SERMON PREACHED BY THE DEAN ON THE FOURTH SUNDAY OF EASTER 2011 AT THE CATHEDRAL EUCHARIST

SERMON PREACHED BY THE DEAN ON THE FOURTH SUNDAY OF EASTER 2011 AT THE CATHEDRAL EUCHARIST The theme of this service is – to state the obvious – ‘the ...
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SERMON PREACHED BY THE DEAN ON THE FOURTH SUNDAY OF EASTER 2011 AT THE CATHEDRAL EUCHARIST The theme of this service is – to state the obvious – ‘the Good Shepherd’. Our Choir has sung Psalm 23 as beautifully as ever, and now Peter, Cameron, Hugh and Oscar will be up there with them, to the delight of their proud families and of the whole Cathedral community. We share their joy today and we congratulate Tom on his promotion to Head Chorister. The Gospel we have just heard takes up the theme of the Psalm, and shows Jesus, who applies the image of the shepherd to himself and to his ministry. The 23rd Psalm is part of all our lives. My first vicar, Fr Geoffrey Heal, used to say at funerals: ‘These words have brought comfort and strength to people in times of sorrow for more than three thousand years. They speak of the love of God, the Good Shepherd, a love from which even death cannot separate us.’ I have used his lovely words countless times myself at funerals. Like most ministers, I have read Psalm 23 with people who are near to death. Two examples come to mind. The first occurred in south London. It was three o’clock in the morning in St George’s Hospital, Tooting. A very old lady parishioner was near to death, and seemingly in a coma. I anointed her and commended her soul to God, and then began to recite these words: ‘The King of Love my Shepherd is…’ Mary woke up and responded very clearly, ‘whose goodness faileth never; I nothing lack if I am his and He is mine for ever.’ And then she died. A student nurse at the end of the bed said, ‘Well, fancy that! Who’d have thought she could hear you? I’ll always remember that.’ So did I… The second example was in St Wilfrid’s Hospice here in Chichester with a member of the Mattins congregation, a distinguished retired colonial judge. The scenario was the same: ‘The Lord is my Shepherd,’ I read, and the thin, waspish voice, replied: ‘I know that: please get to the point!’ ‘Very well’, I went on, ‘Surely thy goodness

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and mercy shall follow me all the days of my life, and I will dwell in the house of the Lord for ever’. And he died. This is the Psalm of choice for what Father Heal rather irreverently used to call ‘hatchings, matchings and despatchings’ - in short, at the most significant moments of human life. Whether in Prayer Book or contemporary language, or in metrical versions of the Psalm, the words are the same: ‘The Lord’s my Shepherd, I’ll not want’… ‘The King of Love my Shepherd is’… ‘ The God of Love my Shepherd is, and he that doth me feed’… ‘Loving Shepherd of thy sheep, keep thy lamb, in safety keep’… ‘Faithful Shepherd, feed me in the pastures green’. What is it about this image, and the development of it in Psalm 23, that exercises such a hold on people of faith? Well, it is comforting, of course, in the conventional sense of the word; it is familiar, and, even for town-dwellers, it presents a more or less recognisable set of visual images. But in the context in which Jesus expounded the Psalm, in first century Palestine, there was much more to it than familiarity; that is why the writer of John’s Gospel develops the notion of Christ as the Good Shepherd, and why the writer of 1 Peter, addressing a persecuted young church, warns against going astray like sheep, and urges his readers to return to ‘the shepherd and guardian of your souls.’ I used to lead pilgrimages to the Holy Land until for various reasons I felt unable to continue. I remember once sitting in the grounds of the YMCA at Beit Sahour, outside Bethlehem – it’s in a prohibited area now. It is one of the best-attested sites of the original Shepherds’ Field, so important in the Christmas story. I gathered a group of about 25 people, and we thought together about this Psalm, with sheep and goats for companions, a young shepherd boy sitting on the stone wall and – at a short distance – a group of seriously injured young Palestinians who were being cared for in the YMCA, sitting or lying in the shade under the trees.

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The first thing we noticed was that there were no green pastures: the land was dry and stony, and much too bare to support cattle. Away in a Manger seems to have been guilty of poetic licence! On the open hillside, the only source of security for the flock, usually sheep and goats together, is the shepherd. Where possible, he will bring the animals into a pen, perhaps made of dry-stone walls. The shepherd himself would lie across the entrance to protect them, thereby becoming ‘the door of the sheepfold.’ Green pastures were, and are, an almost unimagined luxury. The animals scratch for food on barren and dusty ground. Anyone who could promise greenery would be no ordinary shepherd – hence the Greek word the Gospel writer uses for ‘good’, when he describes the Shepherd: it is kalos – which literally means ‘attractive’. The shepherd is the attractive provider. As for the still waters, there are none. The shepherd would know where to look for springs or prepared watering places, and these would be very rare. Water of course is vital for survival; but the Good Shepherd, so the Gospel tells us, restores the soul as well: that, for the evangelist, is no less a matter of survival. The ‘paths of righteousness’ correspond to the network of tracks which are scattered over the Judean hillsides: they are known, for obvious reasons, as sheep-paths. The ‘valley of the shadow of death’ refers to the constant danger from wolves or scorpions from which the flock needed constant protection: so the attractive shepherd is also a figure of protection and reassurance. I remember seeing a flock of sheep and goats terrified by the hooting of an army lorry. They all froze with fear until the shepherd, no more than a boy, laid his staff gently on their backs to calm them. It reminded me of an image in the Bayeux Tapestry, in which Bishop Odo is described as ‘comforting his troops’. Actually, he is pursuing them with a large cudgel! I guess there is a sermon waiting to be preached on ‘the Holy Ghost, the Comforter’. Comfort is, of course, from the Latin word meaning strength.

