Sermon: "One is the Loneliest Number"

Rev. Maureen Frescott

Congregational Church of Amherst, UCC

June 15, 2014 – Trinity Sunday

Genesis 1:1-2:4a

“One is the Loneliest Number”

If you were a child growing up in China, you would probably be familiar with the story of P'an Ku.  

P’an Ku is a fur wearing giant, and he’s the central character in an ancient Chinese creation story. 

P’an Ku is hatched from a giant cosmic egg.

Half the shell is above him as the sky, the other half below him as the earth. He grows taller each day for 18,000 years, gradually pushing the sky and the earth apart until they reach their appointed places.

After all this effort, P'an Ku crumbles into pieces. His limbs become the mountains, his blood the rivers, his breath the wind and his voice the thunder. His two eyes become the sun and the moon.  And fittingly, the fleas that crawl on his fur become humankind.

If you were a child of the Native American Cherokee tribe you would have heard the story of Dâyuni'sï.

Before the earth was formed, there was only sky and water, until Dâyuni'sï, a little water beetle, came from the sky realm to see what was below.

He scurried over the surface of the water, but found no solid place to rest, so he dove beneath the water and brought up some mud.

This mud expanded in every direction and became the earth.

The other animals in the sky realm were eager to come down to the new earth, so Buzzard was sent to see if the mud had dried.  When he flew down his wings brushed the earth, gouging mountains and valleys in the soft ground.

When the land was finally dry all of the animals came down.

But it was dark, so they took the sun and set it in the sky, at first setting it too low, scorching the shell of the crawfish and turning it red.

They elevated the sun seven times in order to reduce its heat.

As they did this, all of the plants and animals were told to stay awake for seven nights, but only the owl and panther succeeded and they were given the power to see and prey upon the others in the dark.  Only a few trees succeeded as well, cedar, pine, and spruce, so the rest were forced to shed their leaves in the winter.

The first humans who appeared on the earth were a brother and sister.

One day the brother hit his sister with a fish and told her to multiply.

She gave birth to a child every seven days and soon there were so many people on the earth, that all women were forced to have just one child every year.

(The message to woman here is beware of men throwing fish)

Nearly every human culture has a creation story of some kind -

a story that explains how our world, and how we, came to be.

Many of these mythological stories involve heavenly creatures, jealous Gods, or races of giants who battle to the death, and human beings are often the residual and flawed byproduct of their violent creative fits.

When the Hebrew decedents of Abraham spent 70 years in captivity in ancient Babylon they would have heard the creation story of Enuma Elish - a story that elevated the Mesopotamian God, Murduk, above all other Gods.

In this story, Murduk battles and defeats Tiamat, the chaos monster of the seas. Murduk becomes the supreme God over all, and humanity is created to serve him as slaves.

This story dates back to the 12^th century B.C. and is believed to be 300 years older than the Hebrew creation story that we read here in worship this morning.

For the Hebrew people languishing in the despair and drudgery of captivity, there wasn’t much hope to be found in these stories of warring Gods who created a violent and evil world to serve their own needs.

So the Hebrew people began to tell their own story.

In their story there is only one God above all Gods, and this God created a world that is good.

This God created light and dark, the sun and the moon, the plants and the animals, and named it all as GOOD.

This God created humankind, male and female, in God’s own likeness, and named it as GOOD.

This God did not create a race of slaves, this God instead created a family of caretakers.

Beings formed from dust and given life through divine breath.

Beings whose purpose was to care for creation and celebrate the one true God who gave them life.

This is the story that the exiled Israelites told their children when they tucked them into bed at night - children who were facing a very hard and painful life, and had never seen the Temple that was built for the loving and powerful God that walked with them in their misery.

The Israelites told and retold this story in the hope that it would help them to tune out the prevailing story of the culture, which said they were destined for a life of sorrow in a chaotic world created by power hungry Gods. And it was hoped that they would instead embrace the story of the one, true God, who created a world of beauty and order, where life had meaning and purpose.

Perhaps the most amazing part of this story that that the children of Abraham told is that this God created a being that was meant to serve as the voice of creation itself.

A being that would not only care for creation but speak for it.

A being capable of communicating with and loving its Creator.

A being that was created to live in relationship.

With God, with the created world, and with other beings like itself.

