The Shepherd of Our Soul

Today is the fourth Sunday of Easter. Because children cannot come to church, we sent a small gift to each family by courier this Children's Sunday.

I don't know if your children received a gift as you worship at home. If your children have not received it yet, please contact the church office. We have prepared a gift for all children.

 In addition, this Sunday is traditionally celebrated as Good Shepherd Sunday. In the Bible, there are a lot of accounts about shepherds, so it is traditionally regarded as the Good Shepherd Sunday. The fact that God is a good shepherd was so familiar to me in the Old Testament. Psalm 23 clearly portrays God's image as a good shepherd. It is a psalm that is a great comfort to us.

 We also know in the New Testament that Jesus is the Good Shepherd, Jesus himself said that and the parables of the sheep and the shepherd tell us that. 

Many paintings, many songs contain the content that God is our good shepherd and Jesus is our good shepherd, and all the brothers and sisters know that. In Psalm 23, as well as in Psalms 28, 49, and 80, we can see that God is our shepherd. We know very well that when we follow the Lord, who is the Good Shepherd, we are always full of life, healing, and peace and blessings awaiting us.

 However, according to the text of the Gospel of John that we read today, Jesus Christ is our good shepherd and it gives us a new understanding of what kind of good shepherd we are. The text of the Gospel of John today shows that Jesus is our shepherd, and it is also said that Jesus is the door to the sheep. Perhaps many people know that Jesus is our shepherd, but Jesus is the door. There may be a lot of people who are a little unfamiliar. However, I think we will be able to understand what kind of shephered Jesus is by deeply meditating on that Jesus is the door to the sheep. Jesus said:

Verse 7 says, therefore Jesus said again, “Very truly I tell you, I am the gate for the sheep. And verse 9 reads, I am the gate; whoever enters through me will be saved.[a] They will come in and go out, and find pasture. 

What gate comes to your mind when you think of the word ‘gate’? Isn't there 4 gates near Seoul?

There are Namdaemun, Dongnaemun, Seodaemun, Budaedaemun, right? There is a fortress that protects Seoul, and gates through which people enter and leave. In a way, the gate will serve to protect and defend a certain area and to control people's access. Therefore, no one can enter the fortress, but only through the door. In that sense, at first glance, the gate is imprinted on us as a very controlling, manipulating, and monitoring role.

So when Jesus says that I am the gate, if you think at first glance, Jesus is sticking to the door, so he is watching the good guys, the bad guys, the ones who can't come in. There seems to be such a side.

If you read the Gospel of John carefully, you will realize that there is an opposite aspect of the gate. What are other meanings to the gate?

The gate is a device that is made accessible and easy to pass through, so we can understand it. If you don't have a gate, you don't know how to get inside. If there is a gate and a large road connected to the door, you can safely enter this area by entering through the gate. You can think of a gate as a facility that allow people enter and exit effectively. One of the gates we can easily think of would be something like a toll gate on the highway.

Don't you put in a lot of devices to pass through effectively to avoid the discomfort of people, because many cars pass through? Doesn't the gate provide a function that makes it easy for a lot of people to enter and exit, such as a high pass to make a lot of lanes to avoid delays? 

When we read the scripture today, I think the gate means two things. 

We, at first glance, tend to associate the meaning of the gate with controlling power, but what we want to emphasize more than that is that many people can move more freely and smoothly through the gate. There seems to be more content in it. We talked about the gate, but it is us to go through the door. 

 Then, if Jesus is the gate, what are we? What's the difference between inside and outside? We have no choice but to ask what is different between the world inside us and the world outside us. One of the things Jesus said was that I am a gate where sheep go in and out, and when I open the door, if you enter through me, you am saved. As in verse 9, we can say that we are the ones who are saved through Jesus.

 In other words, we can say that we, as sheep, live in a shippen which is for those who are saved; Heaven, Paradise, and the Church. Anyway, you can think of it as a space protected by God. But the interesting thing is that it is not a space for sheep to enter once and live there forever, but it is a space for frequent entry and exit. It is a door where sheep come and go repeatedly. I say this. It means that the sheep are coming in and out, not coming in and out. We can see that it is the space of the saved, the place where God's will is fulfilled, the place where there is true rest, and God's grace is full.

However, it is very unusual that the sheep do not stay there forever, and when the door opens, they must go out and follow the shepherd. Among the hymns, this hymn was made with beautiful poetry on the dew on roses. In the lyrics, I want to continue to stay with the Lord, but there are so many things to do in the world that you call me out to the world again. Probably in the shippen a space where we want to stay forever and a place of true peace and rest, but because Jesus is the gate, we realize that we must repeat the work of entering and exiting the world through Jesus. And in today's scripture, following Jesus, we say we will get the fodder, where is it?

Will we be inside? Or is it outside of the shippen? If you read carefully, it looks like we are outside. It means that you have to go out into the world to get the food. Figuratively speaking, if we are trapped in shippen and remain calm, we think that it is like a beast being reared. It looks happy, but I think again whether it is true happiness. Can it be said that it is a grazing that goes back and forth through the door from time to time, and only when it is night and protected? If you think about the difference between grazing and breeding, I think you can easily imagine why Jesus is the door. Of course, the heaven where we all go after death is an eternal place, and although we dare not specifically imagine, there will be true full rest and blessings.

As we live in the world, we think that the kingdom of God we experience is a space where we come and go with the world from time to time.

There are many people who are self-contained these days. My daughter was in the United States and came to Korea three weeks ago. For 15 days, she was self-contained. It is very convenient to do self-isolation.

You don't have to go to work, you don't have to do household chores, you only need to eat rice, but most self-contained people find it very difficult. I don't think it's a pleasure to do nothing and eat still.

