Hands of the Shepherd

The Text for this week is John 10:22-30--

To be the king of understatement, it's been a pretty crazy week.  And it light of the craziness that has unfolded, I thought it important to look at some specific portions of the text this week that relate to our identity.  We may be inclined to focus on fear or hatred or pride or a need for vengeance disguised at justice when things happen like what happened this week.  But our identity is so much more than those emotions; out identity is so much more than a specific geography or nationality or ideology.  So today I zero in on verses 27-30:

“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. My Father who has given them to me is greater than all, and no one can snatch them out of the Father’s hand. The Father and I are one.”

There are other manuscripts with translations of verse 29 which say, “What the Father has given me is greater than all else, and no one can snatch it out of the Father’s hand.”

We belong to Christ.  We belong to God.  Jesus is saying, either, “We are so great a treasure to God that he would never, ever let us get snatched away” or he is saying, “There is nothing so powerful, not even death, that can snatch us from our Abba’s hand.”  Good news no matter what, don’t you think?

One song writer pens these words: 

Save your sermons for someone that's afraid to love.

If you knew what I feel, then you couldn't be so sure.

I'll be right here lying in the hands of God.
I am in love with nothing less.

Tear drops of joy runs off my face,

I will rise for someone that's afraid to love.

If you knew what I feel, then you couldn't be so sure.

I'll be right here lying in the hands of God. 

What might it mean for us to live out of the confidence and trust that we are in the hands of Christ and cannot be snatched away?

And if you think that’s old knowledge, if you want to say, “Tell me something I don’t know, Chaps,” then I have to wonder if you’ve let that little nugget crawl up inside your heart and really change you the way God wants it to change you.

One author says:

“When I become so sophisticated that ‘Abba’ is old hat, then the Father has been had, Jesus has been tamed, the Spirit has been domesticated, and the Pentecostal fire has been extinguished. Evangelical faith is the antithesis of cozy, comfortable piety. Faith means you want growing intimacy with Jesus Christ. Cost what it may, you want nothing else. The moment I conclude that I can now cope with the awesome love of God, I am dead.”

What might it mean for us to live like we can’t be snatched away from our Daddy’s hands?  Maybe it means that we want nothing more than to stay there in his embrace; maybe it means that being in the presence of Jesus gives us more joy than anything else; maybe in means that we want to be in his presence the way an addict wants a fix.

I quit smoking in July of 1996, tossed the better part of a pack of Marlboro Light cigarettes into a trash can at a rest stop in Mendocino County on my way to a new life in Eureka.  1996 is the year I quit smoking.  For whatever reason, a few weeks ago, in the year 2013, I felt like it had been less than 24 hours since I quit smoking.  I was literally pacing the floor, figuratively climbing the walls of my office.  In the years since I gave up smoking, I’ve never experienced anything quite like it.

A few days later, I found myself craving the presence of Christ more than I was craving that cigarette and it was such an awesome feeling.  David in the psalms writes about longing for God like a deer longs for streams, and I have experienced that in the area of spiritual thirst from the dry and desert place, probably you have too, but in the midst of plenty there I was yearning to have Jesus with me in every moment, or to be with him in every moment.  I wanted to ponder him, more than just in a mystical or contemplative sense, but to find out how I could make him as real to those around me as he was to me in that specific moment.

Maybe you’ve noticed that we have a very particular tradition and liturgy with the children.  It involves the Bible and this phrase, “I believe I can be everything it says I can be; I’ll never be the same in Jesus’ name.”

Look at Romans 8:14 and following and I’ll show you why we say this; Paul says, “All who are led by God’s Spirit are God’s sons and daughters. You didn’t receive a spirit of slavery to lead you back again into fear, but you received a Spirit that shows you are adopted as his children. With this Spirit, we cry, “Abba, Father.” The same Spirit agrees with our spirit, that we are God’s children. But if we are children, we are also heirs.”

So we have them say, “I believe I can be the adopted Son or Daughter of God.”  I believe I can be in the hand of Jesus’ Abba and my Abba, and never, ever be snatched away.

This isn’t just a navel gazing way of life, or a pie in the sky in the sweet by and by understanding of the Gospel.  It means something right now, today, and applies every single day.  You want the gospel to be relevant? It can’t get any more relevant than our core identity as Abba’s Child.

