Shepherd’s Love

Luke 15: 1-10; Psalm 23

 

Psalm 23 is the most familiar of all the Psalms.  A person who journeyed through a valley of darkness wrote the treasured words.  He was acquainted with an existence in which enemies draw near and evil surrounds him.  He walked in a desert-like land where nothing grows and nothing lives, a land that acts as nature’s morgue. 

          But, for the Psalmist, despair and distress do not prevail.  God comes to the Psalmist in the dry, parched desert of danger and distress.  There, he experiences God as a Shepherd. 

          Author Frederick Buechner has written about a man he knows who once was a shepherd.  To some of the sheep, he gave names and to some of them he didn’t, but he knew them equally well either way.  “If one of them got lost, he didn’t have a moments’ peace till he found it again.  If one of them got sick or hurt, he would move heaven and earth to get it well again.  He would feed them out of a bottle when they were newborn lambs if for some reason the mother wasn’t around or wouldn’t ‘own’ them…He always called them in at the end of the day so the wild dogs wouldn’t get them.  I’ve seen him wade through snow up to his knees with a bale of hay in each hand to feed them on bitter cold winter evenings, shaking it out and putting it in the manger…”[1]

          The Psalmist has experienced the Lord in that way. 

          In the midst of our own walk through the valleys of life, we experience the Lord in that way. 

In Luke 15, Jesus tells three memorable parables.  One is about a shepherd who leaves ninety-nine sheep in search of the one who has strayed.  When he finds it, he lifts it up and carries it home.  The second parable is about a woman who loses a coin.  She leaves no corner of the house unsearched until she finds that coin.  The third parable is about a son who was totally ungrateful for his father’s generosity.  The son leaves home and wastes his money in a foreign country.  The late great preacher John Redhead describes the scene this way.  “The father always kept his candle burning in the window, and always kept watch too.  One day there comes a speck down the road.  Gradually it gets larger.  It comes nearer.  “It walks like my son!  It is my son!”  Down the stairs, through the open door, out through the gate.”  “When he was yet a great way off, his father…ran, and fell on his neck, and kissed him.”[2]  He embraced his wayward son with unconditional love.   

           Those stories from Luke teach us that, when we stray from the path, the Shepherd follows us and brings us home; like a father welcoming home a child who was lost, with goodness and mercy the shepherd embraces his sheep.  

          In her devotional book titled Life after Grace, Carol Bechtel recalls reading a Nora Roberts novel one day and laughing out loud when she came across the names Roberts had given the main character’s golden retrievers:  Goodness and Mercy.  “Get it?” Bechtel asks her readers.  “Goodness and mercy shall follow me…”

          Bechtel refers to Goodness and Mercy as the Shepherd’s trusty sheepdogs.[3] 

When we stray from the path we are being followed.  The Hebrew word for follow also can be translated ‘pursue’.  When you are feeling lost, “surely goodness and mercy shall pursue you all the days of your life…” 

Our security in the faith is found in a God whose steadfast love will not let us go. His pursuit does not end until we dwell in the house of the Lord our whole life long. 

Erma Bombeck, in one of her books, describes a visit to a church one Sunday. She writes:"...I was intent on a small child who was turning around smiling at everyone. He wasn't gurgling, spitting, humming, kicking, tearing the hymnals, or rummaging through his mother's handbag. He was just smiling. Finally, his mother jerked him about and in a stage whisper that could be heard in a little theatre off Broadway said, "Stop grinning! You're in a church!" With that, she gave him a slap on his hind-side and as the tears rolled down his cheeks added, "That’s better," and returned to her prayers. [4]

Sometimes we are like that mother.  We lose our way.  We judge when we shouldn’t judge.  We fail to love when we should love.  But our Shepherd Lord always sends his sheep dogs of goodness and mercy to pursue us and bring us home.

Surely goodness and mercy shall follow me all the days of my life and I shall dwell in the house of the Lord my whole life long.