they were the blind ones. Jesus responds with the use of this metaphor of the sheep and the shepherd.

Gates and thieves and gatekeepers is the language, familiar to their society, but not to most of us except in our hymns and church life.

What Jesus is doing most is being a gatekeeper, letting in his own sheep and keeping out the bandits, who usually resort to breaking into the fold. It doesn’t matter what brand or generation of Christian you are, this metaphor has been used to condemn every other sort of Christian whom we believe does not belong. I have heard some Christians in this town plug the United Church into the category of those who do not want to go through Jesus at the gate and are therefore barbarians at the gate of the kingdom. And I have heard pious, liberal United Church types label the evangelical, fundamentalist churches as the false shepherds and sheep who want to claim the fold for their own.

I do not believe this is helpful in the slightest. If a judgment is to be made, God will handle the arrangements. I am more concerned with how you and I are the gatekeepers into our fold.

Gatekeepers has found a new life as a pop psychology term for people who act as conduits for all sorts of organizations, families most famously.

I remember the first time I met Molly’s family. It was her mother, Aunt Mary and Uncle Phil. As we were driving from the bus station, Uncle Phil turned and asked me, Silent Bob, overwhelmed by the Irishness of it all, if I was a student at Clarke School. Clarke School was a famous school in Northampton for the deaf. Eventually, I said enough to be admitted.

Gatekeepers can also tell us exactly who we are. Don Overlock’s parents were clear. Don and his wife had three children, all of whom were married. One Christmas they all managed to come home at the same time. They went to the grandparents who handed out envelopes as Christmas gifts - $10.00 apiece for the grandchildren and $5.00 for the new sons- and daughters-in-law. Full membership in the family was still pending.

Every church has at least one gatekeeper. Not an official or appointed position, but someone always assumes the task. Not always, but their haunt is normally the narthex, where they lie in waiting for newcomers and visitors, greet them warmly, ask who they are and where they are from, welcome them into the fold. Basically, the gatekeeper checks you out and makes sure you know you are one of the fold. That certification may take a few visits before it becomes clear, before you get back a full $10.00.

In John, Jesus is the gate and gatekeeper and the language is highly symbolical, mystical and theological. We shy away from such language because of its dreamy vagueness, and frankly because of the way it can thinly veil a virulent form of exclusiveness.

Yet now I have come to believe that Jesus is the gate, though we must never be smug in thinking we know precisely what kind of gate Jesus is. We are received into the fold because of our faith in Jesus, not as in the 1950’s our desire for social acceptance and power. The gate of the church is not intellectual or pietistic superiority, nor is it the spiritual consumer’s Alice’s Restaurant where you can get anything you want. The gate into the kingdom is not in the first place a passion for social justice, as important as that is for our mature faith. There is only one Lord, One Word through whom we enter into the kingdom.

“Jesus Christ, as he is attested to us in Holy Scripture, is the one Word of God we have to hear, and whom we have to trust and obey in life and in death. We deny the false doctrine that the church could and should recognize as a source of its proclamation, beyond and besides this one Word of God, yet other events, historic figures, and truths as God’s revelation.”

So wrote Karl Barth in the 1934 Barmen Declaration of the Confessing Church of Germany to refute Hitler’s attempt to establish a German Christian Church with its first allegiance to the FŸhrer.

Jesus is the Gate and you and I have been handed the task of staying at the gate and receiving the sheep. How do you do it? Do you make them feel welcome? Part of the family? Do you treat them justly, mercifully, compassionately? Do you make them feel safe, saved?

Preached by Robert Kitchen
Knox-Metropolitan United Church
Regina, Saskatchewan