Not By Words Alone

I John 3:16-24; John 10:11-18; Psalm 23

Easter 4

Psalm 23 (King James Version, 1611)

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: 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:

for thou art with me; thy rod and thy staff they comfort me.
Thou preparest a table before me in the presence of mine enemies:

thou anointest my head with oil; my cup runneth over.
Surely goodness and mercy shall follow me all the days of my life:

and I will dwell in the house of the Lord for ever.

John 10:11-18

[Jesus said,] ¹¹ “I am the good shepherd. The good shepherd lays down his life for the sheep. ¹² The hired hand, who is not the shepherd and does not own the sheep, sees the wolf coming and leaves the sheep and runs away—and the wolf snatches them and scatters them. ¹³ The hired hand runs away because a hired hand does not care for the sheep.

¹⁴ I am the good shepherd. I know my own and my own know me, ¹⁵ just as the Father knows me and I know the Father. And I lay down my life for the sheep. ¹⁶ I have other sheep that do not belong to this fold. I must bring them also, and they will listen to my voice. So there will be one flock, one shepherd.

¹⁷ For this reason the Father loves me, because I lay down my life in order to take it up again. ¹⁸ No one takes it from me, but I lay it down of my own accord. I have power to lay it down, and I have power to take it up again. I have received this command from my Father.”

I John 3:16-24

¹⁶ We know love by this, that he laid down his life for us—and we ought to lay down our lives for one another. ¹⁷ How does God’s love abide in anyone who has the world’s goods and sees a brother or sister in need and yet refuses help? ¹⁸ Little children, let us love, not in word or speech, but in truth and action. ¹⁹ And by this we will know that we are from the truth and will reassure our hearts before him ²⁰ whenever our hearts condemn us; for God is greater than our hearts, and he knows everything. ²¹ Beloved, if our hearts do not condemn us, we have boldness before God; ²² and we receive from him whatever we ask, because we obey his commandments and do what pleases him.

²³ And this is his commandment, that we should believe in the name of his Son Jesus Christ and love one another, just as he has commanded us. ²⁴ All who obey his commandments abide in him, and he abides in them. And by this we know that he abides in us, by the Spirit that he has given us.

The Sermon

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: he leadeth me in the paths of righteousness for his name’s sake.

Let’s talk about sheep for a minute. If you’ve ever been awakened three hours earlier than you wanted to be by someone making a sound that seems to be a combination of a vastly irritable whine and a shard of glass being rubbed against a rusty guitar string, you have some idea what sheep can sound like at their worst.

I always thought they were supposed to give a gentle, “baa, baa.”

It’s more like AGKK! AGKK! And it’s like they mean it to sound like that, too: AGKK! That shirt doesn’t match those pants! AGKK! Some flocks sound perpetually irritable, and like they have kind of an attitude, frankly.

And so when we considered our Lord and Savior to be our shepherd, the one who would make any sacrifice for the sheep, it was with no small degree of humility that we accepted the metaphor.

That last night that we had together, we looked at him with silent awe; with gratitude, and sorrow, and a feeling of unworthiness, and the hope that we had learned all the lessons he had tried so hard to teach us, because we sensed that our opportunity to learn from him was drawing to a close.

And after the meal we went outside together, and he said, “I give you a new commandment, that you love one another. Just as I have loved you, you also should love one another.”

And I thought about how he loved us.

He taught us to love God’s creation, and even when he spoke negatively about “this world” in comparison to God’s kingdom, the things he said were all because he loved this world—its people, its parties, its places to be alone, its grandeur, its intimacy—he loved this world.

He loved it so much that he was willing to give up his part of it so the rest of us could live in it and live abundantly—not having too much in the way of extravagance,

but having everything in the way of health and happiness and peace and forbearance and love—the kind of deep, abiding love that means something more profound than “I love ice cream,” and something other than “Did you see that skirt she was wearing? I think I’m in love.”

The kind of love he bequeathed to us was a love that appreciates every second that God gives us—and appreciates God for every second of it.

But that’s love for the world. He also taught us some more radical notions of love. Love the unlovable. Love the person you could get a disease from. Love the crooked tax collector. Love the street walker, with the respect that’s due to every human being who was created in the image of God—which is every human being. Love your enemies: That one was easy enough to smile beatifically and nod our heads sagely, until we found out who our enemies are, and what they claim to intend to do to us just for being who we are. Then, “love your enemies” became something almost unfathomably deep.

But that night, there was something else. That night it was us—around the table; getting our feet washed, incongruously, by the one whose feet we should have been washing; sharing the last supper we would have together.

It was us, the family of the church, that he was talking about that night, when he looked us all in the eyes and said, “Just as I have loved you, you also should love one another. By this everyone will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another.”

