Sheep And Shepherd Both: A Homily for the Fourth Sunday of Easter

 

My sheep hear my voice. I know them, and they follow me. I give them eternal life, and they will never perish.

 

Today is called Good Shepherd Sunday in the life of the church.  The readings for the Fourth Sunday of Easter traditionally focus on the “good shepherd” sayings of Jesus, which of course come with a side order of Psalm 23 and passages from the New Testament which emphasis Jesus’ role as saviour and protector of the faithful.

It’s a pleasing work of the Spirit (I prefer that phrase to the word coincidence) that this particular Sunday comes just after word that the Roman Catholic Church has selected a new Pope, Leo XIV, and that this event should come less than a week after we heard in church, on the Third Sunday of Easter, Jesus tell Peter three times to feed and look after his sheep.

We are thus reminded that just as God in Christ protects and cares for the faithful, so God’s church is called to protect and care for those who have no one else to speak for them.  Good Shepherd Sunday ties together the sheep and shepherd imagery in scripture to reassure us that God is not detached but is engaged with us, that God is not absent but is present, invested, and attentive, deeply invested in our loves, and that God knows us intimately, understanding our weakness and committed to our welfare.  If you watched the crowds in St Peter’s Square in Rome rejoicing as the new pope was announced and then seen, I think you were seeing that deep human need to be cared for that is at the heart of faith and indeed of our human identity.

All of the ideas that are central to our faith – nourishment, protection, nurturing, companionship and love– are basic human needs, and if you’ve ever studied Mazlow’s theory of the hierarchy of human needs, they are fundamental to our wellbeing.   Just as sheep need a shepherd to lead them to pasture, water, and to protect them from predators, so do humans need food, shelter from the elements, and perhaps even more importantly, others who will help see to our emotional wellbeing and give us purpose.

We want our basic needs looked after, but as humans, if we are fortunate, we can find our greatest satisfaction in caring for others – ailing partners, children and grandchildren, strangers in distress to who we can be good Samaritans, even and (maybe especially!) our pets.   Collingwood, being a wealthy town, has no shortage of pet stores where you can buy all manner of high end things for your pets.  As you know, Joy and I have two little terriers that rule our lives, and we’re fortunate that we can spend an inordinate amount of money on looking after them.   Their current dogfood has the words “Life Protection Formula” in large letters on the bag.   How satisfying for us that we can buy “Life Protection” to our beloved dogs.

Protection from harm is way up there in the hierarchy of human needs.   We want to protect our pets, our families, our pets, and we spend a lot of money in search of protection.  If you’ve driven by All Saints at night, you’ll see the new lighting that we’ve installed to make the church safer, and the new intercom cameras so Nancy can see who wants into the building.   But of course, the word “protection”, so beloved of advertisers, has its limits.    Your insurance policy that should have protected you against disaster has its loopholes.   Your internet antivirus software may protect you from hackers and identity theft, but who really knows?  And your virtuous lifestyle and diet may not protect you against cancer.   Protection is an attractive idea, but we all know that life is inherently risky, and no one gets out of it alive.   The last time I checked, the mortality rate was hovering at 100%. 

So who protects us?  If you’re a sheep, your best source of protection is your shepherd, someone who will provide for those needs we spoke about – pasture, good water – and who will protect you from predators, both two legged and four legged.   If you’re a sheep, a shepherd will also protect you from yourself.   There’s a saying that the difference between sheep and goats is that goats only think about escaping, and sheep only think about ways to put themselves in fatal situations.

Today, on Good Shepherd Sunday, we are reminded that  Jesus can be our our shepherd if we wish to follow him.   We can follow him for many reasons, to meet our many needs:  to be intimately known and loved in an age where so many feel lonely and anonymous, to know what the good life looks like because of his teaching, and ultimately, I think, because Jesus is life.  The ancient church had a phrase it used in worship, “In the midst of death, we are in life”, and I think the idea there is why Good Shepherd Sunday falls during the Easter season, as we try to figure out how the resurrection of Jesus touches our own lives.

