By Keith E Gatling Sermon
for July 22, 2012
Lessons for Pentecost 8 [16] in Year B
Jeremiah 23:1–6
Psalm 23
Ephesians 2:11–22
Mark 6:30–34, 53–56
Today I want to talk about Mrs Olsen.
Now Mrs Olsen is not a pseudonym for some generic Scandinavian
Lutheran woman. Mrs Olsen is a real person from my life. She was a substitute
teacher, and later a full-time teacher at Ashland School, where I went from
Kindergarten through 8th grade. But I also knew her from somewhere
else. She was one of the Vacation Bible School teachers at Holy Trinity
Lutheran Church on Glenwood Ave. Even though our regular church at the time was
Mount Olive Baptist, a block away from our house, our parents signed us up for
two weeks of VBS across town at Holy Trinity every summer.
It was from Mrs Olsen that I learned two very important
things…which I promptly forgot. But then, when I learned them again later on in
life, I remembered who taught them to me first.
The first thing was about church music. She asked our class
one day, which was the more important type of music in church, hymns or
[Charlie Brown sound]. Now, the reason I make that sound is because I couldn’t
remember the other word she used. And the reason I couldn’t remember the other
word she used was because I had never heard of it before. Down at Mount Olive,
all I ever knew that we sang was hymns, so I guessed that, and DING, got the
right answer. She said that hymns were more important because they were sung by
the entire congregation, whereas the other type wasn’t.
A few years later, when I was recruited to join the choir at
St Andrew’s Episcopal Church, a new word entered my musical vocabulary.
Actually, a number of new words entered my musical vocabulary, as a whole new
musical world was opened up to me. One of these words was anthem.
For me, the working definition at the time was the special
music that the choir sang during the offering, while the congregation listened.
But then one day, the little light went on and I realized that this was the
other word, the other type of music, that Mrs Olsen had been talking about.
The other thing I
learned from Mrs Olsen has a direct bearing on today’s readings, because it has
to do with the 23rd Psalm.
Now back in the 20th century, before the modern
English translation movement of the 70s and 80s, most of us learned the first
line of the 23rd Psalm as:
The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not
want.
Now this made absolutely no sense to a certain kid from
Ashland School. Why wouldn’t I want the Lord to be my shepherd? Seems like he’d
be the best person to have as a shepherd. So why are we saying that we don’t
want him?
I asked Mrs Olsen about this, and she patiently explained the
way that the Elizabethan style of English worked, and that it wasn’t saying
that we didn’t want the Lord to be our shepherd, but rather, that because the
Lord is our shepherd, we shall not want for anything.
Suddenly it made sense! For one brief, shining, moment, it
made sense to me…until the end of the day, when the explanation she gave me
fell out of my head, and landed on the ground, where it shattered into many
little pieces. After that, I couldn’t remember what the explanation was, but I
knew that it made sense somehow.
Many years later, with a little more experience with the
English language under my belt, when I saw that line from the 23rd
Psalm, I understood exactly what it meant. I also remembered Mrs Olsen
explaining it to me, and what she must have said.
Why is Mrs Olsen so important? Because she was a shepherd.
To this kid who didn’t quite understand, but wanted to, she was a guide. And
most of today’s readings are about shepherds.
From Jeremiah we have “Woe to the shepherds who scatter and
destroy the sheep of my pasture.” The 23rd Psalm gives us the
classic, and previously-mentioned “The Lord is my shepherd.” And Mark’s Gospel
gives us “They were like sheep without a shepherd.”
Each of those readings talks about God’s people – us – as
being sheep. And if you know anything about sheep, you know that they’re pretty
stupid. In the piece All We Like Sheep
from Handel’s Messiah, the words,
taken from Isaiah 53, are “All we, like sheep, have gone astray, every one to
his own way.” This image of us as stupid sheep is much different than the one
we so often see of us as willful and premeditated sinners. It implies that most
of us do the evil that we do, and cause the harm that we do, not because we
intend to, but because we bumble into it.
Make no doubt about it, though, the results are still the
same; the person is still dead whether we specifically intended to run them
into a ditch in a fit of road rage, whether we avoidably bumbled running into
them by texting while driving, or whether we more innocently bumbled into it by
getting lost and running into a bridge that was too low.
What is clear, however, is that we need a shepherd. What is
clear is that we need to recognize that we need a shepherd. We need to
recognize that we are like sheep, that we do screw things up, that our screwing
things up, even innocently, has serious consequences, and that we need someone
to guide us.
We need a shepherd. But with apologies to Thomas Jefferson,
not all shepherds are created equal. Even if we know that we need a shepherd,
some of them are pretty bad.
