Sunday, April 17, 2005

Life Abundant


Sunday, April 17th, 2005
Easter 4 (Good Shepherd)
Jerusalem Baptist Church, Emmerton VA
John 10:1-10

1‘Very truly, I tell you, anyone who does not enter the sheepfold by the gate but climbs in by another way is a thief and a bandit. 2The one who enters by the gate is the shepherd of the sheep. 3The gatekeeper opens the gate for him, and the sheep hear his voice. He calls his own sheep by name and leads them out. 4When he has brought out all his own, he goes ahead of them, and the sheep follow him because they know his voice. 5They will not follow a stranger, but they will run from him because they do not know the voice of strangers.’ 6Jesus used this figure of speech with them, but they did not understand what he was saying to them. 7So again Jesus said to them, ‘Very truly, I tell you, I am the gate for the sheep. 8All who came before me are thieves and bandits; but the sheep did not listen to them. 9I am the gate. Whoever enters by me will be saved, and will come in and go out and find pasture. 10The thief comes only to steal and kill and destroy. I came that they may have life, and have it abundantly.

We’re getting into a rhythm of sorts in the Park household. School during the day, gymnastics or softball practice in the evenings, and game one, game two, and game three on the weekends. I think before it’s all over, there may be a few weekends where we’ll have more than one game per child. Granted, it’s only been two weekends now, but I can already sense the rhythm starting: a rush to get ready, arrival, getting the kids to their teams, and then sit and watch, and cheer the team, shout words of encouragement to your child or the children on each team, and make quiet conversation with other parents, or friends, or meet and befriend people who you recognize, but can’t quite name. Then wander over to the concession stand for a hot dog or some chicken wings and a coke. And the whole day is bathed in sunlight, and a brisk wind that keeps your hands in your pockets more often than not pulling out a tissue to blow your nose with. Before long, the sun will overpower the wind, and we’ll be dealing with the HEAT much more than with the cold. There truly is something idyllic in the scene. It reminds me of something out of a Norman Rockwell painting. I’ve had several moments like that since we’ve been living here. It’s not a bad thing, not at all. In fact, if I had to characterize it, it would be easy to say we were living the abundant life. When friends and family have asked how we’re doing here, I always answer that we’re doing good, we’re doing fine. And I can’t help but tell them that it sometimes gets to the point where it is scary how good things are.

But what is an abundant life? We’d surely find different definitions of that within the lives of those of us sitting right here. Is an abundant life one that is long-lived? Probably not. We heard just this past week of a young mother, the sister of a young lady who has visited here in the past, barely in her thirties, who was found by her six year old daughter lying on the floor when she got home from school. Can her life be DISqualified from having been abundant just because it was cut short at so young an age?

Is an abundant life one full of unforgettable experiences? If we were to ask our Hispanic friend, who lost her twins twenty-three weeks into her pregnancy last Sunday, certainly an unforgettable experience, but I’m not sure she’d say that her life is more abundant because of it.

Is it a life marked by significance, or impact, or one that is memorable to more than just one’s immediate family? Tuesday evening I met a man who was in the final stages of a terminal disease. Though he is barely ten years older than I am, his life would certainly make a much more interesting read than mine would. With a history of alcohol and drug abuse, poverty and homelessness, he somehow managed to find the strength to straighten himself out, and begin to live what might be called a normally productive life. In the process, he met and straightened out his wife, who was a crack addict and an alcoholic. Working together, he got her off drugs and sobered up. But then last September, he was diagnosed with prostate cancer, and she began drinking again. Tuesday he had asked to stay in the hospital for pain management, but she did not want him to stay there and die. Her beloved husband belonged at home with her, surrounded by his animals and the love of a devoted, though alcohol-dependent wife. He definitely made an impact on HER life, insofar as he was the reason that she cleaned herself up from all the other drugs save the alcohol. Talking to their friend who’d driven the wife the 45 miles to the hospital, and hearing HER story about losing her sister, her husband, AND her mother within the last year, there was definitely more than just friendship that prompted her to stand by this couple in the midst of what is not only devastating to THEM, but which must surely reopen painful wounds left by her own losses. I came away with the impression that this man had a way about him that drew people, not just those two women, to him. When he rallied enough to speak clearly and directly, in a strong voice, to his tearfully combative wife, she quieted along with everyone in the room. It was certainly an example of a life that had an impact on everyone else in the room, but whether or not it has been an abundant life was not for us to say at that point.

