Feed My Sheep by Cheri Holdridge (with an assist by Kurt Young)

I saw my friend Leslie during Spring Break down in Cincinnati.  She and I have been friends for about twenty years.  Leslie is not dealing well with her son graduating high school and getting ready to head off to college.  My parents started acting strange right before I went to college.   They started to frantically try to teach things they thought they had not taught me yet. Anyone ever experience that?  We have this kind of panic when we hit these milestones.  

Jesus’ resurrection appearances, after his resurrection but before he ascended into heaven sort of remind me of this.  First, Jesus wanted to get his disciples ready to carry on without him; Second, he wasn’t quite ready to say good-bye.

So he has this wonderful little conversation with Simon Peter (for those following along via the Internet, John 21:1-19 from The Message paraphrase).  To me, it’s like a little final test, not in a judgemental way, but as a way of emphasis, he asks him three times: “do you love me? “  By the third time, Peter gets a little exasperated.  

Jesus is giving them a mission for the rest of their lives They have been the children up to this point, but now they are the leaders.  When you were young you dressed yourself and went wherever you wished, but when you get old you’ll have to stretch out your hands while someone else dresses you and takes you where you don’t want to go.” …. And then he commanded, “Follow me.”  In other words, do what I do.

Now we need to know a little something about sheep to get this lesson. Henri Nouwen, one of my favorite spiritual teachers, writes this about the imagery of the shepherd and the sheep: “As Jesus says, good shepherds know their sheep, and their sheep know them (see John 10:14).  There must be a true mutuality between shepherds and their sheep.  Good leaders know their own, and their own know them.  Between them is mutual trust, mutual openness, mutual care, and mutual love. This is the kind of relationship Jesus wants us to have, The kind of communities Jesus wants us to build.    To follow our leaders we cannot be afraid of them, and to lead our followers we need their encouragement and support.  Jesus calls himself the Good Shepherd to show the great intimacy that must exist between leaders and those entrusted to them.” (emphasis mine) Source: http://wp.henrinouwen.org/daily_meditation_blog/?p=2055

 

So Jesus is telling Peter, you need to go out now and lead, but this work takes time. You need to develop relationships with those you will lead. They need to trust you like a sheep trusts a shepherd. Then you can help them know how much God loves them. This work, Simon Peter, will take this rest of your life. That is why I am asking you three times, “do you love me?” and are you ready to feed my sheep? 

This text is a wonderful post Easter Text for us. You see, we came here on Easter Sunday a couple of weeks ago. We celebrated the Easter miracle. YES! Death does not win, we have hope.  Eternal life is the promise, not just in this life, but joy in this life. We have hope.  God forgives us of our sins and God wants us to walk in freedom and joy; loves us and accepts us and we don’t have to work so hard trying to prove ourselves.  All of that is rolled up in the Easter message. We claim life right here and right now. 

But, my friends, it means nothing, if we do not go out, feed the lambs for Jesus. That means, we can’t hold this message to ourselves. The message is meant to be shared. But even before we go out into the world to share the message with strangers (strangers who will become friends) we have to live the message right here in community with one another. We have to practice it right here.   We have to practice this right here and right now.

What did Henri Nouwen say? Between shepherds and sheep there is mutual trust, mutual openness, mutual care, and mutual love. So we practice these things right here with one another. 

 We say it every Sunday: “We know that we are imperfect people who make mistakes.  We give thanks that God loves us anyway.  In this community we practice patience, compassion, and forgiveness.”  This means that here in the Village we value every person, every person – mean, nice, rich, poor, etc. When we feel ourselves in conflict with a person, then we value this community enough to go to the person and work it out.

 Because no one is perfect. We all have times when we need to forgive and we need to be forgiven.  I lost count this past week how many times I had to ask for forgiveness. But it makes me really sad when people won’t give me a second chance and forgive me. It also really hurts when they won’t even listen to my apology.  I don’t understand how people who are in community or how people who are family to one another, won’t practice this basic act of forgiveness.

We teach our children from the time they can talk, “Say you are sorry.”   Sometimes they even really mean it.  Sometimes older children, Break same rule, “I’m sorry” does not cut it.We have to teach that repentance means nothing without change.

Recently with one of my kids I had to work to break a pattern because I was the one who was repeating the behavior that was hurtful to my child. I know I’m the one who keeps messing up. I had to change and get forgiveness .  I got to model that for my child.

When someone comes to me, and asks for forgiveness, that is a holy moment. When my husband and I have a disagreement and he has hurt me, and he looks and me and says he is truly sorry that he has hurt me, that means something to me. I hope  it means something to you. This is what mature people do. When we make mistakes, we talk to one another. We let the other person know we are hurt and we practice forgiveness. And we change the behavior that was hurtful. This is what it means to be in community. 

Jesus called his disciples to go out into the world and teach people how to be in mature, trusting, healing relationships. Between shepherds and sheep  (and in communities of Christians) there is mutual trust, mutual openness, mutual care, and mutual love. 

Now, we can’t really practice these things on Sunday morning in corporate worship. Worship is, in many ways, more of a consumer act. This is where we are fed. We come here and listen to the band, we sing along, we hear a message from the pastor, some Sundays we are fed the holy sacrament that someone else gives us, and we go home. We are not asked to do much except show up and be fed by the experience. 

