John 10:7–21 Funeral Sermon

Background

Graveside services will be held for Katy Swank, a thirty-year-old mother of two who died by suicide this past Sunday. While Katy’s name had been on the church roll since childhood, she had not attended service at the local church for the past twenty years. Her children had been active participants in the church’s youth ministry program and had recently been baptized. She leaves to mourn her passing a devoted husband, a mother and father, and two children ages eight and ten.

The Shepherd’s Call

Funerals are often bittersweet events for Christians, as though we gather with the hope of salvation and resurrection, we are at the same time confronted with the reality in the world before us. Despite all our hope, death still carries a sting for those of us left on earth to carry on with our lives even though there is now a piece of that life that is gone from us. So great is our fear of death’s sting in spite of our hope that we so often do not wish to think of it at all. It is much easier to forget about the reality of death, than to confront the inevitable. In these moments, when confronted with such tragedy that your soul screams out in anguish and fear against our last and most ancient enemy, that the Shepherd’s call drifts out towards your heart in response.

It is the call of love reaching out to answer the anguish of your soul, acting like cool water on warm skin as it speaks the soothing certainty of the caller’s deep and complete care for you to your heart. The Good Shepherd does not call out with loud commands, demands, or threats, but rather the loving concern that one who is searching for something precious to them and has heard its cries of pain. Just as in times of fear and hardship the sheep cries for the shepherd, or a dog cries for its master, so too does Christ respond to our soul’s aching in the face of loss and tragedy seeking to bring comfort and assurance that despite what has stricken your heart so there is One who will not rest until He finds you and offers you the comfort and peace that seem so impossibly far away.

As we stand here, surrounded by graves that stand as monuments to pain and loss, that the call of the One who loved so much that not even a grave could contain it seeks to remind each and everyone of you that despite how far away hope seems from this place, not even death can stop the Good Shepherd from seeking his flock.

Good Shepherd Alone

This fact, that Christ will always seek out those who listen to His call no matter where they may be found is especially important to remember during the tragedies in our life. So often religion has been bent to the human desire for an explanation that it is easy to lay the responsibility for such tragedy at the feet of the victims. Just like the voices of those in the passage called thieves whose words bring only death and destruction, so too do the accusations of fearful humans seek to comfort their own troubled souls at the price of speaking condemnation on another.

But the call of the Good Shepherd brings life, not death. Just as the Good Shepherd protects his flock not for pay, but because that is what a Good Shepherd does, so too does Christ not come to you with a voice that demands anything other than the cries your suffering soul already makes for him to run to answer you because He is Christ. The act of you crying out for comfort and safety is the only condition, because the shepherd must first hear the cries of his suffering sheep before he can find it and bring it to safety.

I say all this to drive home the reality that despite what some may say when faced with tragedy, no one but the Shepherd himself can state which sheep is a member of his flock. All other voices that seek to enter the sheepfold to lead the flock are just repeating the death and destruction that they see in the world, whereas Christ comes to the fold to give life and safety in spite of the world. Christ alone gives life, salvation, and peace to the grieving heart that cries out for comfort and Christ alone demands nothing from one seeking entrance into the flock other than this cry grief seeking help.

The Father’s Flock Together

It is this same love from Christ, the Good Shepherd, that explicitly tells us that there is no favored sheep pen or pasture, but rather this shepherd is one that is not content until all of his sheep have been gathered together into one flock. It does not matter to God where you go to church, where you spend your Sundays, or how far afield you are, if you are one Christ’s love has claimed there is nothing that will keep Him from bringing you home. Just as death could not contain Christ, so too earthly things cannot keep the Good Shepherd from gathering his sheep no matter how scattered. It is not location that makes one part of the flock, God is the God of all creation, and Christ is the Shepherd to all those who cry out.

And while our human faith is fragile, and our hope is easily clouded by grief and loss, we still gather together as sheep crying out for our shepherd so that we can find the comfort that comes from the knowledge we are not suffering alone. More than the company of one another, we can count among us here all those who have come before us into the earth including Christ himself. God’s flock is not just a privilege of those of us living on earth, but carries onward beyond death. While our grief fogs our eyes and hearts in this moment, and leave scars that will still twinge with pain even after the wound is long since healed, you can take some small strength from the fact that your God is one who knows what is means to suffer, to die, to grieve, and one who also brings the balm of hope that the grave is no longer end of the flock.

Christ, our Shepherd, has one flock in many places, here on Earth and beyond death. As we commit the vessel of one of your flock to the soil, Lord, grant our heart’s mournful wails the answer of your call. That in the gentle refrain of the Shepherd’s call, our souls may be brought strength we do not ourselves contain to move forward on this earth with the knowledge we will all be rejoined together as truly on flock. That there is never a true goodbye through your love, that the pain and tragedy of this world is not a result of your anger, and that through your love we are never alone through your eternal presence and the cloud of witnesses that still belong to our same flock. They have just moved to another pasture.