Sermon for the 4th Sunday of Easter, April 11th

Are you familiar with the term ‘glamping’?

Perhaps you’re not, but it’s simply the putting together of two words, glamour and camping, to make one word, ‘glamping’.

Glamour and camping. For me if you put the words glamour and camping together you come out with something that sounds a lot like ‘hotel’, but for other people like Mrs Lloyd to whom the thrill of the outdoors is calling, but the practicalities of living in a tent are not, ‘glamping’ offers a half-way house. You can wake up to sounds of the dawn chorus, but avoid the sound of other people in the toilet block.

If you want to glamp the possibilities are endless. You can stay in a ready made ‘bell tent’, complete with awning and fire-pit. You can stay on a landscaped yurt retreat with all meals included. You can have a fixed camping pod with composting toilet. Or, and this option is the most expensive so far that I have come across, or you can stay in the modern take on a shepherd’s hut. Fold down double bed, solar powered television, cast-iron fireplace, these options make the modern glampers’ shepherd’s hut an exclusive place to stay. David Cameron bought one to write his memoirs in.

My point is, these things called shepherd’s huts are a long way away from shepherding. I know practically nothing about modern animal husbandry, but what I do know is that the more closely you have to care for someone or something, the less glamourous it becomes. When it’s lambing season and the ewes are struggling and it’s raining- that’s when shepherding today is probably at its least glamorous. There is a big gap between the glamping vision of it, all brass fittings and hot cocoa and the reality of getting on a quad bike at 5am to bring a sheep in.

Although glamping was not invented, the same gulf between expectation and reality is at play in our Gospel reading this morning.

Jesus is in the Temple, and the people questioning him want to nail down just who they’re talking to, once and for all. ‘How long will you keep us in suspense, they ask? Are you the Messiah or aren’t you?’

This question is a big one. The Messiah, translated in the Greek as Christos, Christ, means ‘the anointed one’, the kingly one, the new version of King David that God chooses to free his people from oppression and slavery. And Jesus says in answer that a shepherd is what God is and that that is what he is too.

Now this idea isn’t new. The people to whom Jesus was speaking knew that very often in scripture God was described as a shepherd:

Psalm 80: ‘Hear O thou shepherd of Israel, thou that leadest Joseph like a sheep.’

Psalm 23: ‘The Lord is my shepherd, I’ll not want’.

King David is known as the shepherd of his people, he was literally called from tending his father’s flocks to defeat Goliath and then be King after Saul. So Jesus in identifying himself as shepherd, blends these themes together, of God and David, Lord and King, and says that that is what they see before them.

Was it any easier to be a shepherd 2000 years ago? No, very much not. In fact it was such hard work that most of the time people who owned sheep employed other people to be shepherds because the places where there was enough pasture were a long way from the comforts of civilisation.

But perhaps the people questioning Jesus had forgotten what shepherding actually looked like.

Are you the Messiah, they ask? Because you don’t much look like one. There was no space in their idea of a Messiah for someone who looked and smelt like Jesus, making the claims he makes; claims that God was not interested in glamping with his people but shepherding them. Real, difficult, painful, tiring shepherding for the sake of a flock that was just as hard to manage as any on the hills outside Jerusalem.

‘I am the Good Shepherd, Jesus said, ‘who lays down his life for his sheep.’ My sheep hear my voice, I know them and they follow me.’

And immediately after he has finished saying these things they take up stones to kill him. This version of God is blasphemous, too dirty, too ordinary, too shepherd-like, to be true. The man must be stopped. And Jesus is stopped, as we know, via the horror of the cross.

As his followers will come to understand, Jesus is making both a statement and a prophecy here- he is the good shepherd and he will lay down his life for his sheep. A prophecy and a promise, that through his death he opens the gate to the sheepfold, to the gift of eternal life.

This is the version of God that we are here to worship today.

This is the version of God that we need. Not a glamping God who achieves precisely nothing, but a real-life shepherd who goes to the places in us that are dark and dirty and sinful. Goes to these places, and doesn’t turn away with disgust but offers to free us from them with rejoicing. We are not held by these things because Jesus the good shepherd is not held by them.

This Easter and always may we hear his voice, ask his forgiveness, and follow him home.

Illustration: Christ the Good Shepherd, Mosaic, Early Byzantine (c. 330–750), Mausoleum of Galla Placidia, Ravenna, Italy.