[Parish] Sermon 4-18-10

Thu Apr 29 11:31:28 PDT 2010

Dear Brothers and Sisters in Christ,

Here's the latest sermon.  I hope that you feel God blessing you today.

Yours,

Malcolm

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This sermon comes to you from Christ Episcopal Church in Los Altos, California (www.ccla.us).  If you think that this would be helpful to someone you know please forward it to them.

Other sermons in written and audio form can be found at www.malcolmcyoung.com.

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Malcolm C. Young                                                                                                                  Acts 9:36-43

Christ Church, Los Altos, CA Sermon Q13                                                                                                        Ps. 23

4 Easter (Year C) Good Shepherd Sunday                                                                                               Rev. 7:9-17

Sunday 18 April 2010                                                                                         Jn. 10:22-30

Action Words

“My sheep hear my voice.  I know them, and they follow me.  I give them eternal life, and they will never perish” (Jn. 10).

I began reading Chris Anderson’s book Free: The Future of a Radical Price with a false expectation.  I thought it would help me to understand if the church gives too much away, or expects so little of people that they fail to value what we do.  Many people take it for granted that our church will be there when someone dies, or when they want their babies baptized, or want to borrow something, or use our space, but they don’t feel any responsibility for supporting the church or its ministry.  I wonder if our church simply does not ask enough either of its members or of others.  Becoming Christ’s disciples takes work.

But other than briefly mentioning that people don’t seem to care as much about things they don’t pay for this book struggles with another topic entirely.[i]  In freshman economics class many of you learned that prices are a function of supply and demand.  If there is a lot of something, like sand for instance, all else being equal it will have a lower price than something scarce like diamonds.[ii]

In this new internet world in which the cost of making one more of anything is next to nothing, everything digital is on its way to becoming cheaper than sand – pictures, music, magazines, novels, movies, video games all are on their way to being free.  For some this is gravely troubling; others regard this as liberating.  Anderson’s book is about this new situation.

Anderson writes that when one thing becomes free, it makes other things scarce.  Over the last fifteen years many forms of entertainment and communication have become virtually free.  This has had profound social effects, not only for newspaper and recording companies, but for us, in work and leisure.  Our time and attention have become more scarce.  In this respect the gospel is harder for us to hear.

The people who come to Jesus seem to have a similar impatience.  Literally in Greek they surround him and say something like “until when (or for how long) will you grasp my soul? (Jn. 10:24).”[iii]  This vivid expression means, “how long will you keep us in suspense?”  They go on, “If you are the messiah, tell us plainly.”  Jesus was in a bind – he was the messiah, but he had a very different picture of what that means.

My daughter Melia asked me about Jesus’ response because she didn’t know what the word testify means.  But Jesus basically says, “Don’t ask me to tell you who I am, look at what I have done.”  For me this is one of the most important recurring ideas in the gospel – don’t look at what people say about themselves, or what they say they believe, but at what they do.  What matters about you and me is not what we think, but how we act to bring into being God’s Kingdom.  How we think only matters to the extent that it makes it possible for us to act more fully like children of God.

On this Good Shepherd Sunday in two compact verses Jesus says what it means to belong to him.  “My sheep hear my voice.  I know them, and they follow me.  I give them eternal life, and they will never perish” (Jn. 10:27-8).  I want to look more closely at the four verbs, the action words at the heart of our faith.

1. The first action word is to hear (akouo), as in “my sheep hear my voice.”  Despite our attention deficit society we commit ourselves to hearing God.  Last week at the 9:00 a.m. service we talked about how easily Ananias heard and how Paul had to be struck physically blind before he would listen.  We wondered how many other ways God had tried to speak to him before that and how God is trying to talk to us today.  We recognized that hearing God may require us to leave our “comfort zone.”

But how do we know that it is God talking to us and not just our self-centered and self-justifying imaginations? How do we hear what the real Son of God says apart from our fantasy of the Good Shepherd?

We recognize how Jesus talks to us today on the basis of what we know about him through scripture and tradition.  In the Bible Jesus wants to be sure the poor do not starve, that widows are not ignored.  He heals people and shares meals with social outcasts like tax collectors and sinners.  He challenges comfortable people, and comforts challenged people.

At some time in our life we may have thought, if only God spoke clearly to me or if I could spend an afternoon with Jesus in the flesh, then I would really change.  The truth however is that by studying the Bible we know what Jesus says and it isn’t something we always want to hear.  Take for example how hard it is for us to seek reconciliation.  In the Gospel of Matthew, Jesus says, “So when you are offering your gift at the altar, if you remember your brother or sister has something against you, leave your gift there before the altar and go; first be reconciled to your brother and sister, and then come and offer your gift” (Mt. 5:23-4).  Really loving our neighbors and being reconciled is not something we always want to hear, but this is what it means to listen to God.

