I do wonder what a small town carpenter would have know about sheep rearing. But then again the image crops up many times in the Hebrew scriptures. The idea that people were ‘the sheep of God’s hand’ would therefore have been commonplace and the image would have worked for Peter and for all the others on that basis alone.
For my part, I like sheep but have very little to do with real ones. Even so hearing these words on the radio this morning was enough to push me gently but firmly into the image again, and find there a playground for imagination which is the ‘fundation’ of remembering the bible.
I’m willing to feed the sheep. I started the week a bit cranky, my mind not quite on task, but by the end I was once again fully engaged and bouncing in the meadows. It was the sheep wot did it, in this instance the children and young people. Worshipping together and then waiting and listening with them got me back on track again. ‘Can I talk to you Rev?’ The same question in a new office with boxes piled up everywhere and other things to avoid tripping over. One said ‘I forgot to thank you for your help last year so I came today to thank you’. Well by the end of that little speech I was eating out of their hands again.
So the sheep aren’t the problem. But the sheepdog trails are, or the Synods as we call them. Not just them but all the other sheep trading paraphenalia of Country Fairs and Auctions and Markets. You see, that first command to ‘Feed my sheep’ soon got hijacked and developed into a full scale industry which now spends more time preserving itself than getting on with feeding the sheep. And it’s all that I have the problem with. You might argue that the gospel would not have survived without it. My point now is can it survive with it?
For the next few weeks our chapel theme is ‘All one’ and that notion Paul sent to the Christians in Galatia two thousand years ago that ‘In Christ’s family there are no divisions between Jew and Greek, slave and free, male and female’. Because of course there still are. But what does that look like from the perspective of a young person today. A much greater understanding of diversity in some ways and a much narrower toleration of ‘others’ in another. Two thousand years ago people from modern day Iraq and Syria were making their way across the North of England. They were Romans and Hadrian’s Wall was their highway. They bought with them many new ideas, including the stories of the carpenter and his friends and the command to ‘Feed my Sheep.
So free yourself from the preservation order and get on with living with and sharing the story yourself.

In our life and our believing
The Love of God