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What of the table which is prepared, we are told, in the Psalm? That is a bit strange, but again has a deeper significance. The shepherd would take the animals to the entrance of the sheepfold, and lay his staff over it. Each animal instinctively places its head on the staff and the shepherd pours oil from a horn to soothe the hot head and the teeming brain, in temperatures which can reach 120 degrees Fahrenheit. They then pass through to a prepared feeding-trough – ‘and my cup shall be full’. The gloss on the 23rd Psalm, provided by the writer of the fourth Gospel, is quite plain: the shepherd leads, and provides sustenance, protection and reassurance. He is none other than the Lord, who describes himself as ‘the Good Shepherd’. ‘Surely thy lovingkindness and mercy shall follow me all the days of my life, and I shall dwell in the house of the Lord for ever.’ The whole Psalm is rooted in the everyday practice of sheep and shepherding, and given a Godward reference. Small wonder that this particular Psalm is chosen for the rites of passage which mark the joyful and sorrowful occasions on the human journey. But there is a snare, and it is most obviously exposed in a certain kind of picture of Jesus the Good Shepherd: a white-robed figure without a hair out of place surrounded by improbably coiffured lambs, gazing adoringly. It is a far cry from the harsh and perilous life of a subsistence farmer in the 1st or the 21st century, now, of course, with the added peril of a security wall dividing the West Bank in two, and the construction of settlements on land which has been planted or grazed for generations; but that is for another day. The readings chosen to accompany the story of the Good Shepherd are from Chapter 2 of the Book of Acts and from the First Letter of Peter. Both are very significant: Acts 2, because it sets out the priorities of daily living for the very earliest Christians, and 1 Peter because it seeks to recall a particular Christian community to those same priorities at a time of vicious persecution. In Acts we read how the believers studied and drew on the teaching of the Apostles; how they shared food and broke bread together – surely a Eucharistic reference – how they prayed and held all things

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in common. There is a note of gladness and assurance in the description. In 1 Peter, written 30 or so years later, the situation has changed radically, so the writer addresses the issue that must have been uppermost in the thoughts of his frightened readers: what were they to make of undeserved suffering? He points to Christ’s own experience on the Cross, and warns them against going astray like sheep: ‘but now you have returned to the shepherd and guardian of your souls.’ They must keep the faith. The concept of shepherding, and the 23rd Psalm itself, provide an imaginative series of events which people might relate to their own daily experience. The images themselves, and the rural knowledge which they presuppose, require a leap of imagination if they are to speak to contemporary western society; but the notion of a pastor who knows everything there is to know about his creatures, who calls them by name – that is, in their individual identity and experience – and whose care is without limit, speaks across the centuries and cultural divides. In Scripture, to know means to love, and that adds an even fuller and very particular dimension to our understanding of the Psalm. Such goodness, loving-kindness and intimacy are far removed from the way of life of the thief or the bandit, who I suppose we would describe as a terrorist, because such people take property, freedom and even life itself, whereas the Good Shepherd gives life and opens up possibilities of joy and fulfilment – what the New Testament calls ‘unaffected joy’ - even in the midst of a world of pain and conflict. ‘I am the Way,’ says Jesus and goes on to add, ‘and the Truth and the Life.’ Jesus Christ is the gate, the door into God’s Kingdom, offering a new way, and guidance when we are confronted by a plethora of possible pathways. Last Saturday I attended a Service of Thanksgiving for the life of Grace Sheppard, the widow of David Sheppard, a man of Sussex who became Bishop of Liverpool. As is well known, Grace overcame all sorts of physical and psychological challenges in her life, and helped many people with her books, especially her first one, An Aspect of Fear, in which she described her battle with agoraphobia. 5

As I was beginning to think about this sermon, we heard some of her words read out in a packed Liverpool Cathedral. They had been spoken by Grace herself a few days before her death, in an interview on Radio 4. It occurred to me that they could almost be a commentary on the 23rd Psalm. ‘We are faced (she said) with a fork in the road. We make choices, and for me I have seen self-pity in people and I don’t like it, and therefore I don’t want to go there. And so if that crops up at my fork in the road, I will look at that and say, “No, I don’t want to go there. I am going to go down the other way.” It all comes back to gratitude. That’s the key, this awareness of gifts and of love. I have had a lot of love in my life and that’s helped me to handle the suffering that I have to handle at the moment.’ And then we prayed a prayer that Grace herself had written: ‘Help me to remember that I am not alone, that I can find pathways to you in everyday life. Guide each of us in our different roles, to find the courage to live the way you would want in our daily lives. Inspire us, as part of your church on earth, to grow into the church as you would wish it to be. Show us how we can be instruments of your love.’ Which is, I suppose, another way of expressing the words we sang a few moments ago: ‘Where thou leadest I would go, Walking in thy steps below, Till before my Father’s throne, I shall know as I am known.’ -----------Nicholas Frayling

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