As Christians this relational triangle – or trinity - is familiar to us.

We already think of God as having three parts –

God the Creator.

God the redeemer – through Christ.

And God the sustainer – through the Holy Spirit.

In human terms, this is a God who is our life-giving parent, our forgiving and loving brother, and our guiding and providing sister.

It’s natural that as a being created in God’s image that we too would long for this three-fold relationship – with God, with creation, and with each other.

Perhaps this is why we feel so alone or unsettled when any one of these relationships is missing, strained, or in need of healing in our lives.

If we think of God as having three aspects that live in relationship then it seems odd to suggest that perhaps God created us because God was lonely and was longing for someone to talk to.

But I believe there is some truth in that.

As much as God could sit back and enjoy the beauty of the created world – the wind in the trees, the roar of seas, the cycle of life as lived out through the birds of the air and everything that walks or crawls on the earth – there was something missing.

Perhaps God longed for a creature that would one day be aware of God’s existence – and reach out as a child reaches for a parent, as a friend reaches for a beloved companion.

If you think about it, the fact that we have such an awareness is quite extraordinary.

You don’t have to be a quantum physicist to marvel at the wonder of how particles smaller than the eye can see, come together to form creatures capable of doing all that we are capable of doing.

God’s creation is amazing indeed.

Here is a God who created the light sensitive cells that make up the eyes of most of the world’s creatures, and then creates a being who would one day use those cells to look through the lens of a microscope and contemplate the wonder of its own existence.

Here is a God who created a being out of dust - carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, sulfur – the same stuff that stars are made of, in the hope that one day this clump of stardust might compose a hymn of praise.

As the Rev. Barbara Brown Taylor so eloquently put it:

God may well love the sound of waves and spring peepers, but I have to believe there was joy in heaven when the first human being looked at the sky and said, “Thank you for this.”

Just as any parent delights in seeing their child explore, learn, and grow,

and is joyous when they receive expressions of their child’s gratitude for all they have been given, I believe God longs for the same with us.

In the same way, God longs for us to turn to our Creator, our redeemer, our sustainer, when the world is not as ordered as we expect it to be, when in our sorrow and in our suffering we are in need of comfort, courage, and strength.

God created our world and declared it to be good.

The ancient Israelites told this story of a loving God and the gift of creation to counteract the prevailing story of the Babylonians who held them captive.

When we tell the Hebrew creation story to our children, we’re hoping to counteract the prevailing stories of our culture that hold us captive as well.

The stories that tell our children, and us, that we were created not to live in relation with on another but in competition.

The stories that tell us that we were created not to care for our world, but to consume it.

The stories that tell us that God is not a loving, relational redeemer, but is instead an angry, distant punisher.

The stories we tell about ourselves say a lot about how we view the world and how we understand the purpose of our existence.

The fact that in 21^st century New England we’re still telling the stories carried by an ancient desert people who longed to escape captivity, says a lot about the power of these stories to transcend time and space and culture.

Regardless of how technologically advanced we are, how affluent we are, or how privileged we are, we can’t escape the nature of our creation.

We are relational beings.

We long for, and thrive, when we live in relationship -

with God, with the created world, and with each other.

And as long as we continue to share our creation stories,

we will continue to see the value in nourishing and healing those relationships.

Because in God’s image we are created.

And in that image, we can create a whole lot of GOOD in this world.

Thanks be to God.

Amen.

* Quote from Barbara Brown Taylor, The Luminous Web, Cowley Publications, pg. 31-32

Sermon: "Confirm or Conform"

Rev. Maureen Frescott

Congregational Church of Amherst, UCC

June 8, 2014 – Pentecost Sunday – Confirmation Sunday

Genesis 11:1-9; Acts 2:1-21

“Confirm or Conform”

I am what you might call a “word geek”.

I am fascinated by words, their origins and the many different meanings they come to have as they wind their way through time and culture.

I realize that not everyone shares this fascination.

I can tell this, because people often roll their eyes when I share some tidbit about a word’s origin or etymology.     For example:

Did you know the word “loophole” comes from the small openings in medieval castle walls that archers used to shoot their arrows through, the only vulnerability in an otherwise impenetrable fortress?

Or, did you know that the words umpire and apron used to begin with the letter “n” but when people said “a napron” or “a numpire” it sounded like the “n” was part of the previous word so over time the ‘n’ was dropped?

