Texts: Ezekiel 34: 1-17; John 10: 1-10

In 1785 Marie Antoinette commissioned her favorite architect Richard Mique and court painter Robert Hubert to build what came to be called L’Hameau de la Reine, or the Queen’s Hamlet. Nestled within the properties at Versailles near the Petit Trianon, a special chateau built for Madame de Pompadour thirty years before, this remarkable set of buildings contained a working farm where Marie Antoinette would milk cows into buckets of Sevres porcelain with a specially designed royal seal, have her portrait painted as a shepherdess, and cavort about while the people starved in the slums of Paris. Can anyone who has seen the old Ronald Coleman film A Tale of Two Cities ever forget that scene where the nobleman throws out a copper coin for having run over a small boy with his carriage?

Marie Antoinette, of course, paid for her extravagance during times of great famines in France with her head. Some recent biographies have attempted to resurrect her as a victim of circumstance, having been raised to be a queen, married off at the age of fourteen to the future Louis XVI, and having to contend with the intrigues of court life for which she was not fully prepared. As an aside, it was not she who uttered the famous words, “Let them eat cake,” an inexact translation from the French, but Marie Therese, the wife of Louis XV, almost a hundred years before during another French famine. The phrase as reported by Rousseau actually referred to brioche, a delectable kind of puffy French pastry made with lots of eggs and butter.

Living in a different time now, of course, our leaders unlike those in eighteenth century France or in the time of Ezekiel are not supposed to be so out of touch with their people. Ezekiel’s railing against the shepherds of his time is, of course, quite different from the bucolic imagery of shepherds and shepherdesses painting by Boucher in Marie Antoinette’s France. There are no images of shepherds slaughtering their sheep as real shepherds do after seasons of shearing them; there are no images of fending off wolves and wild dogs as the shepherds of Palestine had to do in Ezekiel’s time.

Now, sheep have traditionally been considered among the not-so-intelligent animals, primarily because like cows, they are easily herded. But recent research by two British biologists shows that sheep are not as stupid as previously thought. As one of the researchers commented, “Sheep, like people, behave differently when in a herd than when alone.” As Elias Canetti pointed out in his book Crowds and Power, people really do behave differently when herded and directed by leaders to act certain ways as a group.

Much of our behavior as people herded into groups is a response to the kind of shepherd we have. Sheep, of course, don’t get to choose their shepherds just as many groups of people in the world. We, however, in this country have the option of being able to choose the shepherds, the leaders, so, in many ways, we really are complicit in the decisions made by our leaders, even as they try to manipulate us into thinking and acting in certain ways.

But, we say, we are not as docile as sheep, in spite of, or perhaps even because of the images from Orwell’s Animal Farm. But is that really the case? In Ezekiel’s time, God rails, simply rails against the leaders, the shepherds, of Israel because they have been busy feeding themselves rather than feeding their sheep. Ezekiel’s comment about his time, however, rings true in ours. But Ezekiel’s condemnation against the rulers of his time is quite different than the anti-government railing we hear from that group of people who call themselves the Tea Party for they and their far right fellow-travelers would set this country back to a pre-1929 Depression kind of Nation.

There are few people still around who remember that period when the rich got richer and the poor got soaked, when there was no real middle class, which developed from a combination of Roosevelt era programs and the World War II GI bill. What we see now is both major parties, with the exception of a few voices, jockeying more for power than for good. And we, like sheep, rather than looking seriously at issues and trying to use our intelligence to develop solutions, just gamble about in our herds with the dogs of intolerance and fear, greed and stinginess nipping at our heels keeping us in line.

Ezekiel’s vision of the Lord God as shepherd is much like the image of Jesus presented in the reading from John’s Gospel this morning. The shepherd will seek the lost, bring back the strayed, bind up the crippled, strengthen the weak, and “feed them with justice.” The word for justice in the Hebrew canon and in the New Testament is the same word as for righteousness. The Hebrew word tzedek is used more than 500 times in Hebrew Scripture and its Greek equivalent dikaios more than 200 times in the New Testament. It is the same word that is translated as justice and it means more than our modern understanding of that word.

We have narrowed our definition of this word in our modern world and, in some ways, have become like the Pharisees with their legalistic interpretation of the law. Both the Hebrew canon and Jesus’ comments on this word tell us that righteousness includes charity and kindheartedness, something we have lost sight of today. As a people we say we are searching for a shepherd to help lead us out of our current morass of economic and social woes. However, I submit that many of us look for a shepherd that will not demand much of us as Christians.

Several weeks ago, the woman I use as a travel agent when I have to book airline travel invited me to an evening wherein cruise lines advertised their various kinds of vacation travel. Looking about the room, I listened to people complaining that they could no longer afford more than one cruise a year -- now this was at a really ritzy country club in Summit. Quite frankly, I was astounded and appalled at the conversation. The room had many retired people but also people in their forties were well represented. I don’t know where they earned their income but it was clear that they were in a different league than most of us here. I found it hard to sympathize with someone who complained about not being able to afford a $10,000 cruise to God knows where. I kept thinking that their priorities were inverted.

Our societal priorities must be reset so that we reflect the commentary of both Ezekiel and Jesus. As sheep, Jesus searches us out not to herd us into one common way of thinking or believing but as a body watching out for each other, for sheep in a herd do watch out for the other. Lambs are not trampled as are children in our present day world. They are cared for. The imagery used as needing to be cared for is lovely in one way but frightening in another, for in the end, after the sheep are cared for, fed, and sheared, they are often slaughtered for food. The important thing for us as potential sheep is to consider under what circumstances we sacrifice ourselves for others and the ultimate care given to us by God which we need to share with others.

Let us pray: Eternal and Righteous One who calls us to live with each other in justice and equity, show us how to follow the good shepherds rather than the bad ones and help us to live in community with each other. In the name of him who is our Good Shepherd, Christ Jesus our Lord. Amen.