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Have you ever run away from home?

I have. Many times when I was a kid. Upset about some situation, I announced to my mother that I was running away. And with that announcement, I was out the door and down the street, running away. Forever. Or until suppertime…whichever came first.

Running away. Most kids do at one time or another. Some, like me, just down the street in a childish temper tantrum. Others in more serious situations and with far graver consequences – teenagers running off to big cities where they are often preyed upon by people who exploit and sometimes destroy them.

Running away.

And its not just kids who run away.

When I was a child, I was such a rebellious, stubborn, have-it-my-own-way-or-have-it-no-way-at-all kind of little brat that my mother once actually ran away from home!

Seriously!

I couldn’t believe my eyes! It was one of those moments when I was doing my best to not do what my mother wanted me to do. And I had learned over the years that the best defense is a good offense. So I responded to my mother’s requests and pleadings by hollering and screaming and knocking things over – trying to make her the villain – and letting my mother know in no uncertain terms there was going to be hell to pay if she didn’t let me get my way.

That’s when she went into her bedroom, closed the door, and came out a few minutes later holding a suitcase.

“Goodbye,” my mother said, “its been nice knowin’ ya. Have a nice life.”

 And with that, she went out the door.

Well, I was stunned. What did she think she was doing? After all, I was the one who was supposed to run away when things didn’t go my way.

Mothers don’t run away!

 But there she went – walking with her suitcase up Cataumet Street toward Burncoat to catch a bus.

My older sister Karen joined me in the doorway as we watched my mother fade into the distance.

“Nice play, Shakespeare!” Karen muttered.

There was an empty, hollow feeling in my stomach. How was I going to explain this to my father?

All at once, I burst out the door, jumped down the front steps, and started running at full speed, screaming as loud as I could, “MA! MA! Don’t run away!”

 I caught up to her about a block short of the bus stop.

“Ma, please! Stop! Don’t go!”

 She kept right on walking.

“Ma! You can’t go. Please! I’ll do whatever you want me to do! Honest! I’ll be a good boy from now on.”

 My mother slowed her pace, but kept moving ahead.

“Oh? You’re prepared to listen to me?”

 “Yes, Ma, yes, I’ll listen to you!”

 “And you’ll do what I say?”

 “I will! I really will!”

“No more temper tantrums?”

 “Never, never, never again,” I swore.

“Promise?” she asked, finally stopping and looking me square in the eye.

“Promise,” I solemnly vowed.

“Then you can carry my suitcase back to the house,” said my mother.

And I did.

Not realizing, of course, that it was empty.

Running away.

At first glance our Gospel lesson from John 10 may seem to be all about sheep and shepherds and agricultural kinds of things most of us know nothing about. But closer examination reveals that this passage is really about something we know a lot about.

Running away.

Jesus says he is the good shepherd and what makes a shepherd good is that he sticks up for the sheep when danger comes, and even lays down his life for them if necessary. A GOOD shepherd doesn’t run away when danger or difficulty come. And from a sheep’s point of view, that’s a GOOD shepherd.

On the other hand, someone who is merely a hired hand runs away at the first sign of trouble.

I personally know this to be true in another context. When I was in seminary, I worked as a credit supervisor at a large electronics store in a mall. One of my responsibilities was to pick up cash from the various cash registers and transport the money to a secure room way down in the bowels of the store. There it was counted and packaged, and then my job was to put these packages of cash into a shopping basket and deliver them out to the Brinks truck parked outside. Well, this was not such a big deal until the Christmas season rolled around when it would not be unusual to be pushing a couple hundred thousand dollars in cash through the store – in a shopping basket.

And what made it even worse was that they gave me a 195-year old, 350-pound mall cop with pizza sauce stains on his tie as an escort! It was like having a big sign held up saying, “Come and take the money!” So I made a contingency plan. If we were robbed, I knew what I was going to do! I was going to run! And I knew I didn’t have to run very fast. All I had to do was outrun  him!! And they could have the money.

Because, you see, it wasn’t MINE. Hired hands run away at the first sign of danger because they have no personal stake in what they are responsible for.

The GOOD shepherd sticks up for the sheep and even lays down his life for them. The hired hand just abandons them, and runs away.

And Jesus tells this story to teach us a couple of important lessons.

First of all, about his relationship with YOU!

“I am the good shepherd,” he says. “The good shepherd doesn’t run away when you mess up – doesn’t scoot out the door when life throws problems your way – sticks up for you even when no one else will. The good shepherd lays down his life for YOU.”

Many of us have a very shallow view of what the cross means. We see Jesus’ death on the cross in terms of Jesus taking our sins upon himself – Jesus providing the sacrifice needed for forgiveness and salvation. And that is definitely part of what the cross means.