I can see some of you rolling your eyes.

Even if etymology is not your thing, you have to admit that the nuances of language can make for some interesting misinterpretations.

I came across the story of a Girl Scout troop leader who gave her girls a list of first aid supplies to buy for an upcoming camping trip.

She photocopied the list directly from the Red Cross First Aid Manual.

She was surprised when the girls showed up for the trip lugging heavy backpacks that contained huge bags of dry plaster mix.

It turns out the Red Cross Manual she used was printed in Great Britain, where the word used for Band-Aid is plaster. 

The differences between American English and British English account for numerous opportunities for misinterpretation.

In Britain, a boot goes on your car, not on your foot.

Braces hold up your trousers, not your teeth.

You’ll find a trolley in the supermarket, not on the street.

What we call jelly they call jam, and what they call jelly we call gelatin  - or Jello.    

I found this out when I went into a bakery in London and asked for a jelly donut, and received only a confused stare.

Language, and the confusion thereof, plays an integral part in both of our scripture readings for today.

In the Tower of Babel story we find a wonderfully creative explanation of how we came to have so many diverse languages in our world.

In this story, all the people of the world live in one place and share one language.  Yet they fear being scattered from this place so they decide to build a city to anchor them there.

They make bricks of clay and build a tower that will reach to the heavens.

This passage is often interpreted as being about pride.

It is said that the people built a tower to make a name for themselves, to show that they had the power to create great things just as God did.

But in Hebrew scripture, the phrase “making a name for oneself” is rarely used to denote arrogance or pride.

Rather, it implies an act of establishing an identity that is meant to endure.

In this case, the act of building a city to establish a common culture and a common language that will keep the people bound together.

The goal of the building project was to keep the people from scattering.

We know from anthropology that once people are scattered by distance they begin to develop their own ideas, their own culture, their own language, which over time can become vastly different from that of the originating group.    

There is strength in sameness.

As human beings, we have a primitive need to know who we can trust, which is why we often feel threatened by those who are easily identifiable as being outsiders.

But, according to Hebrew scripture, the conviction that humanity was to remain in one place with one single language was not part of God’s plan.

God had commanded humanity to multiply, to fill all the earth, and to care for God’s creation.

By attempting to stay in one place rather then moving out into the world as God intended, humanity was honoring its own will rather than God’s will.

So according to the biblical storytellers, God put a stop to it.

God confused the language of the people.

They could no longer communicate with one another.

They no longer shared a common goal.

The stopped building the city, and they scattered all over the earth.

According to Jewish interpretations, this scattering was not a punishment, but a giant push out of the nest so to speak.

What if we began to see our diversity as God’s design for the world? 

We do have biblical passages that compel us to act as ONE body in Christ and to be UNITED in our faith in the service of God.

But could it be that God desires a world full of faithful people who express that faith and live out the gospel through the lens of different cultures, different languages, and different understandings of how God’s divine presence expresses itself in our world?

I believe the story of Pentecost gives us a resounding YES to this question.

In the Tower of Babel story we hear that all the people of the world are gathered in one place.

The story of the Day of Pentecost begins in much the same way.

On that day the disciples are all together in one place, gathered inside the walls of a house in Jerusalem, feeling isolated and lost….

And then in a rush of wind and fire - God draws them outside.

Instantly, they are filled with the Holy Spirit and begin to speak in other languages.   The story tells us that faithful Jews from every nation were present and each heard the disciples speaking of God’s love and grace in their own native language. 

This was the unique charge of the newly emerging Christian faith.

Jesus himself called on his disciples to carry the message of the gospel to all the nations of the world.

As Jews, they were traditionally a people of one land, one book, and one sacred language, yet God called the followers of Jesus to diversify and scatter yet again.  To spread the message of God’s inclusive love to a world that was anxious to hear it.

Now, our confirmands may be surprised to hear that our Christian faith encourages us to celebrate diversity rather than uniformity.

When I was growing up and first heard the word “Confirmation” I thought the adults were saying “Conformation” –  I thought that the purpose of the yearlong class was to ensure that we CONFORMED to Christian teachings and stopped thinking for ourselves.

Some of you may have thought this as well.