 I wonder if we can be joyful and happy when we do not have to do anything at all in Heaven. Shelly Kagan, a Professor at Yale University, wrote a book named ‘Death’ based on his lecture which he gave for more 20 years. In his book, Professor Kagan gave a detailed explanation of the meaning of eternal life. This person is not a Christian. That's why I did not analyze at the Christian level, but I think there is something to listen to carefully.

Professor Kagan thinks that eternal life is a great blessing for us, and in many religions, he expects and thinks about eternal life, after overcoming suffering in this land and lives a life of faith, but when you think about it, eternal life is not a blessing in itself. What does he mean?

It is said that if infinite time is given, infinite time itself is a great burden to us. If someone who lived on this land and loved chocolate but could not eat it due to the lack of money or health issue, but went to heaven and can eat chocolate forever and ever, would he or she be happy in Heaven? He asks us this question.

You might eat a lot of chocolate a day or two. If you eat chocolate for a year and eat chocolate for 10 years, 100 years, 10000 years forever, can it be a source of joy? 

If someone who likes golfing goes to Heaven and can play golf to their heart's content, it may be good at first, but how many years can you enjoy golfing? It means that it seems like an ideal utopia that we are given an infinite amount of time and that we can do everything we can in it, but we cannot think of heaven only in such a human imagination. Heaven will certainly be a good place, but it transcends human understanding. 

Even more dare than that, you can think of Heaven as a place that gives you deeper, more transcendent joy than you can imagine in a world that we can't imagine. In that sense, we must think the same way in our lives in us, or in our lives in heaven, which we can experience even a little on this earth.

The Kingdom of God on this earth is a place where we are completely protected by God, fully guided, and blessed and guided if we do nothing and are passive, so rather than heaven on this earth, we follow Jesus' footsteps When we go out into the world, we have more work in the world, so we think of a happy space as ours. When Jesus saves us, we do not lead all of us to heaven at one moment, but Jesus, who is God, came to earth as a human and experienced all the sufferings of human beings. We should pay attention to the guidance.

In this world where we live, in the world of the materialism, Jesus paved the way for us to go to salvation. This is clearly seen in the text of 1 Peter. Jesus Himself suffered unfortunate suffering. However, he went the way of righteousness to the end. And don't you tell us that you are telling us to follow that path? The text of 1 Peter says that Jesus is the shepherd of our souls, or director and guardian. That is why the world we should live in is not heaven, but this world, and Jesus, the shepherd who knows how to live in this world, is telling us to go first to draw us and to protect us. That was the scene of the life of the early church. According to the book of Acts, the lives of believers who follow Jesus, who is also a shepherd, appear. Community life like the miracle of the Early Church, aren't we so envious? What do you imagine if you draw a movie or a picture about the early church? I have been drawing such a picture for a long time. I imagined that hundreds of thousands of people gathered together in a big space to sell all of their possessions while living in a communal life.

 It seems that they lived together when they left their jobs while maintaining their daily lives. Couldn't it be done in one place, and it would have been easy to have a space where everyone could gather at that time by going from house to house?

You can imagine that you lived a life of sharing with each other, such as a family of three or five, and you could think that you lived your life while maintaining your daily life rather than stopping and living your life. Back then, the background of Acts was urban culture. It was a living space where various jobs existed in the international city called Jerusalem. In the middle of it, the life of believers made shippen and accepted only the believers in it. It was a space to live while constantly interacting with the world rather than a hermitage. Perhaps Psalm 23 also contains such content. We do not always walk on green pasture and still waters.

 Sometimes it is necessary to walk through the valley of the shadow of death. But even at that moment, because God is our good shepherd, we can follow the path He leads. Considering that Jesus is our good shepherd, and that's the gate that helps us move back and forth between the world and shippen, alas, we realize that Jesus is a good shepherd. Jesus is not a shepherd who keeps us inside us and protects and breeds us, but even when we go out into the world to eat and risk, and even if there is a rugged valley, He leads us there, calling the name of each one of us. You can think through it that Jesus is the one who gives us real life.

In a way, we can think of our church as shippen. What is a church like? The church is like Noah's Ark. Consider the door of Noah's Ark. Once closed, it won't open. It is a place of salvation for the few who can open the door only after the flood. However, it is Jesus who will become our door to the sheep, and it is the role that often invites many people into shippen as people in the world come and go and communicate with the world. Today our church is not going to follow the model like Noah's Ark, but it seems that we should follow the same model as the sheep's cage. We can see that Jesus is not the one who blocks or drives out those who come into the cage of salvation, but the one who accepts everyone.

 We haven't read it, but if you look at the back of the Gospel of John, there are many sheep in this world that do not belong to this cage. I want to bring those many sheep and bring them into shippen. We go to church once a week, but in some way, it is a blessed time given to us. For us, it will be a time of recharging and it will be a time to reflect on God's will and to encourage and comfort one another. However, we can think that our field of faith is the world.

We need to remember that where we have a home, where we have a job, the time we spend more time is not a meaningless space, but a space that follows the voice of the shepherd and fulfills God's will. According to 1 Peter, Jesus is the shepherd of our souls. I am saying. In particular, when we think of the meaning of the word "I am the shepherd of the soul," it means that Jesus becomes our leader beyond time and space and beyond the boundaries of life and death.

We've had a lot of experience with fence, gates and things like that during COVID-19 today. Such a space where the saved people are safely protected, such a space seems safe and good in some ways, but considering the great creative world created by God, being trapped in it is not desirable. The church door was not created to close, but the door of salvation is for more people to pass through easily. Let us remember the shepherd Jesus, who cares for each and every sheep lost in the world and calls by name, one by one. Let us follow and obey His will till the end. Jesus is the shepherd of our souls. Now, let us meditate for a moment, praying silently.