That was a chilly spring evening in Jerusalem, over half a century ago.

Well, a lot can happen in half a century.

Churches rise and fall in that amount of time.

In half a century, high school graduates can serve in the military; apprentice; marry; change apartments and cities and regions; work hard; find their niche; establish a home; make and lose intimate friendships; see their kids off to school and college and marriages; look after aging parents; watch helplessly as their bodies change; endure health crises; achieve seniority in their fields; retire; and see life with a hard-earned wisdom.

“Looking back through the years,

There were joys and some tears,

There were losses and gains,

There was laughter and some pain.

All is well, all is well, all is well, all is well.” [i]

A lot can happen in 50 years.

Those kinds of change and growth—through life, and love, and sometimes pain and trial—fall on churches, too.

Over that span of time, of course, many had joined the church who hadn’t been there when Jesus came back to the disciples (and then came back again, when Thomas doubted what the rest of them had told him).

And we told them the stories. And we taught what he taught us, which is, in a word, love.

And they listened, and they learned.

But gradually, some started think, well, you know, it doesn’t make sense that Jesus came back after he was dead—it seems a little…far-fetched.

More likely, they thought, he didn’t really come back from the dead per se; that’s just not rational. In fact, most likely, they said, Jesus must not even have been really human to begin with. If he was God’s son—“true God from true God,” as the Nicene Creed says—how could the substance of the Almighty exist in a mortal human body?

No, they figured, since that doesn’t conform to our logical sense of what’s possible, it must have been that Jesus was kind of like a ghost—the whole time, from the beginning. You can’t kill a ghost. So that would explain a lot, they thought.

And then they took that to its next logical conclusion. Since they didn’t think he could have been a real, flesh and blood person, that meant that the death and resurrection story didn’t really make all that much of a difference. Because…well, a ghost can’t really die, so whatever this Jesus was couldn’t really have accomplished anything by going to the cross.

So, they said, if the cross doesn’t really mean anything, then the teachings and the whole life that led to it can’t mean much, either.

Which suddenly opened up a whole new area of permission for those who had joined the church without having witnessed the living Christ. Without the cross, they gave themselves permission not to love.

That meant they were free to keep their resources for themselves, because, who cares if there are people on the street? Who cares if someone else is homeless, or hopeless? Who cares if our young people have access to ministry; if our troubled people have access to care and counseling; if our elderly people have access to health and wellness, and if our dying people have access to compassion and grace and mercy? Who cares about housing, and rehab, and food pantries?

Who cares about any of that stuff, because, hey—we’re fine. And love for ourselves is about all we have time for.

And all of this, they said, was made clear to them, and they were given authority to say it, they said, by the Holy Spirit. But we know not to believe every spirit, without testing it to see whether it is from God.

They left the community of believers, and even held some animosity toward us. They said we were backward, that we believed in meaningless or even dangerous myths.

It’s always tempting to despise those who are not in your clan—a different people, a different religion, a different set of beliefs.

But some of the most vitriolic animosity you will find is between people who think very similarly—but just different enough to be different. Different kinds of Christians argue and debate one another, but the strength of those disagreements pales in comparison to the arguments among people within any given denomination.

And so our former fellow travelers looked at us with a mix of condescension and contempt.

“What good does Jesus do you?” they said. “He’s been gone for fifty years. What difference does an empty cross make? Or an empty tomb? How has any of that made any difference at all to your life?”

They misunderstood a lot about us.

But the one thing they understood least of all about us was: we loved—because we learned how to love from the king of love.

He sacrificed everything for this company—this fellowship of people who break bread together. First he opened up to us truth and beauty such as we had never seen before; and then, he walked away from it all, he gave up his life, so that we would have access to this truth and this beauty for eternity. He showed us what it meant to love unconditionally, and then he proved that his love for us was exactly that: unconditional.

And this is his commandment: that we should believe in the name of God’s Son Jesus Christ, and love one another.

We know love by this: that he laid down his life for us—and we ought to lay down our lives for one another. How does God’s love abide in anyone who has the world’s goods and sees a brother or sister in need and yet refuses help?

So let us love, not just in word or speech, but in truth and action.

Let our love be given extravagantly, generously, wastefully, forgivingly, happily, with affection in the face of derision and patience in the face of arrogant self-centeredness.

And by this we will know that we are from the truth. And the world will know that we are his disciples.

“Days of labor were long

Grace from God kept us strong

At the close of life’s day

Shepherd hands will lead the way.

All is well, all is well, all is well, all is well.” [ii]

[i] James Hendrix, “All Is Well” from Songs of Zion. Nashville: Abingdon, 1981; hymn #5.

[ii] James Hendrix, “All Is Well” from Songs of Zion. Nashville: Abingdon, 1981; hymn #5.