Some of us grew up in churches where we had to memorize the responses we were expected to give at the confirmation service, and at the end of the class we were not given the choice to say yes or no to being confirmed.

It was just assumed we would be confirmed, because without it, we would be denying the gift of God’s grace.

As if an all-mighty, all-knowing, and all loving God could be swayed to rescind the unconditional gift of grace because a 13-year-old girl or boy has doubts and questions.

The same doubts and questions that all of us have.

Many adults in the church lament that Confirmation is often seen as graduation.

At 13 or 14 you complete your Christian Education and you move on to bigger and better things.  To put it bluntly – we adults fear that we’re never going to see you again.

Some of you may participate in youth group and we may see some of you in church on Christmas and Easter, but for the most part, while you will be members of this church in name, you may never be active members in the same way as your parents, your mentors, or the people sitting in the pews behind you are.

So with all our cards on the table, I’m here now to make a plea to you as confirmands: 

We need you.

I don’t mean that this church needs you, although being an active member would be nice.

And I don’t mean that the Christian church as a whole needs you because the world needs Christians more than Hindus, Muslims, or Buddhists.

What the world needs is more followers of Jesus.

And when I say the world needs more followers of Jesus, I don’t mean the world needs more people handing out pamphlets urging sinners to accept Jesus Christ as their Lord and Savior or face eternal damnation.

The world has enough of those people. 

What we need is more people who walk in the ways of Jesus.

The world has a multitude of lonely, hungry, anxious, and unloved people.

We need more compassionate, giving, and forgiving people to care for them, to feed them and love them.

The world also has a multitude of angry, selfish, spiteful, and greedy people.

The world needs you to love them too.

Because fear can be expressed in many different ways.

And love always conquer fear.

Now in no way am I saying that it’s going to be easy to live into your Baptismal and Confirmation vows as followers of Christ in the world.

Even at the age of 13 or 14, you have a lot of challenges and transitions ahead of you – entering high school, making new friends, discovering who you are as person, and figuring out where your happiness lies in life.  

My plea to you is to not conform when you feel pulled towards things that harm rather than heal.

Don’t do what everybody else does.

Don’t put other people in boxes or slap a label on them thinking you know everything about them as a person based on the way they dress, what kind of music they listen to, who they hang out with, and what their interests are.

In high school, and in life, you will encounter athletes and musicians, class clowns and cheerleaders, math and science kids, drama kids, quiet kids, popular kids, and the kids who prefer to float on the fringes.

God needs you to love and care for all of them

And treat them all with kindness, as you would want to be treated yourself.

And just so you know, we adults often fail miserably at this.

We also feel pulled to define a person based on their race, nationality, or religion or what they do for work, where they live, how they vote, and how well they, and their children, have managed the challenges of life.

But we’re not confirming our baptismal vows if we’re not doing the four things that you confirmands promised to do here this morning.

To follow Jesus.

To renounce evil and injustice.

To love our neighbor and help ease their suffering.

And do it all in a community that nurtures us and magnifies our love in the world.

Our instinct as human beings is to gather in one place, and hold onto our commonalities and our sameness, because this is where we find comfort.

But God is calling us to live differently.

Sometimes what is familiar and comfortable only serves to hold us back.

Sometimes we need to take a risk and allow ourselves to be drawn out and sent out where the Spirit leads us.

Sometimes we need to confirm our promise to God,

Rather than conform to the ways of the world.

Blessings to all of you on your journeys.

You are members of the body of Christ.

You are uniquely and wonderfully made,

and God’s love and grace has been offered freely to you.

The world needs you to go and do likewise.

Amen. 

Sermon: "Throwing Stones"

Rev. Maureen Frescott

Congregational Church of Amherst, UCC

May 18, 2014 – Fifth Sunday of Easter

Acts 7:55-60;  John 14:1-14

“Throwing Stones”

Whenever I’m tired, stressed out, or in need of a rejuvenating diversion I turn to the same spiritual practice that I’ve come to rely on for the past 15 years.

I put on HGTV and watch House Hunters. 

The premise of the show is simple.

A realtor shows a prospective buyer three different homes in their desired geographical area and price range, and at the end of the show the buyer chooses which of the three homes they want to purchase.

The popularity of this show lies in its ability to tap into the viewer’s emotions as we vicariously experience the thrill of choosing and buying a home, without actually having to invest the time or the money.

