The Sheep Know His Voice - September 5
Today’s Readings: AM Psalm 30, 32; PM Psalm 42, 43; Job 22:1-4,21-23:7; Acts 13:26-43; John 10:1-18
Today’s Reflection
Every Sunday, in our service of Morning Prayer, we say together the Jubilate, which is Psalm 100. I love every word of it, but this line always makes me pause and take comfort: “Know this: The Lord himself is God; he himself has made us, and we are his; we are his people and the sheep of his pasture.”
When it comes down to it, this line from the Jubilate sums up everything we need to know: God is God (which implies, of course, that we are not.) God created us, so we belong to God. And since we are God’s people, we should understand ourselves as the sheep of his pasture—which is to say, since we belong to God, God takes care of us—God is watching over us, and God is giving us all that we need to live and thrive.
In the Gospel of John appointed for today, we hear Jesus declare, “I am the good shepherd. The good shepherd lays down his life for the sheep.” A shepherd does not leave his sheep to find their own path, but he knows and cares for each one, and makes sure that they will each find their way home. And he can only do that if he keeps us, his sheep, near to him.
But it is not just that God, our good shepherd, holds us close. At times, we may find that we have turned away from God, like a sheep who has wandered away from the shepherd and from the rest of the flock (as we hear in another version of the Good Shepherd narrative, in Matthew 18). We may turn away for just a moment, or we may turn away for years, but at any moment we can always turn back toward God.
God wants to be in relationship with each of us. As Jesus tells us in John 10, “He calls his own sheep by name and leads them out. When he has brought out all his own, he goes ahead of them, and the sheep follow him because they know his voice.” Each one of us is God’s dearly loved child. God cares about you. God wants to know you. In fact, God already knows you even better than you know yourself. And, because God knows all about us, he wants to continue his relationship with us. As a loving God extends us his mercy—the mercy of a parent who, though he knows all that we have done and left undone, wants us to come back home and tell him all about it anyway.
As Anne Lamott reflects in her book Hallelujah Anyway: Rediscovering Mercy: “My parents, teachers, and the culture I grew up in showed me a drawer in which to stuff my merciful nature, because mercy made me look vulnerable and foolish, and it made me less productive. It was distracting to focus worried eyes on others instead of on homework, and on poor Dad, after all he had done for us, and on the prize of making the whole family look good. So I put it away, and I got it out only when it wouldn't threaten my grades, my safety, my parents' self-esteem, my child's life, or mine.”
But Anne Lamott, when she allowed herself to take mercy back out of the drawer as an adult, learned that “Mercy means compassion, empathy, a heart for someone’s troubles. It’s not something you do – it is something in you, accessed, revealed, or cultivated through use, like a muscle.” This mercy is what God calls us to extend to one another—and to ourselves. Mercy is how we can show the love of God to one another, as God’s imperfect yet perfectly loved children.
—Becky+
Questions for Self-Reflection
Remember a time when someone extended mercy to you. What did that look like? How did that make you feel about yourself and about them? How did it change the relationship between you and that person?
Daily Challenge
Jesus tells us that “The good shepherd lays down his life for the sheep,” and that he lays it down of his own accord. Think of way that you can sacrifice something, whether tangible or intangible, for a fellow sheep of Christ’s fold and try to put that into action in the days ahead.