I may be going out on a limb, but I bet everyone here has made some kind of decision, some sort of mistake, that—even if you don’t explicitly regret it—you would seriously reconsider if you had the chance to do it all over again.  Everybody makes mistakes, and sometimes those mistakes impact our lives and the lives of those around us.  Depending of the gravity of the impact, we may be inclined to carry the weight of that mistake around with us day after day after day.  The worst mistake we could ever make is to be owned by our sins instead of by our Abba.

If you are in a place where you are carrying around the guilt or the shame or the spiritual and emotional burden of having messed up somewhere along the line, please, please forgive yourself.  And by forgive yourself, I mean know that nothing can snatch your from the hand of the Shepherd; nothing can snatch you from your Abba’s hand; you are too precious of a treasure, and God is too powerful for anything to stand between you and Him.  You are Beloved and you are forgiven, so let it go and let yourself be loved.  

I counsel too many people who cannot forgive themselves, or who cannot believe that God will forgive them for this mistake or for that mistake, because that’s what it means to not forgive ourselves.  To not forgive yourself means you don’t trust that God forgives you, and if there is one thing my past has taught me it is the Truth that there is nothing, absolutely nothing that God won’t forgive. Or as Paul says, “For I am convinced that (nothing) will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.”

So let me end where I began; with the words of Jesus: “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. My Father who has given them to me is greater than all, and no one can snatch them out of the Father’s hand. The Father and I are one.”

Loaded Questions

I am not a fan of loaded questions.  More specifically, I am not a fan of being on the receiving end of loaded questions; I know for a fact that I am incredibly guilty of asking loaded questions of my children, but that doesn’t make me a fan of them.  I don’t like loaded questions because the one who asks the question already knows the answer: “Where did the last bagel go?” The child looks at the floor, pokes at it with her toe and says, “Umm, I ate it.”  I know you ate it because you have cream cheese all around your mouth and little bits of chocolate from the chocolate chips in the bagel.  “So why did you ask me?”  Because you needed to know that I knew so that you could apologize for eating the last bagel. I really don’t like loaded questions.

So this week I’ve been pondering the loaded question that Jesus asks.  I had written a completely different sermon on how the Church, like Peter, so easily defaults to life as usual after the resurrection.  But this passage isn’t about Peter; this passage isn’t about the Church; this passage isn’t about our comfort zones or our love of the familiar.  This passage is about Jesus and his loaded question: “Do you love me?”

Jesus is waiting on the shore for the disciples.  After he gave them a miraculous catch of fish after a fruitless night of labor, he’s standing on the shore with breakfast, and a loaded question: “Do you love me?”

I may be wrong, but I don’t get the impression that Jesus took Peter aside to ask this question.  I don’t think he asked it in front of the others because he wanted to shame Peter;  I think he asked it in front of the other disciples, because he wanted them to think about that question too.  They all left, they all jumped on the bandwagon of the familiar, they all need to dig deep and answer this question: “Do you love me?”

It’s a choice that we all get to make; much like Morpheus offers Neo the red pill or the blue pill, Jesus asks us a question that carries similar consequences: keep on living life as we know it, or go into the resurrection rabbit hole and never look back.

But Jesus asks not because he already knows the answer, but because he wants us know what lies behind his asking of the question.

Do you love me?  Do you love me more than these?  Do you love me more than your boats, more than your nets, more than your 153 fish, more than your friends?  Peter, do you love me?  The choice is yours but you need to know something; the truth of the matter is I am crazy about you.

That’s what makes Jesus’ question a loaded question.  “Do you love me? Because I am crazy about you!”

One of my favorite authors and pastors died on Friday. I cannot begin to say how great of an influence he had on me.  I have read very few words that were as permeated with grace as the writings of Brennan Manning.  The man was radically in love with Christ. He had a saying, “Define yourself radically as one beloved by God. This is the true self. Every other identity is illusion.” 

This is why we need to know what lies behind the question that Jesus asks.  He wants to know if we love him because he is deeply, deeply in love with us.  Like John Cusack’s character in Say Anything, Jesus is standing at the end of our driveways with a radio over his head, blaring Peter Gabriel’s In Your Eyes, all because of his love for us.  And he asks us, “Do you love me?” Because I am crazy about you.

And here’s the thing I hope somebody out there understands.  Peter didn’t understand the Romans Road to Salvation; he didn’t get any particular theory of atonement; he didn’t understand the mystery of the resurrection…all Peter knew was Jesus.  And Jesus was standing there looking Peter in the eyes asking this question: Do you love me? 

