Fourth Sunday of Easter - Cycle A 2019-2020

Acts 2:14a, 36-41 | 1 Peter 2:20b-25 | John 10:1-10

Almighty and everliving God, lead us to share in the joys of heaven so that the humble flock may reach where the brave shepherd has gone before, who lives and reigns with you in the unity of the Holy Spirit, one God forever and ever, amen.

We continue with the theme of the impact that this figure Jesus Christ has had on the world and on each of us, and it’s the task that I take on when I accepted the call to be a priest, that I would preach and teach this mysterious thing that happened in history that changed everything.  I think it’s interesting that we’ve had basically 2,000 years of Old Testament and 2,000 years of New Testament.  That’s where we are right now in 2020.  It’s an interesting time.  We’ve had a long history of pondering the Old Testament, a long history of pondering the New Testament, trying to put them together and realized they’re one message, and the message is so peculiar and mysterious. 

I don't know if you think about how a priest would be affected by these readings and everyone who has a role of ministry but priests in particular, ministers, pastors everywhere.  There’s a challenge put before us, and it’s in a way frightening, because it’s saying that there’s a temptation in every human being to step outside of the role that we really has a people who put other people in touch with the mystery that they’re invited to experience, the intention of that compared to telling people what they need to do and controlling their lives through rules and regulations.  The latter is so human.  I’m in charge of a group of people.  I should tell them what they need to do.  I should make sure they’re not doing the wrong thing, and I never got into that that seriously, but there was always a sense that I might have been maybe too easy on people.  Maybe I should have been more tough over these last 52 years of ministry, and other times I says, “No, no.  You’re just beginning to understand the freedom that God is inviting you to give to people through this gift of forgiveness and love and acceptance, that we should have courage to take risks and make mistakes and be accepted if we’re intending always to grow.”  That’s just the tension that I think all of us as ministers feel in this particular set of readings, pretty much nails us in terms of inviting us to get to the heart of what it is a minister is called to do, because Jesus said, “I am the model that you need to follow in order to minister this mysterious, wonderful thing called redemption, called new life, called truth.” 

So let me see if I can go through these readings and see if I can draw for you and for myself some wisdom and some understanding for this place that I have in your life, because we all share in it.  I’m a minister to a large group of people when I was in parishes, and yet now my audience is the radio and video and things like that.  But it’s still the same.  I still have a sense of responsibility for these open hearts that listen to me.  In fact at times I feel so — I don't know — humbled by the fact that people listen and pay attention, and when they tell me it works, it’s so life-giving for me.  But at the same time, I worry am I doing a good enough job.  That’s just part of me.  It’s part of what, I guess, all ministers feel, because the one thing I have to be careful of, and the one thing I think Jesus is inviting his disciples to be careful of, is to look at the Pharisees and recognize that they went off-track.  They were pretty bad, but they didn’t realize they were as far off as they were, which frightens me a little bit in terms of anybody like me who’s in charge of other people, whether you’re a minister or a parent or a friend.  You’ve got to be careful of how you do this work.  It is not up to us to tell other people what to do and to say, “If you do it, I accept you.  If you don’t, I reject you.”  That’s the shadow.  It seems to me that that’s the biggest sin of the Pharisees.  They didn’t know the heart of the message that God always wanted his people to hear and to listen to and to be transformed by.  They fell into the trap that the mind and the ego — we just get drawn to it.  There’s something about being in charge of people that’s a rush.  It feels good.  It feels like you’re powerful, and without even realizing it, you can sort of begin this little dance where you’re telling people, “This is what I expect of you in this relationship, and if you don’t do it, I pull away,” which is another way of saying I reject you.  “And if you do what I say, then I’m drawing in, and I accept you.”  That’s the shadow of all relationships.  The parent who gives life to their child affirms who they are and encourages them to find out who they are by making mistakes and taking risks, and that’s not easy for a sensitive, caring parent who worries so much about children when they’re younger making mistakes that they’ll have to live with their whole life.  But they tend to forget that this process that God has called us to is one of constantly making mistakes, misjudgments and never, ever receiving anything but acceptance and love and patience on the part of God.  

So what I want to try to do in this homily is to open you to something that I believe God has shared with me as I ponder these readings, and that is that I am never, as a priest, nor is anyone in a relationship, in charge of somehow managing the relationship so the other person ends up doing a certain thing that we think they should be doing.  It’s much more difficult than giving direction, rules and laws.  The heart of every relationship and the heart of God’s relationship with you and me is not to give us rules and laws but to open us to an experience of who he is and to know what it feels like to have somebody absolutely, 100 percent on your side.  No matter what you do, they’re there.  With patience and with understanding and with compassion, they lead you through whatever you’re going through without any resistance to your struggle.  Think of the trust that God has in us in giving us this kind of freedom, and one of the things I realized in this set of readings, for example, in the first reading we see that Peter comes along and says the most — it’s a pretty frightening thought.  He looks at these people and said, “Jesus came.  You’ve all waited for him, and well, he came, and you killed him.”  And they say, “Now what are we going to do?”  It would seem like, “Now we should be condemned.  We should be cut out.  We should be destroyed.  We should be punished.”  He said, “No.  Repent.”  Repent means look at what you did, not with shame and guilt but with the desire to change.  Repent is a kind of recognition that you’ve done something wrong and you want to change.  It’s not shame and guilt  It’s a desire to choose what is true and what is right, and then when you are in that disposition of saying, “I want only what is true.  I want only what is really healthy for me,” then you are in the process of being baptized.  And baptism is the moment in Christ’s life when his humanity was infused fully with divinity, and that’s exactly what he’s inviting us into, a relationship when our humanity is infused with his divinity.  That’s the goal.  

