This is a sermon that I preached on Sunday, 04/28/26, at Berkeley Friends Church. The scripture reading for this sermon was:
Ezekiel 34:1-16; John 10:1-16.
A very long time ago, God called Abraham. God appeared to him and told him that he would be blessed with a family, even though he and his wife Sarah were very old and beyond having children. Nevertheless, God told Abraham that his offspring would become a people more numerous than all the stars in the sky and that his offspring would be a blessing for all the nations on the earth.
Abraham lived in a world that was utterly shattered. People worshipped all sorts of gods: money, power, fertility, nations. Not so different from today. God chose Abraham to be the point of origin for gathering a people who would follow the one true God, the creator of heaven and earth, rather than all these false gods of human selfishness and empire and violence and greed.
But as we know – because we are still in the midst of this journey – the process of gathering and leading this new people would be long, circuitous, and challenging.
Abraham had a son named Isaac, and Isaac had a son named Jacob. And Jacob had a bunch of kids and those kids all ended down in Egypt. Over a period of 400 years, the children of Jacob multiplied and became a whole ethnic group. Now they were not just a family; they had become twelve whole tribes. They became an ethnic group, a nation in the midst of Egypt. While at first their relationship with the Egyptians was friendly, over time it became more fraught. The pharaohs began to see the children of Jacob as a threat, a competing ethnic group among the Egyptians.
The children of Jacob, the people of Israel, became slaves in Egypt. They bore oppression and injustice for hundreds of years. And in the book of Exodus, we read that God heard the cries of his people. He responded by calling Moses to be his voice, his prophet, to tell Pharaoh to let his people go.
God stretched out his mighty hand and liberated his people from bondage in Egypt. He led them through the Red Sea out into the desert of Sinai. Once they were out there, God guided them through the wilderness. By day, God appeared to them as a pillar of smoke, and as a pillar of fire by night. When the pillar stayed in one place, the people of Israel camped there. When the pillar began to move ahead of them, they followed. The pillar of fire and smoke went ahead of the people whenever they were to move.
The people of Israel had a lot of adventures out in the desert. They ended up spending 40 years there being tested and prepared for their entry into the land that God had prepared for them. After they finally entered that land, God continued to have this same sort of relationship with the people. God spoke to them through prophets and through ad hoc leaders known as judges, who were sort of like military prophets. God led them by going out ahead of them and speaking to them in the tent of meeting, also known as the Tabernacle – a mobile tent that could move around wherever God wanted it to go so that people could follow.
Over time, a couple of things happened that God did not want, but that God did eventually allow. First, the people of Israel decided that they wanted a king. They were not content with having prophets who spoke the will of God to the people. They wanted a ruler like the kings of the other nations surrounding them, one who would lead their people into battle and fight their wars for them.
Eventually one of those kings, Solomon, built a temple where the Ark of the Covenant and all the holy relics that had previously resided in the Tabernacle would now reside in a central location in a fixed building in the city of Jerusalem. God had lived in the mobile Tabernacle, but from now on he would live at a fixed address. It seemed like God’s wandering days were over.
This situation went on for a long time with several interruptions. The Temple was destroyed by the Babylonians and many of the elite Israelites were carried off into captivity before eventually some of them were able to come back and re-establish the Temple.
Israel had a succession of kings, at first of a united kingdom and then later of two separate kingdoms: a kingdom of Israel and a kingdom of Judah that each had their own kings. And while there were some relatively good kings, many of them were awful. They oppressed the people and killed the prophets. This was the normal state of affairs.
Kings became exactly what God predicted they would be: a burden upon the people. They took the best of their produce and appropriated it for themselves. They took the young women to serve in their harems and household staff. They conscripted their young men to serve in the military, to die for them in wars.
By the time of Jesus, the Romans had completely extinguished independent rulership in Judah. But there was still a temple that got rebuilt by the corrupt Roman vassal, the so-called King Herod the Great. So the people of Israel had a restored Temple, but they were still a client state of Rome. This situation was intolerable for most Jews in Roman Palestine. They wanted their freedom. They wanted their own state. They wanted to have their own king. They wanted a king after the line of David, not this corrupt Herodian dictatorship under the Romans.
