Transcript
Practice Resurrection: Hear
First Baptist Richmond, May 11, 2025
Fourth Sunday of Easter
John 10:22-30
Jesus said, “My sheep hear my voice. I know them, and they follow me.”
It was winter in Jerusalem. Cold. Maybe a light dusting of snow on the ground. Jesus was in the temple, walking along the portico of Solomon. He had come to celebrate the Feast of Dedication, something we now call “Hanukah.” Seems a little odd to be telling a Hanukah story on Mother’s Day, but that’s what today’s Gospel lesson is—a Hanukah story. And it’s told on a Sunday that we have come to call Good Shepherd Sunday, which may be odder still.
Every year, on the Fourth Sunday of Easter, we read Psalm 23 as our Call to Worship. “The Lord is my shepherd,” we say, “I shall not want.” And then, when it’s time for the Gospel lesson, we turn to John 10. At the beginning of that chapter Jesus implies that the religious leaders of Israel are like thieves and robbers who climb over the wall of the sheepfold to kill and steal and destroy. The one who enters by the gate, however, is the shepherd of the sheep. Jesus says, “The gatekeeper opens the gate for him, and the sheep hear his voice. He calls his own sheep by name and leads them out. When he has brought out all his own, he goes ahead of them, and the sheep follow him because they know his voice.” And those of us who have been in church for a while know what he’s talking about. Jesus is the Good Shepherd. We are his sheep. When he calls us by name we hear his voice and we follow him.
On this Mother’s Day I’m thinking about how a mother might stand at the
gate of an elementary school playground, calling to her little flock above a cacophony of noisy, happy children. You can’t imagine that anyone could hear what she says, but because she’s their mother her children hear her voice. They’ve heard it before. Whether or not they choose to listen is a whole different matter, but when she calls them by name those words cut through the shouts and laughter of all the other children on the playground. They find their mark. And if her children are good and obedient children they stop what they’re doing and come. They follow their shepherd.
When Jesus spoke these words originally he was with the twelve disciples. It’s easy to think of them as his sheep, the ones he would call by name when the gatekeeper opened the gate, the ones he would lead out day after day. I can almost see him standing by the side of the road in the morning while they are still rubbing the sleep from their eyes, saying, “Come on Peter and Andrew, come on James and John, come on Philip and Bartholomew, Thomas and Matthew, James and Thaddaeus, Simon and Judas. We’ve got places to go, people to heal!”
But as you read through the Gospels it becomes clear that Jesus has more than twelve sheep. All those people who followed him were called disciples, which means “learners.” All of them were learning from him as he taught and preached, helped and healed. Some of them were women, who traveled with Jesus and the Twelve and provided for them out of their means. Some were people like Bartimaeus, people he had healed who wanted to live out their gratitude. You don’t have to read very far in the Gospels to see that wherever Jesus went he was followed by a sizeable flock. In John 17 he prays for those who will become believers after he is gone, meaning people like us. And in chapter 20 the author claims that he wrote his Gospel for people like that, people like you.
If you have heard the story of Jesus and become a believer then you, too, are one of his sheep, and what Jesus says in John 10 is intended not only for those original disciples but for you as well. “My sheep hear my voice,” he says. “I know them, and they follow me.” But how do we do that in 21st Century America? How do we hear the voice of the Good Shepherd and follow? If you had asked me two months ago I would have said this:
“Get one of those red-letter editions of the Bible, where the words of Jesus are printed in red. And if you can’t find one of those just read through Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John and underline everything Jesus says.” If you did that in today’s Gospel lesson you would hear Jesus say, “My sheep hear my voice. I know them, and they follow me. I give them eternal life, and they will never perish. No one will snatch them out of my hand.” Doesn’t that sound good? Aren’t you glad you were listening? If you do that often enough, if you read through the Gospels and listen for the voice of the Good Shepherd, you may get to that point where you can almost predict what Jesus is going to say, and that’s helpful. If you find yourself in a situation where you are wondering what to do you might ask yourself, “What would Jesus say?” and the answer may come to you simply because you have trained yourself to hear his voice.
If that’s all you did I would be happy. I would guess that you have surpassed most of the other Christians in America just by reading the Gospels, and paying attention to what Jesus says, and doing your best to follow him. But six months ago I stumbled onto a video from a church in Alberta, Canada, where the pastor was talking about “Jesus-Centered Theology,” and that resonated with me. I had never seen those three words put together in that way but in that moment I thought, “That’s it! That’s my theology!” It’s not systematic theology, where you
try to answer all the questions about God, man, and the universe. It’s not even Christocentric theology, which is the kind the Apostle Paul seems to have had. No, this was Jesus-centered theology, based on the life and teaching of Jesus of Nazareth, and that’s the kind I have. I often tell people, “Everything I know about God I learned from Jesus.”
So, I looked into this church in Canada and found out they were part of something called “the Jesus Collective.” I tracked down the leadership of that group and ended up in a long conversation with a woman named Cherish Hamilton, from Houston, Texas. She suggested that if I wanted to find out more about the Jesus Collective I could sign up for one of their online classes. So that’s what I did; I signed up for the first one I could find. It was called, “A More Christlike Spirit—Hearing, Recognizing, and Responding to God’s Voice,” which was described like this: “Jesus sent the Holy Spirit to be his continuing voice on the earth. Everything the Spirit says will form us into disciples and produce the ministry and mission of Jesus in our lives. This 7-week online training is for leaders who are seeking to grow in their understanding of the work of the Spirit as the continuing voice of Jesus (emphasis mine) and how to hear God’s voice in their own lives and ministries.”
