Two years ago, a woman named Jill Turner was kayaking along the coast of Scotland when she saw a sheep on the beach at the base of a cliff. The sheep bleated at the kayaker, apparently calling out to her. Jill said the sheep “saw us coming and was calling to us along the length of the beach following our progress until she could go no further. She finally turned back, looking defeated.”
Jill assumed that the sheep would find her way back to her flock and grazing fields. After all, if she had gotten herself to that beach, she could get herself back.
However, two years later, paddling along the same coast, Jill saw the sheep again! This time much shaggier but still bleating for help. The sheep, now named Fiona, was trailing two years growth of wool which flowed down her back like the train of a fancy ball gown. A very dirty ball gown.
(Here’s the whole story – with photos!)
At this second sighting the kayaker was moved that the poor animal had been stranded for so long all by herself. Sheep, after all, are social, flock animals. They are not meant to be alone.“It is heart-rending,” she said. “We honestly thought she might make her way back up that first year.”
No one knows how Fiona got to that lonely, rocky beach and she surely couldn’t get herself back. She did have enough grass to eat and a tiny cave for shelter, but not much else.
After the kayaker contacted some animal rescue teams, the newspapers picked up the story and named Fiona the Loneliest Sheep in the World. She was featured on TV news and comedy shows. Eventually, a group of five farmers with lots of equipment lifted Fiona up the steep 600 foot slope and she is now living the good life at a farm/tourist attraction.
When I hear a story like this, I feel a mixture of wonder and embarrassment that we – you and I – are so often compared to sheep in the Bible. Wonder, embarrassment – but also recognition. Because when you think about it, we humans can be resourceful and affectionate and useful – and yet we also get ourselves into all kinds of predicaments. Many times we get ourselves into messes that we can’t get out of alone.
And so, not only are we compared to sheep, but our rescuer – Jesus – is compared to a shepherd. One who will do the spiritual equivalent of scaling a 600 foot cliff to lift us back to the life we were meant to live with all the other sheep in the flock.
At this pivot point between the end of one liturgical year and the beginning of the next, I’m thinking about the mixed images we have for that rescuer –
Enthroned in glory and surrounded by angels
And
Chasing wayward sheep who keep getting lost or stuck.
And then I think about what it means that we are like sheep. We are wonderful, resourceful, affectionate and useful – and we are embarrassing and get ourselves into all kinds of predicaments we can’t fix.
And yet, To be like a sheep is to be in God’s hand.
To be like a sheep is to be part of the same creation as the caverns of the earth, the heights of the hills, the seas and the dry land.
To be like a sheep is to be fed and watered, to have rest when we are weary. To be bound up when we are wounded, strengthened when we are week.
At some point in our lives, we end up like Fiona – at the bottom of a proverbial 600 foot cliff all by ourselves with no way up. We might end up in that place by mistake or on purpose.
At times like that, remember that the God who created everything is not distant, uninterested, or too good for us.
Beginning with Advent, we turn our attention to the confounding miracle that this God came to be among us in cities and fields, in homes and under bridges, in hospitals and in bars, and at the bottom of 600 foot cliffs. And as the most vulnerable one of us – the Jewish baby under Roman oppression.
That’s a comforting thought when you feel like the loneliest sheep in the world.