Preached to the Congregational Church in Exeter, U. C. C., on the Fourth Sunday of Easter, Good Shepherd Sunday, May 11, 2003, by Michael L. C. Henderson, pastor.

Ezekiel 34:1-10; John 10:11-18; I John 3:16-24

Little children, let us love, not in word or speech, but in truth and action.

                      -I John 3:18

     Little children, he calls them. We assume the writer of this First Letter of John is a "he", but we don't really know who it was. Somebody who took the name "John" as a sort of pen name, most likely. Whoever John is, he addresses his readers as little children. How affectionate. How intimate. How maternal.

     You and I might bristle at being called little children, as indeed we might bristle at being called a flock of sheep or a brood of chicks, but I don't think this John means to belittle or patronize anyone. He means to convey how dear they are to him and how profoundly he cares for them. So he talks like their Mom.

     I'm sure that a mother's love was recognized as special in the old days, as it is among us now. But I wonder if in the old days they had the problem we have now, the problem of slipping into sentimentality almost as soon as we say the word mother. I'm worried that by sentimentalizing motherhood we have obscured its genuine power from our sight.

     In truth a mother is a force to be reckoned with. A bumper sticker that reads, "Don't mess with Texas!" is tiresome and silly, if you ask me. But a bumper stick that reads, "Don't mess with Mom!" - now, that would get my respect.

     This has somewhat to do with the image of Mom as a ferocious she-bear with playful little cubs in tow. Mama Bear is not a sentimental image, except in Goldilocks. It's not even pretty. Mama Bear is all teeth and claws and, I have been given to understand, a foul-smelling fur coat and exceedingly bad breath.

     But there's more to the power of motherhood than ferociousness. There's a quality that I don't know quite how to describe. The best word I can think of is "thoroughness." A Mom keeps on mothering till the job is really, truly done. I think this explains a very odd experience I once had with our Board of Trustees. It was some years back, when Bob Cox was chairing our Trustees. Bob brought a unique management style to that job. Whenever there was a project to be done for the maintenance and repair of the church buildings, Bob would appoint not a committee or a task force or a crew or a posse, but a mother.

     He didn't have to explain this to the rest of us, who were mostly guys. We all understood instantly that a project's mother would carry it through ruthlessly and unstoppably from conception to complete fruition, and God help anybody who got in the way.

     I can really enjoy Mother's Day with that kind of motherhood in mind, because it rings true. One of the things I like about it is that it lets mothers be as human as everybody else. No halos, no angel wings, just raw, relentless power. Also, it makes it clear that love isn't something that Mom feels, it's not a sentiment. No, it's something that Mom does. It's action. Little children, let us love in truth and action.

     Let's face it, you can have all sorts of nice feelings about someone and still behave badly to them. I'm sure that was true of those shepherds of Israel that Ezekiel was so exercised about. I'm sure Saddam Hussein has or had excellent feelings about the people of Iraq, but a lot of good that did them.

     And you don't have to be a sociopathic monster to mess up love's action. We all do it. It's so easy that it's inevitable. We mean to do the loving thing, the thing that is best for the person we are trying to love, but we get confused. We end up serving our own interests while sincerely believing that we are serving the needs of others. We lose sight of the fact that the other person's good is different from ours, maybe is even contrary to ours.

     We're like that hired hand, who is not the shepherd and does not own the sheep, who sees the wolf coming and leaves the sheep and runs away, and the wolf snatches and scatters them. Jesus doesn't mean to say the hired hand is evil, just that the hired hand has a limited commitment to caring for others.

     Well, what did we expect? Not even Mom's commitment is necessarily unlimited. Moms are human too. All humans need to draw upon a source beyond their own powers if they're going to love in truth and action.

     I am called a pastor — literally a shepherd. Your pastor. But I am a hired hand too. Your hired hand. You can see both sides of that. They're both real. Which one is more real? It depends. It depends on how willing and able I am, at any particular moment, to distinguish clearly between my interests and your good. If I can't or won't do the work of making that distinction, then I will happily merge the two things and I'll never get around to praying and working for the strength and the will to be a true shepherd in spite of myself.

     And this is what I've been building up to. I have become convinced that constant self-criticism and self-discipline are the basic essentials of true love. Without them, we all become exploiters and users of those around us, even with the very best of intentions and the very purest of feelings. With them, God, who is greater than our hearts, is able to enlarge our hearts.

     The title of "shepherd" as Jesus uses it here is not limited to clergy, any more than the title of "mother" as Bob Cox uses it is limited to actual Moms. The idea is for all of us to love as God loves us. You folks are shepherds as much as I am.

     And Biblical religion, both Jewish and Christian, has been permeated from the very beginnings with the habit of self-criticism. Who were the prophets if not the religion's own built-in critics of itself? What was Jesus if not a practitioner of that same kind of prophecy?

     This is the heyday of self-esteem, so self-criticism has a bad rep, as if it were self-abuse, something unhealthy, something that saps your strength and makes you weak. That's wrong. Self-criticism is nothing more than the suspicion that you could be wrong, especially about yourself. It's humility. It's the key to discerning truth, and it's the door to incredible power and freedom such as only God's love can make possible.

     Amen