Admittedly, there is a bit of voyeurism involved, as we get to peek inside homes that are typically way outside our price range, and we imagine what it would be like to live in such grandeur.

And there’s a bit of judgment involved, as we roll our eyes at the hard to please first time buyers who insist on having granite countertops and walk-in closets, and at the couple whose idea of “downsizing” is moving from a 10,000 square foot home to a 5,000 square foot home.

Through House Hunters we also discover that happiness and contentment is often relative.

As we watch a family from Texas walk into a huge master bedroom and say, “It’s a little small.”

And then watch a family from New York City walk into a tiny bathroom and say, “It’s so big!”

The biggest enjoyment I get out of this show is watching people who have reluctantly made compromises or lost out on buying the home of their dreams, come to realize that the home they chose was the right home for them after all, and they can’t imagine being anywhere else.

We’re all seeking that comforting, welcoming place that we can call home.

In our gospel passage today, Jesus tells his disciples, “In my Father’s house there are many dwelling places, and I will prepare a place for you.”

We often hear this passage lifted up as evidence of God’s inclusivity, as we interpret it to mean that God’s Kingdom is like a mansion where there is room for us all.

In this age of religious pluralism, this image of God’s house having many dwelling places opens us up to the idea that even those of other faiths and different understandings of the divine presence in our universe have a place in what we Christians would call the Kingdom of God.

This is a beautiful way to interpret this scripture as it makes room for an even bigger God than our Christian forbearers imagined.

In a world where we speak many different languages, have many different cultures, and many different understandings of this spiritual force that is greater than ourselves, a God who created such a world would have to, we would think, have room for all of us and for all of our expressions of what it means to be a loving presence in this world.

It is interesting to note that Christianity itself is a diverse faith with many different understandings of how God’s love is expressed in this world.

We need only to look at the many different ways that we interpret scripture as evidence of that.

The image of God’s many dwelling places, which we would say describes God’s expansiveness and inclusivity is contained in the same gospel passage as the verse that has traditionally been used to describe the path to God as being narrow and exclusive.

It is here that we hear Jesus say:

"I am the way, and the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me.”

What emotions stir within you when you hear those words?

Do you hear a promise  - or do you hear a threat?

Do you feel joy?  Anger?

Or indifference?

These words, uttered by Jesus on the night before he died, were intended to give his disciples hope.  It was a promise that their relationship would not end with his death.

If they sought out God, they would find Jesus.

And if they sought out Jesus, they would find God.

For God was fully present in Jesus’ life and in his ministry.

And Jesus was fully present in God.

“I am the way, and the truth, and the life” are words offered in comfort….

But these same words uttered by Jesus’ followers over the course of two millennium, have often been offered not as a comfort, but as an ultimatum.

And in that ultimatum, the “good news” of God’s all-inclusive love is lost.

One of the joys and blessings of being a pastor is that we get to walk with people on their faith journeys in all stages of life.

We baptize infants who have no conception of the promises to God being made on their behalf.

We tell Bible stories to young children who imagine God to be a bearded old man in the sky.

We field questions from confirmands and high school students who have tossed aside childhood images of God and have begun a search for a new image to replace it.

We counsel adults who wonder if all the things they’ve been taught about God are true and if organized religion has any relevance in our world today.

And we sit with the elderly in the last days of their lives, when they’ve either made peace with the God they’ve come to know as loving and forgiving, or they’re seeking absolution or distance from the God they’ve been taught is judging and punishing.

What becomes apparent to any pastor – or any one of you who spends time ministering to others – is that people are desperate to hear the message of the gospel – The good news that God is with us always, and that God loves us unconditionally - and there is nothing that WE can do to make this not true.

As Christians, as people of God, as human beings, we need to hear this message over and over again. Because we have such a hard time believing it.

It’s no wonder why, when the prevailing message from Christian churches – in our time and throughout the ages – speaks of God’s love and presence as being conditional and limited.

Jesus said, “In my father’s house there are many dwelling places.”

And we say, “But only a few will be deemed worthy of dwelling with God.”

Jesus said, “Grace is a gift given freely by God.”

And we say, “Grace is something we must earn through our deeds and our creeds.”

Jesus said, “Let he who is without sin cast the first stone.”