The expectation of many people in Israel was that God was going to send a new king in the image of David to restore the kingdom of Israel, free it from the domination of the Romans, and glorify the temple in Jerusalem. Having a restored kingdom of Israel would be the fulfillment of what God intended to do under King David. Jerusalem and the Temple would become the centerpiece of God’s work in the world.
In our reading this morning from John 10, Jesus steps into this story of divine kingship and God’s plan of restoration. Jesus describes himself as the good shepherd who comes in through the gate and leads the sheep out of the fold. He contrasts himself to robbers and bandits who do not enter through the gate, but jump the fence and steal the sheep and abuse them for their own ends. Jesus says he is not only the shepherd, but he is the gate, and that anyone who wants to enter in to the sheep must enter through him.
For most of us today, this image of a shepherd is a very abstract one. Most of us do not know any real-life shepherds, and the image of shepherd is not one that we have in our political vocabulary. It is not a metaphor that we use for our political leaders typically, at least in this country. But for the people who originally heard Jesus say these things, Jesus was speaking in very political terms that his hearers would have recognized immediately. The shepherds of the people were the kings and the rulers. They were the chief leaders who had a responsibility to care for the whole community.
When Jesus is talking about thieves and robbers breaking into the sheepfold and abusing the sheep, he is pointing directly back to Ezekiel 34, when God describes the rulers of the people – the kings and the elites and the religious leaders – who consume and scatter the sheep rather than caring for them.
If you want to understand what Jesus is doing here in John 10, you must not miss Ezekiel 34. There is a direct line between the two. Ezekiel 34 is a passage of Messianic expectation. It asserts that God will restore the kingship of David and bring about a utopia – a kingdom of God in which Israel will be restored and the kingdom of Israel will finally be a blessing to the nations.
Jesus is God’s great surprise. Jesus is the Messiah, but he is very different from what the people expected him to be. He is so different from David that both Mark and John explicitly distance him from the Davidic model. They go to great lengths to point out that he is a different kind of king than the ones that Israel had experienced before.
We shouldn’t have been surprised, though. God was clear about what he wanted from early on. When God called Abraham, he sent Abraham to be a blessing. When God multiplied Abraham’s descendants in Egypt and then brought them out and liberated them, he led them out by going first. He cared for them and taught them and sent them into the world to become a blessing.
When God finally sent Jesus as his promised Messiah to inaugurate the Kingdom of God, he did not do so by re-establishing a Davidic kingship in Jerusalem; he did not do so by confirming the Temple model of a fixed address for God. Instead, he came as a shepherd leading out his sheep. He went before them just as he did in the pillar of fire and smoke in the wilderness. He led them out of the world as they knew it, and into something new and dynamic and surprising.
In spite of all our hindsight, in spite of having both the Old and New Testament scriptures, we continue to be surprised by what God is doing. It continues to shock us that God is not creating a nation in the way that the world understands it. God is not about just setting up an alternative domination system of kings and a fixed address and a centralized religious authority. We continue to be surprised by the way that Jesus is going ahead of us in a pillar of cloud and fire to lead us. We continue to struggle with God’s call – not to settle, but to follow and respond to the voice of the shepherd who leads us.
This is true for us today, and it’s been true for our spiritual ancestors. The church has repeatedly fallen into the same sorts of centralizing, top-down, fixed-address patterns after the way of David and the Temple in Jerusalem.
The early church, even before Constantine, quickly got obsessed with which bishops had what authority and which rituals were really salvific and which rules really had to be followed. In the post-Constantinian period, the empire adopted Christianity as the official state religion. The church embraced this with relief. Finally, we had a king to rule over us. Finally, we could settle.
Christianity was transformed. What was once a network of small groups meeting in homes, back rooms, and cemeteries had become the religion of the empire. Soon, there were thousands of people gathering in brightly lit basilicas. Communion meals once held in homes were transformed into public spectacles. Home cooked meals were replaced by mass distribution of wafers and wine.
The charismatic ministry of the early apostles had relied completely on the Holy Spirit and on the conviction that came with it. Over time, this inward authority was transformed into a fixed institutional hierarchy that depended on social power and imperial politics, the sword.
