Ash Wednesday 2022: A Good Shepherd Who Provides

For our ecumenical midweek Lenten series this year in Greene, we are using the series “Shepherd Me, O God” from Luther Seminary’s Rolf Jacobson and Church Anew.

For Ash Wednesday, the first week of this series, I’ve chosen the texts Ezekiel 34:1-5, 11-16; John 10:11-15, and of course, Psalm 23. No audio or video recording for this midweek series as Pastor Joan Thomas from the UMC-Presbyterian-Brethren Yoke of Greene and I will be alternating weeks. 

Grace to you and peace from God our Father and our Good Shepherd, Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen

How many of you have a pet? How many of you are responsible for feeding your pet, for taking care of it?

One of my first chores as a kid was to feed our dog every night. He was an outside farm dog, so feeding him meant going out to the kennel and getting food and sometimes it was dark, or cold in the winter, but it was my job to take care of him. It was my responsibility, because he couldn’t feed himself. In fact, feeding the dog is the first chore Micah has learned to help with at home too. He can’t reach into the bag to scoop the food, but he loves dumping into the dog bowl.

Having a pet means taking on responsibility, right? Even more so for farmers. Growing up with horses, we always went out to feed before breakfast. They eat first. Being a farmer means you’re responsible for your animals. They depend on you.

This year for our midweek Lent worship services, Pastor Joan and I are going to be focusing on Psalm 23, probably the most well-know Psalm in the Bible, talking about “The Lord is my shepherd.”

This Psalm was probably written by King David, and before he became king, David himself was a shepherd—someone who takes care of sheep. His image of God is that God is our shepherd, the one who takes care of us. Which means, of course, that we are the sheep. God is protecting us, providing for us, leading us. It’s a beautiful image.

Tonight, we’re looking especially at the first few lines of the Psalm, and thinking about how God is a shepherd who provides for us. This series on Psalm 23 is based on work from Luther Seminary professor Rolf Jacobsen, and he talks about how in the Bible, especially in the Old Testament, shepherd is a common metaphor for king.

Like shepherds, kings are the ones in charge, and everyone else is supposed to follow where they lead. Sometimes, that’s a good thing. Strong leadership can be good, right? A king—a leader of a nation—can provide direction for a country, get things done. Strong kings are remembered in history for the battles they won, for the ways they grew their nations, protected their people.

But of course, having a king brings problems too. There’s a great passage in 1 Samuel 8 where the people of Israel have been asking God for a king, because they’ve noticed all the other countries around them have kings, and they just have judges, people who step up to lead during a crisis, but that doesn’t seem as good as having a king. They want a king, someone to be in charge and lead them all the time. So they go to the prophet Samuel, and say, “Tell God we’d like a king.”

Samuel responds, “Slow down a bit. A king will demand tribute. He’ll take your sons and put them in the army, he’ll demand lots of taxes, he’ll see you as subjects, as servants to whatever his will is.”

But the people say, “No, we are determined to have a king over us, so we can be like the other nations and our king will govern us and go fight our battles.”

So God tells Samuel, “Ok, give them a king.” And Samuel appoints a king named Saul, and it goes pretty much as expected. The king raises taxes, drafts people into the army, and the people eventually say, “No, we don’t want a king like that!”

Samuel anoints a new king for them, King David, and lots of what he does is great, but then as time passes and David’s royal line continues, there are good kings and there are bad kings. The good kings provide leadership and protection for the people, where the bad kings are more interested in how they can exploit the people for their own benefit, more interested in the perks of ruling than the responsibilities.

So with all that in mind, especially the connection between kings and shepherds, look again at our first readings.

God tells the prophet Ezekiel, “Mortal, prophesy against the shepherds of Israel: prophesy, and say to them—to the shepherds: Thus says the Lord God: Ah, you shepherds of Israel who have been feeding yourselves! Should not shepherds feed the sheep?”

Then there’s a list of all the ways the kings aren’t living up to their role as shepherds, how they’re exploiting their subjects instead of serving them. And so, God finally says, “I myself will search for their sheep. I will be their shepherd.”

The promise is that God’s going to personally step in, personally take responsibility for caring for God’s people, strengthening the weak, binding up the injured, feeding them with justice.

A few centuries later, Jesus fulfills the prophecy. As Kale read, Jesus says, “I am the good shepherd.” And what makes a good shepherd? Well, “The good shepherd lays down his life for the sheep….the good shepherd knows his own sheep.” Jesus lays down his life for the sheep, for us. That’s the measure of Jesus’ love: His willingness to sacrifice his own life.

The invitation of Psalm 23 is to accept that the Lord is our shepherd, and to trust and be willing to follow where the shepherd leads. And that can be challenging. We don’t always want to be sheep! Lying down in green pastures sounds nice, except for all those times we feel more like trotting down a road. Even when God is leading us to places of peace and rest, so often we resist and try to go our own way. We listen to the world telling us we know better than God.

Our world is all about telling us what we lack, how we need better stuff, a better car, a more fit body, a new phone; there’s never enough. In this Psalm, we are invited to have faith that the good shepherd knows what the sheep need, to trust God to provide all we need, our daily bread. God provides enough to not leave us wanting.

Accepting the Lord is our shepherd means accepting we’re not in control. It’s accepting God as our king, and admitting we’re not the ones in charge. I think that’s really the message of Ash Wednesday. Acknowledging the reality of death, receiving the proclamation that we are made from dust and we shall return to dust, that’s the ultimate confession that we’re not in charge.

I heard an interview with a Ukrainian college student yesterday, and she talked about how just a week ago, she’d been in a trendy coffee shop laughing with friends, and now days later she’s spending nights in a bomb shelter, and she realized, “I could be dead.” She realized how little control she has, how fragile her life is.

Ash Wednesday is about being honest: Honest with ourselves about our mortality, and with God about our sinfulness and our need for grace. It’s a reminder of the fragility of our existence. Our lives will come to an end. Even without wars or pandemics or accidents, our bodies will eventually wear out. We can’t make ourselves live forever.

We need a shepherd to guide us. We need Jesus to lay down his life for us. We need the grace and forgiveness of the God who breathed life into dust at creation to give us the gift of eternal life.

When you receive ashes tonight, they’ll be traced on your head in the shape of a cross, the sign given to you at baptism. The sign of the cross marks us as belonging to Christ, sheep of the Good Shepherd’s flock. In your mortality, in your dustiness, you have been claimed by God, redeemed by the Good Shepherd who cares for you and provides for you, the One who gives you life.
Amen