The Gospel is a Promise whose Speaker is Good on his Word.

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My friend Ken Sundet Jones is covering the pulpit for my other friend, Sarah Hinlicky Wilson, this summer for the Lutheran congregation in Tokyo. Here is his first sermon for them.

And if you haven’t already, check out the Iowa Preachers Project on which Ken and I are collaborating.

Grace to you and peace, my friends, from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ. Amen.

Reading the Bible is often difficult. Sometimes it happens because the story it tells is so challenging. Sometimes the difficulty happens because there is such a huge chasm dividing the ancient world of the Old and New Testaments from ours, and we don’t catch nuances that any first century reader would understand. Much more rarely the difficulty happens because we simply don’t understand the words. We don’t recognize our master's voice when we hear it.

That’s what happened when, at the end of the nineteenth century, European missionaries in Papua New Guinea worked to translate the Bible into Tok Pisin, or what many people call “Pidgin English.”

Today’s Gospel reading posed a real hurdle. The people the missionaries hoped to bring God’s word to had no idea what a sheep was, let alone what a shepherd was.

So the translators had to find a solution. They began with the word “master” to describe the person who owns the sheep. Then they had to deal with the fact that Tok Pisin doesn’t have an “apostrophe-S” like in English, or a word like “watashi” in Japanese to indicate ownership. So they used the word “belong.”

The word they landed on for a sheep was “sip,” but Tok Pisin makes things plural by doubling a word to show that there’s more than one. In the end a single word in English or biblical Greek, became four words in Tok Pisin: “master belong sip-sip.” All of which shows how ingenious and committed those translators were, but it offers no help for readers of John 10 who have never seen a sheep, much less handled one, felt its wool, or smelled its awful odor before the wool is cut off, cleaned, and spun into yarn.

When preaching on a passage like this one, preachers in Papua New Guinea often will talk about a person who cares for hogs instead of a master belong sip-sip.

All of this is to say that for me to preach on this passage of God’s Word is an easy thing among the people I grew up with in the American west where sheep and cattle ranching are well known and understood. But where I live now, in a city of a half million people, people don’t know about sheep, and certainly here in this giant city, most people have no personal experience of a sheep except in petting zoos or the Shaun the Sheep exhibition here in Tokyo several years ago.

So here’s what you need to know about Jesus, our Good Shepherd who looks after us, his sheep: If Jesus calls you his sheep, it’s not a compliment. Newborn baby lambs are cute, trying to stand up on wobbly little legs and bawling for their mothers. But you don’t want to be in a pen with even a few of them. The noise is loud and relentless.

And as soon as the lambs’ mothers no longer let them suckle, they lose their cuteness and become what every shepherd knows them to be: stupid, thoughtless creatures whose sole motivation is eating whatever they find wherever their noses lead them. Sheep are in constant danger. If it weren’t for shepherds, many fewer of them would survive and no rancher would have a return on his investment.

On top of everything else, in Jesus’ time shepherds weren’t regarded with any honor. Only a fool would want to work tending such hopeless creatures. Shepherds, including the ones in the Christmas story to whom the angels announced Jesus’ birth, were outsiders, widely regarded as drinkers, and certainly not people you’d want your daughter dating. Sheep-herding was a job on the lower levels of society.

So Jesus calling himself the Good Shepherds tells us something about both us and our Lord. First, the story implies that we can’t manage life on our own. It’s our sinful nature to go our own way, to let our bellies and other desires guide our decisions. Often, like sheep, we don’t even think. We need a shepherd to protect us from the wolves that prowl around us, seeking to devour us. But even more we need the shepherd to save us from ourselves.

Second, if Jesus is the Good Shepherd, it means we have a God who is willing to come to us not in power or prestige. We have instead a God who emptied himself for our sake, to the point of being regarded as an ungodly blasphemer, and being branded as a dangerous criminal, tortured by the Roman authorities, and executed on a cross.

Jesus the Good Shepherd humbles himself and gives his life because of your sinful foolishness and for your benefit because he is just that: the Good Shepherd. He’s no normal shepherd.

He’s the good one who doesn’t abandon his flock, who will search out even a single lost lamb, who has decided a sheep like you is worth living and dying for.

If we don’t know anything about sheep and shepherding, we do know about feeling lost, about losing our way, about finding ourselves in difficult predicaments, and about being on the verge of death. To these things our Lord says, “I have found you, and I will carry you home to a safe pasture in my arms.” This is a promise whose speaker is good on his word.

Jesus even now has laid you across his shoulders. He who carried his own cross to Golgotha has no problem with your weight being laid on him. Because of his promise to you, you belong in his flock, and he has a place reserved for you in his pen. He says his sheep know his voice. He’s calling your name today. Do you recognize your Good Shepherd? Do you know that with this food at this table today, in the Lord’s Supper, he’s ready to give everything he has to you so that you might know his mercy and goodness?

Your Lord Jesus lays his claim on you. And he does so by saying your name. And not once. And not twice either. But over and over, all the way from eternity. And he won’t stop either. Not until your last day. And then, like he did with Mary Magdalene in the garden at his resurrection, he will say your name one final time, and you will recognize your shepherd by the sound of his voice calling your name (no translators needed) And you will rise. You will rise.

Rise, rise. Rise to eternal life. Amen.

And now May the peace which far surpasses all human and sheeply understanding keep your hearts and minds in Christ Jesus our Lord. Amen.

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