May 3, 2020 - Fourth Sunday of Easter

May 3, 2020 - Fourth Sunday of Easter

Readings: Acts 2:42-47; Psalm 23; 1 Peter 2:19-25; John 10:1-10

Opening Prayer
Life abundant, God of grace, you call us by name to live without fear: in peace may we resist all who kill and despoil your people, that their hearts might be turned to the only source of life; through Jesus Christ, the gateway. Amen.


Sermon adapted for print from transcription.

This Fourth Sunday in Easter is often known as Good shepherd Sunday. As I've mentioned in previous years, this is as close as we get, as Shepherd of the Hills United Church of Christ to having a feast day. And it was just last week that we remember our first worship service together 61 years ago.

In the gospel of John, we have lots of “I am” statements. So too we hear, “I am the true vine. I am the bread of life. I am the way. The truth and the life. I am the light of the world. I am the resurrection and the life. I am the good shepherd.” Now, Good Shepherd Sunday. The framers of the lectionary ran out of references to the good shepherd.

So they start earlier, in this first cycle of Year A. And we don't really get a proper image of the Good Shepherd. You may have heard, and all of our readings today, including our Psalm, Psalm 23, we hear some reference to the Good Shepherd. But in John's gospel today, we actually hear another version of this idea of the Good Shepherd, Jesus, who says “I am the gate.”

The gate. So on this fourth Sunday of Easter, we have Jesus referring to himself as the gate. Now, the Greek there, in some translations of the Bible, you'll actually hear this; you'll have Jesus saying, “I am the door.” Because door is actually a more appropriate translation of that Greek word, θύρας.

So we have Jesus saying this Sunday, “I am the door.” That's something that, growing up, I never heard the pastor say. I never heard pastors preach on Jesus being the door. But this past year when I had an opportunity to go on pilgrimage and was actually in the Holy Land, I had an opportunity to see what exactly Jesus is referencing in today's gospel.

And that's a sheepfold. I never knew what a sheepfold was, and for those of you that don't know what a sheepfold is, it's an enclosure. The ones that I had an opportunity to see in Israel came up to about waist height, sometimes a little taller, sometimes a little shorter, and they were square.

If you Google ‘sheepfold’ and just take a look yourself, you'll see round ones and square ones, often made of stacked stones. But in the Holy land, they are often constructed in a mountainous or hilly region. For me, it was in Palestine where I had an opportunity to see these ancient images of a sheepfold. It reminded me of our topography here in Arizona; if you're familiar, the Dewey-Humboldt region as you're driving into Prescott.

So as you're driving into Prescott, you get into Dewey and you look along the freeway there you kind of see hilly regions. And so a lot of Palestine actually looks just like Dewey, and what shepherds would do is they would have their sheep follow them. Even in today's gospel, you hear that.

“They hear my voice, they know my voice, and they follow.” And so, as a reminder from other years when I've preached this lesson before; shepherds never lead from the back. They always lead from the front. The sheep follow their shepherd. And so the sheep would follow their shepherd into what we would call a sheepfold, and the sheepfolds, again, going back to Dewey or in this kind of hilly part of Arizona, what would happen is as these, we would call them caves, but not like a mine shaft.

They would be more of these, you know, parts where the hill would go inside and so kind of create a crevice, a shallow cave. And so what they would do is they would clean all of that out and create a barrier in front and in the front of this barrier, on the barrier, there would be an opening. A door.

If you Google sheepfold, as I mentioned before, you'll actually see squares and round ones. But the one thing that sheepfolds have in common is there is an opening. Now often, in the ancient sheepfolds, there was no gate, there was no door, but there was a doorway. And so that shepherd would lay down along that opening and sleep there, and act as the barrier; a form of protection for the sheep at night.

Now, I think that breaks open this image of Jesus as being the gate. As being the door. I did want to kind of address that we have lots of readings today and during this time of COVID, you may have noticed that since we've not been meeting in person and not celebrating communion, we actually have all three of our lectionary readings.

And so I do think that it's important to go back and address that second reading from 1 Peter. Now, as I read that over and over again this week, I do think that it's really, really important that we acknowledge that this piece of scripture has been used to traumatize people through the centuries, by the church and by believers.

And I think that it's important that we as church acknowledge the times where we hear these scriptures and to acknowledge today the hurt and the pain that we have inflicted, that Christians have have used these scriptures to inflict pain on others throughout the centuries.

But as I hear that piece from 1 Peter. What's important to acknowledge about that today is that it's not redemptive suffering. So it's very important that we hear that in context. This is not redemptive suffering that we're talking about. As we hear that scripture in context, it's important to know that the community of 1 Peter was a community that was experiencing trauma.

They were by no means the group that was in power or control. They were experiencing a type of persecution. They were being persecuted for their faith. So as we hear that, again, I think that it is important to acknowledge that that scripture has been used to traumatize people throughout generations, and again, it's not redemptive suffering that we're talking about.