To understand what I mean in saying that we follow Jesus because he is life, let’s conclude these reflections with a brief look at today’s first reading, from Acts.   The apostle Peter has been summoned to a town where one of the leading lights of the local church has passed away.  Tabitha, or Dorcas to use her Greek name (both names mean Gazelle) is the sort of faithful woman that any church would love to have,  someone “devoted to good works and acts of charity”.   But she has died, leaving a huge hole and much grief in the community; the description of widows holding the cloths that Tabitha made for them is a very real detail that tugs at our hearts. 

I don’t think there’s a pastor alive who wouldn’t love to be able to do what Peter does, to heal the sick and bring the dead back to life.    We would certainly be asked to do more hospital visits if that were the case.   But I think we need to resist the temptation to think of this as a fantastic story.   The Book of Acts has its place in scripture because it describes the impact of the resurrection of Jesus Christ, in the way that a seismograph captures aftershocks following an earthquake, or in the way that our eye registers the ripples moving out from a stone thrown into a pond.

Peter was in that room with the disciples when the risen Christ appeared to them and breathed on them, giving them the Holy Spirit.   Acts makes it plain that Peter is drawing on this power, because he puts the widows out of the room and prays before he brings Tabitha back from the dead.    Likewise, in an episode just before this one, he tells a sick man to be healed “in the name of Jesus Christ”.   Acts thus describes a vital power that flows out of Jesus in the immediate aftermath of the resurrection that empowers the apostles and brings enough people to faith to create the church.   Indeed, one could fairly say that the biggest miracle that Acts describes is not healings or resurrections, but the creation of a church that has survived for all these centuries.

Even in the first generations of the church, it became evident that believers would die, either from sickness and age or from persecution.  Our second reading from Revelation describes martyrs. those who “have come out of the great ordeal”, who are now sheltered under the throne of the Lamb who has himself been slaughtered, so that Jesus, himself crucified, becomes the most powerful force in the universe, a force of life and love who is both sacrificed sheep and protecting shepherd.     The message of Revelation is that whatever our fate, our faithful shepherd will never let go of us, never let us be snatched away, either in this life or the next.

When a church is real, and not just a social club or a cultural experience, the living Christ is at the centre of its life.   That living Christ, the voice of Jesus speaking to us in our scriptures and in our hearts, calls us into an eternal life that begins now.  I think Jesus’ promise of “eternal life so that we may never perish” is not just the afterlife, but is also experienced in the present.   We find eternal life in the knowledge that Jesus knows us completely and loves us, but that Jesus also calls us to see others as he sees us, as individuals worthy of respect and dignity.  Jesus calls us to a life of service, in which we realize our satisfaction from recognizing that the needs of others are as great as our own, that we too can be shepherds to those around us.

I started this homily with a mention of the new pontiff, Pope Leo, and I’ll finish with another reference to him.  I read yesterday that the reason Cardinal Prevost chose the name of Leo was in honour of Leo XIII, who was alive when the industrial revolution of 1800s was impacting the lives of millions.   As the new pope said on May 10, the church’s social teaching, which comes from the gospel of Jesus, speaks to “another industrial revolution and to developments in the field of artificial intelligence that pose new challenges for the defence of human dignity, justice, and labour”.    That word “defence” is important because it speaks to the role of the shepherd as a protector, and reminds us that the church’s role is to speak for and protect those who have no voice.

Good Shepherd Sunday reminds us that we, as followers of Jesus, can be sheep when we need to be, but can also be shepherds when we are called to be.

 

Follow Christ and Die?: A Homily for the Third Sunday After Easter

Preached at All Saints, Collingwood, Anglican Diocese of Toronto, 4 May, 2025, the Third Sunday of Easter.  Texts for Easter 3C, Acts 9:1-6 (7-20); Psalm 30; Revelation 5:11-14; John 21:1-19

9 Meanwhile Saul, still breathing threats and murder against the disciples of the Lord, went to the high priest ² and asked him for letters to the synagogues at Damascus, so that if he found any who belonged to the Way, men or women, he might bring them bound to Jerusalem

Before Paul, there was Saul.  Before the proclaimer, there was the persecutor – a man convinced of his own righteousness,  an enforcer willing to use his power cruelly and violently  against those he deemed subversives and criminals.    If Saul existed today, I suspect he’d wear a ski mask, heavy boots, and military style uniform, armed and empowered to kick down doors and make arrests and haul people away in shackles to grim prisons from which they might never return.

