The Fourth Sunday of Easter 2004
A Sermon preached at Saint Paul's Cathedral, Buffalo on the Fourth Sunday of Easter, May 2, 2004 by the Revd Canon Daniel S. Weir, Rector, Saint Matthias Church, East Aurora, New York.
Jesus said, "My sheep hear my voice. I know them, and they follow me. I give them eternal life, and they will never perish. No one will snatch them out of my hand"
When my wife Jan and I lived in England, we worshipped each week at 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."
Edward knew the passage earlier in this chapter of the 4th Gospel in which Jesus makes a clear distinction between those who are simply hirelings and the One who is the Good Shepherd. The Shepherd knows the sheep. They hear his voice and they follow him.
There are plenty of other voices in the world - and even in the Church - voices that, like the sirens in the Odyssey, would lure us to our destruction. But there is 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 gift of eternal life, the abundant life of the children of God.
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. It is Christ's voice that we are to hear and Christ we are to follow. And to hear and follow in community with those who Christ has also called. "I come with joy to meet my Lord," in the words of Brian Wren's wonderful hymn text, but in that very meeting, I am joined to others in community "and as his people in the world, we'll live and speak his praise."
And there's the rub for many in the Church these days. As we listen for the voice of the Good Shepherd, we hear those other voices that want to define for us who is worthy and who is unworthy to be within the community of the Good Shepherd. We hear those voices that would try to interpret today's lesson from the Acts of the Apostles to mean that Dorcas was raised because she "was devoted to good works and acts of charity." Whatever else we might say about this account of an even that seems so contrary to all that we know about the laws of nature, we can say that whatever happened to Dorcas was pure gift, an expression of God's abundant love for her and a sign of the abundant life that is ours as members of the community of the Good Shepherd.
The Bishop of Atlanta, Neil Alexander, wrote a wonderful book last fall, This Far by Grace. In the opening chapter he described the changes in him that had occurred as he became an Episcopalian. He said that growing up he had believed that if he lived a good moral life he would, when he died, get into heaven. Now he understands that eternal life begins at the font and goes on forever. Eternal life is not a reward for being good, but a gift of God's love.
God's called Israel into covenant that it might be a light to the nations, the means by which God could draw all people into a relationship with God's-self. 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 be 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 that we don't fall into the trap of thinking that when we say things about who will or will not get into heaven that we're not trying to set limits on God's love. Disciples of Christ pastor Charles H. Bayer, in his book A Resurrected Church, recounts conversations that he has had with fundamentalists, conversations that have often conclude with the statement, "I haven't condemned or considered anyone an outsider. God in his word has." My question, when hearing that kind of statement, is "But whose interpretation of God's word are you relying on?" There are lots of 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.
v 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.
v 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.
v 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.
v And more recently, we Episcopalians were willing to have gay members and even clergy as long as they stayed in the closet.
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, because you're gay.
These, of course, are 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 called "The Welcome Table." It's 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 Holmgren, in his book in the New Church's Teaching Series, Ethics After Easter, writes about our difficulty in dealing with someone 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, puts 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 all those who listen to Christ's voice and follow him.
I have a vision of God's community, that reality which we sometimes call heaven. There are lots and lots of folks there, from "all tribes and peoples and languages," 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, that they might find a place at God's table.
