The Good Shepherd Raises Us Up
by Rev. Cory Coberforward
John 10:14-18
“I am the good shepherd; I know my sheep and my sheep 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 are not of this sheep pen. I must bring them also. They too will listen to my voice, and there shall be one flock and one shepherd. The reason my Father loves me is that I lay down my life—only to take it up again. No one takes it from me, but I lay it down of my own accord. I have authority to lay it down and authority to take it up again. This command I received from my Father.”
Responsive Reading - Psalm 33:1-5
Sing joyfully to the Lord, you righteous;
it is fitting for the upright to praise him.
Praise the Lord with the harp;
make music to him on the ten-stringed lyre.
Sing to him a new song;
play skillfully, and shout for joy.
For the word of the Lord is right and true;
he is faithful in all he does.
The Lord loves righteousness and justice;
the earth is full of his unfailing love.
Read the written message below with music videos
We all can feel lost at times. Not knowing what’s true or what to do. Even when things are going relatively well in our lives, we can feel despair and a sense of failure, inadequacy. We suffer from what we might call “modernitus,” or, more accurately, “separatitus,” because these challenges arise when we have not come to settle into the peace at our core, the unity we share within, what some call “Buddha,” “Goddess,” “Jesus.” The core beliefs of the modern world do not serve our spirit, beliefs about individual achievement, materialism, and what it means to be a civilized society. But the Divine Life that encircles us and is the light of our very consciousness beckons us back into the fold, back into harmony with nature and the earth, back into our rightful place led by our innate wisdom and divine love, sometimes called the Good Shepherd.
The modern world pretends as though it is the supremacy of wisdom and culture, with its capitalistic drive and so-called scientific viewpoints. But it largely ignores the facets of other cultures that have served people better, from a more village-like approach to economics to a view of nature and humanity that centres on our unified ecology and the quantum nature of this earth. We see around us today what capitalistic, profit-centric economies give us: rampant homelessness and a workforce enslaved by the wealthiest 1%, where all the wealth flows down to them. We wouldn’t be wrong to start comparing modern humanity’s plight to that of the enslaved Israelites under Egypt, and like them, we must start to listen to our inner Moses, our inner burning bush, to transform our earth’s hardships into the promised land.
It doesn’t make sense that the world is producing more than ever, GDP is at an all-time high, and yet wages are stagnant for anyone but the ultra-wealthy while inflation is destroying our purchasing power. Our system often means that we have to make hard decisions based on dollars, the working class must squabble amongst itself, while corporate greed bleeds our community institutions and our families dry.
You can call it death by a thousand cuts, most things in the system are set to drain the lower classes of wealth. But perhaps this is just what we need in a way, the pressure and strife that’s necessary to finally drive us to give up on our own false “American” or “Canadian Dream” and to turn the page back to the spirituality and the peace found in our Indigenous traditions, found in our holy scriptures, albeit often twisted by modernity for its own aims. We must lay this false way of living down in order to pick up true life again.
This is what Christ in our reading says that he is able to do, lay his life down in order to pick it up again. And it is only through finding our own unity with what Christ knows himself to be, what the Buddha, the angels, Krishna, and others know themselves to be, that we can find the power and the presence necessary to lay down our false modernity for a true one. The Great Goddess Kundalini Shakti is at our core, known as Jehovah, Elohim, Allah, Shiva, and on and on, these are one and so are we as the light of life and consciousness. Great transformation is available to us as well as great joy and peace, but we have to turn to the Good Shepherd within.
It’s funny that so many religions in their scriptures say the same things, and yet we think and talk about these spiritual disciplines and sources of wisdom as if they aren’t ultimately talking about the same thing. Jesus said he is “The Way, the Truth, and the Life,” in much the same way that the sages and incarnations of Divinity tell us throughout other traditions, he was not saying that we must always turn to the past to find the Way in the historical idea of himself, but that he is the very thing that is closes to us, our true heart, beyond historical personality or divisions of dogma. He knew himself to be trans-personal, and he invited us to know our unity with God as well, which he said many times in the scriptures. He wasn’t gatekeeping as the “only begotten son,” but invited us too to “become children of God.” We as a whole are God’s only begotten because we are one.
In our reading today Christ talked about this, how there are other followers “not of this sheep pen.” He was acknowledging that there are other ways to know God, and yet they all follow him because he knows himself to be one with God. From a modern mindset, we may get confused about this sort of thing because we can’t help but think divisionally, but we have to see things from Christ’s perspective, he was not identified with just the “historical Christ” but with the very Way, Truth, and Life that flows through all of us. God is the Good Shepherd of the sheep, but to the extent that we haven’t turned to the Divinity that shines through our consciousness, we will continue to feel loss and anxious, downtrodden and disempowered.
The Good Shepherd teaches us to shirk modernity throughout their teachings, from Christianity to Islam. To instead look toward our source using helpful practices such as contemplative prayer and meditation, “Be still and know that I Am God.” God points us back to our own sense of “I Am” when the Lord tells us to become still to know God, to become still to know that I Am that Jehovah spoke of when he called himself “I Am that I Am.” God is indeed THAT I am: your I am, my I am. God is Being itself, our own never-ending sense of presence, the only thing that never changes in our lives, the shining Divinity that we have only just begun to know.
Peace to you,
Cory