We’ve seen people like Saul on the news, he might be the immigration enforcement agent in the US or the riot police in countries like Russia or Georgia, wading into protesters with baton swinging and throwing them into vans.   He’s the kind of thug whose bosses are self-satisfied, smug men and women in high office who boast and smirk at news conferences and say that the undesirables are finally getting what they deserve.

So while there are aspects of this first lesson from Acts that we can relate to, let’s first put it into context text. The Book of Acts moves us forward a decade or so beyond the events of the Jesus’ death and resurrection.    The message of the gospels has spread out of Jerusalem to neighbouring regions, where some Jews in places like Damascus are coming to believe that Jesus is the Messiah.  In Acts, such people are not called Christians (that word hasn’t yet taken shape) but they are called followers of The Way.   

The Jewish religious authorities in Jerusalem are worried that things are spinning out of control.   They begin to arrest and imprison the apostles (Acts 5), and one, Stephen, is executed, which is the first time that we meet Saul (Acts 7.58).  Stephen’s death doesn’t slow down the spread of the gospel, and soon Saul is fully employed as a religious policeman “ravaging the church by entering house after house; dragging off both men and women, he committed them to prison” (Acts 7.8).  At the beginning of our first lesson today, Saul has been sent to Damascus wit orders to inspect the Jewish population there and round up any Jews who are now Jesus followers.

The story of how Saul becomes Paul is one of the most well known stories in the New Testament, so that when someone makes a lifechanging decision, we still sometimes call it a Damascus Moment.  In the church we refer to it as the Conversion of St Paul, an event which is commemorated on 25 January, and while it’s a very important and dramatic story, it’s strange that we only hear it in church as part of our Sunday lectionary cycle once every three years.

When Jesus speaks in this story, he asks a question:  “Saul, Saul, why do you persecute me?” (Acts 9.4).  The pronoun “me” speaks volumes.  The “me” is Jesus identifying with the persecuted church, with the men and women that Saul wanted to arrest and bind and haul away.    Jesus may speak here as a disembodied voice, but he is very much embodied and enfleshed in those powerless ones who suffer because of people like Saul and the authoritarian systems that he works for.    The “me” of Jesus represents God’s compassion for and solidarity with those who have no voice of their own to speak for them. 

Jesus can speak with and for the persecuted and the hunted because he became one with them on the cross.   Since Palm Sunday, when Jesus entered Jerusalem not as a conqueror but on a donkey, we’ve seen this strange and consistent way of how God in Christ turns worldly power on its head and invests ultimate meaning and ultimate hope in an innocent man condemned to death after a show trial.    This same man, exhibited, broken  and shamed on a Roman cross, comes out of the tomb to show that human power is empty and that the imperial apparatus of death is a hollow sham.

Saul’s encounter with Christ takes two forms, the first with the disembodied voice on the Damascus road, and the second with the very real and very embodied Annanias, the first person he sees when he regains his sight.   I say Annanias is Christ because is the “me” that Saul is persecuting, he is a member of the persecuted church that is the body of Christ.    Saul, who would have hauled this man off to prison, is now tended by him, is called “brother” by him, and I think this is the moment when Saul becomes Paul, when he finds his earthly power broken by the love of Christ which has claimed him and remade him.

There are two ways that this story is helpful to us, I think, one being political and one being personal.  Let’s take the political first.

The theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer wrote that “When Christ calls a person, he bids that person come and die”.    This statement sounds like terrible advertising for the church, but it’s actually good news.  When Jesus calls Paul, Saul has to die.     Whereas Saul would have despised and cruelly treated Annaias,  Paul sees him as a brother and an equal, as a vehicle of Christ’s love, and Paul will spend the rest of his life working out how those who follow Christ are one body and one family.  And likewise, something of Ananias had to die.    When Jesus called him to go to Paul and tend him, Ananias didn’t want to go, he was afraid of the man Paul was and probably even hated him, in the way that we fear and hate mortal enemies.   But Jesus wouldn’t let him off the hook, Ananias had to go and minister to this man, and in the process he too had to change, even let his old self die so he could truly become Christ’s disciple.

