Sermon: “Counting Our Blessings: 
God’s Watchful Eye”

Well, today is the last Sunday of the lectionary year, and next week Advent begins.  In the United States we call this Thanksgiving Sunday, but it is also known as “Christ the King” Sunday in most of the Christian world.  As we do in worship every week, we remember the victory of the cross over the grave, we worship the lamb upon the throne, and we celebrate the eternal Reign of the Prince of Peace.  This Risen Christ we follow is our Good Shepherd, and we listen to his voice as his obedient flock.  There’s just one problem with this pretty, pastoral picture:  most of us freedom-loving, red-blooded Americans do not wish to be sheep.  I had a mentor in ministry who tried to warn me about this early-on – he said being a pastor (in spite of the shepherd image in the word) is a lot less like herding sheep and much more like herding kittens! 

Especially here in New England, we Congregationalists are so strong and self-reliant, sometimes we act a little like we’re doing God a favor by attending church now and then.  We treat God the way a cat treats her master.  Sure we appreciate God, but we don’t like to overdo that gratitude thing.  George Carlin did a great routine about the difference between dogs and cats.  The dog worships his master as a god – because he is the all-powerful one who knows how to operate the can opener.  A cat, on the other hand, will sometimes eat the food put before her, but her love is doled out as a kind of treat for her master. Cats are proud and independent.  Dogs are Fido faithful and prone to grovel.

The sad truth of it though, I hate to tell you, is that we are NOT called to be cats, or even dogs, but sheep – stupid and helpless, blindly following, grass-chewing vegetarian sheep.  That’s the bad news.  The Good News is that Jesus Christ is, and always has been, the Good Shepherd, the one who lays down his own life for the sheep.  We modern town-dwellers are not so familiar with shepherds and sheep, but I think it’s a great metaphor for understanding how small and weak we are compared to God.  In contrast to God Almighty, Creator of heaven and earth, our human wisdom and power starts to look kind of, well, sheep-like.  Knowing how headstrong and stupid we humans can be, we can count our blessings that we live under our Good Shepherd’s watchful eye.  You can think of me, your pastor, as God’s little sheepdog.  I come and bark at you from the pulpit each Sunday to keep your attention on the one who leads us on the paths of righteousness, for his name’s sake.

If it makes you feel any better, neither Ezekiel’s people in the Babylonian Exile nor the early Christians who circulated the Letter to the Ephesians around Asia Minor (what is now Turkey) much wanted to be sheep either.  Ezekiel began preaching before the conquest of Judah in 587 BC, and he continued during the exile in Babylon. He brought a message of hope to his enslaved people that God would lead them back to their homeland and restore their temple.  I think it helps us better understand our roles as sheep if we remember how animals were used as idols and totems of pagan deities in the ancient world.  The lion was a symbol of both the Assyrian and Babylonian empires – in fact, the Jews would have passed the great stone lions of the Ishtar Gate as they entered Babylon in chains.  Even now, in ruins just 50 miles south of Baghdad, you can see old wall carvings of bulls – for Adad, god of storms – and mighty dragons, symbols of Marduk, the ruler of the gods.  Later, the wolf was a symbol of Rome and the eagle the symbol of the armies of Empire. 

In neither of these contexts would any sane people want to see themselves as sheep.  And yet, Paul ends chapter 8 of his Letter to the Romans with joy, ³⁵ “Who will separate us from the love of Christ? Will hardship, or distress, or persecution, or famine, or nakedness, or peril, or sword? ³⁶As it is written, “For your sake we are being killed all day long; we are accounted as sheep to be slaughtered.” ³⁷No, in all these things we are more than conquerors through him who loved us.”  Paul’s words have given great comfort to persecuted Christians over the ages – whether these earliest Roman martyrs under Caesar or English Protestants under Bloody Mary or Russian Catholics under Stalin.  Through it all, we are reminded by our faith that tyrants always fall, and Christ is our ONLY King.  The Lord keeps a watchful eye over his flock and hears those who cry out for justice. The Good Shepherd rules with his rod and staff, protecting the weak.

One year, at my last church, I got this group of rowdy boys from my son’s church school class (3^rd graders, I think) to act out the 23^rd Psalm, the Shepherd’s Psalm, for a Childrens’ Sunday.  I worked with them to improvise a script, so in their version it was Ninja shepherds versus the wolves – leave it to kids to add some good action scenes to the Bible!  I was fascinated to learn that it was another “Ninja shepherd,” Pope Pius XI, who got this “Christ the King” Sunday started in 1925 – I’d thought it must be much more ancient.  But this Pope faced the challenge of finally winning Vatican independence from Mussolini when both Fascism and Marxism were on the rise between the two World Wars.  This was also the same year Hitler published Mein Kampf and began seriously organizing the Nazis into a patriotic secular organization.  In Russia, priests were being murdered and church properties stolen – as they would be later in Fascist Spain.  The Pope saw the hearts and minds of European Catholics as battlegrounds for competing political philosophies – both of which denied any role for God.  He warned that their loyalty to these new political or economic philosophies could easily become false idols.  Christ would remain the only true King and head of the church, his body.