That’s the thing I want more than anything else to teach people to believe in and to trust in and to open themselves to that.  That’s so different than the generation in which we live, according to Peter, when he says, “Save yourselves from this corrupt generation.”  Well, corrupt is a pretty strong word, but basically the world as it is doesn’t work so much out of some power coming into us and making the difference.  It works on the power that’s in us already.  So for me to say to you the only way I can be a valuable minister to you is to open you to an experience of a God who said, “I will dwell in you, and I will be your guide, and the thing I want you to know more than anything else is how much I’m on your side.”  That’s the most amazing thing about Jesus.  Listen to Peter describing this.   He said, “This Christ has come into your life, and he wants you to understand he is there for you.  And his commitment to you is not just that he wants to give you direction and encourage you to follow it.  No.  He’s going to do something for you that enables you to cross over a line that is resistance, resistance to something greater than yourself.”  And I don’t know how to describe this.  The more I try to describe it, the more I lose it, but let me see if I can do this.  What he was doing is he took upon himself all of the stuff that our sins create in the world.  When we aren’t living the life we’re called to, we are caught in a way of living where we are at odds with people who are not who they should be.  We condemn them.  We criticize them.  We insult them, and then the pattern continues, and they do the same back to us.  So he said, “I want to change that.  I want to change it.”  And the way he did it is so mysterious.  I can’t describe how it worked, but he said,” All right, I’m going to give you an example of what you need to be, but I’m going to do it first.  And when I do it, I will empower you to do it.”  Now, I don’t understand how to describe that, but all I know is, when he said, “I am rejected, and I refuse to take that personally, and I refuse to return insult for insult, pain for pain.  I absorb it.  I take it in, and I refuse to return evil for evil.  And when I take it on, when I accept it, I destroy its power.”  Now, I can’t describe how that works literally, but all I’m telling you is what it feels like to me is, when someone that I’ve offended or done something wrong to, they consistently turn back to me and tell me, “I do not feel alienated from you or separated from you because of what you’ve done to me.  I accept it.  I’ll endure it, and I’ll return to you nothing but love and acceptance and belief that you have a potential to get past that, to be loved like that.”  Somehow Christ took on the sins of everyone and didn’t respond with sinful reaction, and by that, he destroyed the power of sin.  I’m saying that in a way, and I can’t fully understand it.  So I can’t describe it.  I can’t explain it.  It’s just something that you need to believe in, that this love of this God is so different than human love, and when you feel it and sense it, it’s so transformative that you not only want it, want to receive it and are thankful for it, but you want to give it.  And that’s the greatest mystery, that this God gives us an example in a person that he filled with divinity, a human like us, and he showed us what love really could be like and how it affects people.  He’s saying, “When you are affected by that love, when you are touched by it, when you’re freed by it, when you’re affirmed by it, just know that, when you feel that life flowing in you, you can give that to somebody else.” But you can’t do it unless you’ve received it.  You can’t do it unless it’s happened to you.  

So that’s why Jesus decides he’s going to tell everyone about how to minister to one another, and he said, “The only way you can minister to one another is to minister like I’ve ministered to you.  I’m the gate.”  If you want to minister, if you want to come in to a group of people, the flock that God has given you, the community of people you’re in charge of, whether it’s your — if you’re a priest or a minister, it’s your congregation.  If you’re an individual, it’s your circle of friends, but all he’s saying is, “I want you to feel that you have within you the capacity to do something for these people that goes so far beyond what normal interaction is.”  What do we try to do for each other?  We try to be nice.  We try to stay in touch.  We return favor for favor.  We can be nice to each other, but being nice is not following the Good Shepherd.  The Good Shepherd said, “No, what you have the potential to be is like me.  If you enter into this world of caring for others, you enter through the gate.  You enter through me.  You have to be like me to others, and you have to understand that this thing that you can be for others is something that I will give you.  It’s not something you have.  It’s something I give you.  I give it to you when you realize what it means to be fully loved, accepted, affirmed.”  We don’t have it from other human beings.  It has to be, I think, something that comes through us through the divine.  It’s like Jesus is saying, “The only way you can minister to those that you love is to be filled like I am filled with divinity, and the divinity is what does the work.”  And how does that work?  I don't know.  I’m not capable of loving that way.  I don’t love anybody that deeply, but I know that I want to.  And I know that God can do that through me, and so what I believe in is that there’s some power given to every human being.  It’s a force.  It’s an energy.  It’s a grace.  It’s an experience of being loved, unconditionally loved.  No matter what you do, it never changes the commitment of the person that’s there to serve you.  That is something that can only come through us from God to another person, and that’s our destiny.  That’s our work, to be the Good Shepherd, and how it works, I wish I knew.  If it worked all the time, we’d be egocentric, crazy people, I guess, but I struggle to do it, and yet I know somehow it works through me.  And that gives me joy, but I don’t claim it.  And the more I try to claim it, the worse it is.  So I guess I’m just saying surrender, submit to a mystery of God working through you, loving in a way that no human being can love, and you are instruments of that.  That’s your inheritance.  Everybody has it, and it’s not us.  It’s not on our shoulders to change people.  It’s God’s shoulders, and he will use us with our imperfection, with our sinfulness, with our selfishness, yet something can come through that so powerful and so healing that it should bring us enormous amounts of peace, because it’s his gift to us, and then it’s our gift to one another.

Father, your presence is everything.  Your love for us is so foreign from our human nature.  It’s hard for us to grasp the amount of love that you care for us and the amount of intention within you that we grow and become all that we’re intended to be.  Bless us with faith in this and trust in this more than in ourselves and in our discipline and our desire to form a conscious that is always doing what’s right.  Let us be used by you, trusting in you, and we ask this in Jesus’ name, amen.