Enfolded By Love

I John 3:16-24
John 10:11-18n
May 3, 2009

The great German theologian of the 20th Century, Karl Barth said, that “there is no such thing as an individual Christian.”

What he meant when he said that is that Christianity isn’t a personal, save-me-get-me-into heaven, just-me-and-Jesus relationship but that of a community, a flock, watched over by the Good Shepherd.

Remembering the metaphor of seeing Jesus as the Good Shepherd helps me illustrate the meaning of this idea, that there is no such thing as an individual Christian.

Let me share with you this profound thought:
There is no “separate singular form of the word sheep.”
Now that’s profound. The word for one sheep or 100 sheep is ....sheep.

We are not separate from one another: “In our essence, our being is bound up with the entire flock: with people who break bread and recite prayers with us, with people who go to work and enjoy week-ends with us, with people who begin young and grow old with us.

To be a Christian is to be a person in community, a community that is founded not upon doctrinal unity, but upon God’s knowing us and being for us.
To be a Christian is to be a person in community, a community that is founded, not upon economic status, or political party affiliation, or sexual orientation, or ethnic identity, but upon God knowing us and shepherding us.

Now this is where things become more difficult, making room for one another in the fold of God’s love.

It seems like we ought to find it easy and even natural to relax into the warmth of God’s care, to move over and make room for everyone else. And yet we oftentimes have a hard time thinking about who’s in the flock, and who isn’t.

That can equate with who’s loved by God, and who isn’t…or at least, who isn’t loved by God quite as much, or in the same way, as we are.
And yet, it’s not up to us to decide who’s in or who’s out. The passage from the Gospel of John tells us that Jesus has “other sheep” elsewhere and that he intends to draw them in, too. The flock is growing. New people are coming in.

How will we welcome the stranger, invited into the community by the enfolding love of God?
So as comforting, even warm and fuzzy, as we’d like to think this image of the good shepherd is, it’s really quite unsettling. Jesus often unsettled his listeners, so he might as well unsettle us, too.

“The life of a shepherd was anything but picturesque. It was dangerous, risky, and menial. Shepherds were rough around the edges, spending time in the fields rather than in polite society. For Jesus to say, 'I am the good shepherd,’ would have been an affront to the religious elite and educated. The claim had an edge to it. A modern-day equivalent might be for Jesus to say, ‘I am the good migrant worker’”

We’d rather not talk about anything that might disturb the peace and quiet tranquility of our little flock, safely gathered behind our protective doors. It’s too much of a challenge to shine the light of the gospel on our communal decisions about the rights and the very lives of all God’s children in this community.

“Jesus did not exclude people based on the standards of the day….He embraced the outcast, the oppressed, and the overlooked.

The Gospel of John makes it clear that the work of gathering the flock belongs to Jesus and God – we are to provide a space where all are welcome. The community that John envisions is open and celebrates its diversity as a gift from God”

Like Jesus, we are to provide a space where all are welcome. The flock is open-ended, not closed. Jesus owns up to having “others” that he cares about, too, and remembering that, nurtures in us a whole new perspective on hospitality. It’s more than a warm welcome to worship and a cup of coffee downstairs afterward (although those are very good things).

Hospitality is difficult; it tests us. It calls, even pushes, us out to our growing edges. In Barbara Brown Taylor’s new book, An Altar in the World: A Geography of Faith, she reflects on “encountering others” as a spiritual practice, and she expands our understanding of hospitality:

“In biblical tradition, the practice of encounter shows up most often as the practice of hospitality, or philo-xenia. Take the word apart and you get philo, from one of the four Greek words for love, and xenia, for stranger.
Love of stranger, in other words,
which is about as counterintuitive as you can get.
For most of us, xenophobia – fear of stranger – comes much more naturally, but in that case scripture is unnatural. According to Jonathan Sacks, chief rabbi of Great Britain, ‘the Hebrew Bible in one verse commands, “You shall love your neighbor as yourself,” but in no fewer than 36 places commands us to “love the stranger.”