So as I hear that scripture and kind of interact with it through the week, I think of the part of the worship service in many churches and including our very own UCC, if you look in the front of our New Century Hymnal, you'll see different rites or orders of service in that hymnal.

And in that very first order of worship, you'll see at the end or the conclusion of the communion, just before everyone comes up and receives Holy communion, the community, in unison, either says “the lamb of God,” or sings “the lamb of God.” And if you've ever been to a Catholic mass or a Lutheran worship service, this is something that you would always hear as part of the worship service of the community.

I've been thinking about this lamb of God in context for this Fourth Sunday of Easter, and the fuller context of that is “Lamb of God, who takes away the sin of the world.” So in light of this second reading from 1 Peter, I think that it's important for us to remember what this idea of sin really means.

I've spelled this out before in the past, but I think that it's important for us to circle back to it, remind ourselves that sin has to do with relationship. Sin always connects to relationship. And so when we are “sinful,” we have to remember that the idea of sin itself has to do with separation. So any time St. Augustine talked about this, he said that we can be separated from God. We can be separated from self and we can be separated from others. And I'm just going to keep saying that. I know you've heard that a lot, but I'm going to keep saying that because it's so important that we remind ourselves exactly what this idea of sin really is in our Christian context.

And so when we say, “Lamb of God, who takes away the sin of the world,” we're reminded this Sunday that it is Jesus. In terms of relationship, Jesus is always calling us into relationship, always calling us into community, community with self, community, with the divine, and community with others.

“Lamb of God, who takes away the sin of the world.” When we say that, we're proclaiming this idea that it is through Jesus, the gate, or the door, who takes away the separation of the world and brings us into relationship not only with each other, but into a deeper relationship with all of humanity.

And we see that in today's first reading from the book of Acts. In Acts, we see a very definite layout, or maybe you could say guidelines, for our early Christian community that we continue to follow today. You know, just like in our children's sermon where I say that we all have different ways of doing things well.

We hear from the book of Acts in the first reading. Normally, that first reading comes from the old Testament or the Hebrew Bible, but throughout the Easter season, we hear from the book of Acts. And so today, we hear from the second chapter of acts: it's one of my favorite chapters.

We hear that the disciples, that this early Christian community, these disciples that Jesus organized, we see that they hold fast to the teachings of the apostles. We see togetherness in terms of fellowship and sharing. Then we see that in the breaking of the bread, they not only shared in the Eucharist of what we would know as Holy communion and Thanksgiving, but they also shared meals together.

And then lastly, prayer and praise. These are all components that we're called to return to during this Easter season. As we hear what it means to be a disciple of Christ, we hear what it means to be a community organizer. And so in this time of the Coronavirus, in this time of being locked down, the question for us today that I think comes through loud and clear; Will we pick up this mantle of being gatekeepers, or doors? And what kind of doors will we be when this is all over? I do think that it's important that we keep this in front of us, of what it means to be Christian community right now. What it means right now, to be Christian community, is being at home. Staying put.

But as we begin to talk about what things will look like when we come away from this, the true question is, is how do we continue to be community in relationship to not only each other, not only to our Arcadia community, but to our state, and to the world. Where do we go from here? I think the most important lessons that we as Christians can share with others, and we can think of ways to do this right here, right now in the context of our homes, are these ancient truths that we hold dear as Christians as we try to model the life of Jesus Christ, the door. So how today do we be doorways, doorways of lessons, lessons that Jesus taught us that I mentioned during our children's time? Lessons of love. Lessons of kindness, of being hope and being joy in the midst of a world that's so often living in fear.

How can we, today, and during this Easter season, during this time of lockdown; How do we go forth? Maybe not physically, maybe not literally, but how do we go forth from our places of isolation and bring relationship to others to be a walking canticle of truth, of hope, of love? All sentiments of God.

Friends. I miss you so much. Know that I am with you, that we are in this together, in community.

Give me a call this week if you need to talk. Better yet, you’ll notice in our e-blast, as I mentioned in our announcements, that we have that new partnership with our Muslim friends in Chandler, an opportunity to just chat with someone. It doesn't have to be religious. You know Mustafa, who's their executive director at SEMA Foundation. He and I, and Craig, our Jewish friend have been gathering together for the last two years at my office at Shepherd. Every other week we get together and we have coffee and we just chat about what it means to be a Christian, what it means to be a Muslim, what it means to be a person from the Jewish faith in life today.

Sometimes we just talk about our families. And so what we really wanted to do in sharing this experience was to give people the opportunity to sign up, to meet someone, and during this time of lockdown, to do it all over the phone. So go to our e-blast from this past Friday or this upcoming Friday, we'll continue to advertise it and you can sign up.

So we can be doorways, doorways to life, doorways to love, doorways to happiness, peace and love, my friends.