Going Through The Gate

Scriptures:    Acts 2:42-47, John 10:1-11

How many of you have ever met a shepherd? Thought not. Not too many of them in or around Las Vegas, are there? How many of you have been near a sheep? Well, if you’ve ever taken children or grandchildren to petting zoos, I suppose there’s more of a chance for that to have happened. Maybe some of you grew up on or near a farm where sheep were kept for wool-gathering. But even if you have encountered a sheep, I would venture to guess that it wasn’t the most pleasant of experiences. Pretty smelly animals, aren’t they? Oh sure, docile enough – except when agitated or frightened and then they can get all snappy or head-butt-y. All-in-all, not the kind of animal we’d want to invite into our backyards (by-the-way, we are going to have another service of the blessing of the animals this October; I do hope that you will not plan on bringing any sheep to it!).

So, it’s a bit off-putting, isn’t it, that there’s so much about shepherds and sheep in our Bible and in our religion. Our well-beloved 23^rd Psalm affirms that “The Lord is my shepherd”. So many paintings – especially those by Warner Sallman – show Jesus gently holding a lamb. J.S. Bach composes one of the most beautiful of all lilts in “Sheep May Safely Graze”. Our litanies pick up lines like “All we like sheep have gone astray.” Of course, we can chalk this up to the fact that it was a different context and culture – an agrarian society for whom sheep and sheep-herding were indispensable. But that reality doesn’t make us any more comfortable with all of this imagery. Knowing what we know about them, do we really want to be compared with sheep?

But here is Jesus identifying himself for us as the Good Shepherd, and telling us that he will lead his sheep through the gate. Couple of things to note here at the start. The word “Good” means much more in this context than “better than average” or “morally OK”. As Lutheran pastor Mark Brown points out, “The translation of good in our text recalls an older use – something that our dominant culture no longer believes in – the good, the true and the beautiful. To be good was to meet the mark. To be good was to be ideal. When Jesus says I am the good shepherd, what he is saying is he is the model shepherd.” In other words, he is the one we would want to follow, not because we are docile sheep but because he cares for us so deeply, even to the point that “the good shepherd lays down his life for the sheep.” The second thing to note is that by using this imagery Jesus is very specifically contrasting who he is with those in authority – kings and judges and religious leaders like Pharisees and Sadducees. Now, it is the case that some of the greatest leaders in the Hebrew Scriptures – like Moses and Joshua, the great prophet-kings of the Exodus – are described as shepherds. And David, the covenant King of Israel, started out as a shepherd. These were leaders who needed to rally their people through the power of their authority. But the qualities that Jesus is invoking here are the opposite of the power of leadership – gentleness, humility, strength brought under control – all those qualities we talked about when we preached through the Beatitudes during Lent. Jesus is offering a path to those who want to follow him – not out of coercion or compulsion or political necessity, but because they have encountered the goodness of the shepherd.

So, what we have in this passage from the gospel of John is a metaphor for what God wants God’s human creation to be. Jesus as the Good Shepherd and we as the sheep encompass God’s call to community – the kind of community spoken of in our passage from Acts where they “ate their food with glad and generous hearts, praising God and having the good will of all the people.” Because of their witness “day by day the Lord added to their number…..”

But Jesus adds yet another layer to this metaphor when he talks about himself as the gate. (Older translations use the word “door” here, but it really doesn’t matter; what Jesus wants us to see is how we are to enter – and how welcome we are to enter.) American Baptist minister Marcia Bailey helps us to see the significance of what this means as a metaphor when she says, “But notice Jesus doesn’t say he’s a gatekeeper. Jesus says ‘I am the gate.’ He is the gate itself, inviting ‘whoever’ to enter, and ‘be saved,’ allowing easy access, in and out, safety, and life. Jesus is the gate, the way to relationship and intimacy with God. Jesus is the gate, the place of welcome, security, freedom, and rest. Jesus says to the Pharisees and any others listening that he isn’t about restricting or stealing or harming but about offering life – abundant life; life that is sweet and whole and full.”

We know all about gatekeepers, don’t we? Gatekeepers are much better known for keeping people out than they are for letting people in – think of our “gated” communities. Many of you will remember the television ad that the United Church of Christ produced about six years ago called “The Bouncers”, in which two burly, head-shaven, huge guys stood outside a church and let only the “right” people in – keeping out gays and poor and those with other than white skins. The ad was controversial, you’ll remember, with NBC and other stations refusing to air it and other denominations claiming that it showed them and their entry policies in a bad light. Like the ad, Jesus was controversial about who he wanted to let in the gate, which was himself. “’I am the gate….. I came that they may have life, and have it abundantly.’”

Many of you will know the name Everett Parker. For many years Everett headed the UCC’s Office of Communication, and one of his and the OC’s main goals was to enable access to the media for those who – like the ones the bouncers were throwing out – had little opportunity to air their views on the media. Beginning in about the middle of the 20^th century and still today if you weren’t on television or the radio or featured in a newspaper or a magazine you were invisible – you just didn’t count – it was as if you simply didn’t exist. Oh sure, today many say that because of the Internet and especially social media like Facebook and Twitter we now have a true democratization of media with access galore. But look at whose Twitter accounts get reported – it’s almost all celebrities. The ability to get past gatekeepers such as newspaper publishers and broadcast executives is not much greater than when Everett Parker was doing his groundbreaking work. Real access to media is hard to come by.

