St. Paul’s United Church Sunday, April 25, 2010

Good Shepherd Sunday

The Lamb of God – Rev. David Mundy

Psalm 23 Revelation 7:9-17 John 10:22-30

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For the past few years we have visited farmer friends who live north of Kingston, Ontario around the time of the March break. These folk keep sheep and our March arrival always coincides with lambing season, although they informed us beforehand that we should be prepared to be disappointed this year. By their calculations the lambs would start arriving just after we left. Apparently they should have consulted with the ram a little more thoroughly because the evening we arrived we were told by our weary friends that ten lambs had entered this world during the day.

We went to the barn to see these new arrivals who were only a few hours old yet already lurching about on unsteady legs. Our younger daughter Emily joined us from college for our visit. Although she has never met a shopping mall she didn’t like, she has always enjoyed these family friends and been fascinated by their farm life.

As she held one of the lambs in her arms, I wasn’t going to tell her that this adorable creature wasn’t long for this world, relatively speaking. Unlike the beef cows our friends raise, the life of a lamb is relatively short –lamb chops don’t come from sheep. In a few months these lambs will be up to “market weight” and headed for someone’s plate.

Many lambs that go to market meet a religious fate. Orthodox Christians and Roman Catholics from certain ethnic backgrounds insist on lamb as part of their Easter celebration. And Muslims provide a growing market for lamb in Canada. They pay top dollar for unblemished lambs and Canadian lamb producers do their best to provide them. Perhaps those of us who aren’t vegetarians would be better off not thinking about the fate of those little lambs.

Except that today is Good Shepherd Sunday and so all the readings we heard today have to do with shepherds and sheep and lambs. It’s not surprising that the psalm for today is twenty three, which tells us that the Lord is our shepherd, the God who leads the flock into safe and restoring pastures. It is a comforting image isn’t it, one of protection and loving concern which we all need at times? For some of you it may be your favourite passage of scripture. We can conveniently forget that shepherds have always had a tough job protecting their flocks from predators. Remember that the young David figured that he could take on Goliath with his slingshot because he had used it with success on bears and lions when he was a shepherd.

The gospel lesson from John is also comforting, in a way. Jesus has just offered that he is the Good Shepherd who is willing to lay down his life for his sheep. Then he offers the assurance that “my sheep hear my voice. I know them, and they follow me.” Except that Jesus says this to some people who clearly do not want to listen to his voice and are increasingly hostile to his ministry and mission.

The passage which would have been really tempting to totally ignore today is the one from the Revelation of John with its emphasis on Christ, the Lamb of God, and the notion of his faithful followers being washed in his shed blood. In this vision there comes a time when all those who have been faithful to Christ will hold a big victory party with waving palm branches and shouts of celebration. Still, it isn’t the most pleasant image, especially if we are a bit squeamish about blood.

What do you make of the images of blood and Christ as the slain lamb of God in scripture? The answer may be “not much,” both in the sense that we don’t talk about this much any more in our denomination, and in that we really don’t find it all that helpful.

Our Christian faith has always sent mixed messages about the importance of shed blood. There really isn’t a great emphasis on blood sacrifice in our faith. Yet there is blood in our scriptures and so blood in our faith, the blood of Christ on the cross. When we celebrate communion, we have a cup of red juice or wine which symbolizes Christ’s blood shed for us. And it used to be that the more formal communion service included what is called the Agnus Dei which is Latin for “lamb of God.” In our hymn book we still find the words

Lamb of God, you take away the sins of the world,

Have mercy on us, have mercy on us.

Lamb of God, you take away the sins of the world,

Grant us peace, grant us peace. VU 940

There is an old and once popular hymn which hasn’t been in our last two hymn books which draws heavily on the imagery of the shed blood of the lamb:

There is a fountain filled with blood drawn from Emmanuel’s veins,

And sinners plunged beneath that flood lose all their guilty stains.

The dying thief rejoiced to see that fountain in his day;
And there have I, though vile as he, washed all my sins away.

Dear dying Lamb, Thy precious blood shall never lose its power
Till all the ransomed church of God be saved, to sin no more.