I think this story from Acts is incredibly relevant at this dark and fearful time that we find ourselves in.   Authoritarian regimes seem to be on the march in many cases.   There’s a famous line from George Orwell’s 1984, where the chief of the secret police says “If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face – for ever”.   Our Christian faith tells us that this is a lie.  The resurrection of Jesus Christ shows that the power of despots is hollow and fleeting.   The secret police and soldiers who oppressed Poland before the fall of communism couldn’t defeat a man called Karol Wojtyla, who we knew as Pope John Paul II.   Dictatorships inevitably collapse because they can't control the place where God lives, the human heart and the human soul.

Dictatorships do end, but often they end in violence and revenge that create new cycles of violence and fear.  Last night I heard a rousing chorus from Les Miz, the one that goes "do you hear the people sing, singing a song of angry men", but the problem with all revolutions is how do you stop people from being angry?   Reconciliation seems like the only way, as we've seen in Northern Ireland and South Africa, but it's a slow process.   Our best hopes for reconciliation, I think, is to let God into our hearts, so that old selves can die and new selves can be born.  I started this homily by imagining Saul as some kind of secret policemen in fatigues and boots.   What if we ended by imaging his fatigues and boots and truncheon abandoned in a trash can, and Paul and Ananias together walking into a new future?

Finally, let’s look at the personal.  You may have had a conversion experience in your life. It might have been a religious transformation or maybe something less spiritual but important, like from smoker to non smoker.  

When we think of conversions I think we tend to think of them as conscious decisions, though in our lesson today  Saul doesn’t really get to make any decisions.   Instead, he is directly affected by the intervention of Jesus, who, despite seeming to be only a disembodied voice and a blinding light, can still change a life, and even change world history.  Not all Christians have a dramatic story to tell like Paul’s, but I’ve known many whose life’s direction changed significantly because they had an experience of Jesus that was very real to them.   

On Friday night we witnessed an ordination service, which can be an extravagant display of conversion, but not everyone needs to become a minister to follow Jesus.  Sometimes Jesus just forces us to recognize we have to see, stand with, and even love those we didn’t previously recognize as people.  If you’ve come to one of our Friendship Dinners, and served and sat with people whom our affluent Collingwood community generally ignores, then you’ve had your eyes opened by Jesus.

Genuinely wanting to know Jesus can be risky.  Jesus knows us better than we know ourselves, he understands what holds us back from being our best selves, the people God always wanted us to be.   He may ask us searching questions, like he asks Peter in the Gospel today, but those questions come from a deep love and can lead us forward.   But be warned that Jesus does want to transform you.  You may be on that road already.  But if you want to be on that road then I encourage you to consider our course starting this spring, which we call a confirmation course but is actually a course about following Jesus so that we can truly live.

A Homily and Backgrounder for the All Saints Special Vestry Meeting

Preached at All Saints Church, Collingwood,  Anglican Diocese of Toronto, on the Second Sunday of Easter, 27 December, 2025.

Readings:  Acts 5:27-32; Psalm  150; Revelation 1:4-8; John 20:19-31

And we are witnesses to these things, and so is the Holy Spirit whom God has given to those who obey him.” Acts 5.32

A witness is someone who can speak to what they know to be true.

Since 1855, in one form or another, All Saints has been a witness to the community of Collingwod.

We’ve been a witness through our physical presence, through our worship, and through our service to the community.

It hasn’t always been easy, especially as the world became more secular starting in the mid 20th century, but like the disciples who say to the sceptical Thomas that “We have seen the Lord”, so our job has always been to say that we are witness to the Lord Jesus whom we believe to be true because of the love, forgiveness, and community that we’ve found.

Part of Christian witness has been the churchyard or cemetery, a place where the dead are remembered by us as they are remembered by God.  The Christian cemetery is also a place where our witness to the resurrection is displayed.  As we heard this morning in Revelation, Jesus is the “firstborn of the dead”, meaning that those who follow him and believe in him will also be awakened to new life.

