Preached at St Peter’s, Poulshot and Christ Church, Bulkington
Acts 2.42–47; John 10.1–10
“…the sheep hear his voice. He calls his own sheep by name and leads them out.”
What could be more American than a cowboy? The rough-hewn frontiersman, driving his cattle along the untamed frontier, encapsulates both the American Dream and American nightmares. The courageous individualist risking everything to get the job done in a place far from government support, where the added risk is an acceptable price to pay for freedom, is as American an ideal as it gets. The wresting of the land from the Native Americans to make the cowboy possible was one of America’s original sins.
What could be more Kyrgyz than a nomad? If you went to my photo talk the other week, you’ll have learned that the nomadic pastoralist with his herds of sheep, horses, or yaks is at least as powerful a symbol of national identity in Kyrgyzstan as the cowboys are in America – and the same is true across the Central Asian ’stans and Mongolia. We could also talk about the gauchos of Argentina, Kenya’s Maasai, or the Bedouin of the Arab world.
The idea of the nomadic animal herder as the incarnation of the nation seems remote and alien to us in this more settled country, even though Wiltshire was one of the last places in these islands where this way of life survived, dying out less than a hundred years ago.
But for Jews in the Ancient World, some of their greatest national heroes and holy men had been shepherds before God called them to lead flocks of people – Abraham started out as a herdsman, and Moses famously kept his father-in-law’s flock after he left Egypt the first time.
