“It’s Sunday, get rolling, you’ve got a sermon to deliver.” It is a thought that is so automatic in my mind that It comes to me as I rise even when I am on vacation. My life is lived in a series of rhythms. I keep track of what day of the week it is. I tell myself what day it is as soon as I awake each day. I keep track of the time of day. I have appointments to keep and there are events in my life each week that need to start and end on time because they affect the lives of many other people.

Time may be an artificial construct, invented by humans, but it is a construct that has an impact on my life.

This isn’t a complaint. I do not experience myself as being a slave to the clock or the calendar. Rather I see the rhythms of life as supporting me as I journey through it.

The Revised Common Lectionary is a pattern of readings for worship that is laid out in a three-year pattern. That means that the texts I studied in preparation for today are the same ones I studied three years ago and the same ones I studied three years before that. In fact, I’ve preached my way through that three-year cycle more than a dozen times now.

Repetition doesn’t always lead to boredom, however. In fact, sometimes the texts don’t even seem familiar to me. It is the nature of Scripture to have something new to offer to every situation - a freshness that comes with each reading of the text no matter how many times you’ve read it before.

The fourth Sunday of Easter is known as “Good Shepherd” Sunday. The psalm is the 23rd every year of the cycle. I suppose that there may have been more sermons preached about the 23rd Psalm than any other scripture text. Many of us memorized the Psalm when we were children. I recite it at bedsides and in homes of grief because it is familiar. Like the Lord’s Prayer it is a constant in the lives of faithful people. In the second year of the lectionary cycle, the one we’re in right now, the Gospel is from the 10the Chapter of John, where Jesus refers to himself as the good shepherd.

So why was it that this week one phrase from that Gospel leapt out for me in ways that I’ve never encountered it before? I guess the fact that I noticed it means that something is going on in our community that brings it to the fore. Jesus body states, “I have other sheep that do not belong to this fold. I must bring them also, and they will listen to my voice. So there will be one flock, one shepherd.”

Last week we had two large funerals in the same day. The afternoon funeral was of a man who had been a part of the church for more than half a century. He had served as usher, moderator, deacon, and search committee member. He had a booming voice that seemed to get louder as his hearing failed. He had a commanding presence that made him impossible to ignore. Although he has been out of circulation for a few years, living in a care center without transportation, most of the members of the congregation immediately knew him.

The other funeral was for a woman who was beloved by her family and friends and her tragic death from cancer at only 52 years of age brought out a large gathering of people from across our town. But many members of the congregation asked, “Who was she?” or said, “I don’t remember her.” I knew part of the story of her life because I had conducted the funerals for her father-in-law and mother-in-law and had developed a relationship with her husband over the past half dozen years. But they weren’t church-going people.

This week’s funeral (so far there’s only one of which I know) is for a woman that will be known by even fewer members of our church. She attended once with her mother a few years ago. Her family were leaders in the first congregation we served, in North Dakota. She had a connection to rural and isolated congregations in Southwestern North Dakota, but never joined, or became active in a congregation in Rapid City. A year or so ago, she and her husband moved to Billings, Montana, and only returned to our area when her illness became so severe that she decided to come back to friends. I wouldn’t be surprised if all but a handful of people who attend the funeral are not members of our congregation.

There are some churches that are reluctant to offer funerals for those who have not participated int he congregation, but ours has always been a church that is open to people who have no church home.

Though my life has its rhythms, there are also many weeks, like this one, that head off on tangents and lead me in directions I don’t expect. Often the tangents come from the fact that as a pastor, I seem to have “other sheep that do not belong to this fold.”

This week there will be a visit to a prisoner facing serious charges who I will meet for the first time in jail. My relationship with him will most likely be brief, but may be intense for a while as he sorts out issues of the meaning of his life. Sometimes visits with prisoners are attempts for them to “clean up” their image in jail before trial. Since I will meet this prisoner after charges have been filed, I won’t know anything that would be useful as evidence in court and everyone knows that I am immune from testifying because of clerical privilege, so no one expects me to figure out the truth. I trust God with knowing the truth, and have no illusions that I will know whether or not I’m being conned by the prisoner. What I have to offer is prayer.

So I have the “regular” sermon to deliver today, but it won’t be my only sermon of the week. Like other shepherds, I can’t ignore my flock simply because I have other sheep who are not of this fold.

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