I didn’t realize when I signed up for the class that it would conclude in the same week I was getting ready to preach from a passage where Jesus says, “My sheep hear my voice,” but that seems to be the way God works sometimes. The class was taught by a lovely woman from Sydney, Australia, named Tania Harris, who has a Ph.D. She reminded us of that in almost every session because, let’s face it, almost any crackpot could give you advice about how to listen for the voice of Jesus. But she had done her homework. She had combed through the pages of
Scripture, looking for those places where someone heard a word from the Lord and responded. And then she had spent several months in each of three Pentecostal churches where people still claim to hear God’s voice. She wanted to know how you can tell when it’s really God speaking and not just indigestion, because we’ve all heard someone say, “The Lord told me thus and so,” when it wasn’t the Lord at all.
I wasn’t sure I was going to like this class. It was so different from how we did it in seminary, where you had to read big, thick books with more footnotes than text. This one seemed much more experiential. We were talking about dreams, and visions, and whispered voices. There was a story near the beginning about some Australian farmer who believed that God was telling him to plant seeds in the middle of a drought. He spent thousands of dollars on seed and planted it. And then guess what happened? It rained. The crops grew. And he had a great story to tell. But there were other stories where people thought they had heard from God and hadn’t. They tried things that failed spectacularly. So, how do you know what’s from God and what isn’t?
I don’t want you to think we didn’t have a book in our class. We did. It was written by our teacher, Tania Harris, Ph.D., and called, The Church Who Hears God’s Voice. It was big—355 pages long—but the thing that convinced me was the bibliography, which referenced 134 scholarly books and articles. Obviously Dr. Harris wasn’t a quack. In that book she used the story of Peter and Cornelius from Acts 10 to suggest a paradigm for discernment. Do you remember that one, when Peter was on the rooftop and saw a sheet being lowered down with all kinds of unclean animals in it? He heard a voice saying, “Rise, Peter. Kill and eat!” But he said, “By no means, sir! Nothing unclean has ever entered my mouth!” But then
the voice said, “Don’t call unclean what I have made clean.”
This happened three times and then there was a knock at the door. When Peter opened it he found three unclean Gentiles standing there, but those words must have still been ringing in his ears: “Don’t call unclean what I have made clean.” They told him they had been sent by a man named Cornelius, a Gentile living in Caesarea. He had sent them to ask Peter if he would come and speak to him. So, Peter went, and when he got there he explained that it wasn’t kosher for a good, law-abiding Jew like himself to be in the home of an unclean Gentile. But the Lord had told him that he shouldn’t make distinctions between people, so he began to share the gospel and as he did the Holy Spirit fell on Cornelius and his family just as it had on the Jewish believers on the Day of Pentecost. And Peter said to those who had come with him, “Can anyone withhold water for baptizing these who have received the Holy Spirit, just as we have?”
Dr. Harris suggests that this is a good way of discerning whether what we’re hearing is from the Lord or from some other source: 1. Is it something Jesus would say? (And in Peter’s case it was. “Don’t call unclean what I have made clean” sounds exactly like something Jesus might say). 2. Is anyone else saying it? (And again, yes. Those three messengers were asking Peter to come to the home of an unclean Gentile). And, 3. Are there any spiritual signs following? (In this case, the Holy Spirit fell on Cornelius and his family in a way that made them holy as well).
I wrote those questions down and they came in handy a few classes later when we broke into small groups on Zoom and a classmate named Peter, also from Australia, asked me if I had heard from the Lord lately. I said, “Well, I’d like to. I’m in a process of discernment myself. I’ve reached the age where I’m
beginning to think about retirement. Not anytime soon, of course, but sometime. My brother-in-law says it’s an ‘age-appropriate’ question, but I’d like to know how the Lord would answer it. When would he say it’s the right time for me to retire?”
And then Peter said, “I don’t know if this is for you, but this morning I had a dream, and in that dream someone was getting into a car that looked like something someone in America might drive. I was able to see the gas gauge, and as this person drove the needle on the gas gauge began to go up rather than down; it moved toward ‘full’ rather than ‘empty.’ So, I don’t know: maybe that dream was for you.”
And suddenly I was very interested in what the Lord might be saying to me here and now, and not only through the pages of Scripture. I was moved by the idea that he might have a word specifically for me. Tears came to my eyes. I had to ask myself, “Is this something Jesus would say?” Well, yes! “Is anyone else saying it?” Well, maybe Peter, from Australia. “Is it being confirmed by spiritual signs?” Well, not yet, but I’m going to start looking. I’m going to start listening.
In John 16 Jesus says to his disciples, “I still have many things to say to you, but you cannot bear them now.” That seems to be a promise that he will continue speaking. And then, in the next verse, he says, “When the Spirit of truth comes, he will guide you into all the truth, for he will not speak on his own but will speak whatever he hears, and he will declare to you the things that are to come.” And that seems consistent with what I read in the course description for the class: “Jesus sent the Holy Spirit to be his continuing voice on the earth.” Because there are many things I wish Jesus had talked about that he didn’t talk about.
I often wonder what he would say about some of the things that divide the church and the nation these days. But maybe he’s not finished speaking. If we
believe that Jesus rose from the dead then we might also believe that he still has something to say. And in this Season of Easter we might “practice resurrection” by listening for his voice, by talking with trusted friends, by paying attention to our dreams, by looking for spiritual signs, and by underlining long passages in our Bibles. Maybe what he said in today’s Gospel lesson is true: “My sheep hear my voice. I know them, and they follow me.” And if it’s not true for us, then may we all learn to listen, and hear, and follow.
Amen.
—Jim Somerville © 2025
