Jesus Comes for His Flock

¹¹“I am the good shepherd. The good shepherd lays down his life for the sheep. ¹²The hired hand, who is not the shepherd and does not own the sheep, sees the wolf coming and leaves the sheep and runs away—and the wolf snatches them and scatters them. ¹³The hired hand runs away because a hired hand does not care for the sheep. ¹⁴I am the good shepherd. I know my own and my own know me, ¹⁵just as the Father knows me and I know the Father. And I lay down my life for the sheep. ¹⁶I have other sheep that do not belong to this fold. I must bring them also, and they will listen to my voice. So there will be one flock, one shepherd. ¹⁷For this reason the Father loves me, because I lay down my life in order to take it up again. ¹⁸No one takes^£ it from me, but I lay it down of my own accord. I have power to lay it down, and I have power to take it up again. I have received this command from my Father.”

"God could not be everywhere, so he created mothers," says an anonymous poet and philosopher.

Without being lost in the theological questions of whether God can or cannot truly be everywhere at once, let us think today of those special angels God sends our way to care for each one of us – our mothers.

A mother walks by the big picture window at the front of her house, just in time to see, out of the corner of her eye, her six year old child attacking her favorite azalea bush. She goes back to the window to gape and sees that he has got one of its leafy branches and he's tugging and tugging and the entire bush is shaking! By the time she gets out the door to get him to stop, he'd broken off a huge branch and was asking her "Can I take this to school with me today?"

Looking down at him all she can think about is how much she loves that azalea bush and why can't she just have one thing that can stay nice and pretty and unspoiled?! She's about to lay into him for maiming her plant when she stops herself, holds it in and just waves her hand and says, "Go" and sends him to school.

She had already sent her husband to work again with anger in her heart because he still hadn't been able to fix the washing machine and now they had water all over the brand new linoleum.

She thought of that anger later in the day as she did the laundry at the Laundromat and this time she was angry at herself because, looking down at her watch, she realized that she was late to pick up her son from school. Throwing all the finished laundry in the back seat of the car, she rushed off to the school and leapt up the steps to her son's class. There she saw her son, still coloring with two other children in the room.

The teacher, upon seeing this mother quickly pulled her aside and said, "I must speak to you about your son!" She could feel the anger begin to sell up inside her again, as she thought to herself, "Oh, no what now!"

The teacher didn't notice, instead she pointed to the table where the kids were sitting and said, "See that little girl your son is drawing with? Her parents are going through a difficult divorce. Yesterday in class, she had a crying fit. She was bawling, with her face in her hands, sobbing 'nobody loves me.' Today your son came in holding the biggest, most beautiful branch of pink flowers and gave them to her. He said to her, "I love you."

The young mother was overwhelmed, this time not with anger, but with love for her baby. All her anger was washed away in quiet tears that came to her eyes. She took her son home and when her husband came home, he found her tending to her favorite azalea bush, weeding it and trimming it. Suddenly the love that had been in her heart at school that day, once again overflowed in her heart and as a word of apology, she tore a branch from the azalea she had been tending. She rose and giving it to her husband said to him. "I love you."

Where had that little boy learned love but from his mother and father. Her responsibilities, her schedule, her expectations, the trouble in the world around her, had given anger to her heart, but the seeds of love she had sown in her son's heart during rare good moments returned fruit to her own.

God had given her love to pour out upon her son and family, and God had returned that love to herself when she most needed it.

Today, we've read the story of the Good Shepherd, seeking out his sheep in order to care for them, to love them, to sacrifice for them. In the face of attacking wolves, the Good Shepherd does not escape, as do the others contracted to help watch the sheep, the Good Shepherd is not afraid, is not intimidated by the predators and destructive forces in the world but jumps into hams way to love and nurture and care for his sheep.

In her book The Preaching Life, Barbara Brown Taylor tells of a conversation she had with a person who grew up on a sheep farm in the Midwest. According to him, the common stereotype about sheep is not true. Sheep are at all not dumb. How many times have you heard someone say, "They follow like sheep, like that’s an awful, and stupid thing to do." The sheep farmer says, "The cattle ranchers are responsible for spreading that ugly rumor, and all because sheep do not behave like cows. Cows are herded from the rear by hooting cowboys with cracking whips, but that will not work with sheep at all. Stand behind them making loud noises and all they will do is run around behind you, because they prefer to be led. You push cows, but you lead sheep, and they will not go anywhere that someone else does not go first. Their shepherd-who goes ahead of them to show them that everything is all right."

He went on to say that "it never ceased to amaze him, growing up, that he could walk right through a sleeping flock without disturbing a single one of them, while a stranger could not step foot in the fold without causing pandemonium."[1]

Sheep, like most animals, need trust in order to survive. All God's creation too need trust, and in our mothers, we receive it.

Last week, I finished my last class in my doctoral program, now all that remains is my doctoral project, my dissertation. As you know, I've been studying, marriage and family therapy and counseling. One of the things I've learned through the program is that some of the most severe and profound psychological problems that can appear in people come as a result of a lack of trust and a fear of abandonment.

Several of the most difficult disorders to treat find their roots in the earliest stages of life, that if before the age of three, a child is not nurtured, does not experience the love and care and feel the protection of parents that are present and able to help that child grow. But you didn't need to go to graduate school to learn that did you?

We all know how profoundly parents have loved us, how they have been there to protect us and keep us afloat, and how important that love has been to our development.

In one church, when a Bible is presented to a third-grade child, the child recites a passage of Scripture. On one occasion, everything was going well until the minister came to one little boy who couldn't remember his name, much less a Bible verse. The little boy's eyes frantically searched for his mother, who was seated very near the front. When he finally spotted her, he was greatly relieved when she whispered, "I am the light of the world," to which he immediately bellowed, "My mother is the light of the world."[2]

God gives us a gift of life and a gift of love, a spiritual gift, not of riches or possessions or even an easy life, but of strength in our hearts, of resilience and courage in the most difficult and vital places that bear fruit in all aspects of our lives, especially our homes.

A Sunday School teacher, while teaching the ten commandments, spoke to the young ones of the commandment, "Thou shalt honor your father and mother." When she was done, a little girl asked is there anything about little brothers in the ten commandments? Another child responded immediately, "Thou shalt not kill."

Conflicts, hardship and difficulties arise, even in the Christian home, yet God gives amazing gifts, seeks out the most miserably lost soul and through the commitment, sacrifice and fearlessness of mothers, fathers, the Holy Spirit and all other good shepherds and angels of flesh and spirit, he keeps us in our way.

Amelia Josephine Burr expressed her sentiments regarding her mother and her God with these words:

Our mothers' love is perhaps the greatest love we, like this poet, can imagine, perhaps even greater than God's love. Yet let us not fool ourselves. God's love, the love of the Great Good Shepherd, is far greater and truly the source of all good caring and nurture we have ever know. Let us be Glad, let us give thanks and be Glad!

[1]"Sheep Know Their Shepherd" Author Unknown. From the e-mail newsletter received by Ara Heghinian from, 'illustrations@MINISTERSMAIL.COM"

[2] "My Mother Is The Light Of The World" Rodney Wilmoth, Minneapolis, Minnesota. From the e-mail newsletter received by Ara Heghinian from, 'illustrations@MINISTERSMAIL.COM'

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