Our Congregationalist ancestors also insisted on the sovereignty of Christ.  That’s why they refused to submit to either the Pope or the Church of England under King James.  They weren’t just stubborn lions who wanted to rule their own territory.  They still proclaimed Christ, as the Letter to the Ephesians says, as the only true head of his living, risen body – the church.  They read the Bible every day and listened to hours of preaching each Sunday to discern Christ’s will for themselves and for their world.  Their belief in “the priesthood of all believers” became the foundation of American democracy, and the reason for universal education – for Christ to govern the world with justice, he needed to rule through the movement of the Holy Spirit in the Church, his body. 

Their forefathers the Pilgrims were in exile like Ezekiel’s people, but in Holland and the New World instead of in Babylon.  They too had known what it was to live like sheep at the mercy of a powerful King, and later, at the mercy of nature.  When the Mayflower finally anchored in what is now Provincetown Harbor on Nov. 21, 1620, snow had already arrived, so they considered it a true miracle that they found abandoned Indian mounds with food and seed corn buried there.  William Bradford later recorded in his book, Of Plymouth Plantation: “Being thus arived in a good harbor and brought safe to land, they fell upon their knees & blessed ye God of heaven, who had brought them over ye vast &  furious ocean, and delivered them from all ye periles & miseries therof….”

And yet, by December, most of the passengers and crew were sick, coughing violently, and suffering from scurvy.  They ate first the Indian food they found, and paid the natives back the next fall, after planting with seeds they’d taken that first winter – when half of them had died.  Only 47 remained of the 102 passengers when spring finally came to Plymouth.  But in his account, Bradford gave God all the praise and glory. He chose to count their blessings instead of focusing on their bad luck and heavy losses.  He wrote, "It is to be noted as a special providence of God, and a great mercy to this poor people, that they thus got seed to plant corn the next year, or they might have starved; for they had none, nor any likelihood of getting any, till too late for the planting season."

If that story were being told today, I suspect that truly miraculous find of Indian supplies would be dismissed as “good luck” or credited to the pluck of those skilled enough to repair their broken boat or those heroes brave enough to go off to explore the new land.  But Bradford, instead, saw it as an opportunity to share a testimony of God’s goodness:  “What could not sustaine them but ye spirite of God & his grace? May not & ought not the children of these fathers rightly say: Our faithers were Englishmen which came over this great ocean, and were ready to perish in this willdernes; but they cried unto ye Lord, and he heard their voyce, and looked on their adversitie. Let them therfore praise ye Lord, because he is good, & his mercies endure for ever.” [1]

It’s a profound and ironic truth of our faith that gratitude is often felt in inverse proportion to the to hardship we have endured.  Those who have suffered serious illness or other tragedy, who have rested in the arms of God’s mercy, know a gratitude that escapes those who still believe in the illusion of their own wisdom and strength.  I remember my dear grandmother talking to me when I was in high school about another 1970s teenager, a friend of the family who was throwing his life away on drugs and alcohol.  But instead of judging him, she said, “I feel so sorry for you children today – because you have never known hard times.”  She said she learned very young to get her strength from the Lord – when she was 6 and told she was likely to die from rheumatic fever, when she was 9 and her mother died after giving birth to her 10^th child, and when she just barely survived the Spanish flu epidemic of 1918.  She got so sick that year, she had to drop out of college – her best friend from high school died.  And then she raised two children on a millworker’s salary in Appalachia during the Great Depression.  But she was one of the most genuinely thankful people I’ve ever met, and one of the most generous givers.  She tithed a full 10 percent to her church her whole life, even though she never made enough to have to pay federal income tax.

Especially in today’s economy, I suspect many of us are learning how wrong we were to worship the false god of self-reliance.  A good education and good work ethic do not necessarily add up to a lifetime of stability in a good job.  Life is not always fair.  Sometimes we’re NOT in control – disease or disaster sometimes gallop into our lives like two of the four horses of the apocalypse.  And it’s at times like these that we most need to turn to Christ, crowned in the Book of Revelation as the lamb upon the throne.  Sometimes our only hope is to surrender to our shepherd’s will and let him guide us through the valley of the shadow. That’s what our ancestors did.  They counted their blessings for God’s watchful eye over them, even as they fell like sheep to the slaughter – just as Ezekiel’s people did at the time of their cruel exile and as the recipients of Paul’s Letter to the Ephesians did, in the midst of Roman persecution.  They knew who rules the world, with truth and grace, and so do we.  It is Jesus Christ, our good shepherd and only true king. 

Thanks be to God for this Good News.  Amen.