And we confidently pick up our stones and lob them at each other, standing firm in the conviction that our sin is lesser than the sin of our neighbor.

Why do we do this?

Why do we take a faith that Jesus commanded us to open up to ALL and pile on so many qualifiers that it becomes accessible to only a few?

Perhaps because we are so accustomed to throwing stones we don’t know how to live otherwise.

Throwing stones keeps others from taking what we value.

As human beings, it’s hard for us to break away from the mindset that everything that is valuable and desirable must be hoarded or kept only for a select few, because to share it widely means that we have less of it for ourselves.

We do this with food, resources, land, money, power, status, and love.

Why would the prospect of sharing our God be any different?

So while we have scripture texts that tell us that God is big enough for us all, we seek out those texts that help us to shrink God just enough so not everyone will find a home where we’ve already staked out our claim.

 “I am the way, and the truth, and the life. No one comes to the father except through me”

We may say that here Jesus pretty explicitly states that only those who come to know him will find a home with God.  But when we consider Jesus’ words in the context in which they were spoken, a different understanding emerges.

These are words offered in comfort to the dear friends and committed followers of a man who is about to die in a horrific and tragic way.

Their lives are about to be turned upside down in a way that they could not even imagine.

So Jesus gave them something solid and strong to hold onto -

the conviction that God would be with them and love them, no matter what.

Jesus told them, “If you know me – and YOU DO - you will know my Father also.”

If they became lost in their pain and their grief and couldn’t conceive of the indescribable and otherworldly presence of God being with them, they need only remember Jesus - The contours of his face, the sound of his voice, the warmth of his presence, and they would know that God was with them.

Jesus told them, “I am the way, and the truth, and the life.”

Here he was not speaking to the billions of adherents of a worldwide religion as we imagine him doing today, instead he was speaking to the anxious and concerned men and women gathered around him that night in the upper room.

They were a small group of followers of a renegade Jewish prophet.

Once Jesus was arrested and killed they would no longer be welcome in their home synagogues or in the Temple of Jerusalem.

Their avenue and access to God would essentially be cut off.

Thus, Jesus told them, “No one come to the father except through me.”

As Old Testament scholar, Gail O’Day explains, when Jesus said, “No one” he meant No one of YOU – meaning the disciples and followers gathered in the room that night.

As religious outcasts, the teachings Jesus would leave with them would become their only WAY to God, their only path to truth, their only hope for life.

If we fast forward 60 years after Jesus’ death to the time when John’s gospel was written, we find a community of formerly Jewish Christians who are desperate to establish themselves as being unique and different from the other religious sects.

Jesus’ statement that no one comes to God except through him has moved from being comforting words to his intimate friends to serving as a badge of distinction for the members of John’s community.

It became the conviction of a religious minority who had discovered that its understanding of the truth of God carried with it a great price.

Their faith had gotten them expelled from their religious home, so they would have to carve out a new home, as a distinct people.

John's Gospel expresses "the distinctiveness" of Christians who find their way to God through Jesus.            [Kate Huey paraphrasing Gail O’Day]

Two thousand years later, we still embrace this distinction, as we should, but too many have made it a requirement. And have limited the reach of the good news of Jesus as a result.

Our denomination, the United Church of Christ, is considered to be on the progressive end of the Christian spectrum, as we have a history of widening God’s embrace to include those who have stood outside the narrow way that others say is the only path to God.

The abolition of slavery, the civil rights movement, the full inclusion of women, and the move towards being Open and Affirming congregations have all resulted in a multitude of stones being thrown our way…both from the outside and the inside.

Each time we widen God’s embrace we get a little more fearful that there is going to be less to go around – because we haven’t yet grasped the message of the gospel – that God’s love is big enough for all of us.

Yet there are so many people out there who are dying to hear this message.

They’re leaving churches and labeling God as irrelevant because they’re not hearing this message.

Now we as inclusive Christians have the opportunity to make ourselves distinct from the others yet again.  By embracing the gospel truth that God’s love and grace is offered unconditionally to all - and by preaching this truth, and living this truth, and believing this truth as if Jesus had spoken it to us himself.

I don’t know about you, but I’m tired of all the stone throwing.

God is big enough for all of us.

God has a massive house – with many dwelling spaces – I’ll bet there are even some with granite counter tops and walk in closets.

