Grace Inefficient

A Sermon Preached by

The Rev. Paul Debenport

May 17, 2008

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Please have ears to hear God’s good Word to us in these words of Jesus from John 10: 11—18:

“I am the good shepherd.  The good shepherd lays down his life for the sheep.  The hired hand, who is not the shepherd and does not own the sheep, sees the wolf coming and leaves the sheep and runs away—and the wolf snatches them and scatters them.  The hired hand runs away because a hired hand does not care for the sheep.  I am the good shepherd.  I know my own and my own know me, just as the Father knows me and I know the Father.  And I lay down my life for the sheep.  I have other sheep that do not belong to this fold.  I must bring them also, and they will listen to my voice.  So there will be one flock, one shepherd.  For this reason the Father loves me, because I lay down my life in order to take it up again.  No one takes it from me, but I lay it down of my own accord.  I have power to lay it down, and I have power to take it up again.  I have received this command from my Father.”

The Word of the Lord.  Thanks be to God.

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          This will be a very efficient sermon.  It has to be, given all that’s in this service this week (a baptism and communion at the first service; new members and other special recognitions at the second).  I’m sure you’ll agree that efficiency is good—especially in a sermon.  Get to the point and be out in an hour, right?  No wasted words; hence, no wasted time.  And none of us likes to waste time or have our time wasted.  These days when our lives seem more and more pressed for time, we all highly value efficiency. 

My first memory of valuing efficiency was when in I was cast as the narrator of the Junior High play Cheaper By the Dozen, the still popular story of efficiency expert Frank Gilbreth, Jr. and his wife Lillian and their twelve children.  I vaguely remember one scene when the father has his stopwatch to precisely time the children as they line up to wash up and brush their teeth in their one bathroom.  If you want to get to school and work on time, it’s necessary to be really efficient if you have a dozen children.

          It’s probably even more necessary to be efficient if you’re a shepherd of a flock of hundreds or even thousands of sheep.  My friend, preaching professor Tom Troeger, tells this story about a pastor preparing a sermon of Christ the good shepherd:  “The pastor, who knew nothing about sheep or what it takes to shepherd them, had stumbled upon an article in the city newspaper about a modern day shepherd who had opened a large sheep operation.  The farm was within a reasonable driving distance, so the pastor phoned the shepherd to ask if he could visit and have a conversation.”

          “The shepherd welcomed the pastor, drove him out into the expansive grass lands where the flocks were grazing, and explained to him the rigors and challenges of raising sheep.  One of the most common frustrations was finding lost sheep.  When a sheep wandered off, the shepherd got on his cell phone and alerted his fellow shepherds.  Each of them then drove a pickup truck around a particular area of the vast grasslands until the animal was found, thrown in the truck, and returned to the flock.”

So far, so good, right?  But here’s the kicker.  “If the same sheep wandered off a second time, it was not returned to the flock.  Instead, with no further ado, the creature went straight to the slaughterhouse, because, as the shepherd explained to the horrified pastor seeking a sermon metaphor, it just takes too many man-hours and too much fuel to keep finding again and again an animal that consistently strays away.  So, sheep beware:  wander twice and the shepherd slaughters you because it is the efficient thing to do!”^1.

Which sort of takes the shine off a “Christ the efficient shepherd” metaphor.  But, to the puzzlement of the literal shepherds then and now when hearing Jesus’ parable of the lost sheep we heard at our call to worship^2. and this passage from John 10, Christ is not the efficient shepherd; Christ is the good shepherd.  And the grace of the good shepherd is the exact opposite of human, efficient shepherds.  Instead of the wandering sheep getting either abandoned to die in the wildernesses of our own making, or, as in Troeger’s story, slaughtered, “The good shepherd lays down his life for the sheep.”

 If Christ and the grace of Christ were efficient, there is not a one of us who would make it safely back to the fold.  We would get one chance to reform, and that would be it.  On the second strike, we’d be out forever.  If God’s grace were efficient, it would not tolerate having to restore us again and again and yet again to the family of Christ’s beloved community.  But the remarkably good news in Christ is that God’s grace is not efficient, but in the wideness of God’s mercy, is sufficient.  And the sufficiency of God’s loving grace lies in its abundance, its fullness, its amplitude.  Its size and quantity is ample.  Christ’s generosity toward us—indeed toward the whole world he died to save, is a quality and quantity of being that reveals that efficiency is not the ultimate measure of all things.  So in an ironically efficient sentence, here’s the point:  Thank God that grace inefficient is grace sufficient!

Amen. 

Let us rejoice and with enthusiasm sing of God Grace amazing and sufficient.