Nov. 24, 2019           Shepherd/King                                      

    (I introduced this sermon, by noting that the President of the United States that I used in my story, was not intended to be any particular president, but the idea of what the president was supposed to be.)

Imagine yourself, standing outside on your front lawn, when a dark four door sedan pulls up in front of your house. A man in dark suit gets out of one of the back seat doors and walks up to you, asks you your name, and when you answer, he informs you that the President of the United States has taken an interest in you, and that in the next few days, you will receive an invitation to the White House.

Two days pass, and when you go out to get your mail, you find a manilla envelope, with an official seal of the President on it in your mail, and inside is an invitation, a plane ticket to Washington DC., and a note that a limosine will pick you up the next morning so that you can meet with the president. The next day arrives, the limosine comes, you get in and you are whisked off to the airport. You then board the plane, it takes off, and then lands in Washington. Another limosine picks you up and takes you to the White House, and within an hour you find yourself, sitting in the oval office, waiting to meet with the President.

As you are sitting there in the office you notice that there is a picture of you and your family, sitting on the mantel of the fireplace. And just then, the door opens and in comes the president of the United States, pushing a coffee cart. “Don’t get up he says, just thought we might have a cup of coffee together.” He pours you a cup of coffee, asks you how you like it, hands you the cup and offers you some coffee cake. Then he sits down and spends the next hour, asking about you, where you grew up, how your family was doing, what he could do as president to make life easier for people like me. He seems genuinely interested and concerned, and after a while, you begin to get the feeling that he actually cares about you, and cares about the problems that everyday people have.

At the conclusion of the meeting he stands up, and shakes your hand, and promises that he will follow up on the things “we” talked about, in the weeks to come, you find out that he really is trying to follow through on those things. And when you ask him, why me? why did you invite me to the White House?, he replies, because I am a servant of the people, and I just wanted to get to know you, to know what I could do for you.

In our reading from Jeremiah this morning, Jeremiah rails against the leaders of Israel, whose only concern is for themselves. Who in seeking their own political interests and pursuit of power, divide the people and “scatter the sheep” of Israel. It seems to me, that that is a pretty good description of many of our leaders today. For them it’s all about getting power, or about maintaining power, and at times it seems they really don’t care much about the everyday people of America.

But in my story this morning, of the visit to the white house, I hoped to give us a sense of what it would look like if our elected leaders genuinely cared about us, wanted to know us, wanted to help us. I told that story, because I wanted to envision how a leader, a shepherd who cared for us, would behave. How, rather than be lords and kings over us, they would be servants. And I believe that is the kind of leadership that Jeremiah talks about this morning. The LORD, the LORD of LORDS, will raise up a shepherd, in the line of King David, who will execute justice and righteousness, the righteousness of the LORD God, and that is very different from the righteousness of men. That is our hope, and that hope has been realized in Jesus Christ.

As disciples of Jesus Christ, we are called to recognize that the righteousness of men is the will to power, the desire to rule over one another, but the righteousness of God is the call to be servants of one another. This is difficult, it takes patience, understanding, and even a bit of suffering one another in love, just like we do with our children. This is what we are called to do with other people, even other people whose behavior is not so good. Instead of being lords over one another and judging them, we should be servants, seeking to encourage them towards something better. Not just something better as we see it, but something better for them, and that means getting to know them, and genuinely caring about them.

As the criminal on the cross recognizes, as long as we seek to be lords and kings over one another, we are all under the same condemnation of sin, but through Jesus Christ, through the righteousness of the servant king, we can escape the judgement of sin, the division, violence, and death it brings, and we can be together with Christ and one another in paradise. And that is the Good News of Jesus Christ.