Now sure, here at The Village we do ask you do pitch in by bringing food, helping with set up, being a greeter, counting the offering, creating the power points,  singing along, and those things are important for keeping the Sunday event happening every week, but for the most part, Sunday worship does not demand a high level of trust among the participants. 

It’s when we start to dig deep and reach wide, together, that we start to demand  mutual trust, mutual openness, mutual care, and mutual love of one another. Think about it. When we are in a small study group together, and begin to read scripture together, or a book, and to pray together, we begin to share our life stories. We get vulnerable. We share our challenges as Christians. We talk about the times when it is hard to follow Jesus. We do that a little bit in those times after the message when we talk and share, but we can take it even deeper when we offer small connection groups and we create situations where we can dig deeper.

Jesus says: do you love me, and will you feed my sheep? So one take away for us from this message would be this: Will you be in a small group the next time The Village offers one, or will you form one of your own, because it is in these smaller groups for study and prayer that we dig deeper, and we find opportunities  to practice mutual trust, mutual openness, mutual care, and mutual love of one another. I often find that people tell me that want to grow deeper in their walk with God but when we offer groups that would give us this opportunity people say, “I just don’t have time for that.”  I know, I am as busy as everyone else here.  But, I think Jesus was saying to Peter, “You say that you love me, so are you really going to make loving me a priority in my life, when the choices get hard?” So you can practice that with others.

Here is another example. We have opportunities to serve in ministry with other folks from The Village. We have a music team, and a tech team that prepares our power points. We have a marketing team that organizes events out in the community like going to Take Back the Night, and doing things like the Tax Day event we were going to have this week, and going to the Old West End Festival and the Maumee Street Fair this summer. Kurt coordinates this team. We also have a Service team that organizes service projects in the community. Jodi is running our project to rehab Rock and Beth’s house. Beth is scheduling our other projects such as going to the Seagate FoodBank on May 18. All of these are opportunities for you to join in and be part of a Village ministry team in action as we go out and make a difference in the world either telling folks that The Village exists or doing some act of service. When you come to one of these events, it is an opportunity to be the hands and heart of Jesus in the world. 

Guess what? Doing one of these things may not be 100% in your comfort zone. You may not even get to work with your best friends for your whole shift, they might be busy that day. But you might learn something about someone you did not know. You might make a new friend. You might find out that someone in our own community who seems like someone you will probably be best friends with is still someone with a gift for something that you would not have seen if you did not spend that day with them. And you just don’t know. While you are working at the Food Bank one day, Jesus might want to use you to feed that lamb of God, or Jesus might use that other person to feed you. And you’ll never know that if you didn’t step out of your comfort zone.  There just might be some act of mutual care or love that occurs, on top of the fact that we fill a whole lot of food boxes for hungry people. 

I believe with all my heart that Jesus wants us to grow deeper in love with God and that the way we do that is to grow in mutual trust, mutual openness, mutual care, and mutual love of one another. One way to do that is to spend more time with one another and really pay attention to one another with grace.

That leads me to my final point: listening. I believe when Jesus said to Peter, “Do you love me? Then feed my sheep.” Jesus was also saying: listen to my people. Do you like to be listened to?  When someone just shuts their mouth and listens to you.  You see, we all just want to be respected and listened to. In all my years of counseling as a pastor, I think the number one cause of conflict that I can identify between people is the inability of people actually to be quiet and listen to the other person – and to actually ask a question and then wait and listen for the answer. So many conflicts are caused because people assume they know what the other person is thinking or what their motive is, instead of actually asking the person.

When we sense a conflict with a person, if we would simply value and trust the relationship with that person enough to actually go to them and ask what is going on, and then listen, so many problems could be avoided.  Rather than assuming what is going on.  

We are human beings and so, guess what? We will have conflict. But when we stop and listen carefully to one another, and ask clarifying questions in order to understand what is going on, we will often find that much of the conflict is caused by misunderstanding and miscommunication. In community, we need to build enough trust that we are not afraid to call a person and say, “Hey can we talk about this? I care about you and I care about such and such. Let’s see if we can work this out.”

I am here to tell you that if I am in a perceived conflict with someone and they call me and start the conversation with kind and open words like those, and I trust that we are both in community together, it makes all the difference in the world.

When Jesus made these resurrection appearances to his disciples, he was getting them ready to go out and build the church that we are now a part of. Jesus knows human nature. He had lived with us for 33 years, that was long enough to know what human beings were like. He knows we are prone to getting our feelings hurt, to conflict, and to mistrust. But Jesus was full of God’s love and he saw a vision of a better way, that someday when things are better. So he said to his disciples, “If you love me then go and feed my sheep. Love them, care for them, show them how to trust one another.”

That is what we are called to do today as we continue to build this community of The Village Church: build a community of mutual trust, mutual openness, mutual care, and mutual love.  If you are looking for a community like this, they are out there.  We are at the corner of Conant Street & the Anthony Wayne Trail in the Maumee Indoor Theater Sundays at 10:30 AM, and we continuing feeding Jesus’ sheep the rest of the week.