April 29, 2007 Fourth Sunday after Easter, Good Shepherd Sunday
First Congregational Church in Thetford, Vermont, UCC
Psalms 23; John 10:1-11
The Lord is my shepherd; I shall not want.
He maketh me to lie down in green pastures:
he leadeth me beside the still waters.
He restoreth my soul…
The first lines of the 23rd Psalm are all about nurture. They go in an
inward, sheltered, restorative direction. But then it continues:
He leadeth me in the paths of righteousness for his name’s sake.
Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death,
I will fear no evil…
These lines are about going out into the paths of right action, paths that
often lead into confrontation with forces of evil.
Jesus said in the gospel of John, “I am the good shepherd.” He also said,
“I am the gate.” It is important to note that his is a two-way gate. That might
seem obvious, because any sheep paddock gate is two-way, leading in to shelter
and out to pasture. But Christ’s gate works a little differently. It leads inward to
the pastures that feed us and the shelter that comforts us, but it also leads us out
into a vulnerable engagement with the world. Fed and rested, we go out to share
with the world what we have found within the gate of our soul.
Jesus said, “I came that that they may have life and have it abundantly.”
Part of abundant life is the nurturing and restoring of our soul, but to have
abundant life is also to find meaningful work on a path of right action. It is one of
Christ’s fundamental truths that in giving, we receive. In laying down our life, we
find life.
Christ’s teaching goes against common sense—how can we gain life by
losing it? How can we receive by giving away? Our worldly mind says this is
unreasonable, but our heart says otherwise. We follow the good shepherd through
this unlikely gate because deep inside we know the truth his voice speaks. Yet
even feeling that truth and knowing that voice, sometimes we hesitate like sheep
afraid to go into spring pasture after a winter in the paddock.
It is reasonable to be afraid of Christ’s gate. Not only does it go against
logic, but it led him to crucifixion. It is natural to want to save our life and not
lose it. Today we live in a world that is increasingly alarming. Forces more
monolithic than even the Roman Empire of Jesus’ day are mushrooming before
our eyes. The military-industrial complex is bloating with wealth and power
under the perpetual war plan of the current administration. The oil industry racks
in record-breaking profits as the costs of gasoline and heating oil soar. Climate
change appears to be a runaway train. Poverty worsens, the middle class slips
farther behind, while the rich get richer than ever before.
In the face of this all-too-familiar litany, we are tempted to run through the
gate screaming, or to hide behind the gate of denial. Al Gore says that he sees
these two responses as he travels the world talking about climate change. People
tend to swing from one extreme to the other, from denial to despair.
We can see this in contemporary Christians. Some have drawn the gate to
shut out the world’s threatened and uncertain future, focusing all their attention on
their personal relationship with Jesus Christ and the assurance of their own
salvation. Other Christians respond with a frenzy of good works that have the
scent of fear about them, working themselves numb trying to control and save the
world, making their last stand with their back to the gate—a gate they have shut on
their soul to keep from feeling despair.
Both of these groups need to hear the good news that Christ’s is a two-way
gate. He leads both inward to restore our soul and outward to right action. This
may not sound like good news to people who are afraid of what they will find on
the other side of the gate, but if they can trust enough to follow Christ’s way
through, they will discover that it is good news indeed—that it leads to new life.
A woman named Mary has lived for the last twenty years in a female
monastic order. At first her life was serene, but then she found herself getting
increasingly disturbed by the news of the outside world. As her fears increased,
she clutched more tightly to her rosary, she shut herself more securely off from
upsetting media reports, she isolated herself from people outside the convent walls
and took refuge even from her sisters with extra devotions and solitary work.
As she did so, her fear evolved into depression and she found herself lonely
and loveless. She clung to her savior and her salvation, but the harder she grasped,
the less secure she felt. Finally, one morning in late September of 2001 her sisters
missed her at breakfast and went looking for her. They found her weeping under
her bed, refusing to come out.
Gradually through the help of a good therapist who taught her cognitive
behavioral therapy she came to understand the way her fearful and depressive
thinking was taking over her life. She gained tools to break her habitual emotional
spiral and reprogram her thinking.
