"My Sheep Hear My Voice"

by Revd Bruce Waldron - 29th April 2007

I always felt uneasy about being classed as a sheep. Being from the sheep country of central Victoria I know what sheep are for, and it isn't very flattering. Like all metaphors, it has it's weak points if you push it too far and it only makes sense if you completely remove it from the context of sheep farming in our modern age.

We've just heard a metaphor about sheep and shepherds. Jesus is the good shepherd, and his sheep hear his voice and follow him. Psalm 23 forms the Hebrew cultural backdrop to that statement. But how do Jesus sheep hear his voice today, 2000 years later. Most people in suburban England don't even know what a sheep smells like, far less understand a 3000 year old metaphor about good shepherds leading their sheep to still waters and green pastures and anointing their heads with oil.

Sometimes I've heard Christians talk as though when people don't want to join the church it's because they simply aren't Jesus sheep - but that's too easy an explanation. It isn't easy to hear the voice of Jesus through the words of the church. Sometimes it takes a lot of careful thought, and listening, and reflection before the voice of Jesus is clear to us who are in the church - and we all pay attention to it with varying degrees of success.

I can still remember as a little boy in a crowd at a local agricultural show, following the wrong skirt until suddenly recognising what was happening I realised I was completely lost. I got the wrong voice. Fortunately, my Mum realised it too and found me before I'd completely dehydrated myself through crying.

Those of us who try to follow Jesus voice faithfully, know that it isn't always simple to know what that voice is saying, or to distinguish it from other voices, and we have to deal with the simple reality that we don't always follow the right voice, even when we listen very carefully. Certainly the church hasn't always got it right and the time's it has got it wrong still weigh us down dreadfully in our work today.

And even when we do hear it truly, and follow honestly, we don't always reproduce it in a way that makes it easy for other people to hear it.

We all too frequently couch the voice of Jesus in ancient language that no one outside the church ever uses, and we have a particular way of doing things that adds to the strangeness of Jesus message rather than making it more accessible to people who haven't heard it.
It is not always easy for people outside of the church to hear the voice of Jesus through the church, and understand what it really sounds like. Jesus voice is so often disguised beneath a cladding of history and tradition and culture that it is a very different sound to the plain accents and colloquial metaphors of the Galilean carpenter.

Even if you do manage to hear the voice of Jesus clearly yourself, and articulate it faithfully and in language and a medium that makes it accessible to the people who haven't heard it, you still have to deal with the reality that the church is a composite of a whole mix of people who carry the voice of Jesus in different ways, and with varying degrees of faithfulness. And we are still people; even if we have a profound sense of being loved by God, we won't always all be perfectly faithful all the time. Christian faith knows very well that all of us mess it up from time to time.

So while one person is trying to convey the voice of Jesus in all they say and do, someone else who is in the representative group, the church, may not. And the person who comes to "hear the voice of Jesus" may hear something very un-Jesus like. Every one of us is important, all the time. Attention to this aspect of Christian living is very significant. God forgive us when we fail, and as a result cause someone else to not hear Jesus' voice.

If you're a person who is immersed in classical music, try one day to hear what is being expressed in the music on BBC 1 or Vibe FM. The message is distorted by the culture of the station, for you - but very accessible to the people who listen to it all the time. If a person who absolutely lives Arctic Monkeys and Justin Timberlake tunes into Classic FM or Radio 3, she probably won't understand what is being conveyed. The opera may not move her, at all. The medium will obscure the message as effectively for one as it carries it for the other.

You know that one of my great concerns is that we clothe the voice of Jesus in cultural garb that is alien to the world around us, and so distort the voice of Jesus that people outside of the church culture can't hear it clearly to know if they want to follow Him. We need to have all the variety of ways of conveying the gospel that the huge diversity of our church affords.

I think tonight's Third Gear is an attempt to try and put things into a more accessible garb for folk who don't go to church. It may feel a bit odd to some people but it might be something that will resonate more easily with others. I hope it works; it's an attempt at something different.

We clad the voice of Jesus in church culture, and sometimes the clothing is so strange that people find it hard to hear clearly. The voice can come through, distorted by cultural baggage, and by personal baggage too.

"My sheep hear my voice and follow me." Said Jesus. What we can not assume is that because we repeat the words of Jesus, everyone will hear Jesus voice. It might be that we've unwittingly so disguised the voice of Jesus by our cultural and personal accoutrements that we've made the voice unrecognisable as His.

What we must try and do is make sure that the words are put in ways that different people can hear them clearly; that's our responsibility as a Christian church. It takes some attention to do that, and it's clearly what Jesus wanted his followers to do. St Paul's famous quote was "I have become all things to all people that I might by all means save some."

There is however, a farmore powerful medium than what we do of a Sunday morning or evening in worship.

I am utterly convinced that the most powerful vehicle through which people may hear the voice of Jesus today, is by the unmitigated love of the people who follow Him, by the people who strive to allow the Spirit of Christ to live through them. And that, sometimes, can even be heard clearly through the cultural distortions that we inevitably place around the voice of Jesus in our living.

Two things are critical. One thing is certain.
We in the church speak many cultural languages, some of them reflective of our age and sociological background, some of them reflective of our training and natural predispositions. We need to honour the different abilities and tastes; they are not a threat or a hindrance, they are a blessing from God for they carry the voice of Jesus in different ways, to different people.

The second thing is, and this is probably the most important, we can only carry the voice of Jesus, whatever our cultural predispositions, when we hear it clearly ourselves, and that means, as one of Jesus' sheep mentioned to me last night, a lot of very careful listening. Who knows where we might hear the voice of Jesus, or what that voice might say. Perhaps, by grace, it might even come from our own mouths.

And the certain thing. When the voice of Jesus is clearly heard, those of his flock will hear, and follow, and be blessed in doing it.