Listen here
Acts 4.5-12, Psalm 23,
John 10.11-18
“The Lord is my Shepherd”, says the familiar Psalm we heard just now. “he
leads me beside still waters.” I’m reading a book about leadership at the
moment. It been highly recommended by other vicars during this pandemic. It’s
called ,,,“How
to lead when you don’t know where you’re going” It was written by Susan Beaumont just
before the pandemic struck, but it’s certainly found its moment! I am sure many
of us can identify with that title. What should we do, what decisions should we
make, when we don’t know what the future holds?
It’s a question that’s
relevant to everyone. You don’t have to
be the CEO of a big company, or the Archbishop of Canterbury, or even the local
vicar to find yourself having to take a lead sometimes, at work, at home or in
the community. If you have a caring responsibility for children or other
vulnerable family members, you’re a leader. If you take the initiative in
supporting a friend in need, you’re a leader. Leadership comes in many forms. There’s
a sense in which we are all leaders of our own lives, even if we don’t feel we
lead anyone else. We have to make
decisions for ourselves; prod ourselves into action when we’d rather just stay
in bed, set ourselves on one course or another. But, as the book’s title puts
it, how do you lead, “when you don’t know where you’re going?
The book calls those times of
confusion “liminal” times. Limen is the Latin word for a
threshold, the place you have to step over as you go in and out, from one place
to another. Liminal times are times of
change, times when we find ourselves stepping into a new situations, whether we
wanted to or not. Life is full of them; the first day at school or college, starting
a career, moving house, the beginning - or the end - of a relationship. A time
of serious illness can be a liminal moment, and so can retirement and bereavement
… I’m sure we can all think of plenty of
examples from our own lives. Even if the
change is a happy one like getting married or starting a dream job, liminal
times can be very unsettling. For a while everything seems different, but
eventually, if we hang on, we get used to the new routines, the new shape of
the world around us. What seemed alien becomes familiar. It might feel better.
It might feel worse, than what we had before, but eventually it at least stops
feeling so strange.
Often liminal times are
personal, just affecting us and our family, but over this last year we’ve been
going through a collective liminal time, or perhaps more accurately, a
prolonged series of liminal times. We’ve been locked down, opened up, put into
tiers, encouraged to stay at home, go to work, eat out to help out, allowed to
travel, banned from travelling… We hardly have time to take in one set of rules
before we get another one. No wonder our heads are spinning. No wonder we feel so
disorientated. No wonder we feel like we don’t know where we’re going, or how
we can hope to lead others for whom we may be responsible.
And that brings to today’s
Gospel reading, a passage with leadership at its heart, which was written by
and for people who knew all about liminal times, times of change and disruption,
times when they didn’t know where they were going.
Like much of the Bible, the
Gospels were written against a backdrop of trouble and uncertainty. Israel was
often at the mercy of the powerful nations round about it, struggling for
control over this strategically important country at the meeting point of Asia,
Africa and Europe, as it still is. At the time of Jesus and the early Church, it
was the Romans who were top dogs. Their rule was often brutal, and they cracked
down ruthlessly on anyone who threatened their power or refused to fit in.
Jesus and his followers, like so many others, lived with constant uncertainty,
powerlessness, the knowledge that everything they relied on could be swept away
in an instant if Rome decided they were in the way. Many of the first
Christians had embraced huge changes when they decided to follow Christ too, losing
family, friends and security. All the old certainties were gone. They lived in
a constant state of liminality. But somehow, they hung on to their message, the
message of God’s love, shown in the death and resurrection of Jesus. And that
message took root, and still nourishes people today. How did they keep going? How did they not
give up in despair? It wasn’t because they had some secret knowledge of the
future, a road map or a compass or a crystal ball. They didn’t know where they
were going any more than we do, but they knew who was going with them - God
himself - and they knew that it was safe to trust him because the resurrection
of Jesus showed that even death couldn’t destroy his love. Jesus was the
shepherd who didn’t run away when he saw the wolf of his crucifixion coming.
To understand the images
Jesus uses in this passage we need to know that in Jesus’ time and place sheep
weren’t kept in nice, neat fields. They lived on the open hillsides, in wild
terrain. Their shepherds, often young boys, would lead them from one pasture to
another, to find food and water, just as the familiar words of Psalm 23
describe. But how do you get a flock of sheep to follow you in a vast
wilderness? A lone shepherd can’t round them up and drive them. They have to
want to come with you. The theologian, Paula Gooder, describes this way of life
still in action in modern Israel. ‘I will never forget the sight of four or
five Bedouin shepherd boys, early in the morning, she says, calling to their
flock; nor how, when this happened, the large flock split into groups to gather
in front of their own shepherd. Each shepherd knew which sheep would follow
them and each sheep knew which was their shepherd.” (Parables p.56)
Or, as Jesus puts it, “I
know my own and my own know me just as the Father knows me and I know the Father…
[my sheep] will listen to my voice. It’s all rooted in relationships; Jesus
relationship with his Father, and our relationship with Jesus. That
relationship is shaped by time spent
with God in prayer, in reading the Bible, in serving others, in doing the
things he calls us to do. When we don’t know where we are, or where we are
going, when our hearts are disoriented, the answer isn’t to look for the
certainty of a detailed itinerary, even if that were possible, it is to orient
ourselves towards God, towards good, towards love, towards hope. We don’t know
what’s around the next corner, over the horizon, but we can know the one who
walks ahead of us, who is faithful in his love of us, and when we know that, we
shall not be in want, there is nothing we lack, as the Psalm says.
How do we lead when we don’t
know where we’re going, in liminal times, whether we are leading a nation, a
business, a church, a family, or just ourselves? The answer, it seems to me, is
that we first need to follow, listening for the voice of the Shepherd who loves
us more than we can imagine, so much that he even lays down his life for us.
Amen
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