Song: Come let us sing of a wonderful love
Come let us sing of a wonderful love (youtube.com)
Prayers:
God
of lost sheep, find us, re-route us.
Quiet
now our wandering minds,
O
God, that we may hear Your voice.
As
we pass places of darkness, seasons of isolation,
periods
of sickness and gloom,
Good
Shepherd-God, You are somehow both with us
and
walking before us.
When
we lose our way, may we experience the thrill,
the
joy of being found.
Brace
our hearts to trust and follow,
To
see, even in troubled times,
that
our cup runneth over.
Anticipating
the good that is in store for us, O God,
And
seeing anew, the blessings of Your love. Amen.
Reading: Isaiah 40: 9-11
Song: I was sinking deep in sin
Love Lifted Me (Re-discover this traditional hymn!) (youtube.com)
Reading: Luke 15: 1-10
Song: In loving kindness Jesus came
Prayers:
Jesus said: ‘I am the good shepherd' and so we pray:
Good Shepherd, watch over us today In all we face and experience.
Never leave us or forsake us and journey with us always.
Good Shepherd, you know us as no-one else knows us.
Guard us and keep us,
As you guard and keep those whom we love.
Good Shepherd, we pray for the sick and the lonely;
For the anxious and the bereaved; for those whose pain is beyond our comprehension.
We stand with them and commend them to your care.
Good Shepherd, we pray for the carers in hospitals and in homes and for all who serve the needs of others.
May the example of living compassion Inspire us in our care for others.
Good Shepherd, you know the depths of our heart and the fears which are ours.
Speak into the depths of our heart and calm our fears.
Good Shepherd, you know us by our name and our identity is not hidden from you.
Gather us to yourself as a shepherd gathers the sheep, that we might know your Name.
Amen.
Song: The Lord’s my shepherd
The Lord's My Shepherd - Stuart Townend (youtube.com)
In his book, “The other side of the dale”, Gervase Phinn tells of the time when, as a
new school inspector he was summoned to the office of the chief education officer. The chief officer wanted him to do “A little job!”. He was asked to go to the meeting of the Feoffees. He didn’t get the circulated notes. Perhaps some of you have been in a similar position?
In the meeting, one of the members used the word “shrievalty”, and went on to bemoan the standards of English in the modern world where people did not know what the word meant.
The inspector left the meeting without having discovered what feoffees were, and failed to discover what was meant by shrievalty.
Definition: a feoffee is a trustee who holds a fief (or "fee"), that is to say an estate in land, for the use of a beneficial owner.
The term is still in use today to mean a trustee invested with a freehold estate held in possession for a purpose, typically a charitable one. E.g. in Rotherham “The Feoffees
Of The Common Lands Of Rotherham”
For the sake of completeness, the definition of Shrievalty:
The office, jurisdiction, or tenure of a sheriff (shrieve (obsolete))
Why have I told you this story? What has it to do with the story of the Good Shepherd?
Perhaps this story helps.
A friend shared a story of a person who attended an Alpha Course for the first time. During a discussion group it was shared that ‘Jesus died to save us from our sins’. The person declared that they had never sinned and therefore had no need of Jesus and left! To that person sin was murder or stealing, they failed to comprehend that sin can be anger, envy or gossiping; seemingly trivial in comparison.
Taken from Contact, the newsletter of the Wesleyan Reform Union.
Some of you may have read a book called “The Screwtape Letters” by C.S. Lewis. It is a fictional correspondence between “Screwtape”, a senior devil, and “Wormwood”, a junior devil, charged with obtaining the soul of a man on earth, referred to as “The Patient”. Throughout the book, God is referred to as “The Enemy”. In one of his letters, Screwtape says this:
“Nothing
is very strong: strong enough to steal away a man’s best years not
in sweet sins but in a dreary flickering of the mind over it knows
not what and knows not why, in the gratification of curiosities so
feeble that the man is only half aware of them, in drumming of
fingers and kicking of heels, in whistling tunes that he does not
like, or in the long, dim labyrinth of reveries that have not even
lust or ambition to give them a relish, but which, once chance
association has started them, the creature is too weak and fuddled to
shake off.
You will say that these are very small sins;
and doubtless, like all young tempters, you are anxious to be able to
report spectacular wickedness. But do remember, the only thing that
matters is the extent to which you separate the man from the Enemy.
It does not matter how small the sins are provided that their
cumulative effect is to edge the man away from the Light and out into
the Nothing. Murder is no better than cards if cards can do the
trick. Indeed the safest road to Hell is the gradual one—the gentle
slope, soft underfoot, without sudden turnings, without milestones,
without signposts,”
The Screwtape Letters
C.S. Lewis
The church has the same effect on many people as the meeting of the Feoffees. They turn up without knowing what they are coming to, or with a preconception that is not met. They are immediately confronted with words that they do not understand, or that have not been explained properly.
Our visitor to the Alpha course had attended a meeting, but was put off by a word that was used before it was explained. I would be prepared to bet that no-one had explained what “saved” meant either.
What was the purpose of parables? Jesus told many stories. What was behind them?
All of them were about things that his audience would be familiar with. He would have been fairly sure of the response from his listeners. Can we be as sure?
Gervase Phinn recounts telling this story to a school assembly. He was certain that they would get the point, and finished the story by asking why the shepherd would take such a lot of trouble for the one missing sheep. Eventually, on of the pupils responded with “ ‘Appen it were t’tup.” (a tup is the northern England word for a ram or male sheep)
We tell this story, as if it needs no explanation, but most of our listeners have no experience of shepherding. It is not a part of their culture.
The people of Jesu’s time were also familiar with idea of God as their shepherd, and that their leaders were supposed to guide them in the right way as a shepherd. These ideas are not part of modern society. Can you imagine any of the leaders of the political parties in your country presenting the idea that they are shepherds of the people who will lead them in the correct way, and have their best interests at heart?
When we are using the parables of Jesus, we need to be aware of the cultural differences between the time when they were told, and now. The truth is unchanged, but we need to make sure that the hearers understand what the story is really about. Otherwise, people might get the idea that God regards us a sheep, and in the modern society, sheep are not animals that invite flattering comparison. Let us give people the right understanding by being careful with our words and images.
Song: There were ninety and nine that safely lay
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