And I guess that’s where we fit in, too.  We don’t have to “get it” to get Jesus or to receive his grace.  We don’t have to have complete knowledge or fullness of faith—all we need to do is trust that we are loved by him; more deeply than we could possibly imagine, we are loved by Jesus and he desires nothing more than for us to love him back.

Purposeful Peace

Image courtesy of http://www.cruzblanca.org/hermanoleon/

Before I get started: I want to take a quick sidebar and clarify what John means with his term “the Jews.” This phrase comes up with regularity in the fourth gospel and what John means with this term is the religious authorities, not the entirety of the Jewish people.  It may seem obvious to state this but just to be clear: John was a Jew; Jesus was a Jew; all of the eleven are Jewish people.  They weren’t in hiding from their kin or from themselves, they were hiding from the religious authorities and specific people who were responsible for the death of Jesus.  Certain folks, historically and even today, want to use John’s phrase as a way to indict the Jewish people, and since this evening begins Yom HaShoah, the commemoration of the Jewish Holocaust, I wanted to take a time out to clarify that phrase.

I spent a lot of time in trouble as a kid.  Not in school or in juvenile systems, but at home, I spent a lot of time in my room thinking about what I’d done.  I also spent a lot of time in my room waiting for my father to get home.  You know what I mean: “Just you wait until your father gets home.”  It’s not that Mom was unable or unwilling to give discipline; no, she gave plenty.  But that particular phrase was the one that let me know I was seriously in for it.  It was a phrase that is perfectly designed to strike fear in the hearts of children.

So when I read that the eleven were locked in the room for fear of the Jews—the religious authorities, I understand what John means.  They are in the house waiting for what they feel is the inevitable; their arrest, their mock trial and their deaths. 

This is still the day of the resurrection in John’s timeline.  None of the eleven have met with Jesus; Peter and John have seen the empty tomb, the whole group has heard Magdalene’s testimony of having seen the Lord, but they themselves have not yet encountered the risen Christ and they are paralyzed with fear;  life has become frozen in a moment; they are imprisoned by what may be if they show their faces to the community.

One author writes: “On each birthday, the women of a certain caste in India add four rings of heavy brass, one on each ankle and one on each arm. By the time they reach middle age, they walk with difficulty under this senseless burden. But this is no more senseless than weighing one’s self down with inward fears of failure, of the future, of sickness, of being dependent, of the opinions of people and so on.” (E. Stanley Jones—The Way)

Into their fear-driven imprisonment and paralysis walks Jesus with these words, “Peace be with you.”  The same word that Jesus spoke to the wind and the waves which calmed them in a single moment, he speaks to those who are frozen in fear, “Peace be with you…Peace! Be Still!”  

Maybe the challenge that we face with these words is that we can choose to block their power.  The wind and the waves they respond.  We fearful humans, we hold on to questions, we wonder whether or not the peace of Jesus can truly calm the troubled waters of our souls.

But for the eleven, the word of peace sticks with them and they can see Jesus for who he is.  He shows his wounds, proof that God can transform any horror, proof that death has lost its power and they rejoice.  

But it seems that Jesus knows how susceptible we are to fear because he speaks those words again: “Peace be with you.”  But this peace isn’t about the disciples’ fear of what has been; this peace is to calm the fears of what may be.  Because Jesus follows this instruction of peace with words of commissioning: “As the Father has sent me, so I send you.”

I’ve mentioned before, I think, the way in which my call to ordained ministry began.  I was sitting with my friend Mark and we were talking about Church and I blurted out, “I think it would be kind of cool to be a priest.”  Those words hung there between us for a few moments, and as their seriousness and their gravity sank in, I mentally began trying to pull them back.  The idea that we are called and sent to continue the ministry of reconciliation that God offers in Jesus is seriousness business.  We need to know that we have the peace of Jesus with us as we set about this work, because the peace is for us AND this peace is for others.

Jesus continues by breathing the Holy Spirit onto and into the disciples and he tells them, “Receive the Holy Spirit. If you forgive the sins of any, they are forgiven; if you retain the sins of any, they are retained.”

Please let those words, and their implications, sink in.  If we forgive people their sins, they are set free; if we don’t, they remain in bondage.  We have been given, with the gift of the Holy Spirit, the power to set people free from the rooms they are locked in.  And that freedom comes from the words: “Your sins are forgiven, be at peace.”

And so here I am today carrying the blessed burden of needing all of you to know the Peace of Christ; needing all of you to hear those freeing words, “Your sins are forgiven, be at peace.”  Because it is in the community where those words, exchanged between those who have encountered the risen Christ, that transformation happens and people are set free.