But here in John 10, Jesus takes us even deeper. Here, Jesus shows us that the cross means that he has a personal stake in you – that he is sticking up for you – standing by you like a good shepherd stands by his sheep – and that he will never abandon you and run away.

The death of Jesus on the cross is the fulfillment of what he said the good shepherd does for his sheep. Jesus is no hired hand who runs away in the face of your sin, your doubt, your problems, your difficulties, even your unfaithfulness.

Jesus will stick by you NO MATTER WHAT!

I love how the psalmist puts it in Psalm 139.

“Where shall I flee and get away from you, God? If I fly up to the heavens, you are there! If I go down and hide myself in Sheol, you are THERE! You have me hemmed in on all sides! I cannot get away from you!”

You should never look at a cross on the top of a church, or at the front of a sanctuary, or in a piece of jewelry without remembering that the cross means there is a GOOD shepherd who is sticking up for you – ready to fight for you – even to die for you.

And if you are going through one of those difficult times of life right now, you need to know that Christ has not abandoned you. Take hold of the promise that Christ is on your side – sticking up for you even when no one else will – protecting you even when no one else can – defending you even when all others have run away. Call upon the Lord. He is a good shepherd to you!

But not only you.

In verse 16, Jesus says, “I have other sheep that are not of this sheep pen. I must bring them also.”

Who do you think Jesus was talking about?

The disciples to whom he was speaking were all Jews. They were from the sheep pen of Israel. But Jesus said he has sheep of other folds.

Do you remember how, at his birth, there were magi from the East? Persians, probably, who practiced a religion much different than that of the Jews. During his ministry years, there were Roman soldiers, Samaritan women, and many others from outside the house of Israel who Jesus embraced and loved as his own.

“I have other sheep that are not of this sheep pen.”

I think Jesus was talking about all people everywhere – no matter their nationality, no matter their religion, no matter their faith or lack of faith. At the very center of Christianity is the declaration that the Good Shepherd gave his life for the WORLD.

You should never look at a cross without remembering that Jesus has a personal stake in the children of Israel and Gaza, the women of Afghanistan, the men of Mexico, the families of Nigeria, the communities of Appalachia, the runaway teenagers in New York City.

And you should never look at another person of some other religion, or culture, or ethnicity, or life experience without seeing the Good Shepherd beside them, sticking up for them, defending them, advocating for them, and doing everything he can to save them from danger and to lead them to green pastures where life is whole and good and they know him face-to-face.

Christ has a stake in you and others!

And this first lesson leads us to a second that comes in the form of a question to the Church.

Are we a good shepherd, or just another hired hand?

Throughout history, the Christian Church has been pretty good at running away.

In 1946 – after the second World War – a German Lutheran pastor by the name of Martin Niemoller reflected upon how the Church of his day – and he himself – abandoned people in the face of the Nazis. He wrote a now-famous poem that goes like this:

First, they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out,

because I was not a socialist.

Then they came for the trade unionists, and I did not speak out,

because I was not a trade unionist.

Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out,

because I was not a Jew.

Then they came for me,

and there was no one left

to speak for me.

If you travel to Germany today and visit the Dachau concentration camp, you can actually see the cell in which Martin Niemoller was imprisoned.

The Church is pretty adept at running away from people when things get rough – when people doubt, when people practice lifestyles we don’t agree with or understand, when people make mistakes that throw their lives into disarray, when people think differently than we do. We can call that “running away” by many names – the Crusades, the Inquisition, the Salem Witch Trials, the Final Solution, Slavery, Fundamentalism, Doctrinal Purity…

But no matter what kind of fancy name we give it, running away is running away, and over the years, the Church has been very good at it. It happens whenever we lose sight of the great spiritual truth that in Christ others are our brothers and sisters – they belong to us – and we have a stake in them.

And yet, from time to time, we see churches and individual Christians who look an awful lot like the GOOD shepherd. The families who took in Jews to save them from the holocaust – Christians who walked little black children to school in the early days of integration – Christians who opened clinics to care for AIDS patients when no one else would – Christians who kept an eye out for that kid at school no one else liked and made an effort to become friends – Christians who fought off efforts to suppress free thought and expression – Christians who reached out to poor people and hungry people and gave them a hand up and not a hand out.

Oh, sometimes the Church shines as it takes a stake in the lives of others and risks itself for the sake of the world. And when that happens, we see the beauty of God’s amazing grace lived out for all to see and life is transformed.

I don’t know how you see it, but it seems to me that what the world truly needs today are more good shepherds and fewer hired hands.

What person in your life could really use a good shepherd these days? Is there someone who comes to mind?

What group of people really needs someone to stand with them?

Here, in the Great 50 Days of Easter, Jesus comes to us once again and calls us to do something beautifully life-giving:

Go and be good shepherds to the people God loves and for whom Christ has laid down his life.