I am the Good Shepherd...
...so says Jesus in John 10. Today was the "Good Shepherd Day" in much of the church. It's a day to remember the great image of the shepherd that Jesus gave us to describe his relationship with us.

Over the years, I've tossed this image around and have learned different nuances that are available within it. This morning, as I heard the passage read within the church, my mind discovered one more that I'd like to share to you.

In the movie, "Waking Ned Devine," you learn a little about what it means to work with animals. A central character in the movie is a pig farmer deeply in love with a woman adverse to his profession. She often comments that he smells way too much like the animals for whom he cares. To win her over, he uses "fruity soaps". It's a great movie about more than a love story, and I recommend it to all.

The pig farmer takes on the smell of the pigs. I've heard the same said about shepherds--they take on the smell of the sheep. Shepherds, in a more pre-modern world, stayed with their sheep constantly. They were always found in the midst of the sheep. They provided for them, encouraged them to follow and move along to different pastures, and protected them. They'd often corral them into some cleft where they could keep them all in one place over night, and place themselves in any natural exit point to prevent the sheep from escaping and from wolves and thieves from snatching one of them.

All of this is a dirty job. Shepherds were covered in earth and all the smells and fluids that come from sheep. They showed ultimate devotion to their job, and they had to for success as a shepherd. Sheep are good for slaughter and their coats. If you don't have any sheep leftover, you wouldn't have much of an income.

But there's something to this taking on of the smells and character of the sheep that lends richness to Jesus' metaphor of his relationship to us. Jesus is the Good Shepherd, the one covered in the stink of the sheep. We are the sheep who lend him that stink.

This taking on the stink works in two ways: 1) it highlights how Jesus takes on human nature. He's not some divine agent in a human shell. He is human, and his commitment to being human is stinky. 2) He takes on the stink of sin that we as sheep give to him. The Good Shepherd is not the remote person who shepherds from afar for fear of getting dirty. Jesus is down in the midst of his sheep, stepping in their crap, lifting them from danger, leading them to green pastures and water, and protecting them from outside danger. He is committed fully to his role as the Shepherd who takes on the stink of the sheep.

On the cross, we proclaim that Jesus takes on the sin of the cosmos and puts it to death in his own death. On this Good Shepherd Sunday, we see that he was stinky with the smells of his sheep on that cross.

Who's taking on your stink these days? Jesus is the Good Shepherd.

Will the real Easter please stand up?

Easter surprised a lot of people this year with its earliest arrival in years on March 23. For those who follow the church calendar, Lent started just days after Christmas. Christmas presents hadn't even lost their shine by the time we were kneeling down and confessing our corporate sins and entering the 40 days of repentance. Easter just came way too early this year.

Its early arrival prompted many in my own congregation to search further behind the reasons why the church sets the calendar the way it does. I received a record number of forwarded emails from people who were passing along the ancient formula of establishing Easter by the lunar calendar. We follow the Jewish practice of setting Passover which falls after the first full moon after the vernal equinox. It's confusing, but it's ancient and helps us get beyond our own need to control time and to live in God's rhythm for the world.

Many began to ask when will future Easters fall, as if to be able to plan their schedules into the future and not be surprised again. Very bright people who understand how to turn everything into a mathematical formula are able to create algorithms that let us know when future dates fall. April Fool's Day will fall on Easter in the year 2040. Click here to figure out any Easter date possible.

Today, April 7, is the real Good Friday according to a few scholars. Wednesday, April 9, will be the real Easter. Instead of looking forward to plan out vacations and other possible conflicts, some smarty pants people looked backward through the biblical record and have estimated that Jesus died on Friday, April 7, and rose on Sunday, April 9.

I have a couple of thoughts about this...1) it's cool to know the actual date (even if it's our best estimate). Like my birthday, I can look to it with anticipation and excitement. It makes Jesus that much more human to point to the day that he actually breathed his last, and to the day where he took his firstfruits breath. I have a lot of those days in my own life. The day I met my wife (March 15--the Ides!), the day I was ordained (June 18), the day I even drank too much for the first time...(that will be unnamed). Those days have special meaning to me and take on a larger significance.

2) I don't mind living my life according to an archaic church calendar that moves most celebrations around throughout the course of a year. I like that when I show up to worship this coming week, it will be the 3rd Sunday after Easter...not April 13. I like that the church has chosen to pattern its life after God's interaction with the world and not our own attempts to master time. This interrupts our lives and disrupts our activities. It reminds us that God is the one who owns Time, and not us. As much as we try to control our schedules and get in front of time, we never can. When we join with the church's concept of time, we join with the God-intended movement of our lives. The ordinary calendar days of our lives now can become transformed by the power of God working through something as simple as the title of a day.

And I thought today was a hum-drum Monday like any other. Who knew?