Led into the Kingdom by a Shepherd

Text: Luke 23:33-43
Other texts: Jeremiah 23:1-6

How is it that in this world today slavery still flourishes, with around twenty million people, mostly women, held as slaves?

How is it that in this world wars still rage, people live in terror, ethnic populations eliminated, people tortured? How is it in this world that people still are left to starve, lack clean water, are infested with parasites? How is it in this world that so few still hoard so much, control so much, while so many have so little and are powerless? How is it in this world that nations still falter in fragility, refugees march, justice is systemically denied?

Where is God’s kingdom?

God knows, people long for a king. A king powerful enough to discipline the nations, compassionate enough to heal the wounds of poverty, wise enough to bring justice to all, clever enough to bring abundance, humorous enough to value joy and pleasure and beauty, humble enough to be in awe of all creation.

Where is God’s kingdom?

People long for a king. The story of such longing is not new. The list of human ills is largely unchanged. Only the names and places vary. People suffer war, injustice, scarcity, and nastiness. This is not new. People wonder when it will all be made better. That’s not new either.

Some expected Jesus to be the king. The King, in capital letters. For a population under foreign control and oppression—torture, injustice, ethnic disdain, poverty amidst luxury—the coming of Jesus seemed to some to promise the restoration of another, better time, though a time maybe in fantasy more than in history. They were disappointed then, to say the least, when Jesus was crucified. They called him Messiah, which is the word for Christ. Jesus Messiah. Messiah means the one who is anointed. Anointing is how kings were installed, or ordained, a sign of and a means of God’s blessing. What kind of Messiah are you, they wanted to know, who is executed as a criminal?

Where is God’s kingdom? they wanted to know.

The Bible seems to say that there is something a little perverted in our longing for a king. Or at least the kind of king we usually long for. Before the days of great King David, the Israelites had no king. But they badly wanted one.

“Give us a king to govern us” it says in book of the prophet Samuel. But God said to them: I’m not so sure you want a king. A king is a pain in the neck.

“These will be the ways of the king who will reign over you: he will take your sons and appoint them to his chariots and to be his horsemen, and to run before his chariots; and he will appoint for himself commanders of thousands and commanders of fifties, and some to plow his ground and to reap his harvest, and to make his implements of war and the equipment of his chariots. He will take your daughters to be perfumers and cooks and bakers. He will take the best of your fields and vineyards and olive orchards and give them to his courtiers. He will take one-tenth of your grain and of your vineyards and give it to his officers and his courtiers. He will take ... the best of your cattle and donkeys, and put them to his work.

“But the people refused to listen to the voice of Samuel; they said, ‘No! but we are determined to have a king over us, so that we also may be like other nations, and that our king may govern us and go out before us and fight our battles’”

This model of king as commander in chief—what the Israelites hoped for and what people hoped to find in Jesus—is not the primary model in the Bible. The people who surrounded Jesus at the cross should not have been so surprised. The king’s job is to be a shepherd, not a ruler.

The king’s job is to watch over the sheep, not to boss them around. Not to be the king who takes your sons and daughters, but one who guides the flock. Not to use the people to fight his battles, but to give up his life for the people, his sheep. When God speaks through the prophet Jeremiah, God condemns the rulers as bad shepherds. You have scattered the sheep, God says, and have not attended to them. So God will anoint new shepherd kings to protect and gather the people.

Where is God’s kingdom?

Like the Israelites longing for a king to do battle, people make out God to be the same as their contemporary big, powerful leaders, but bigger and more powerful. And the kingdom of God becomes like a political state, only more imperial and victorious. We might make God out to be as a president, or a general, or a CEO. Just like a regular ruler, only more so.

But a shepherd is not a person of power. A shepherd was and is a low-paying low-prestige job, a humble job. A shepherd’s relationship with his or her flock is not one primarily of power. The sheep don’t appoint or validate the shepherd, they don’t elect their shepherd, they don’t hire and fire the shepherd, they don’t conduct yearly evaluations of the shepherd’s job.

An Episcopalian bishop recently resigned over a dispute with his congregation. His entitled attitude was revealing. He said, “I will neither compromise the faith once delivered to the saints, nor will I abandon the sheep who elected me to protect them.” But the sheep don’t elect the shepherd.

They don’t choose the shepherd. The sheep trust the shepherd. They follow the shepherd. They depend on the shepherd.

The kingdom of God is led by a shepherd.

We long for a king, mighty and victorious. What we get is a shepherd. What we think we need is a boss. What we need is a shepherd. We need someone, as Jesus spoke of, who will not be expedient or efficient, and will search for the one lost sheep in a hundred sheep bring that sheep back. [Like this Jesus in the mural here.] We need someone, as Jesus did, who will heal us, heal the world. We need someone who will feed us. We need someone who will teach us. We need someone who will keep us safe from our own clumsy wanderings and our good-natured ignorance. We are in deep mud right now. We need to be rescued.

We can call on God to lead us into battle, as Christians have for centuries. Onward Christian Soldiers. We can think of the kingdom of God as something wrested from the forces of evil. As in the video game where the evangelicals zap the sinners. We can ask God to be our king and we to be God’s army, carrying out holy destruction. But when we ask that of God, the answer we get is Jesus. We get Jesus as an answer. Jesus refuses to take on that job we put on him. At Golgotha Jesus does not bring fire down on his executioners. Forgive them, he says.

