"Abundant Life" May 7, 2017

John 10:1-10 With all the Sermons that have been preached over all the years about the Church being Sheep, about the Good Shepherd, and about whether we widen or make narrow the Gate, there is a terrible confusion about our passages this morning, because the 23rd Psalm and John 10 are not about these but about Abundant Life, life in communal relationship with God and one another! You belong. You are loved. When given a choice between life and death, we choose life. This is the goal of all the Vitamins and Exercise and Diet. A longer more Abundant Life is what every Advertisement promises. It is what Oprah and Ellen, and Joel Olsteen, all are selling. Human nature is so constructed, we do not need to consciously think in order to live to be able to breathe, to have our hearts beat, to swallow, to digest, to see or hear. There is Life, and Eternal Life, and resurrection, but this morning what we address is abundant life, the search we all undertake for purpose, meaning, fulfillment. How different life, if instead of stumbling out of bed, to all the appointments of a day then having a drink or taking a pill to sleep/ remember the times of life when we worked hard and played hard and slept soundly knowing we were making a difference for others. What the Vitamins and Exercises and Diets, and Talk Shows all promise, are secrets to possessing abundant life faster, through hidden ways others do not possess. The power of the Wizard of Oz, was in realizing that you already have the secret, that is a Heart, Courage, a Brain, or a Home, but you had to come to see that you did. You belong. You are loved. Remember weeks ago, we read of Jesus’ Disciples asking “Who was it that sinned, this blind man or his parents, that he was born with this affliction: Blindness?” and Jesus said “Neither, but that God might be revealed in him.” Which then raised questions whether the man, or the Pharisees, were the ones who were blind? This is a 99 verse passage in the Gospel of John revealing that Jesus is Sent from God, but Pharisees refused to see. That Jesus is the Light of the world but humanity preferred darkness, easy answers for survival, compared to following the way to Abundant Life. In total, this is a passage making reference to being included and excluded, about sin and purity; BUT the truth revealed back in John 3:17 is that Christ came not to condemn but to forgive. You belong. You are loved. While there are a few in our community who have raised sheep, a contemporary analogy to John’s metaphor of a Sheep-gate, would be those so computer-savy in ways I will never understand. We would call them “Nerds” of “Geeks” except instead of being the oddballs, our society now covets their skills. But what they enjoy most is “hacking”, finding back-doors and secret-passages into software. When Mario Brothers and Donkey Kong Videogames first came out, I recall my kids enjoying playing for the joy of play, the novelty of something new, until they were told that there are secret codes, that allow you to accumulate more prizes/ faster, and the game changed from the surprise of learning trying to win the game, to accumulation of rewards that were not even rewards but “virtual” points in a game, competing against others at having the highest score of all time. Perhaps as an example we can all identify, like many cars, my Mini Cooper has a computer chip imbedded within the key. Without even being next to the car, I can push a button and the doors lock, a different button and the lights flash and horn sounds, another and the windows roll down and sunroof opens, there are those with automatic ignition and heated seats. Because my car is about a dozen years old and the chip is wearing down, the radius for this to work has decreased, but if I put the key to my head, conducting through matter rather than through air, that invisible force has a greater range. However, there are thieves possessing gadgets, who can steal the computer chip code then walk up to your car and drive it away. So no longer can I be certain of locking out others. The Pharisees had become so embroiled in determining who was in and who was out, who sinned and who was righteous, that they were blind to God, blind to the light of the world. When you have backdoors or passwords, or secrets to abundant life, it is like driving to the top of a Mountain, versus hiking the trails one foot in front of the other. You get the product, to view the panorama, but without experiencing the awe of how to get there. Growing up in Michigan, near the border to Canada, we were taught French in Elementary School. While there were recitations, and vocabulary, what I remember most was when we were able to use our reading ability in French to read the adventures of The Little Prince. What most of us recall from the Readers’ Digest version was that the Narrator crashed his plane in a desert where he met a Little Prince from a tiny far off distant planet, and on this planet were 3 volcanoes and a single rose. The Little Prince devoted his life to the care and nurture of that rose. However, in one of the Prince’s Adventures, he met a Fox, and the Fox begged the Prince to tame him. The Prince learned that the process of taming is about spending time together, some might describe wasting time together, waiting for each other, being vulnerable to the other’s needs, which made each the Fox and the Prince unique to each other. While all the world has a sameness to it, they were each unique to each other by being responsible for each other. The line I recall is: “You see clearly only with the heart, all that is essential is invisible to the eyes.” The difficulty of the search for Abundant Life is not only the work that is involved, but just as with taming the fox, we have to be willing and able to be vulnerable. You belong. You are loved. So much of our lives, particularly since 9/11 is about protecting ourselves, guarding ourselves so we appear to have everything all together. There is a balance between security in order to guard against being abused/ and /vulnerability that allows us to feel, to experience, to love, to believe without proof. And yet, while this is a balance, in protecting ourselves from disappointment, from hurt, in locking out all others, we numb ourselves and cut ourselves off from feeling. The difficulty is we cannot choose what to numb, when. We hide secrets and tell half-truths about ourselves to steel ourselves with emotional armor. You belong. You are loved. Judaism and Islam never fathomed Christianity. Because according to both, God is God, and Humans are Creaturely. The Law as difficult as it is to adhere to, was to identify sin, to guard us from sin, from falling away from those identities and that relationship as mortal creatures with God. In the same way, the Jewish hope of a Messiah was to bring us to God, not to be a God for us, let alone to be both God and Creature. Islam cannot conceive of the Divine so profaning God’s-Divine nature as to conceive a child with a human. Even Muhammed was only a prophet bringing believers to God, and carrying the Law to the people. The primary claim of the Christian Reformation, has been that Jesus is both Fully Human and Fully Divine. MaryLou Osborne left a note in her Bible: We long to be human beings on a Spiritual quest, But in reality we are Spiritual beings living human life’s journey. We yearn to be Divine, to be invincible, to be superhuman and untouchable, but doing so we blind ourselves to our humanity, our vulnerability our spiritual nature. You belong. You are loved. There are no shortcuts, there are not ways to steal in the backdoor for abundant life, because Abundant Life is not a Possession to be Acquired! Abundant Life is a Promise, the Promise of a Gift from God, a gift of God giving God’s self to us. That promise is that we are loved, we are accepted, we can be human and open ourselves to one another, even naming our broken nature and need for forgiveness. You belong. You are loved.