Chad's spot for various thoughts, musings, poetry, ideas and whatnot

Thursday, November 27, 2008

My final post in this series will be to look at God and how He relates to our sin through the metaphor of "wanderlust" and Shepherd. In this metaphor there is ample Scriptural evidence that portrays God as a Shepherd that tends to, protects and even rescues members of His flock. The most common examples of these ideas are "I, Myself, will send a shepherd" passage in Ezekiel 34, Jesus' parable of the lost sheep and Jesus looking at the crowd in Mark 6 and seeing them as sheep with out a shepherd and, finally, the "I am the Good Shepherd" identification Jesus makes in John 10.

In this metaphor the sense of what sin is seems to be more implied than stated and I see it a a sort of desire to go off and blaze our own trial without the protection or provision of God. It is the impulse to rely on our own skills, gifts and wisdom in order to "do our own thing". In perhaps Jesus' best known teaching on this, the Parable of the Prodigal Son, the son, who represents us, disowns his father and treats him as if he is dead with nothing left to offer the son. The son takes his inheritance and leaves the protection of the father's lands. He seems to be afflicted with a sort of, as I put it in the opening to this post, wanderlust.

In the same way, I think our sin nature, or nature to follow our own will, drives us away from what God offers in terms of guidance and protection. The Father offers some pretty clear instruction as to pathways that lead to danger and peril for us and still we choose to follow them. It's like we're hiking along and we see a little used trail that leads down into a dangerous box canyon or something. We know that the area is prone to flooding, that the trail might be unstable, that it might lead us down with little chance to climb back out of the canyon but we are still drawn to it. Our curiosity and sense of invulnerability tell us that nothing bad will happen to us even though we see the bleached and dry bones of others who have gone before us.

In this metaphor, God is the Shepherd that can lead us out of the canyon. He will establish a place for us to be safe and guard it with His life in order to keep out the Predator who stalks around it like a wolf or a "roaring lion seeking whom he may devour." In the Ezekiel passage, He is the Shepherd who provides for His sheep when the strong and unjust seek to steal, take and hoard. Branching this out into David's great psalm, He sees that we will want not but will have ample pasture and clean water in order to rest and to be restored.

In seeing sin this way, we can understand that not every tuft of good looking grass is what it seems, especially when it's pretty close to the edge of the path or pasture. Just as importantly, seeing God as a Shepherd changes how we respond to His voice when we have wandered far from the "sheep fold" and have become separated from the herd. If we see Him only as Judge then all we see is judgment and our tendency is to run. But if we understand that He has come to rescue us from the perils we have gotten ourselves into, we will run to the sound of His voice. When we see others as fellow sheep and we understand how sin has drawn them away we are less likely to judge and more likely to understand and help the person hear the voice of the Shepherd. We will realize as a fellow sheep or another Prodigal that we have little ability to lead a person back to the fold. Instead we will understand that by listening for God's voice and recognizing and responding to it positively, others will be drawn to listen for it as well. In this way, we follow St. Seraphim of Sarov's advice when he said, "Save yourself and thousands around you will be saved."

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