Christ is our shepherd. Our relationship with Christ begins with trust and hope. We are the sheep. We follow Jesus. We do not know the way. The shepherd offers us a way home.

Adiaphora

Text: Luke 20:27-38

On a scale from the most radical and strange to the most reactionary and predictable, worship at Faith is pretty much to the right, to the traditional. We follow a predetermined order from a Lutheran guide to worship, we pick songs from a Lutheran hymnal, we confess our sins in a Lutheran confession. If you were visiting here from most of the other Lutheran churches in the world, you’d feel pretty much at home.

A lot of the things that happen in worship have meaning. It is not just a bunch of arbitrary events strung together in a row. Someone, including theologians and liturgists, has thought the thing through. You might really like the way worship goes here; it might be one of the reasons you are here today. Or you might not like it so much; you might be here in spite of, not because of, the way this church worships. We do all these things in worship here, and each might add to your experience or it might not. We do all these things, but none of them is going to keep you out of heaven or get you into it. They are, I hope, great and helpful and comforting and thought-provoking and nourishing to your life and soul, but they are not the main thing. Not the main thing with God.

In the Gospel reading today Jesus gets into a discussion with some folks, some Sadducees. It seems like an argument. The Sadducees do not believe in the resurrection of the dead. Some other Jews that we read about in the Gospels, the Pharisees, for example, do. But the Sadducees do not. So they present an argument of the absurd. If the husband of a woman dies without her having had a child, the brother of the husband is to marry her. That was the rule. No doubt partly this is to foster growth of the community, but it also protects the woman who otherwise would be left out in the cold without family protection and care. So the Sadducees simply extend this rule. What if she has seven husbands in a row, and then she herself dies. If they all are resurrected, who will be her husband then? Instead of dismissing this as foolishness, instead of saying “OK, next question,” Jesus answers them.

It seems on the face of it that this passage is an argument about resurrection. But really, resurrection has nothing to do with it. That is, the point of the passage is not to tell us more about the resurrection than we already knew. None of the Sadducees would have been convinced by Jesus response, none of Jesus' supporters would have needed convincing, and modern readers bring two thousand years of previous thought to the passage.

The resurrection is the occasion of the discussion between the Sadducees and Jesus, but not the heart of the discussion. They could be talking about the Sabbath, or about how to pray, or about what to eat when. The things that Jesus argues about all the time, and that the Sadducees and the Pharisees and others get all incensed about.

Jesus is a man of his time. Partly. He is a Jew, knows about the law, and respects it, by and large. But he is a man out of his time, too. What he respects is the way the law draws people closer to God. What he does not respect is the way the observance of the law keeps people from God. The argument that Jesus and the Sadducees are having is deep and wide: they are arguing about what God is and what God wants.

Worship and observing the law are things people do to come closer to God. Martin Luther and the reformers talked a lot about the essence of worship. He said the essence of the church—what makes the church be the church—is that the sacraments be rightly administered and the Gospel be rightly preached. Everything else was extra. Not bad, not worthless, just not essential. He used the word “adiaphora” to describe these things. The word means “no difference,” or “it doesn’t matter.”

What Jesus says to the Sadducees is that what they are so worried about doesn’t matter. It is not the main point. Luther once said, when asked a theological question about the Eucharist, Leave that to the philosophers. Jesus is saying pretty much the same thing to the Sadducees.

God is the God of the living, Jesus says in his answer. He also says that people are God’s children. He also says that God is the same God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. This is not the answer the Sadducees seek, yet it is the answer to their question. We worship one God, who embraces us as God’s children, and is on the side of life. The question you are asking is silly. Even if it had an answer, it would be adiaphora.

It is easy to confuse things that are good and helpful with things that are necessary. We think sometimes that praying in a certain way makes God like us better. We think sometimes that if we are more observant, or more ethical, or more something, that God will be more inclined to do what we want God to do. But this is a little arrogant and it makes for misery. We are neither so bad nor so powerful. God is already on our side. We are only children of God, not God’s adviser, attorney, or supervisor. Or employee. Nor is God our client, needing gentle care and from time to time a little persuasion.

In the same way, the future of the church does not depend on our ability to do everything right. What we do in worship and the many other things we do for the church are good and helpful, but it is not our job to save the church. It is God’s church.

We think sometimes that the faithful life is a life of jumping through hoops. Theological hoops (that is, about doctrine), liturgical hoops (that is, about worship) or devotional hoops (that is, about our own personal practices). But those chores are not ones that God assigns us.

It is impossible to say exactly what God wants of us. But I suspect it has little to do with marriage laws and how widows greet their long-dead husbands. Or with how we dress, or how we worship, or how exactly we pray. Or even whether we believe the right thing.

The essence of the church, said Luther, was simple: the sharing of the Lord’s supper and the sharing of God’s word. The essence of faith is even simpler: love God with all your heart and mind, and love your neighbor as yourself. Simple and hard. God is both simpler and more demanding than we sometimes imagine God to be.

We are good at worrying. We worry about all sorts of things. Are we acting right, thinking right, worshipping right, talking right. I once made a sign for my office years ago when I was in business that said “Everything Counts.” But it is not true. Everything does not count. There is adiaphora in life, too.

As Jesus tells the Sadducees, don’t sweat the small stuff. Don’t let it consume you. God is the God of the living, says Jesus. It takes away life to attend so much to the inessentials, in what we do or what we think others do. Choose life over death, says Moses, the man of the burning bush. That is the main thing. As for the rest, it doesn’t matter.