The scene in the Gospel passage this morning is … pastoral in the fullest sense of the word, parts of it might be referred to as something out of a Norman Rockwell painting, what with a shepherd leading the flock of sheep around the pasture, the sheep somehow … tuned into the shepherd’s voice, or a sound, a whistle, a call, or a specific, identifying noise made whenever he wants their attention.

We have the image of Christ as the Good Shepherd, and he himself is portraying himself as that. A man who lies down across the gate to the sheepfold and guards against wolves and marauders, whose sheep follow the sound of his voice, rather than push from behind, he leads. The sheep follow because they recognize HIM, not because he forces them in the direction he wants them to go.

What is it that we seek if we set out on what Robert Frost called ‘the road less traveled”? Christ promised life abundant in this passage, but in others he admonished us to take up our cross and follow him. And yet in another, he warned that if any man loses his life for his sake he would gain it. He wasn’t speaking of a life of ease. He wasn’t promising freedom from pain and suffering … in fact, he did the opposite. He promised a life fraught with peril, with rejection, even with bitter disappointment, but he still calls it an abundant life.

So we have to look elsewhere, perhaps even elsewhen. We have to look for another reason why he would say our lives would be “abundant”.

What are we left with?
We’re left with him. We’re left with Christ. We’re left with the Son of God, calling us to himself, and loving us and cradling us like a Shepherd calls his sheep when they are lost and holds them when they are found. To live in the full knowledge that what we do and who we are is defined not by what we accomplish or accumulate, but by whose we are, and who loves us, and who we love, THAT opens us to an abundance of life the likes of which we cannot wrap our brains around in a lifetime.

Jesus calls himself both the gate and the gatekeeper, the gospel of John is known for Jesus’ “I am” sayings. In this Gospel, Jesus will use "I am" to identify himself as "the resurrection and the life" (11:25)—the "way, and the truth, and the life" (14:6)—and the "true vine" (15:1). It is John’s way of highlighting, of echoing for us that much earlier “I Am” that we hear from the burning bush in the desert. There is no missing the point for John’s listeners and reader: Jesus and God are one.

Life, colored, molded, and formed around the presence of the living God in our hearts is the most abundant life we can hope to experience. It is for us to take that abundance and share it, spread it, release it into the world and into the lives of those who so desperately long for it.

Tonight we begin a four-night Revival campaign. We will share in worship with Farnham, our mother church, Cobham Park, Mulberry and Ebenezer, our daughter churches, a family gathering in the broadest sense of the word.

I’ve seen abundance of life. I’ve seen it reflected in my parent’s faces when all of their children and their families have otten together for a special holiday. I’ve seen it in the faces of my father and mother-in-law, when THEIR three children and THEIR families have been able to manage to be together with them for a special occasion. I saw it in Leslie’s face, last night, after a long and harrowing week, topped off by a day spent at the ball fields watching our kids play, and sitting down to the dinner table groggy after having fallen asleep on the couch, and we were all grumpy and tired, but for a minute, just a second, the children mercifully bounced back from a totally inappropriate tongue lashing from me, and Caleb was sitting in her lap, and Judson and Hannah were chomping on Oreos, and we looked at each other over their heads and that look that says ‘This is what he was talking about. THIS is life abundant’ crossed between us.

May these next four nights with family be so marked.

Let’s pray.


No comments: