Fourth Sunday of Easter
May 3, 2020
(Service, Prayers and Lucia Lloyd’s sermon is located below)
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Lucia Lloyd’s Sermon: Happy Good Shepherd Sunday!
4th Sunday of Easter, Year A
May 3, 2020
John 10:1-10
Happy Good Shepherd Sunday! If you are someone who likes holidays that are not overly commercialized, you will enjoy this one, which is not commercialized at all. Of course, the reason for that is that Good Shepherd Sunday is something that a large percentage of the population has never heard of. If you are one of them, there’s no reason to feel bad. For one thing, it’s always good to learn something new in church. For another thing, Good Shepherd Sunday isn’t actually an official church holiday. It’s more of a common nickname for this day, the Fourth Sunday of Easter Season, because every year on the Fourth Sunday of Easter Season our lectionary gives us scripture passages about sheep and shepherds and a collect about sheep and shepherds.
The scripture passage for today is an odd one, and the oddity of it was what prompted my curiosity to look up what’s going on with Good Shepherd Sunday. On Good Shepherd Sunday, in each year of our three year lectionary cycle we get a psalm about a shepherd. In year A and B it’s psalm 23, “the Lord is my shepherd”. In year C it’s psalm 100, which says, “Know this: The Lord himself is God….we are his people and the sheep of his pasture”. What I was most curious about is what’s going on with the gospel passage. Jesus has a fairly extended discourse about sheep and shepherds throughout chapter 10 in the gospel of John. It comes right after the passage we read a few weeks ago in which Jesus heals the man born blind, and the Pharisees are not happy about it and keep trying to silence the man or get him to say something against Jesus, and the man just keeps on telling the truth. Some scholars see the beginning of John 10 as continuing to comment on these problems with the Pharisees, and implying that they are the bad shepherds. John 10 also comes before the description of the raising of Lazarus, which also contains some contrasts between those who resist the miracle and Jesus himself, including trying to kill both Lazarus and Jesus, and those who respond to the miracle and to Jesus himself with faith. John 10 itself explores the sheep and shepherd images at some length. So each year on Good Shepherd Sunday, we read a different section of this shepherd chapter: this year in year A, we read the first ten verses, next year in year B we’ll read the next seven verses, and the year after that in year C we’ll read another 8 verses of it. Then, of course, we’ll start the cycle all over again. Every time from now on, since you all have been paying attention, you’ll say, “Oh yeah, it’s Good Shepherd Sunday again and I know all about that!”
So here’s the part of today’s gospel reading that seems odd. Jesus tells us that anyone who doesn’t enter the sheepfold by the gate but climbs in another way is a thief and a bandit. In contrast, the one who enters by the gate is the shepherd of the sheep. Then Jesus goes on to give some more description: that the gatekeeper opens the gate for him, that the sheep hear his voice, that he calls them by name and leads them out, that he goes ahead of them, that they follow him because they know his voice. Then back to the contrast: the sheep will not follow a stranger but will run from him because they do not know the voice of strangers. So then we get to where Jesus says, “Very truly, I tell you, I am….” And what we would logically expect is, “I am the good shepherd.” And Jesus says, “I am the gate.” What? The gate?
If you want to boost your Bible knowledge today, you can remember that there are seven “I am” statements Jesus makes in the Gospel of John. If someone were to ask me to name them, it would be the most familiar ones that would come to mind first:
“I am the light of the world”
“I am the bread of life”
“I am the vine and you are the branches”
“I am the resurrection and the life”
“I am the way, the truth, and the life”
And “I am the good shepherd,” which appears slightly later on in John 10, in the passage we get next year, in Year B, on Good Shepherd Sunday.
All of these are familiar images of Jesus. These images show up not only in scriptures, but also in hymns, in stained glass windows, in a variety of forms of art. The one I would be most likely to forget, by a really wide margin, is “I am the gate.”
After all this lead-up about the relationship between the sheep and the shepherd, why would Jesus say something as odd as “I am the gate”?
We are used to thinking of the usefulness of objects based on what they are or what they do: a hammer, a hamburger, a pencil. But there are some objects whose usefulness and value is that they provide us with empty space, such as a cup. A cup would be useless if it were solid; what makes it useful is the empty space it provides us with. The same thing is true of a door; its value is that you can open it and walk through the empty space in it. Or a gate: its value is in the empty space it provides for going out or coming in.
We often think about the value of physical objects, but it’s easy to forget the value of empty space. But we can consider the people who suffer from things like compulsive hoarding, and how difficult it makes their lives. From a fear of not having enough, they fill their homes with more and more objects, and become increasingly trapped as they lose the space to live in. They often become isolated because they feel embarrassed for other people to see what their house looks like, and because there isn’t enough room for guests to come over. Relationships get squeezed out of their lives, and so does joy, because of a lack of space.
What is even more common in 21st century society is the tendency for us to keep filling up our time with more and more things, the way hoarders keep filling up their space. Sometimes it takes a major disruption in our lives for us to notice our relationship with time. For many of us, even when we have unstructured time, our default is to want to fill it with constant busyness or constant entertainment and constant noise, and doing so can squeeze out deep relationships, rest, joy, and God. This can happen even when our busyness is doing things that seem very virtuous.
Those of you who were playing Lent Madness this spring may remember that one of the saints we learned about was Elizabeth Fry, whose devout faith motivated her to accomplish all sorts of societal transformations on behalf of the most neglected and despised, including prison reform. One of the things I really appreciated learning about her was the prayer she often prayed, “Oh Lord, may I be directed what to do, and what to leave undone.” That’s a powerful one. For one thing, if we try to do every task that comes into view we quickly get spread too thin and lose our focus and our sense of purpose and have a constant sense of inadequacy or failure or anxiety. The other result is that if we are unable to choose what to leave undone, then we are unable to ever find the rest our souls need. Elizabeth Fry knew that asking for God’s direction for what to leave undone is just as holy as asking for God’s direction for what to do.
There is a reason that setting aside space for God in our schedules each week is so important that God makes it one of the Ten Commandments. If we are too busy for the space in our schedules for worship, that tells us we have become too busy. If hoarders who compulsively fill their space are driven by fear of not having enough, the tendency to compulsively fill our time is driven by fear of not being enough. This fear of not being enough leads us to overwork to try to earn our belovedness, and the harder we work the less beloved we feel. Allowing space in our schedules for God, for rest, for peace, is a way of letting go of the compulsive busyness so we can live in the freedom of knowing that in God, we have enough and we are enough.
As we look deeper into the oddness of this scripture, these reflections on the value of empty space can also lead us into a deeper relationship with God. The reason for the seven “I am” statements in the gospel of John is that one of the primary purposes of the gospels is to answer the question “who is Jesus?” Each of these scriptural images of bread, light, shepherd, vine, tells us something about who Jesus is. Our human brains operate with pictures of objects, and our human brains need images like bread, light, shepherd, vine, in order to understand what’s going on. But Jesus also gives us something very different in giving us this odd image, “I am the gate.” With this image, Jesus shifts our focus from looking at him as a physical object, and instead presents himself as the empty space through which the sheep interact with their shepherd. And in this passage where Jesus is the gate, who is the shepherd? It is God, the shepherd we know from the Old Testament psalms: “The Lord is my Shepherd.” “We are his people and the sheep of his pasture.” It is through the empty space of the gate that the shepherd enters the sheepfold to be with the sheep, and it is through the empty space of the gate that the sheep follow behind the shepherd to be with him and to find the pasture he leads them to. It is through the empty space of the gate that the shepherd can come in to be physically present with the sheep, and it is through the empty space of the gate that the sheep can go out of the sheepfold to be physically present with the shepherd. The relationship between the shepherd and the sheep is conveyed by the familiarity of the shepherd’s voice as he calls them by name, and the voice is something else that has no physical substance; it is just sound vibrations moving through thin air, and yet the effect of voices in our communications and our relationships determines how our lives turn out.
So the question, “Who is Jesus?” is an important one, definitely. John’s gospel provides us with some valuable answers. However, today’s odd statement, “I am the gate” gives us a much deeper perspective because it shifts our focus from “Who is Jesus?” to the even deeper question “What happens through Jesus?” and the answer is that God our shepherd comes to be with us, and calls us by name, and we know his voice and follow him and go out to be with him in the pasture that feeds us.
The miracle of the incarnation, that God reveals who God is by coming to us in human form, is an important one, definitely. Still, as amazing as it is that we humans can experience God in physical form, it is not the only miracle. We do not need to cling indefinitely to this human body or make an idol out of it, because its role is to be the empty space through which God enters human life, and calls us each by name. Since we recognize that we are loved and cared for (even though we are simply sheep) its role is also the empty space through which we follow God to be in God’s presence where God provides us with all the food we want and all the peace we want. The miracle of the resurrection is that after God reveals to us that God can come to us in the form of a limited, finite, physical human body, God reveals to us that we have access to everything unlimited, infinite, eternal, and divine. This is not because of the accomplishments in the lives of the sheep; this is not because the sheep have done lots of righteous things. It is simply because God our good shepherd loves the sheep, and cares for them. It is because God our Good Shepherd loves us, and cares for us.
Happy Good Shepherd Sunday.
The scripture passage for today is an odd one, and the oddity of it was what prompted my curiosity to look up what’s going on with Good Shepherd Sunday. On Good Shepherd Sunday, in each year of our three year lectionary cycle we get a psalm about a shepherd. In year A and B it’s psalm 23, “the Lord is my shepherd”. In year C it’s psalm 100, which says, “Know this: The Lord himself is God….we are his people and the sheep of his pasture”. What I was most curious about is what’s going on with the gospel passage. Jesus has a fairly extended discourse about sheep and shepherds throughout chapter 10 in the gospel of John. It comes right after the passage we read a few weeks ago in which Jesus heals the man born blind, and the Pharisees are not happy about it and keep trying to silence the man or get him to say something against Jesus, and the man just keeps on telling the truth. Some scholars see the beginning of John 10 as continuing to comment on these problems with the Pharisees, and implying that they are the bad shepherds. John 10 also comes before the description of the raising of Lazarus, which also contains some contrasts between those who resist the miracle and Jesus himself, including trying to kill both Lazarus and Jesus, and those who respond to the miracle and to Jesus himself with faith. John 10 itself explores the sheep and shepherd images at some length. So each year on Good Shepherd Sunday, we read a different section of this shepherd chapter: this year in year A, we read the first ten verses, next year in year B we’ll read the next seven verses, and the year after that in year C we’ll read another 8 verses of it. Then, of course, we’ll start the cycle all over again. Every time from now on, since you all have been paying attention, you’ll say, “Oh yeah, it’s Good Shepherd Sunday again and I know all about that!”
So here’s the part of today’s gospel reading that seems odd. Jesus tells us that anyone who doesn’t enter the sheepfold by the gate but climbs in another way is a thief and a bandit. In contrast, the one who enters by the gate is the shepherd of the sheep. Then Jesus goes on to give some more description: that the gatekeeper opens the gate for him, that the sheep hear his voice, that he calls them by name and leads them out, that he goes ahead of them, that they follow him because they know his voice. Then back to the contrast: the sheep will not follow a stranger but will run from him because they do not know the voice of strangers. So then we get to where Jesus says, “Very truly, I tell you, I am….” And what we would logically expect is, “I am the good shepherd.” And Jesus says, “I am the gate.” What? The gate?
If you want to boost your Bible knowledge today, you can remember that there are seven “I am” statements Jesus makes in the Gospel of John. If someone were to ask me to name them, it would be the most familiar ones that would come to mind first:
“I am the light of the world”
“I am the bread of life”
“I am the vine and you are the branches”
“I am the resurrection and the life”
“I am the way, the truth, and the life”
And “I am the good shepherd,” which appears slightly later on in John 10, in the passage we get next year, in Year B, on Good Shepherd Sunday.
All of these are familiar images of Jesus. These images show up not only in scriptures, but also in hymns, in stained glass windows, in a variety of forms of art. The one I would be most likely to forget, by a really wide margin, is “I am the gate.”
After all this lead-up about the relationship between the sheep and the shepherd, why would Jesus say something as odd as “I am the gate”?
We are used to thinking of the usefulness of objects based on what they are or what they do: a hammer, a hamburger, a pencil. But there are some objects whose usefulness and value is that they provide us with empty space, such as a cup. A cup would be useless if it were solid; what makes it useful is the empty space it provides us with. The same thing is true of a door; its value is that you can open it and walk through the empty space in it. Or a gate: its value is in the empty space it provides for going out or coming in.
We often think about the value of physical objects, but it’s easy to forget the value of empty space. But we can consider the people who suffer from things like compulsive hoarding, and how difficult it makes their lives. From a fear of not having enough, they fill their homes with more and more objects, and become increasingly trapped as they lose the space to live in. They often become isolated because they feel embarrassed for other people to see what their house looks like, and because there isn’t enough room for guests to come over. Relationships get squeezed out of their lives, and so does joy, because of a lack of space.