In many ways, we’re not living in the same situation as John’s early community, but we still have to consider this question of “the stranger” and of being loved by God, and what it means to be a flock together, sharing the goods God provides to us all, not just to some of us.

How can we read a question like “Who is ‘stranger’ for us?”, and hear about the Good Shepherd, and not think of those who feel outside the flock, who perhaps feel abandoned by their family or community, but who are loved by God the Good Shepherd nevertheless?

Last Sunday, when you all were worshiping here together, listening to a great sermon preached by Yolanda Randlett, another excellent anthem sung by our choir, and moving with a hip-swinging hula-hooping children’s moment led by Cynthia Restivo, I was sitting in the sun on a park bench in Stinson Beach, reading these words, written by Marianne Williamson, in her book Return to Love.

“Rather than accepting that we are the loving beings that God has created, we have arrogantly thought we could create ourselves, and then create God. Because we are angry and judgmental ,we have projected those characteristics onto God. We have made God in our image. But God remains who God has always been: the energy of unconditional love. The problem is that we have forgotten this, and so we have forgotten who we ourselves are.” (pg 20, Return to Love)

Well, I liked that, and I liked the feel of the sun on my face and hearing the children having fun and conflict in the playground, so I kept on reading.
“I had never realized that depending on God meant depending on love. I had heard it said that God is love, but it had never kicked in for me exactly what that meant. God is within me.”
When we choose to love, choose to allow our minds to be one with God, then our house is built on rock, then it is sturdy and strong and the storms cannot destroy it.” (pg. 18 Return to Love)

Each one of us, as human beings, are beloved by God. In this very room, there’s quite enough love to go around. In this very community, there’s quite enough love to go around. On this very planet, there’s quite enough love to go around.”

If we choose love, if we trust love, we expect love, if we give love. If we receive the love that is at the heart of the reading from the first Letter of John that we heard just a moment ago.

“We know love by this, that Jesus 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? Little children, let us love, not in word or speech, but in truth and action.” I John 3: 16ff

It was almost time to leave the sunny bench and rejoin my musician friends but I wanted to read just a little more from Marianne Williamson,

“The love in one of us is the love in all of us.”

When love becomes empathy we see in the stranger the same need that we have. We all share the same needs, for shelter, for food, for purpose in our lives, for acceptance within our community. We may have different strategies for achieving those needs, but we all have the same needs.

Our needs are no different than those of a migrant worker wanting to provide food and shelter for his family, or a gay couple wanting acceptance within their community, or a man at the end of his life wanting to know his life had purpose beyond his days, or parents expecting the beginning of a new life and praying for a healthy baby.

Everyone one of us has the same basic needs. Each of us is carrying a great burden. Let us care for one another, as Christ was cared for us.
Each of us is suffering at sometime from spiritual amnesia, forgetting that God is the most real thing that there is within us, let us be sources of remembrance for one another.

There is no singular for the word sheep. And so it is with the word human. Our humanity is enriched when we see that we do hold all things in common.
Let us be human and marry our fortunes together.

Let us surrender our egos and in our daily prayers place our trust in the caring and guiding love of the Good shepherd so that all of our wants are satisfied and we are not afraid, and goodness and mercy will follow us all the days of our lives, and strangers will become friends.

Let us remember, when reading the 23rd Psalm to emphasize the Lord is my shepherd before going on to the rest of the Psalm and hearing the promises.

Let our days begin and end with the affirmation, the Lord is my shepherd.
When anxiety, anger, fear begins to enter our mind, may we pause to remember those words that like a shepherd’s crook can return us to love. The Lord is my shepherd
Then with that pause to remember love, we can truly know and trust, we shall not want, we shall not fear, our soul is restored, we will eat at the table prepared for us by God and where everyone received an invitation to come. Everyone received the invitation. What we have to do is show up with an open heart.

May those who love mercy and seek connection say,
Amen