A Sense of Place
John 10 1-10; Psalm 23
Easter 4
Psalm 23
1 The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want.
2 He makes me lie down in green pastures; he leads me beside still waters; 3 he restores my soul. He leads me in right paths for his name’s sake.
4 Even though I walk through the darkest valley, I fear no evil; for you are with me; your rod and your staff—they comfort me.
5 You prepare a table before me in the presence of my enemies; you anoint my head with oil; my cup overflows.
6 Surely goodness and mercy shall follow me all the days of my life, and I shall dwell in the house of the Lord my whole life long.
John 10:1-10
{1} “Very truly, I tell you, anyone who does not enter the sheepfold by the gate but climbs in by another way is a thief and a bandit. 2 The one who enters by the gate is the shepherd of the sheep. 3 The gatekeeper opens the gate for him, and the sheep hear his voice. He calls his own sheep by name and leads them out. 4 When he has brought out all his own, he goes ahead of them, and the sheep follow him because they know his voice. 5 They will not follow a stranger, but they will run from him because they do not know the voice of strangers.” 6 Jesus used this figure of speech with them, but they did not understand what he was saying to them.
7 So again Jesus said to them, “Very truly, I tell you, I am the gate for the sheep. 8 All who came before me are thieves and bandits; but the sheep did not listen to them. 9 I am the gate. Whoever enters by me will be saved, and will come in and go out and find pasture. 10 The thief comes only to steal and kill and destroy. I came that they may have life, and have it abundantly.”
The Sermon
Apple.
What did you see when I said that word—a big, red apple for the teacher, maybe? Or a green Granny Smith on a summer afternoon; or a shading tree; or maybe a computer that’s technically superior despite being, commercially, a perpetual second banana?
Let me try another one, and this time, for real:
Meadow.
A blue sky, and a gentle breeze; huge, old, solid trees, leaves waving gently; and the smell of fresh air, and the feel of cool grass under your feet; and the soft, rippling sound of a shimmering lake.
What did the happiest day of your childhood look like? I ask because I frequently remember being a teenager, 16 or so, and my best friend and I were driving around our hometown, and for all the stress we had over teachers and tests and college entrance exams, and peer pressure and parents; and girlfriend issues, such as the lack of one—in the context of all that worry and stress, he said, “You know, we’ll never have it this easy again.” We had relatively stable homes in a relatively good environment with a relatively good school and relatively good prospects. And pretty much everything we needed was taken care of by relatives.
What were the happiest days of your childhood? I will hazard a guess that on those days, someone was looking after you—Mom or Dad, or grandparents, or guardians. Maybe you were with them, or maybe you just knew they were there; but the fact that they were looking after things that you didn’t even have to think about made it possible. We learn to give thanks to God for those people, whether they are here among us, or whether they’ve taken their place already at the great banquet table. They take a piece of us with them when they go, but they leave far more than that with us.
I would imagine that, for most if not all of us, the happiest day of our childhood may have been our most carefree; and if it was carefree, there was probably someone whom we knew and trusted, whose presence meant we never had even to think about our safety, our security; someone with whom “the future” did not mean a time of uncertainty, but if we thought about it at all, it was only as a time of hope and companionship and endless, long, carefree days enjoying everything there is to love about God’s green earth.
Maybe that day looked something like this meadow, the cool green pasture where you can allow yourself to forget, just for now, all the injustices and cruelties that the world has perpetrated; forget the politics and pundits; forget the mortgages, the bills, the taxes.
Allow yourself here to forget what you wish you hadn’t done, what you wish you had never said; forget the moment when you should have said something but you did not have the fortitude to say it. In this pasture it is less than irrelevant; it has been deleted from the tapes and is wiped clean from the history books. You will not be judged for that failure any more.
Here there is only peace, and security; the strength of undeniable hope and the joy that comes from the knowledge that you are where you belong, and among those with whom you belong.
“In life and in death, we belong to God.”
That is the first sentence of the Brief Statement of Faith, which is the way our Church, the Presbyterian Church (USA), answered what was deemed the most pressing question of the day at the end of the 20th and the beginning of the 21st century.
Earlier generations of the Church had sought to answer questions relevant to their own time.
In the early centuries of Christianity, the Apostles’ Creed was the Church's answer to questions about the nature and divinity of Christ.
