The Fourth Sunday of Easter 2003

Fr. Dan Weir preached this sermon on the Fourth Sunday of Easter, May 11, 2003.

^"I am the good shepherd: the good shepherd giveth his life for the sheep. But he that is an hireling, and not the shepherd, whose own the sheep are not, seeth the wolf coming, and leaveth the sheep, and fleeth: and the wolf catcheth them, and scattereth the sheep."

When Jan and I lived in England, we worshipped each week at the St. Cross Church, which was, conveniently, right next to the building in which we lived. Young Edward was our acolyte every Sunday. One day his mother told me, with some pride, that the previous week Edward had come home from school and asked her what was for supper. She told him that she had wanted to make shepherd's pie but didn't have all the ingredients and so she had made something that was not quite shepherd's pie. "Oh," said Edward, "it's hireling pie then."

There are hirelings aplenty in this world but only one good shepherd, only one who by his willingness to lay down his life for the sheep has won for us and for all who would receive it the abundant life of the children of God.

"I am the good shepherd, and know my sheep, and am known of mine."

To belong to Christ is to be known by him and being known by him to know him. It is Christ who takes the initiative, not us. As the First Epistle of John makes clear, in a passage that you will hear next Sunday, "Herein is love, not that we loved God, but that he loved us...."

"And other sheep I have, which are not of this fold: them also I must bring, and they shall hear my voice; and there shall be one fold, and one shepherd. "

The man wanted to talk to me after church about his son, now a grown man himself, who had recently started going to church again after a long absence. The son was going to a more conservative church than his father's Episcopal parish, and one of the things that bothered the father was the son's insistence that those who weren't Christians were going straight to hell when they died. Now the father had a strong faith in Jesus Christ, but he was sure that he didn't agree with his son on this point. "After all", as he said to me, "didn't God make a covenant with the Jewish people?"

Indeed, God did, a covenant that was to be a way that God could draw all people into a relationship with him. And now that covenant has been shared with the Christian community, and we are to be a way that God can continue to love all people. But we can't be that, it seems to me, when we get caught up in judging whether people are worthy to part of God's community. We can't be that channel for God's love when we, consciously or unconsciously, decide who ought to receive it.

We need to be careful here that we don't fall into the trap of thinking that because we say things about who will or will not get into heaven that we're not trying to set limits on God's love. Many of us have struggled with God's love for Saddam Hussein. He's not the kind of person we all are pleased is part of our world, but we know that God loves him in spite of the wrong he's done, just as God loves me in spite of the wrong I've done. But it's not just God's love for Saddam that's important for us to recognize. There are lots of other folks whom God loves, but whom we may think of or, worse yet, treat as if God didn't love them. While we wouldn't dream of saying that they ought not to be part of God's community, we may make it clear that we don't want them as part of our community.

Think about the kinds of people that we Episcopalians have subtly, and not so subtly, treated like outsiders. For years we were willing to baptize African slaves and former slaves, but it wasn't until early in the 19th century that we were willing to ordain a black person. For years we were happy to have deaf persons as members of the Episcopal Church, but it wasn't until the end of the 19th century that we willing to ordain a deaf person. And, of course, women have belonged to the church for longer then men have, but we only began to ordain women in this part of the church thirty years ago. For all these years, to all these different people, the church has said you're welcome to be part of the community, but don't presume to aspire to any office of importance in the community. You're worthy, but not that worthy, because you're a woman, because you're deaf, because you're black.

These, of course, of the kinds of mixed messages we've given people over the years. There are also messages that haven't been mixed, where the clear message is - "You're not welcome." There's a wonderful story by Alice Walker about an old black woman who tried to attend a white church one Sunday morning. Politely, but firmly, she was told that she had to leave. Finally, the ushers threw her out. As the story ends, the woman is moving off, down the road, in conversation with Jesus. Now, we don't throw people out of church because they're black, or Native American, or Hispanic, or gay, or disabled, or poor, or not fluent in English, or don't dress right. We don't do that, but do we let folks who are different from us know that we would be really happy if they left and went someplace else? That's the question? And the challenge is to be aware enough of ourselves to know when we're subtly excluding folks, when we're subtly letting the strangers in our midst know that we want them to remain strangers and not to become part of this community of God's love.

But of course, it's not just strangers that we exclude. Sometimes we send a similar message to members of the community who have acted in ways that we don't approve of. Stephen Holmgrem, in the book that has given us the title for our current adult class, Ethics After Easter, writes about our difficulty in dealing with those whose actions have evoked our moral disapproval. Here are his words: "The hardest thing we are called to do in this situation is not to cut ourselves off from him, comforting ourselves with the thought that our friend's behavior warrants a separation. To believe that our relationship with him is beyond redemption because of his behavior is to have made a judgement about him, and not simply about his conduct. In effect, we have condemned him." Or as my friend Jay Phillippi, Youth Missioner of the Diocese, put it, "We Episcopalians don't practice shunning." We don't practice shunning because we know the truth of the Apostle Paul's words in the Epistle to the Romans, "For all have sinned, and come short of the glory of God...."

These are difficult challenges for all of us and we need to know that we will always exclude some people from our fellowship no matter how hard we try to be more inclusive. We'll never quite get it right all the time, but we have to keep on working at it because God wants to use us to welcome those "other sheep..., which are not of this fold" (at least not yet) those sheep who listen to Christ's voice (and want to hear it echoed in our words of welcome and acceptance) so there can "be one fold, and one shepherd."

I have a vision of God's community, that reality which we sometimes call heaven. There are lots and lots of folks there, all different, and lots of them are people that you and I might not expect to see there. But they're there, and they are going to be our neighbors forever. We've got a chance, here and now, to get a head start, to begin building that kind of community right here by tearing down those barriers that we've put up to keep people at a safe distance so that we can welcome them in.