Heard Immunity

​Emmanuel Episcopal Church, Greenwood, Virginia
Easter IV, Year A
May 3, 2020
The Rev. John Taliaferro Thomas
 
I have always been interested in livestock.  Maybe it is because my grandfather Thomas tended a herd of cows on the family farm, and I always wanted one as a pet.  Even now, I am drawn to the pastoral setting of fields and beasts.  Fortunately, I have a gorgeous, agrarian drive from home to just about everywhere I go.  I have been known to stop and take pictures of cows, horses, sheep, goats, donkeys, llamas or whatever I see, and bring them home for show and tell.  They always seem to look so thoughtful and practical, pointing onto the wind, lying down before a big rainstorm, or finding shade and grass even at the extreme edges of captivity.
 
During part of a college summer I spent in England, a friend and I hiked from town to town in the Lake District, and all of the trails meandered through farmer’s fields where there were thousands of sheep on seemingly endless hillsides.  That is the setting that launched William Wordsworth, Samuel Coleridge, and the other Romantic poets into ecstatic, nature fueled reverie.  Thinking about it makes me use words like ecstatic and reverie.
 
Even then I took lots of animal pictures.  English sheep are so well fed, and moppy looking in the dank gray drizzle that settles on just about everything.  Even though there are legions of them and regular thru hikers in their fields, it is not that easy to get a good close up.  In the days before digital pictures, I wasted lots of rolls of film catching sheep’s backsides as they ran out of the frame, and out of my way.
 
There were shepherds of a sort.  They were not the young angelic looking ones we see in the nativity scenes from the Bible, rather, they tended to be old, crusty men in layers of woolies and thick soled wellington boots.  We would see them in the pubs at night, nursing pints of bitters, and looking at us as suspiciously as their sheep did.  Each one of them had lots and lots of sheep, and they wandered the perimeters of the rock walled fields keeping out the odd fox or feral dog. 
 
What was so interesting to us was how the sheep followed, just the one person.  They could tell that particular caretaking person’s voice, their whistle, or even their grunts.  Centuries of collective instinct, passed from ewe to lamb in whatever sheep school there is, must have taught them to stay close to the one who looks out for them.
 
Today is known far and wide as Good Shepherd Sunday.  For this preacher and Christ follower, it is a sentimental favorite.  It is the Sunday we sing The King of Love my Shepherd is and we recite the ever-popular 23rd Psalm.  The scriptures we read have inspired really great ‘Jesus as the Good Shepherd’ art too.  Google “good shepherd art,” and you will get thousands of examples.
 
We love this image because it is peaceful, comforting, and pastoral in all senses of that word.  Even before Jesus, we have lots of Old Testament shepherd characters and stories.  King David started out as a lone shepherd.  All of the patriarchs and matriarchs maintained flocks of sheep for food, clothing, and used them as practical vehicles of wealth and prosperity.  Caring for the flock was a matter of life and death necessity for most of those old biblical folks.
 
Like the poets, we can get caught up in romantic notions of these beasts, and derive comfort from the protective care that Jesus, the “great Shepherd of the sheep” provides.  As most of us have moved away from such agrarian roots, we do suffer a sort of ‘nature deficit disorder’ in our full understanding of the image.  To reify and recapture the breadth of this metaphorical meaning requires a little sheepolgy.  This Sunday, annually, provides an opportunity for that too.
 
While we are apt to get the shepherd role for Jesus, we are not as apt to understand the corollary, that is, that we are sheep.  And here is where a deep dive into sheepology is helpful, if not humbling.  There is a reason that sheep have learned to follow the shepherd and to listen for the shepherd’s voice and guidance.  It is this: they are not naturally smart.  Apart from being particularly smelly and overwhelmed with matted fur, sheep do not have much in the way of defensive capability.  They have no claws, no fangs, or particularly frightening roar.  Their panicked and cacophonous bleating only serves to tell a predator exactly where they are.
 
About the best they can do for defense is to run away and clump up together so the predator can pick out the slowest or fattest one and leave the rest alone.  In extreme danger, sheep tend to scatter, and that leads to no good.  Sheep have been known to run off cliffs or fall into deep ravines.  I will let you do you own interpretation of sheep and the parallels to human nature.  It is not such a flattering exercise.
 
Even so, the best defense is a good offense.  If they stay close to the one willing to risk life and limb to protect them, if they go where that more enlightened mind leads, and if the way they do so, is to recognize that caretaker’s voice, then they have the best opportunity for peace and safety.  Here again, I will let you draw your own conclusions about this image and our current state of our own health and safety, but the best nugget of the day is that deep and insightful listening for God’s voice the best instinct. 
 
With all the talk of vectors, droplets, and risk factors, the one phrase that gets me in all of this is so called “herd immunity.”  That one takes us to the elemental level of the beasts that we are, or could be, if we scatter in all directions and do not take care of each other.  There has to be some balance between reckless freedom and cowering fear.  It comes from accepting our sheepness and knowing the limitations of going all of this alone.
 
The gospel does not advocate herd immunity, but H-E-A-R-D immunity: heard immunity.  That kind of peace and safety comes from listening to the most basic tenet of our baptism: seeking and serving Christ in all persons, loving our neighbor as ourselves.  Hearing that call is practicing H-E-A-R-D immunity.
 
There are immense challenges and there will be plenty more as our economy shifts and whole swaths of our fellow humans will need basic, living resources.  We can be about each other and seek creative solutions.  That is the voice need to hear.  That is the direction we need to follow.  Blame, shame, and acrimony, will not serve any good purpose.  Seeking just, mutual, and loving care and concern will lift us all, and brings us safely home.
 
In those great hymnic words:
 
Perverse and foolish oft I strayed
But yet in love he sought me,
And on his shoulder gently laid,
And home, rejoicing, brought me.
 
When we hear the voice that sings that song, we are practicing heard immunity
 
Amen.