“I don't think it is
enough appreciated how much an outdoor book the Bible is. It is a book open to
the sky--best read and understood outdoors, and the farther outdoors the
better.”
This being Earth Day, Creation
Sunday, I took that and other inspiration from the great poet and
environmentalist Wendell Berry, and was inspired to look at today’s lessons as
outdoor lessons. (I love his work so much that I think he deserves his own picture.)
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| Wendell Berry illustration by Greg Newbold |
A lot of the
stories Jesus tells use examples from out of doors: of planting, fishing, harvesting, and
herding. The mustard seed, the sower, the vineyard, the hen like a mother to
her flock. The people of the Bible, especially the ordinary people whom Jesus
cared most about, paid a lot more attention to what was going on outdoors than
we do today. They had to. They didn’t have insulated houses and glass windows,
or sealed cars to protect them from the elements or keep bugs, or snakes out.
They didn’t have air conditioning or fancy electric lighting. If it was hot—they
were hot. If it was cold—they were cold. If it was light, they could see—if it
was dark, except for a little light from an oil lamp, they couldn’t. They didn’t eat food from all over the
world—they raised and ate the food that came from the plants and animals that
were native to their region.
And speaking of
animals and plants, there are 93 different animals, birds or insects mentioned
in the Bible (I counted). There are donkeys, snakes, leopards, eagles, foxes,
camels. Dogs, but not cats—what’s up with that?
But one thing it’s plain to see – there are a LOT of SHEEP. 218 mentions of sheep, 199 of lambs. When you went outdoors in ancient Palestine,
you would see a lot of sheep!! No wonder
there are also 113 references to shepherds.
Sheep were one of
the first animals domesticated and they were essential to the people of that
day. They were a source of milk and
meat; of wool of course, for clothing and blankets; their hide was used to make
vellum for scrolls; lanolin from their wool was used to make soap.
No wonder Jesus
reached for the metaphor of the good shepherd. But what would it mean to be a good shepherd back
then?
Shepherds in that
time were semi-nomadic. They didn’t own the sheep they tended, but they were
responsible for them. They had to know how and where to find the right grazing
land. They didn’t own the land, so they had to work with the farmers and nearby
villages, and devise systems to guard the land so it wouldn’t become exhausted
by over-grazing. They had to know the weather, watching for flash floods or
drought. They watched for disease, calculated when to breed, ensured healthy
births, protected sheep from predators, knew when to shear them, patched them
up if they were injured, even cared for their hooves. Their job was to deliver
the herd with more births and fewer losses than when it left the village.
A good shepherd
observed, and noticed, and paid attention to his flock, even down to the individual
sheep. Sheep are followers. They stick
together, but in every flock there is a hierarchy—and the sheep will usually follow
the dominant one. So one of the
shepherd’s jobs would be to discern that particular sheep in the herd; it was
called a bellwether—did you know that was the origin of the word? The shepherd placed
a bell around that sheep’s neck—and as that sheep went, so went the flock. Because sheep have this flocking tendency, the
good shepherd had to know how to take advantage of that, and choose and guide
the bellwether strategically.
In our beautiful
Psalm 23, the psalmist praises God for fulfilling all the conditions of a good
shepherd. God faithfully returns season after
season. God knows the best places—the right paths--to lead the flock to water
and pasture. God knows how to protect the herd from harm, and keeps God’s promises
to protect them. And even though there
are dangers, God, the good shepherd, never abandons us, for we are God’s sheep.
The Bible talks a
lot about BAD shepherds, too. The prophet Zechariah calls out, “Oh, my worthless shepherd, who
deserts the flock!” and the flock are the people of Israel. In Isaiah we hear,
the shepherds also
have no understanding; they have all turned to their own way.” In the Gospel of Matthew, Jesus is going about
the cities and villages, teaching and healing, and it says: “When he saw the crowds, he had compassion for
them, because they were harassed and helpless, like sheep without a shepherd.”
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| These sheep probably have a good shepherd. Artist Mike Jory painted them in South Devon, England. |
God expects us to be shepherds, too. Shepherds lead, and good
leaders are important. After all, the people stray, do we not? Oh yes we do. We
need good shepherds, and we need to be good shepherds.
Shepherds are also stewards. A steward is someone who handles
affairs for someone else. A good shepherd is a
good steward. He knows the value of his
flock, and seeks to increase it. And he knows he is
accountable to someone else for that flock.
And so today—on Creation Sunday, I want to take that concept of
stewardship outdoors. For our Creation story tells us that God made all, and
ALL of it is very good—not just the humans, and not just that which is useful
to us. And it tells us that we are made
in God’s image, with the ability to discern God’s purpose, and so the earth is
entrusted to our care. God expects us to be good stewards of the created
world--and not just of the sheep!! So I
wonder, how do we steward the earth as a good shepherds?
Jesus said, “I know my sheep and my sheep know me.” So first, we need to get to know the natural
world around us, just as that shepherd knew his terrain. How well do we know the
land we are in? How well do we know the
ecosystem, the interdependencies of plants and animals, birds and insects,
water and watershed, what is native and what is non-native? I flunked a
15-question quiz on environmental literacy in seminary, and I have been working
to redeem myself. It asked things like,
where does the water from your tap
come from? Where does your garbage go?
Who are the original peoples of the land you live on today? Name three edible plants, three species of
trees, three animals, and three resident birds native to your region. Name three common species around you that are
NOT native and how they impact local wildlife. (Did you know that house sparrows, possums,
and fox squirrels are not native to our region?)
This
is a very local process, this kind of knowing. In fact, I who live in West
Linn, might answer some of those questions differently from those of you who
live in Bethany. Closer to the river, for instance, I see white oaks, which I
don’t see out here here. So we have to look closely. An African
environmentalist named Baba Dioum put it: "In the end we will conserve only what
we love, we will love only what we understand, and we will understand only what
we have learned.” To be good stewards,
we must first go outdoors. We must first learn.
And when we take
stewardship outdoors, we are humbled. We
discover, as Wendell Berry said, “that God made not only the parts of Creation
that we humans understand and approve, but all of it. We discover what God found in the world, as
God made it, to be good; we remember that God made it for God’s pleasure; and
that God continues to love it and to find it worthy, despite its reduction and
corruption by us. We are reminded that Creation is not a single creative act
long over and done with, but is the continuous, constant participation of all
creatures in the being of God. We discover that, for these reasons, our
destruction of nature is not just bad stewardship, or bad economics, or a
betrayal of our responsibility; but a kind of blasphemy.”
Jesus said, “I am the good shepherd. I
know my own and my own know me, just as the Father knows me and I know the
Father.” I
pray that today we recommit ourselves to taking our Bible outdoors, to getting
to know and love the world that God made as deeply and intimately as the
shepherd knows and loves his flock. In so doing, we are following our own Good
Shepherd, who came to renew the very creation on which we depend.
And we remember that God needs us to
be good shepherds, too.
Preached April 22, 2018, St Gabriel Episcopal Church, Portland, OR.
Readings: Acts 4:5-12, 1 John 3:16-24, John 10:11-18, Psalm 23
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