Progressive
Christians sometimes recoil from scriptures about “being saved.” That phrase
reminds us of sweaty preachers warning about hellfire. Did you notice that all
of today’s scriptures speak of God’s saving work in our lives—but in different
ways?
According to Psalm 23, God saves as a shepherd saves sheep, by refreshing or “restoring our souls” with a sense of God’s presence and provisions. (By the way, it was only after this Psalm was much later Christianized that it came to have associations with Jesus and heaven. It was not commonly used in funeral liturgy until the 20th century.)
According to Psalm 23, God saves as a shepherd saves sheep, by refreshing or “restoring our souls” with a sense of God’s presence and provisions. (By the way, it was only after this Psalm was much later Christianized that it came to have associations with Jesus and heaven. It was not commonly used in funeral liturgy until the 20th century.)
In
the book of Acts we read about God’s saving work among the first followers of
The Way who shared what they had with one another: "And day by day the Lord added to their number those who were begin saved."
Outsiders were astonished
that hungry people who might otherwise have starved to death, widows and
orphans who might have resorted to prostitution or been consigned to debtors
prisons or lived as slaves or beggars—were being saved from these very
real plights because their fellow Jesus followers shared generously.
In
our Gospel reading the idea of salvation has this spiritual
meaning: Jesus is like a saving
gate that opens us to the realization of life’s abundance.
I
know. Abundance is not the same thing as
happiness. And my sermon title promised you happiness. And we’ve sung the “Happy” song this
evening. We’ve wished some special
people in our lives “Happy Mother’s Day.” We’ve invoked a scripture about
giving with gladness. But the Bible
doesn’t really say much about happiness. It talks instead about gladness,
blessedness, joy, and abundance. So I’m going to use the happy hinge to swing
us into the richer biblical concept of abundance, which our Gospel reading says
is the hallmark of our salvation. Focusing
on our Gospel verses, let’s consider that living abundantly is a saving
spiritual practice—which has not only personal but also
relational/social/political/environmental impact.
No
one wants a constricted, meaningless, meager life. Like the writer
of John’s Gospel, we, too, have glimpsed the infinite and unknowable More. We have perhaps intuited that a spiritual
disposition of abundance can “save us” with an appreciation for our connection
to life’s vastness and the universe’s ongoing creativity. Ironically, some of
us have learned abundance after great loss, after we’ve had to let go of our
own false identities and false gods, after we’ve stopped counting on things or
titles or abilities or roles we play. Only
then do we begin to recognize God’s love upholding us. Only then have many of us started to learn and
practice these spiritual lessons in a caring community where immensity and
intimacy meet.
The
God who is More is a God beyond our simplistic dichotomies. God saves us not by a list of do's and don’ts
or by doctrines. Instead, according to
John’s gate metaphor, the God we know through Jesus invites us into a life of
balance, paradox, contradictions, and tension.
Earlier in John 10 the writer images Jesus as the shepherd who guides
the sheep. But this discourse culminates
in a picture of Jesus as a gate, a means of access. A gate cannot tell us when and where to go,
as a shepherd might, but simply marks transitions and reminds us of our
choices—to go in, to go out. The gate of
Jesus gives us access both to wild pasture and the safe sheepfold.
God
saves us, according to John, by providing a gate that allows us to enter the
protective fold for rest—and then adventurously move out again for activity and
sustenance—so that we “may have life, and have it abundantly” (John
10:10). The abundant life is both/and, a going and coming, a movement inward and outward. We need both the
sheltered, safe times of rest as well as the daring times of doing; the return
to the familiar and the brave forays in the unknown; the haven and the
undiscovered territory; the self-care as well as the self-sacrifice. This in-and-out rhythm just might be the key
to God’s abundance. It is perhaps both
the musical notes and rests with which we compose our lives’ rhythm.
Think
about the role of silence in music.
Without pauses, a sustained note is just a constant noise. A rhythm is created only by breaks in the
sound. The sound of a clap is both the
noise and the pause that follows. If there’s no cessation of a sound, there can
be no rhythm. Hear these different rhythms—all of which depend on the duration
of the pause as well as the sound:
(Clapping
several different rhythmic patterns.)
The
sound of the clap is the same for each rhythm.
It’s the space between the sounds that creates the rhythm. Music cannot
exist without silence.
We
require this rhythm between sound and silence, the musical notes and the rest, to
be healthy and happy. The Spirit of abundance enables us and maybe entices us
to move back and forth between the inner and outer worlds. The historic Jesus himself ministered
nomadically, moving from periods of prayer to periods of activity and
service. Jesus was not, even in the
Gospel of John’s high Christology, the destination but the gate or way to
abundance. Jesus was in contrast to the
thief John mentions who steals our abundance. Most importantly, Jesus was not,
as people have made him out to be, the gatekeeper.
I
stress again the Bible makes no promises about God making us happy. I like to be happy as much as the next
person. Yet despite the fact that we’ve clapped to the song “Happy” this evening, I am
wary of “happy clappy” religion. I hope our worship life is marked
by genuine, not manipulated emotions. A spiritual experience should take us
deeper. Most world religions teach about
an ecstatic state of enlightenment or nirvana or paradise that has nothing to
do with our emotional responses to winning the lottery or going to theme parks or
having a fun day at the beach. In fact, Richard Rohr says that as we mature
spiritually, we carry with us a certain “gravitas” that is “a bright sadness and
a sober happiness.” The spiritually mature develop a capacity to hold sorrows
and darkness more “creatively and with less anxiety.”[i]
But they have known sorrow.
Again,
I wonder if our spiritual journeying requires just this kind of paradoxical
movement, well symbolized by a gate that takes us in and out, that gives us
access both to shadow and light. As I anticipate a few days of vacation at
the end of this month, I am looking forward to a period of rest and renewal.
Abundance
in our natural world and in the human spirit requires discipline. Christian theology does not promise us
prosperity. The Gospel of John does not describe a Magic God who intervenes to
do our bidding. Abundance is not the oversimplified New Age twist on
Karma. Abundant life, you see, has its
discipline, as Wendell Berry well expresses in his poem “A Vision”:
http://inwardboundpoetry.blogspot.com/2008/06/672-vision-wendell-berry.html
Let us not neglect the work and
exploration. But let us also return to
the sheepfold . . . which for you might, I hope, be here at Open Table . . . or
the comfort of your bed this evening as you pull the cool sheets over your
shoulders, and curl into the darkness, and reenter the womb that shelters you
over and over, and know that there is more work ahead. But not now.
First you will be quiet and let go of the to do list. And then wake tomorrow to find the thing that
speaks your name and requires your gifts and moves you to a pasture beyond the
safety of the sheepfold.
We as a congregation have spent much
energy and money the last few months providing events for the larger
community. We are going to be a little
less active during our summer months and then will gear up again with some new
opportunities for fall. Faith
communities—like people and earth’s creatures—follow seasons.
If we can utilize the gate God gives
us—looking at the life of Jesus as a liminal guide—we might very well save
our lives, our church, our planet from depletion. We might know
abundance.
PRAYER: May we recognize the abundance of love and
life and live into that abundance. Amen.
[i] Rohr,
Richard. Falling Upward: A Spirituality for the Two Halves of Life. (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2011), 117
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