All Saints was blessed to receive a lot of land for its cemetery from the Crown, back in the days of Queen Victoria.  Given current rates of usage, our Cemetery Board believes that the current space actually in use as a cemetery will be sufficient for 160 years to come.   The remaining thirteen acres of scrub forest is surplus to requirements and could be sold.

All Saints has imagined selling this surplus land for years, and while various ideas were proposed to the Diocese and rejected, finally we have full Diocesan approval to proceed.   The only requirement placed on us by the Diocese was that we consider how some of our share of the proceeds from this sale would go to ministry.  Putting all of our share of the proceeds into our Foundation and living off the interest is not an option.

If you look at the motion that will be voted on today, you will see that there are some ideas given as to what our ministry or witness might look like.  These ideas include a shared ministry position between All Saints and Prince of Peace, Wasaga Beach, enhancement of programs in our Regional Ministry (children’s ministry, food ministry, etc), as well as much needed work on our historic building and rectory.  After all, buildings are witness in themselves if they are well used and busy, they say “God’s Kingdom is lived out here, come and see!”  All these ideas will be carefully considered by our parish leadership in the years to come.

Here is the text of the motion below.  You will notice that the proceedings of the sale will be divided 50/50% between All Saints and the Diocese.  We had asked for a 60/40 split but Synod Council was within its rights to make this decision as per Diocesan policy.  Assuming that the property sells for what we believe it is worth, a 50/50% still gives us somewhere north of two million dollars, which is a very nice position for any parish to be in.

Resolution of the Vestry of All Saints Collingwood Regarding the Disposition/Sale of Property

Whereas the Corporation of All Saints Collingwood has proposed the Severance and Sale of thirteen acres of surplus cemetery property as legally described below;

Whereas, during the Vestry meeting held on Sunday, April 27, 2025, the proposal was duly presented, reviewed, and discussed.

Now, therefore, be it resolved that the Vestry of All Saints, Collingwood, authorizes the Corporation to:

1. Seek all necessary diocesan approvals in accordance with Canon 6, with respect to the sale of property; and further,
2. Retain the services of a licensed realtor to list, market, and sell the property, legally described as PT W1/2 LT 41 CON 7 NOTTAWASAGA AS IN CG3285 & CG10012 EXCEPT PT 1 PL 51R19115 & PT 1 PL 51R32520; COLLINGWOOD, PIN 582990068, located on the northeast portion of the existing cemetery property along Ron Emo Road at a sale price not less than five million dollars; and further,
3. Request that, in consideration of the diocesan Capital Re-Deployment Policy, the Incorporated Synod of the Diocese of Toronto grant permission for the parish to retain 50% of the sale proceeds; and further,
4. Allocate the parish's portion of the sale proceeds as follows:

1. A.Repayment of money leant by the parish to the cemetery board for construction of the new columbarium, purchase of software for cemetery management, and other improvements to the cemetery as agreed on in advance by both the Cemetery Board and the All Saints Corporation;
2. B.Regional Ministry priorities including a shared clergy position between All Saints Collingwood and Prince of Peace Wasaga Beach, as well as improvement of services and programs at our regional churches, as discussed by the Regional Advisory Group and approved in advance by the All Saints Corporation;
3. C.Repairs to the physical plant of All Saints Collingwood including replacement of antiquated heating plant and radiators, parking lot repairs, accessibility improvements, and renovations to the historic rectory including window frames and casings, as required and over a time frame to be determined in advance by the All Saints Corporation; and
4. D.Investment of remaining proceeds in the All Saints Foundation to provide for the long term sustainability of All Saints and of the Regional Ministry of South Georgian Bay.

So assuming that we approve this motion today, we will have accomplished everything that needs to be done on the church side.  It will also allow us to unlock a $75,000 line of credit from the Diocese which will allow us to do the things we need to do on the Town side.  All of the items below that do not yet have a checkmark need to be achieved before we can put up a FOR SALE sign, and each of these items costs money.  We are grateful to Mr John Kirby for all the work he has done to date in getting us to this point.

Our hope is that we can complete all the steps required of us by the Town of Collingwood and list the property for sale by this summer or early fall.

Thank you for reading and hopefully for supporting today’s vestry motion.  We shall keep the parish well advised as we move forward in this process, and may the result allow us to continue our witness here for many decades to come.