When it comes to being included in God’s embrace, it doesn’t matter if you’re not a regular church-goer, it doesn’t matter if you have doubts, it doesn’t matter if you’re not sure what to believe about Jesus or what to believe about God. 

This is God’s house.

And no matter who you are, or where you are on life’s journey, you are welcome here.

Thanks be to God.

Amen.

Sermon: "Live Like Someone Left the Gate Open"

Rev. Maureen Frescott

Congregational Church of Amherst, UCC

May 11, 2014 – Fourth Sunday of Easter

John 10:1-10

“Live Like Someone Left the Gate Open”

As many of you know, my mother and father had a lot of children.

There were ten of us all together.

And my parents made a valiant attempt to contain us in the fenced in back yard of our small Cape Cod style home by installing a swinging metal gate between the back of our house and the front of our detached garage.

When we were small, the gate was supposed to keep us in the yard and out of trouble.

The gate didn’t have a lock, and the latch was easily reachable by a child.  The gate itself was made of chain link, which made it easy to climb over.  But we didn’t dare try.

One look from my father – and the sound of his booming voice telling us to get away from the gate - was enough to keep us well penned in.

Except for my brother Nicholas.

Nicky had a knack for escaping through the gate and getting himself into all sorts of trouble.

When he was 3, he climbed over the gate, got into the garage, found a hammer and a bucket of nails and proceeded to hammer a row of nails into the garage wall – all the way around.

My father spent hours pulling those nails out.

And because they were hammered at shoulder level for a 3-year old, it made for backbreaking work.

When Nicky was 4, he got out through the gate again, and wandered into the front yard where my father was planting a row of small hedges.

Nicky watched for a while and then decided that he would help by grabbing a hedge and handing it to my father to plant.

My dad was actually glad for the help. It kept him from having to get up and down, and it kept Nicky out of trouble.

This father-son system worked well, as my father would simply reach back take the hedge from Nicky, plant it, and then move on to the next one.

It wasn’t until they reached the edge of our property that my father noticed he was planting a lot more hedges then he remembered buying.

It was then that he realized that each time he planted a hedge at his end of the row, Nicky would run back to the beginning of the row, pull an already planted hedge out of the ground and run back and hand it to my father.

When he was 5, Nicky escaped through the gate yet again and this time wandered around the side of the house, where my father was painting the trim around the windows.

My dad had just set down his brush and an open can of green paint and had gone inside to get a drink when Nicky came along.

(you know where this is going)

Sure enough, he came out and found Nicky slathering green paint all over the side of our WHITE house.

My father looked at Nicky, who had green paint running down his arms and all over his clothes, and did what any 1950’s era father would do – He picked him up, went inside, and handed him to my mother.

My mother put Nicky in the bathtub and spent an hour scrubbing the paint off of him before dressing him in clean clothes and sending him to his room. But it wasn’t long before Nicky found his way back outside and was through the gate again.

My father was now at the top of a ladder painting the trim on the upstairs windows, when Nicky appeared below and startled him. The ladder shifted, the paint can fell, and green paint poured out all over the top of Nicky’s head.

After each of these daring escapes, my father and mother blamed each other for not watching Nicky close enough and for allowing him to get through the gate. They both had their hands full and each had assumed that the other would be the gatekeeper while the other was occupied.

In honor of Mother’s Day, I have to say, “Mom, I’m on your side on this one.”

When we consider the gospel text we heard this morning, with its talk of Jesus being the Good Shepherd, the Gate, and the Gatekeeper who keeps us from wandering astray – it’s easy to get so caught up in the competing imagery that we like the disciples may wonder what message, what truth, Jesus meant for us to learn from it. 

Some of us gravitate towards the comforting image of the good shepherd who guides us and pens us in when necessary, because we believe at our core we’re mischievous children or wayward sheep who will inevitably stir up trouble in the world if left on our own.

Some of us hear the word “sheep” and shake our heads in disgust.

Because being compared to a sheep in our culture is not a good thing.

Sheep are thought to be stupid animals. They follow blindly. They don’t think for themselves. They seek to blend into the herd rather than stand out as individuals.

Others still have taken this gospel passage and turned it into a gate itself –

a litmus test that determines who is favored by God and who is not.

It is here that Jesus says, “Very truly, I tell you, I am the gate for the sheep. Whoever enters by me will be saved.”

