4th Sunday of Easter: Cycle C 21-22
FOURTH SUNDAY OF EASTER
Acts 13:14, 43-52 | Revelation 7:9, 14b-17 | John 10:27-30
Almighty, everliving God lead us to a 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.
One of the things that excites me about the role that I have as a teacher, one who tries to open your heart to the wisdom and the truth of who God is and who we are and what we’re here to accomplish, I’m also called to be someone who tends and cares for you and helps you through difficult times by giving you a sense of the patience and the love and the understanding that flows from this God who lives inside of us. And every year that we go through these holy days, which we’ve gone through, we’re reliving an experience that happened to a group of people, and the positive thing I want you to take from these stories is that they’re not just about going back in history and listening to what people went through, and isn’t that interesting. No, it’s they’re living out exactly what you and I are called into, that we’re called to live out the same experiences they are. They were moving from an Old Testament image of a God who was distant and judgmental somewhat, or not somewhat but pretty judgmental, and basically held people to a high, high level of performance. And then when they failed, they made kind of an institution that was designed around pointing out faults and then demanding that certain things be done by them to get them out of the disfavor from God. That was the system they were in, and they were invited into a radically different system. And if that seems like that’s something that just happened a long time ago, just think about it for a minute, because that’s exactly what every human being that I’ve ever met goes through, that there’s a kind of — I don't know — instinct inside of us that we have this goal that we’re supposed to achieve. And it’s higher than who we normally are, and that we have to strive to be more than we are. And then that puts us in a kind of stressful situation, because as we’re called to some kind of goodness and perfection — this is especially true when you’re young and you’ve got all this energy inside of you to go in all these different directions. And there’s this sense inside of you that you’ve got to control all of this, and the stress is there, meaning this distress is, “I want to do this, but then I’m told I can’t do that, or I can’t do this, and I must do that.” And it’s a pressure, and we grow through that. And sometimes that even separates us from the whole goal or the idea that we should be better than we are, and we give up. And then we discover something later.
I always think the spiritual world doesn’t really begin to awaken in us the enthusiasm we should have for this life that we share with God until we’re in our 30s and 40s, and for me, it was probably more my 50s and 60s, because that notion of being in a pressure cooker that says, “I should be better than I am, and I’m failing. And I’ve got to do something to make up for that.” Or if worse, we get caught up in a deep, dark spiral of shame, and we figure that because we failed so many times there is no hope for us. And we have this pressure inside of kind of this pain in the center of our stomach that kind of constantly shows itself and says, “What’s the use? What’s the use? I can’t do better than this.” And we kind of give up. We give up on this goal of being more than we normally can be on our own, because we’re trying to do it on our own.
And what we’re seeing in this story unfolding for these disciples, they’re like all of us who have this time in our life when we are spiritually awakened. They were caught up in an image of themselves and the world that they thought, “We’re special. We’re chosen. We’re going to be the new temple elite.” They thought they were going to be — they used to have arguments of who among them was the best. Does that sound familiar? Competition, am I better than this other person? And they got caught up in that, and then they saw something happen, that when the God who was calling them to a different way of life, to a kind of death to that old life, and they were caught with not being able to make that shift, and they denied him, and they felt so ashamed and so guilty. And then this awakening happens, and God reveals to them who he really is. And he’s saying, “Look, the fact that you failed miserably is an invitation for you to always look at yourself and realize that human beings are not capable of anything I’m asking them to do. They’re not able to be the people I want them to be unless they are awakened to a gift, and the gift is me — me, God.” Jesus is God. Jesus, when he says this, “I, I am forgiveness, and forgiveness is nothing more than I will come into you and enter into your sinfulness and use it to teach you, to awaken you to a mystery, which is this co-mingling of my presence in your humanity, your selfishness and my selflessness. And I teach you how to become selfless like me.” It’s beautiful.
It’s called destiny. What is your destiny? It’s in that first reading. Our destiny is that we’re called to live in grace, in God’s grace. What is God’s grace? What is grace? Look it up in the Oxford English Dictionary. It’s favor, God’s favor. Remember, when Jesus was baptized, he said, “This is my Son. My favor is with him.” When he said that, he was saying that not only about his Son but about you and about me. He created us. He sent us into this world to accomplish a goal that is our destiny, and the destiny is not necessarily a life that’s predetermined, we have no input in how it goes. No, the destiny is not that we are in — that we don’t have control over our choices. Destiny is that we’re called to live in those choices we make and in the way the world unfolds with a conviction that there is this presence in me that is always there with me, for me to enable me to deal with whatever life is presenting to me. And the thing about life’s presentations to you and to me, well, we need grace to be with us. So what does that say about them? That we’re not capable of dealing with these situations on our own, and that’s when we talk about stress and distress. Stress and distress are those moments in our life, in your life and mine, when we feel this stress, desire, longing to be more than we are and we can’t quite achieve it. And we find ourselves in a disposition perhaps of just giving up sometimes. “I’ve tried, and I’ve failed, and I can’t do any better than I’m doing,” or whatever. But whenever there’s that sense that there’s something in us that is saying, “You’re not worth. You’re not good enough,” be careful, because that’s the Old Testament coming back and wreaking its havoc, because the Old Testament would do nothing other than point out your fault and then tell you that you have to do something to make up for that. You have to make some kind of sacrifice, pay something. And what Jesus is trying to say to you and to me, that idea that you have to make up for the sins of your past is wrong, because I — Jesus speaking now, “I am the one who’s come into your life, and I am doing something. But you have to understand, it’s beyond your comprehension to figure it out, but I will pay for everything you’ve done that’s wrong. I will take care of that for you.” That’s called living in grace, living in God’s favor. Can you believe that? Can you feel that without taking advantage of it?