Since this time, there have been many other movements of the Holy Spirit, which have heard the voice of the shepherd and sought to follow him wherever he goes. This was the origin of the Quaker movement. The early Quakers found themselves in the middle of an institutional fight with a centralizing Church of England that wanted to bring all English people into a one church under one king. This was an institution that imposed heavy taxes on the people to support an elite clergy. It was a system that put the king on top of the church as the temporal ruler of the church, replacing Christ the head. This was a system that upheld arbitrary social distinctions and class hierarchy, to make sure that the wealthy and socially important people got the respect they were due and that the poor and uneducated were kept in their place.
In this context, the early Quakers found themselves being called by the Holy Spirit out into the desert places. They were hearing the voice of the shepherd, calling them out of the sheepfold of the institutional church of their day, and into a new adventure that would involve following Jesus dynamically in context in their own historical moment. Rather than simply accepting the forms they had been handed, they waited on Jesus to teach them. Rather than embracing the submission that was demanded of them by corrupt shepherds who were devouring the sheep and abusing the flock, they submitted themselves to one another as they were guided by the Holy Spirit.
This movement had an enormous impact. It called ordinary men and women throughout British and American colonial society out of these authoritarian and manipulative institutions, and into a closer walk with Jesus.
But time moved on. One generation came, and another went. Quakerism shifted from being a movement of the Holy Spirit and dynamic listening to the voice of the shepherd. Increasingly, it became an institution as manicured and ordered and hemmed in as the sheepfolds of the Church of England, or the basilicas of the early church, or the temple-king structure of Israel.
This way and truth and life that we are discovering in Jesus is one in which the journey never ends. We do not get to settle at a fixed address. We do not get to build a city. Jesus continues to walk ahead of us as a pillar of fire and smoke. The early Quaker movement was something that God did; it was a movement toward Jesus, following the shepherd. It was never meant to become a sect, gathered around books and meetinghouses, and Quaker organizations, and nice-sounding principles.
We are called to be a people of the Tabernacle, not the Temple. We are called to be led by king Jesus, not king David. The Good Shepherd is available to us. He is here; we don’t need anything else. The path of discipleship is one of always listening for his voice and together following him where he is leading us. Moment by moment, year by year, decade by decade, generation by generation, we have to continue to listen and to follow. Any time we think we can settle down and rest on our laurels, we have gotten lost.
This is the great adventure of true Christianity, and it was the genius of the early Quaker movement. This is what saves us from both the authoritarianism of institutions and leaders, and also the fundamentalism of books and tradition. We are here to follow Jesus and to respond to his voice. It’s that simple, and it’s that challenging.
Just as God led the people of Israel out into the wilderness to form them into a people who could follow him and respond to his voice; just as Jesus called his early disciples and taught them to follow him as he led the way; just as the early Quakers broke with the hierarchies and traditions that were oppressing the people and chose instead to follow the good shepherd where he was calling them, we today must re-dedicate ourselves to hearing and responding to that voice.
He will lead us out from the sheepfold of institutional religion and dogmatism and authority structures and into a dynamic, personal and community relationship with Jesus. He will take us where he wants to go. He will teach us what we need to learn. He will deploy us to bless the world. This is what he promised Abraham, and this is what he has in store for us.
We’re already hearing this call in our community. We are listening in prayer for how Jesus wants us to move. Berkeley Friends Church is transforming into a community that is more able to hear the voice of the Shepherd and respond. Our pastors, elders, and the Day One Taskforce are actively working on strategies to deepen our community life, our depth of prayer, and our faithfulness in action, so that our community continues to be a blessing to the world around us. This process of listening means holding our inherited forms and institutions lightly, while deepening our practice of discernment – listening and responding to where Jesus wants to take us.
That may mean that we look like weirdos to people in this world. Other Quakers might say we are not being “Quakerly” enough. Other Christians might accuse us of abandoning key rituals and church structures. And even if no one else objects, we will be challenged. We will have to change our lives in ways that make us uncomfortable. Because life with Jesus is on the move.
But the promise of Jesus is that he will never forsake us. He will always be present to guide and lead us. Not one of us whom God has given into his hand will be lost. He will guard us. He will lead us. He will gather us so that we can be his people, and he can be our teacher, our friend, our Lord.
In the words of the angel to the women who found the empty tomb in the gospel of Mark: Do not be afraid. Jesus is risen. He has gone ahead of you to Galilee – back to the place where it all began.
Follow him.