This is the gate that some followers of Christ use to separate the redeemed from the damned, the insiders from the outsiders, the sheep from the goats.

But when we get caught up in the imagery in this gospel passage and imagine Jesus as a parental shepherd, or a gatekeeper for mindless sheep, or as the gate to salvation itself that is accessible to only a few, we miss the key words that Jesus speaks to us that make up the heart of the gospel itself.

In the last verse of this passage, Jesus says,

“I came that they may have life, and have it abundantly."

Jesus came to bring us life – abundant life.

He came to free us from the fear of loss and suffering and scarcity that causes us to hold tight to our love and our generosity. 

He came to call us each by name and to lead us OUT of the sheep pen and into the green pastures of the world.

He does this by showing us a better way to live.

A counter cultural way to live.

His commandment to love our neighbor, and love our enemy, and love God as much as we love ourselves IS counter cultural.

It was counter cultural in the 1^st century and it still is in the 21^st century.

Many of us struggle to love ourselves, let alone extend that love to our neighbor, and our enemy.

But the gospel, the good news, keeps reorienting us back to this point.

It really is all about love. It really is that simple.

But it is so hard for us to do.

Which is why we keep getting stuck on the idea that God must be as fickle and as stingy with love and grace as we are.

To be otherwise, is just incomprehensible to us.

There’s a story making the rounds on the internet about an African tribe that has put into practice what many of us find so difficult to do –

They’ve learned what it means to be generous with love and grace.

In this tribe, when someone does something harmful, they take the person to the center of the village where the whole tribe assembles and surrounds them.

For two days, they tell the person all the good things they have done.

The tribe believes that each human being comes into the world as good.

Each one of us desires only safety, love, peace and happiness.

But sometimes, in the pursuit of these things, we make mistakes.

This tribal community sees those mistakes as a cry for help.

They unite then to lift up the person who has done wrong, to reconnect them with their true nature, to remind them who they really are, until they fully remember the truth that had been temporarily disconnected: "I am good."

In the internet accounts of this amazing ritual, the tribe is not named, and there is some question as to whether the story is factually true, but it is true in the same sense that our story of the Good Shepherd is true.

Jesus came so that we may have life, and have it abundantly.

God created this world so that we may have life, and all the joys and sorrows that come with it.

And the only way we’ll experience that life is by leaving the safety of the pens that keep us contained and restrained and head out into the pasture.

The Good Shepherd is there to lead us, and as long as we follow the sound of his voice – his teachings and the example of his life he has left with us – we won’t wander too far astray.

There’s a motivational poster that some of you may have seen that has a picture of small dog running free in a grassy field – The camera catches him mid-stride with all four feet off the ground and a look of pure joy on his face. The caption on the poster says, “Live Like Someone Left the Gate Open.”

Jesus IS the Shepherd and the gatekeeper – he is the one who opens the gate, calls us by name and leads us out into the open pastures of the world.

Jesus is also the gate–but not in the way that many of us imagine him to be. He is not a gate that swings open and closed to let some in and keep others out - rather he is a gate in the same way that a harbor serves as the gateway to the ocean. 

Just as water flows in and out of the harbor carrying our boats and allowing us to experience both the great expanse of the ocean and the comforting stillness of the harbor, God’s love flows in and out Jesus, and carries us along with it.

If we want to experience and conceptualize what God’s love can accomplish and CREATE and BE when if flows through a human being, we need only look at Jesus.

At the way he lived his life using love as his guiding force,

and at the way he died doing the same, seeking not revenge but forgiveness.

Jesus is a conduit, a gateway to God.  

In him we experience the love and the life that God offers freely, and abundantly to us all.

May we all be encouraged to live each day as if someone left the gate open.

Knowing that on any given day this kind of freedom is going to lead to trouble for some. Some of us won’t be able to resist the urge to pound nails into the garage wall and others will wind up with paint cans dumped on their heads. 

But Jesus calls us out through the gate nonetheless.

With the instruction that we LOVE each other and offer grace to one another, just as God offers it to us.

Jesus came so that we may have life – not a penned in life where we hold tight to our love as if it were a scarce commodity, but an abundant life –

where we lift each other up,

live generously,

and serve as wide open gateways for God’s presence in our world.

Amen.