And so, to some extent, is real access to churches. We pride ourselves on being a welcoming church, and indeed many newcomers have commented on how friendly we’ve been to them. When we were going through the Open and Affirming process the only really negative comments heard were along the lines of: “We’re already open to all and welcoming; why do we need to formalize it?”

But there’s a more subtle barrier around access to our congregation, which in a general sense I might term insularity. It took me awhile to come to the realization that some of our practices during worship can be off-putting. It wasn’t until several people kept saying to me that I got it through my thick skull that not everyone who comes through our doors knows the words to the Gloria Patri or the Doxology or even The Lord’s Prayer. Having them printed in our bulletin may seem redundant to many of you – but to others this may be the kind of grace note that says, “We do care about you wherever you are on your spiritual journey, and we do want you to feel the warmth of welcome here.” This bespeaks an offer of access that is consonant with Jesus who IS the gate and not just the gatekeeper. Marcia Bailey, again, puts it this way: “[What] about this kind of easy access . . . do we find or offer in our own lives, in our own church? I wonder about this kind of unfettered welcome where folks can come and go, where abundance is what life is all about.

“There are lots of churches where multiple gatekeepers obscure the welcome of the ‘Jesus gate,’ plenty of places where folks who don’t fit the theological, physical, or spiritual mold aren’t invited in. Making churches handicap accessible is a great challenge for many with old buildings; it can be nearly impossible to invest the money necessary so that all can literally come in.

“But churches can be inaccessible in many other ways as well. In recent visits to churches I was surprised to see all the ways we limit people’s access to our communities, even to God. We abbreviate things in the bulletin (to save space we say) so that only those who ‘know’ get the message. We say ‘everyone’s welcome,’ but we don’t say where we’re meeting or how to get there or what we’re really about.” This is the challenge that we have constantly if we as a congregation are to be the truly accessible gate that is our Lord.

Accepting that challenge and finding appropriate ways to be accessible is a large part of why we have instituted a Layperson of the Year Award. It’s not to glorify individuals so much as to lift up examples of those for whom the Spirit has become a living, breathing presence that allows them to model for us what it is to be Christ’s witnesses in the world – for this is an important way that we make Christ, who is the gate, available to all who come our way. In so doing we demonstrate how in the beloved community that is the church of Christ we are all special. As Christ said in another place each one of us is “of more value than many sparrows”.

And Christ also told us what following him through that gate would mean: “I came that they may have life, and have it abundantly.”

Just what is abundant life? Here’s where it gets rather tricky, because the temptation is to think in terms of an abundance of things – which leads us pretty quickly to the dangers of what some have termed the “prosperity gospel” – you know: follow Christ and all manner of riches and success will be yours. Indeed, my on-line thesaurus’ synonyms for “abundant” include “plentiful”, “copious”, “rich”, “great quantity”, “wealth”. Somehow, I don’t think this is quite what Jesus means when he talks about having life and having it abundantly.

Lou Lotz, who for years wrote a column at the end of the monthly Reformed Church in America magazine, and who is an author I greatly admire, has, I think, the best take on this passage. He says: “That grouchy, gouty Englishman, Thomas Hobbes, said that life was ‘nasty, brutish, and short.’ What an attitude. Maybe it was something he ate? Someone he met? Jesus said that life was meant to be abundant, rich, and overflowing. I like that philosophy better, and I believe it. Prosperity Preachers and Get-Rich Televangelists believe it, too, and they relentlessly preach the Gospel of More to their flocks. For Jesus, however, abundant life did not mean more; it meant less. Less worry. Less anger. Less covetousness. Abundant life, for Jesus, was a life freed from the tyranny of things. It was a life lived in harmony with the will of God, a life of serenity, security, and a peace that the world can’t give, and the world can’t take away. The abundant life, for Jesus, was a life free from fear, even the fear of death.” I really like the paradox behind the idea that “less is more”.

And yet…..Jesus was also offering more. This passage is one most often cited when the topic is salvation. “I am the gate. Whoever enters by me will be saved…..” There’s a whole other sermon to be written here about the exclusiveness of this claim, but for now I want to focus on the fact that Jesus is offering to those who follow him a relationship with his parent Lord God and an on-going life that is filled with abundance – in a word, what we usually think of as Heaven. Heaven (or, at least, the idea of “some place up there”) has gotten a bad rep in our 21^st century scientific sensibility. For that matter, so has Hell – and this is a teaser preview of what we’ll be talking about next week. But as Thomas Long says in this week’s The Christian Century, “Yet, the hope of heaven dies hard in the popular imagination. Polls show that nine out of ten Americans believe in heaven, regardless of religious affiliation…..” Long goes on to quote from Christopher Moore’s new book, The Difference Heaven Makes: Rehearing the Gospel as News: “heaven is mainly ‘not about blue skies or life only after death.’ Rather, heaven is the life that is now coming toward us from God….. Heaven is God’s unbounded love breaking in to every situation, stronger than any loss, even death.” In other words, we are living in Heaven right now. This is what it means to have life abundantly.

We have come a long ways from talking about smelly sheep. But Jesus understood that we, who are his sheep, are indeed precious, and he offers himself to us as the gate through which we walk.

I want to give the final word to Charles Schulz, creator of Peanuts and Charlie Brown, a Christian himself, who captures the essence of this passage when he said: “I cannot fail to be thrilled every time I read the things that Jesus said, and I am more and more convinced of the necessity of following him. What Jesus means to me is this: In him we are able to see God, and to understand [God's] feelings toward us.”

Amen.

Dave Pomeroy

First Congregational Church, UCC
Las Vegas, NV
May 15, 2011