What is even more common in 21st century society is the tendency for us to keep filling up our time with more and more things, the way hoarders keep filling up their space. Sometimes it takes a major disruption in our lives for us to notice our relationship with time. For many of us, even when we have unstructured time, our default is to want to fill it with constant busyness or constant entertainment and constant noise, and doing so can squeeze out deep relationships, rest, joy, and God. This can happen even when our busyness is doing things that seem very virtuous.
Those of you who were playing Lent Madness this spring may remember that one of the saints we learned about was Elizabeth Fry, whose devout faith motivated her to accomplish all sorts of societal transformations on behalf of the most neglected and despised, including prison reform. One of the things I really appreciated learning about her was the prayer she often prayed, “Oh Lord, may I be directed what to do, and what to leave undone.” That’s a powerful one. For one thing, if we try to do every task that comes into view we quickly get spread too thin and lose our focus and our sense of purpose and have a constant sense of inadequacy or failure or anxiety. The other result is that if we are unable to choose what to leave undone, then we are unable to ever find the rest our souls need. Elizabeth Fry knew that asking for God’s direction for what to leave undone is just as holy as asking for God’s direction for what to do.
There is a reason that setting aside space for God in our schedules each week is so important that God makes it one of the Ten Commandments. If we are too busy for the space in our schedules for worship, that tells us we have become too busy. If hoarders who compulsively fill their space are driven by fear of not having enough, the tendency to compulsively fill our time is driven by fear of not being enough. This fear of not being enough leads us to overwork to try to earn our belovedness, and the harder we work the less beloved we feel. Allowing space in our schedules for God, for rest, for peace, is a way of letting go of the compulsive busyness so we can live in the freedom of knowing that in God, we have enough and we are enough.
As we look deeper into the oddness of this scripture, these reflections on the value of empty space can also lead us into a deeper relationship with God. The reason for the seven “I am” statements in the gospel of John is that one of the primary purposes of the gospels is to answer the question “who is Jesus?” Each of these scriptural images of bread, light, shepherd, vine, tells us something about who Jesus is. Our human brains operate with pictures of objects, and our human brains need images like bread, light, shepherd, vine, in order to understand what’s going on. But Jesus also gives us something very different in giving us this odd image, “I am the gate.” With this image, Jesus shifts our focus from looking at him as a physical object, and instead presents himself as the empty space through which the sheep interact with their shepherd. And in this passage where Jesus is the gate, who is the shepherd? It is God, the shepherd we know from the Old Testament psalms: “The Lord is my Shepherd.” “We are his people and the sheep of his pasture.” It is through the empty space of the gate that the shepherd enters the sheepfold to be with the sheep, and it is through the empty space of the gate that the sheep follow behind the shepherd to be with him and to find the pasture he leads them to. It is through the empty space of the gate that the shepherd can come in to be physically present with the sheep, and it is through the empty space of the gate that the sheep can go out of the sheepfold to be physically present with the shepherd. The relationship between the shepherd and the sheep is conveyed by the familiarity of the shepherd’s voice as he calls them by name, and the voice is something else that has no physical substance; it is just sound vibrations moving through thin air, and yet the effect of voices in our communications and our relationships determines how our lives turn out.
So the question, “Who is Jesus?” is an important one, definitely. John’s gospel provides us with some valuable answers. However, today’s odd statement, “I am the gate” gives us a much deeper perspective because it shifts our focus from “Who is Jesus?” to the even deeper question “What happens through Jesus?” and the answer is that God our shepherd comes to be with us, and calls us by name, and we know his voice and follow him and go out to be with him in the pasture that feeds us.
The miracle of the incarnation, that God reveals who God is by coming to us in human form, is an important one, definitely. Still, as amazing as it is that we humans can experience God in physical form, it is not the only miracle. We do not need to cling indefinitely to this human body or make an idol out of it, because its role is to be the empty space through which God enters human life, and calls us each by name. Since we recognize that we are loved and cared for (even though we are simply sheep) its role is also the empty space through which we follow God to be in God’s presence where God provides us with all the food we want and all the peace we want. The miracle of the resurrection is that after God reveals to us that God can come to us in the form of a limited, finite, physical human body, God reveals to us that we have access to everything unlimited, infinite, eternal, and divine. This is not because of the accomplishments in the lives of the sheep; this is not because the sheep have done lots of righteous things. It is simply because God our good shepherd loves the sheep, and cares for them. It is because God our Good Shepherd loves us, and cares for us.
Happy Good Shepherd Sunday.