2. The second verb is “to know” (ginosko).  Jesus says about his sheep, “I know them.”  I think many of us have mixed feelings about being known.  On the one hand we all have secrets, we have been applauded for things that we did for the wrong reasons.  We have failed to give our best effort when it really mattered. We do not live up to our own ideals or best picture of ourselves.

At the same time, it is impossible for us to conceive of really having a relationship with someone who failed to understand us.  It is comforting to know that God give us the benefit of the doubt and really understands the reasons why we have come up short.

Psalm 139 says, “O Lord, you have searched me and known me.  You know when I sit down and when I rise up; you discern my thoughts from faraway.  You search out my path and my lying down and are acquainted with all my ways.  Even before a word is on my tongue, O Lord, you know it completely…” (Ps. 139).

The idea that God knows us better than we know ourselves isn’t so foreign to me, since so often my wife Heidi does too.  She and I talked about what it means for God to have this knowledge.  God can present us with challenges that change us and help us to grow.  If we make the right choices our good experiences and bad ones each can draw us more completely into God’s love.

3. The third action word is “to follow” (akolouthousin).  Earlier I pretty much assumed that really hearing means following.  In this sense Christianity is absurdly simple.  Jesus summarizes the law in Matthew and Mark saying, “love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind, and with all your strength…   [and] love your neighbor as yourself” (Mk. 12).

There is a pernicious idea going around that if we follow God, we will get some kind of prize in the end.  It is left over from centuries of thinking that human life is principally about avoiding punishment and earning rewards.

Christian theology especially in the Reformation teaches us that God doesn’t make deals.  We will never get what we deserve from God.  The whole idea of God’s relation to us is that it is one of grace.  Grace means getting something we don’t deserve.  We didn’t do anything to deserve our life, we simply receive it as a gift.

I have learned so much in puppy training – it should be a required course in seminaries.  These classes have made me realize that in relation to children and pets we are moving away from relying mostly on punishment and toward creating the kind of relationship where our pets and children want to do things for us.  Harsh punishments mostly teach our pets that we are only to be feared and cannot be trusted.

God doesn’t wait for us to do something good before rewarding us.  God gives us great gifts.  We accept them and then we follow Jesus on the basis of this relationship.  Christian life isn’t about trying to earn a reward from God, but giving generously out of what we have already so blessedly received.

4. The last verb is the word “to give” (didomi).  What is it that God gives?  Jesus is clear about this saying, “I will give them eternal life, and they will never perish” (Jn. 10).  In this sentence Jesus uses the word eternity twice. We translate it rightly as eternal life the first time and never in the second instance.  In English the double negative is bad grammar (“there ain’t no way”).  In Greek it isn’t bad grammar, but functions in a similar way – to add emphasis.  A more literal (probably less accurate) translation would be that Jesus says they will absolutely not perish in the eternity.”

Eternal life is not merely about being happy eventually in heaven.  It means living fully right now.  Doing important work, going on an earth day hike with your church, flying kites, making music together on Sunday, being with friends, visiting people in the hospital, gardening, throwing a Frisbee with your son, preparing a meal for someone you love – these are simple things.  But we recognize eternity in them.  Intuitively we know that eternity is more about the quality of our life right now than it is about duration.  It is fullness and wholeness.

A book of interviews with the French philosopher Pierre Hadot is called: The Present Alone is Our Happiness.  It alludes to the way that we only experience the past and the future here in the present.  We may remember the past chiefly with nostalgia or regret.  We may experience the future with worry or anticipation.  But neither really belong to us.  This present is the gift God gives us when we can receive it.

Jesus says, “what my father has given me is greater than all else.”  This greatness is an experience of the divine life which makes it possible for us to receive the present as a gift even in our world of attention scarcity.  We don’t have to wait for this until we are dead.  As people known by God, who listen to Jesus and follow him we already live in eternal life.

Let us pray: God of this beautiful springtime, bring forth also in us, your sheep, the new life found in those who hear your voice, so that when we do see you face to face we will already have a share in your eternity.  We ask this in the name of the one who went before us and walks beside us, Jesus Christ our Lord.  Amen.

[i] Chris Anderson, Free: The Future of a Radical Price (NY: Hyperion, 2009), 67.
[ii] Anderson actually argues more about marginal cost becoming effectively zero.
[iii] I’m not completely sure of this translation of aireo.  I don’t have anyone to speak to about it.