This is the weird thing about the Old Testament and the New Testament or even super-conservative religious people and more liberal people. It seems like the conservatives don’t have any real trust that people will respond to love. They only respond to punishment or to being condemned or to being judged. How many times do people tell me they feel, when they go to church, that there’s a spirit in some communities where, unless you have figured out your life and are living it perfectly, unless you do that, you’re not really accepted. And how does that show up? Well, when faults or experience by people, there’s not so much a judgment — there’s not so much an acceptance, but it’s more like a judgment, and we exclude people. What I love about one of the readings that we have — the first reading was about the disciples experiencing the joy of feeling God’s grace, God’s acceptance, and whatever we’ve done, he forgives. And there is the attractiveness of that to the people. That’s what they need. That’s the kind of shepherding they need, because this Sunday has always been set aside as Good Shepherd Sunday, which is meaning — it’s trying to say now we’re ready to begin to see what it means that we live in God’s favor and not in God’s judgment, because the Old Testament is God’s judgment, and the New Testament is God’s love and his favor. But what I find interesting is that the image of the Old Testament in that first reading is that they’re jealous. The temple priests are jealous of the love and the outpouring of joy and acceptance and welcoming the disciples into their life and their message in. It’s clear to me that the message of condemnation may be accepted. You may say, “Okay, this is God that’s always demanding perfection of me, so I guess I’ll do everything I possibly can to become the best person I can out of my own energy.” And it’s always so frustrating, because it doesn’t work. There’s that kind of reaction, or that kind of human response to that kind of system is not love. It’s fear and shame, and there was something in the heart that I think is beautiful. Maybe you didn’t read it this way, but there’s something beautiful in the heart of these Pharisees, that they would like to think they’re respected. They would like to think they were honored for their work, but they weren’t. They were feared, and when anybody in your life has that role, if it’s a parent or if it’s anyone else in a relationship, where there’s that kind of power over you, “You must perform in this way in order to have this relationship with me,” there isn’t anything there as a response other than kind of fear and anxiety and stress. And that’s one of the things that the gospel has come to relieve us of, distress.
There’s an image that’s in the second reading. That image — Revelations is such an interesting book. It’s hard to figure out, but some people think it’s just a way of imagining in very interesting images the heart of the message of Jesus. And that image of distress, this image of everybody around this figure that’s Jesus, the truth, love, light, they’re all delighted. They’re filled with joy and happiness, and it says they’ve endured the period of distress by being washed in the blood of the lamb. When you think about that, when you’re under a system of perfection and obligation and forcing yourself to be somebody that you aren’t yet really there yet, but you make yourself do it in order to be acceptable, that’s stress. And that stress is there in everyone’s life in their own particular journey, and what this beautiful image in whoever wrote Revelation — John was his name, but we don’t know for sure who it was. But anyway, he’s saying, if you understand what the blood of Jesus is, it is the outpouring of his love in the form of saying, “No matter what you’ve done, no matter what you’re held to in terms of obligation, if you fail in that, that does nothing other than increase my desire to fill you with an awareness that you are still loved. You are still mine. You are going to be my sheep, and I will shepherd you.”
That thing we did last week with the difference between tending and feeding, when you feed someone, you give them all this information perhaps about what they need to be and what they need to do with their life. That’s important, but nothing is as beautiful as the image of the God of the New Testament, the God that lives in you and lives in me, that he tends, pays attention to, listens to the pain, listens to the stress and wants nothing more than for you and for me to be freed of the stress of guilt and shame. What a gift, and what a terrible shame it is that in certain — from certain pulpits, from certain religions, from certain — and all religions are — come on. They’re not guided solely by God directly. You don’t go to a church and hear the voice of God directly. You hear it through another human being, and depending on how much that person has been touched with grace and living in grace, the more likely it is — if they’re filled with that grace, they’re going to be teaching you something that gives you comfort. And if you go to a place where it’s about judgment and condemnation, you’re going to leave with stress. So what a beautiful thing to be sensitive to and to be aware of, and that is the transformation from the old to the new, from a judgmental God to a God of favor, a God of grace, a God of love.
Father, your favor, your presence, your deep concern for us in our journey of seeking, of better understanding of who we are and why we’re here and what we’re called to be to the people around us is an incredibly complex thing at times, and then it’s almost like you tell us, “No, it’s simple. It’s so simple. It’s living in your favor. It’s knowing you’re always there. It’s using our life and our experiences to constantly teach us.” So our destiny is to grow into a relationship with you that frees us from the stress that is not our inheritance, but our inheritance is peace. And we ask this in Jesus’ name, amen.