The passage in Jeremiah speaks to that. He uses the metaphor
of sheep and shepherds to describe the evil kings who have driven the sheep…the
good sheep…away. But he might just as well be talking about shepherds who
mislead the sheep. He might just as well be talking about those who take
advantage of people who know that they need a shepherd, and intentionally lead
those souls onto a path of their own selfish devising. And woe unto those
shepherds, of whom we know many, even these days.
Or do we?
As I’ve said so many times before, and will probably continue
to say for years hence, we often know where we disagree with our fellow
Christians, but we so rarely know where they’re wrong. We’ve all been
led by different shepherds…who claim to be following the same eternal shepherd,
and not every sheep is going to respond well to the same shepherd or the same
shepherd’s methods.
Those of you who are teachers know this from your students.
You know that what works for Bobby doesn’t necessarily work for Suzie. Those of
you who are parents know this about your children. I have two daughters who are
as different as night and day. The one constant about them is that anything I
say is a bad idea, but if someone else suggests the same thing, it’s a
wonderful idea worth trying. Ah…I see that some of you have been there too.
We may think that some of those people out there who have the
nerve to call themselves shepherds aren’t worthy of the term, and deserve to
have their rods and staffs taken away from them…after being smacked upside the
head with them. But before we do that, it’s important to take a lesson from
Mister Rogers.
Yes, that Mister Rogers. You see, in addition to being
the host and producer of the long-running children’s television series, Fred
Rogers was also an ordained Presbyterian minister, and his TV show was his ministry,
even though he probably never mentioned God once during the entire 33-year run
of the show.
According to a story that he told himself, as a seminary
student, he had been visiting a church in New England one Sunday, and suffering
through what he thought was the worst sermon ever. As the sermon ended, and he
thought again about how bad it was, the woman in the pew next to him, said with
tears in her eyes, “He said exactly what I needed to hear.” Rogers was a
changed man…a better neighbor, as he said…after that incident, and learned that
what speaks to him may not necessarily speak to someone else.
Perhaps the shepherd we think is so inept because they’re not
reaching us, is doing just the job they need in order to reach some other
sheep, and bring them into the fold.
To be sure, there are shepherds who, by their methods and spin
on the message, seem to drive more sheep away than they gather up. There are
definitely shepherds who seem to drive people away from God. But by the
same token, there are sheep who don’t seem to realize that maybe there are
other shepherds out there that might be better at guiding them.
Pastor Paul recently passed along a story about Steve Jobs, of
Apple, and how as a teenager he asked his pastor…his Lutheran pastor…if
God knew he was going to bend his finger even before he did. The pastor replied
in the affirmative. Then Steve went on to show his pastor a picture of starving
children in Biafra, and asked, “Then why can’t he do anything about this?”
The pastor, not knowing the kind of mind he was dealing with,
fumbled the ball, and said something along the lines of, “Steve, you’re too
young to understand, but God really does know what he’s doing.”
That was Steve’s last day at church.
Now, Pastor Paul, in his notes on that article, wrote a huge
“UGH,” next to what that pastor said. My reaction was much different. My first
reaction was to say “Steve, I thought you were smarter than that. You got one
unsatisfactory answer from one pastor, and you walked away? You gotta be
kidding me. You didn’t ask others? You didn’t research this to death? This is
not the Steve Jobs I thought I knew about.”
My second reaction was to cut the poor pastor a little slack,
because he probably really didn’t have any idea of the kind of mind he was
dealing with. Maybe he had tried to explain this to kids before, and their eyes
just glazed over as he tried to explain how theologians had wrestled with this
for years, and still don’t understand.
This poor pastor was probably a very good shepherd to everyone
except for this one kid who grew up to be insanely famous. And this kid who
grew up to be known for being insanely smart turned out not to know anything
about choosing shepherds.
And there are more people out there, who, rather than looking
for a different shepherd, would rather just walk away and bail on the whole
thing. Is that a failure of the shepherds, of the sheep, or is their enough
fault to go around for everyone?
With that in mind, it’s worth noting that even our shepherds
need shepherds.
Knowing that we need shepherds, and knowing that some of us
are shepherds does not mean that we’ll always get it right. By no means!
Knowing that we are like sheep…all of us…means knowing that we
need almost constant guidance so that we’re not going every one to his own way.
Fortunately, Jesus took pity on them…and us…because he saw
that the people were like sheep without a shepherd.
And because of that, even though I understand the explanation
that Mrs Olsen gave me, I can say, I will say: The Lord is my
shepherd…the one that I want.
This is most certainly true.
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