Help Wanted
Fourth Sunday of Easter – Year B
May 7, 2006

Let us pray: O God, we ever want to know you more clearly and follow you more dearly. May these words help us in that desire. Amen.

    Good shepherds are hard to find these days. At least around here. I know there are still places in the world where large flocks of sheep are a common sight, but I haven’t seen too many during my most recent travels. I remember hearing a couple of years ago that the city of Fort Saskatchewan was on the hunt for a good shepherd to look after the flock of fifty sheep that keeps the grass in their public parks and green spaces well trimmed.

    I know for sure that shepherds and shepherding are not as much a part of our everyday life as they would have been in the time that both David the psalmist and John the gospel writer knew. I’m sure that the image of God as a shepherd was both intimately familiar and meaningful to people who saw flocks of sheep on a daily basis. Photos of modern day Palestine often show that sheep and goats are still part of the context in that area of the world. I think a recent bulletin cover illustrates my point.

    Our own lack of familiarity with sheep and shepherding sent me on a bit of search this week. The prayers with which we opened worship this morning both used the image of a good shepherd as a metaphor for God. I wondered if there was some other image that would suit our own context better. Even when it comes to such familiar pieces of scripture as Psalm 23, it can often be helpful to introduce a new image for the opportunity it gives us to reflect on the original idea with new insights and perspectives. A wise teacher once told me that an important concept in adult education is the one of dissonance where a familiar image or concept is introduced – hopefully with consequences that are not too controversial but just enough to invite a deeper exploration. So with that in mind,  I did come across one restatement of the familiar psalm in a fashion that might suit modern day mall shoppers. It comes from Jim Taylor, a Christian writer from the Okanagan. He has written many paraphrases of the psalms that are attuned to modern life. I wonder how this one strikes you:
            God keeps a cool café. What more could I ask?
            She provides a comfortable chair to take the weight off my weary feet;
            she puts up an umbrella to shade me from the sun;
            she serves me iced tea.
            Though I have battled with the crowds at the bargain counters,
            though I have suffered the scent of too many sweaty bodies,
            I don’t care.
            I know what’s waiting for me at the end of the day.
            An ice cream cone. It drips over the edges, and I lick it up gratefully.
            I close my eyes;
            the sound system plays the gentle chuckles of waves lapping on a shore.
            I am content.
            I would love to sit here forever.
            In God’s cool café.
       
    As you can hear, there is more than one dissonance there, and it may be upsetting for some people to have a cherished piece of scripture reworked in new ways. Even if sheep and shepherds are not a regular part of our context, the images and memories stirred up by those well known six verses of the psalm are hard to replace. Other people might find it refreshing to hear the theme of the psalm conjured up in a way that has more resonance for our own circumstances. That’s how dissonance works – even if controversy is the result. It invites deeper thought and a search for greater knowledge.

    A cool café might work as a replacement for green pastures and still waters in a modern day rendition of Psalm 23, but I also have to say that try as I might, I could not come up with a metaphor or image to replace the one of Good Shepherd that is part of the psalm and the gospel passage that we heard this morning. My thesaurus gave little help. The small list of possible replacements just did not do justice to the image of care giving that, even though we don’t know a lot about the nitty gritty details of sheep herding, is still conjured up by that image.

    I remember a few years ago, perhaps on this very Sunday in the liturgical calendar, but a Sunday when sheep and shepherding were part of the readings reading a small report from someone who had spent a good portion of their life as a shepherd. As is usually the case, the more you learn about a situation, the more important it is to consider nuances and details. That intimate report from a former shepherd shed a whole bunch of light on the psychology of sheep and the important duties assigned to the task of keeping them healthy and happy. As much as we can form opinions and understand something from a distant perspective, a closer look and understanding can also portray many things we would never consider without the informed perspective of someone who has been there. So, even if a new image cannot be found to establish the dissonance that my teacher described, then another approach is to find someone who knows more about the topic in question. I am reminded of the words I spoke a few weeks ago on Easter Sunday when I talked about the importance of hearing from people like the Christian Peacemaking teams which have been placed in hot spots all around the world. We hear one story from the news bureaus and syndicated news agencies, but it takes someone on the street and someone who is living the life of the ordinary people to give a different view on what is happening in any situation. The dissonance we often find between the official reports on newscasts and in newspapers and the stories we hear from people who are spending time inside the situation is often all we need to put that little bit of doubt in our minds and which leads us to find out more.

    That’s why I thought it might be helpful to cast the image of Good Shepherd in a new light. If only I could come up with an image that shares some of the same meaning but with which we can relate on a more intimate level. As you can see, it didn’t work – when it came right down to it, there was nothing I could use to make the prayer more fitting of our own circumstances and situations.  So, failing that, the option left is to go deeper into the metaphor we had. Unfortunately, I could not put my hands on that informative note about shepherding a few years ago. But I can remember the comment of a colleague who was taking a course on the psalms and who chose Psalm 23 as the one on which she would use for in depth study. For her it was a way to force the kind of dissonance that we had been taught. Take something familiar and rather than let the familiarity speak to us in old and well tried ways, try to find new insights and perspectives.

    A similar experience happened for me one time when the bulletin cover featured a hillside flock of sheep and accompanying text on the back. At a meeting which followed the service, a friend said how she did not like it when people are referred to as sheep. Sheep will blindly do whatever they are told, if they are led to a cliff face, they will follow each other over the edge. She felt that people are more thoughtful than sheep and therefore did not like the image which casts us such under the guidance of the Shepherd God. Once again, dissonance was introduced into my previously unjudged attitudes and perceptions.

    Hopefully what I’ve done today is just that - despite my inability to come up with anything better or different for the Good Shepherd image - just perhaps you will imagine something new and insightful when you repeat the familiar words of Psalm 23 sometime in the future, or imagine what it means to think of God as a shepherd and ourselves as sheep. May God ever create just enough dissonance in our lives to make them ones which seek deeper meaning and more faithful insight. Amen.