She also changed her spiritual direction. She began praying a surrendering,
centering kind of prayer. Rather than shut herself within the gate of her savior,
she began practicing opening her heart like a gate to let the Spirit flow. She
began letting go of her thoughts in prayer, a kind of losing life to gain life. Instead
of thinking or talking in prayer, she looked toward God in silence. She began to
sense what she called a “luminous vastness” within her, an expanded and light-
filled inner space. She discovered that all around the fear and urge to control that
had seemed to fill her completely was this much wider, encompassing place full of
God’s presence and peace, a place in her soul where she could trust God and love
the world despite the part of her that was still afraid.
She found new life. It was the new life Jesus talked about coming from the
Spirit, the same new life that mystics of all faiths have described since the dawn of
recorded religion.
Not only was Mary able to crawl out from under the bed, but eventually she
was able to follow her love out the convent gate and renew her contact with the
world. Today she is organizing support in the United States for the thousands of
wounded and orphaned children in Iraq. The work can be excruciatingly
painful—seeing the suffering of the children and the heartless disregard of the
American government. Christ’s paths of righteousness lead her into the valley of
the shadow of death every day. But Christ also leads her the other way through
the gate, restoring her soul through the combination of cognitive therapy and her
centering, surrendering prayer opening to the presence of God’s loving light.
Christ is the gate, a two-way gate, and to be healthy we need the balance of
both ways. We need to withdraw into the comforting shelter of God’s love and we
need to allow that love to lead us out into relationships with our community and
world as well. We need to follow Christ out into conflict with the forces of
violence and injustice, and follow him the other way into the green pastures and
beside the still waters that each of us has within us, waiting to nurture and restore
us.
We are so blessed in this church to have the opportunities both to come in
and go out through Christ’s gate. We can come in to worship, to study with Dick
Devor, to pray the Prayer of the Heart, to recover in the twelve step groups we
host, to nurture our soul through music, to find spiritual direction with the pastor
or to find guidance and comfort from the many, many wise people in these pews.
At the same time we can find diverse paths leading out to right action.
People among us are caring for those in need in the community, people are
working to end war, people are working to stabilize the earth’s climate, people are
working to end poverty and racism, and there are many more Christ-like causes
that people here volunteer for or do as their jobs week in and week out.
This is good, but it is not enough. Jesus said, follow me. Do what I do. It
is not enough for us to let Christ be the gate we come in and go out. If Jesus is the
gate for us, we need to be the gate for others. Somehow we need to make our lives
gates that open those around us to the paths of right action in one direction, and in
the other direction to the nurture and shelter that can restore their soul. There are
people around us who are lost in denial or despair. There are people hungering for
a way out of their fear and a way into meaningful action and peace of mind.
The Mahatma Gandhi overthrew the British Empire and gained
independence for India, saying, “My greatest weapon is mute prayer.” We
become gates by letting silent prayer open us to let the Spirit flow in and out of us,
so that through us the Spirit can lead others. Gandhi also said, “My message is my
life.” We become gates to others by letting others see our truth, letting the laying
down of our life speak for itself, leading others to our spiritual source of power
and truth. As St. Francis said, “Preach the gospel always. If necessary, use
words.”
It is not enough for us to have this good thing here. We need to be like
Christ and be a gate for others. But he is not just a gate. Christ is also the
shepherd leading us through the gate. He is also the way, the truth and the life—
the path that leads to the pasture. He is also the bread of life—he is the pasture
grass itself. All that Christ offers comes to us when we become as empty as an
open gate, when we lay down our fearful or self-interested thoughts and follow in
trust, when we lay down our life and follow the paths of righteousness for the sake
of all that the name Christ means. When we let all that Christ is fill all that we are,
then we become gate and shepherd, way and bread for the world.
Let us pray in silence, watching whatever thoughts or anxieties arise that
get in the way of our opening completely to the Spirit, and letting all thoughts and
feelings go, laying down our life so that Christ may lead us to have life and have it
abundantly. Let us pray in silence…
Sermon 04/29/2007