E’er since, by faith, I saw the stream Thy flowing wounds supply,Redeeming love has been my theme, and shall be till I die.

The word “ick” is not a theological term but there is a certain “ick” factor to this hymn, don’t you think? There is something of the slasher movie to this image which is a little disturbing, although those of us who sang this hymn in another day probably did so without thinking twice about all that blood.

Really, how important is that blood imagery in this day and age? It must be a huge “turn-off” for our young people. Except that if you asked a teenager, particularly teenaged girls, which books they read avidly they might tell you about the Twilight series which is all about vampires and -yes- there is blood. The movies developed from this series have been a huge success, and there are they television copycat series such as The Vampire Diaries and True Blood.

Come to think of it, while blood sacrifice is foreign to us, we consider giving blood at a blood donor clinic a noble act which can make the difference between life and death for another person or persons, people we have never met. There are folk here today who have given blood, and others have received blood which has saved their lives or made surgery possible.

This past week there was an article in the New York Times newspaper by a man named Dana Jennings who went through a series of operations where over a period of time he received 27 pints of blood, about three times the average of all the blood in a human body. Jennings reflects on what he calls his “forced intimacy” with blood:

We are taught that blood is the essence of our lives, that there’s nothing more intimate than blood. Even so, we often forget that we are our blood. Some of us think we are our intelligence, or our looks, or our souls. But from head to toes, it’s the creeks, rivers and deltas of blood suffusing our bodies that sustain us.

We could argue that we are all actually of those things he mentions, but he makes his point: blood is essential to life, a little miracle, not something to repulse us or make us squeamish.

And what is one of the most life-affirming, hopeful events in the unfolding of the human drama? It is the birth of a child, where there is always the shedding of blood, even in the best controlled scenario. There is always a risk in childbirth as well, but we are willing to take that risk, for the sake of life.

Which brings us back to Jesus as the Lamb of God who takes away the sins of the world. This may not be the imagery which we turn to immediately in the way that other generations of Christian did, almost without thinking. Still, maybe we all need to give blood a second chance when it comes to the images of our faith.

The late Dr. Paul Brand was a surgeon who was honoured internationally for his surgical innovations in mission hospitals in India and elsewhere. He was both an innovative scientist and a committed Christian. He wrote about heading home from a hospital in London one night and hearing a Salvation Army band playing and singing There is a Fountain Filled With Blood. It made him smile because he had spent his day with blood which had been drawn from veins, transfused into others, scrubbed from surfaces, all part of healing and saving lives.

For Dr. Brand the image of blood was extremely positive, hopeful. He knew that as it coursed through our veins and organs it is the vehicle to filter and cleanse impurities and creates the inner environment for life. All this happens day in and day out, without us giving much thought to this miraculous process unless something goes wrong. As a Christian he celebrated the essential nature of the cleansing, healing blood of Christ.

There is a little meditation exercise where the participant is asked to calm him or her self and reach for the artery in the neck and be mindful of the pulse, the blood coursing through the body as the heart pumps so many times per minute. It is an invitation to be aware that we are alive and can be alive to the God revealed in Christ who is as close as our heartbeat.

There is more to this, though, than just saying that Christ is close at hand. Our message is that our relationship with Christ is lifesaving and life-changing. In the passage from John’s revelation a strange and remarkable thing happens. Those who have been faithful in Christ, including those who have been persecuted and had their own blood shed, have their robes washed in the blood of the Lamb. Yet this immersion makes their robes whiter, rather than stains them. This blood of Christ gives hope.

Surely this needs to be our emphasis. Christ cleanses and heals those who come to him humbly and hopefully. The only way we can be helped by a transfusion is to acknowledge that we need it and to make ourselves vulnerable to the gift.

I encourage you to roll up your sleeve, in a figurative way, to an awareness that it is in Christ that we are made whole. This is our faith story, and we are sticking to it!

As far as we know, Jesus did not write one single word about his theology, or anything else for that matter. All the gospel writers and the apostle Paul tell us that Jesus lifted up a cup at a meal with friends and told them that he was life-giving blood. Through the mystery of the cross and his shed blood we are given Easter hope. So today, as always, we open ourselves to the Lamb of God with gratitude and commitment.