In 1560, the Scots Confession answered the question: now that we’ve declared that our Mother church, the Catholic Church, has strayed so far from the New Testament ideal of the Church that it’s unrecognizable, what do we propose as a more Biblical model?
In the 1600s, the Westminster Confession answered the question, “What happens when you put 100 English-speaking scholars in a room for an indefinite period and tell them just to write as much as they think they ought to?”
In the 1930s, the Barmen Declaration provided the Church’s answer to Hitler’s claim that he and his Nazi government were the proper head of the Church.
The Confession of 1967 answered the collapsing cultural norms and the fragmenting society with a sentence straight out of Ephesians (“In Jesus Christ, God was reconciling humankind to himself”), and the assertion that God’s will is for us to be reconciled to God, to one another, and to ourselves.
And then, in the 1980s, when the Northern and Southern branches of mainstream Presbyterianism were at last reunited, the Brief Statement of Faith confronted what was thought to be the essential question for its time, namely: do we belong to anything anymore?
They addressed an American society where a generation had long since abandoned not only many of the institutions that previous generations took for granted; they had in fact largely abandoned the whole concept of institutions. That included all kinds of civic clubs and organizations; even Scouts took a major hit at the time. And it included the Church.
The word in the 70's was “independence.” My older brothers and I, and our neighborhood friends, all dreamed about having a separate place. The ideal would be for your bedroom to be over the garage, and for the garage to be separate from the house. Mom and Dad can pay for my room and board, but you really thought it would be cool if you lived like you were independent (so you could play your Led Zeppelin records as loud as yu wanted to).
Somewhere along the line a generational shift happened, and all of a sudden “family time” seemed like a quant relic in a lot of places; and kids didn’t have to crave independence because they already had plenty of it. Both parents out of the house all day or, just as likely, parent and step-parent out of the house all day, and everybody grabs something to eat whenever they get a chance—if that’s your family life, you’ve already got all the independence you want.
And the Church saw the concept of joining an institution as something that for many people was way back in the rearview mirror, and saw the opportunities for casual family life slipping into history—the dinner table, the pleasantly boring Sunday afternoon with nowhere else to go and nothing else to do—and they interpreted the fundamental question of their time to be:
In the absence of things that used to bind us together, to whom do you belong? Where do you belong?
And no matter what generation you’re a part of, or what segment of society, one way or another, something within us is scanning the horizon; some computer chip in our brain is scanning the information about the best days of our childhood, and even at rest, our eyes flutter under our eyelids: where is the meadow? Where do I belong? How do I get home?
“The one who enters by the gate is the shepherd of the sheep. The gatekeeper opens the gate for him, and the sheep hear his voice. He calls his own sheep by name and leads them out.”
You may have noticed that the imagery doesn’t all hold up to strict scrutiny.
Jesus is talking to the disciples, and first he seems to be saying he’s the shepherd. But then he mentions a gatekeeper. And just when you think he must have meant that God is the gatekeeper and Jesus is the Good Shepherd—or was it the other way around?—he says plainly, “I am the gate for the sheep.”
Now the shepherd and the gatekeeper and even the gate are all mixed up.
But if the details don’t make a logical correspondence, the image is crystal clear: you are at home here. You belong. You have a right to be here, which has been bought for you at enormous cost. You have a protector and a guardian and a way in and a way out and you will find sanctuary.
There was a little girl who was being held by the Gestapo, Hitler’s Nazi thugs. They were trying to get information from her which they thought she had, and they were going to do whatever was needed to get it out of her. And as a grown woman in late middle age, she remembered being in a chair, and they were doing some inhuman, excruciating thing to her little hands, and finally one of the officers in the room came to his senses and said “For God’s sake! This is a seven year old girl!”
And for the rest of her life—and she went on to become a minister—when she remembered that moment, she felt a strange warmth, a warmth that tells you that even in our earthly hell, a glimpse of heaven can come through. As Leonard Cohen said, "Forget your 'perfect' offering / There is a crack in everything / That's how the light gets in."
Whoever enters by me will be saved, and will come in and go out and find pasture. I came that they may have life, and have it abundantly.
You may say it with me if you like:
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.
Keith Grogg
Carolina Beach Presbyterian Church
Carolina Beach, NC
April 13, 2008
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