Sunday May 7 sermon
An Abundant Life
Today we continue our reading of the gospel of the writer we call John and we have images of sheep, thieves, gates and fences and gatekeepers, and finally of abundance.
There are a couple of things I want to highlight from today's readings. One relates to the imagery around shepherds and gatekeepers. The other relates to the last sentence: I have come that they may have life and live it abundantly.
For today's sermon I have referred to a blog called pastordawn.com , by Dawn Hutchings, a progressive Lutheran pastor from near Toronto in Canada.
So John is full of Metaphors. ‘Here is the lamb of god’.’ I am the bread of life’. We have a range of Metaphors used by John to try and help the audience understand Jesus and God. Some of these Metaphors relate to well known passages from the Hebrew scriptures, and some are new Metaphors. It has to be said there is some mixing of metaphors in this chapter. Jesus says ' the one who enters by the gate is the shepherd' and also ' I am the gatekeeper' I don't know about you but I was always taught not to mix my metaphors. Which is it gatekeeper or shepherd?
We also read in chapter 1 that Jesus is the 'lamb of God, who takes away the sin of the world'. an abundance of Metaphors to contend with.
The word metaphor comes from 2 Greek words : meta= beyond, and phor = to carry. A metaphor is a figure of speech meant to carry us beyond the actual meaning of the words.
I used a retelling of Psalm 23 this morning in our reading, where Bruce Prewer has replaced the shepherd with the drover. He was looking to enable an Aussie audience to relate to these images. The problem is a metaphor relies on the audience's familiarity with the images created to be able to get nearer the meaning the writer tries to convey. But I'm not sure if today's Australians relate any better to the image of a drover than they might to a shepherd. I know that it has famously been said that 'a drovers dog' could have won a particular election... but I think we might not appreciate much subtlety in this metaphor.
The writer of the Gospel of John crafted his Metaphors carefully, skillfully weaving together the images of YAHWEH that his Jewish listeners would have understood. They knew their own Scriptures and the images of Jesus as the Good Shepherd would have carried them beyond the sheep in the field to the words of the Prophet of Ezekiel who echoed the promises of YAHWEH to the people of Israel. In Ezekiel, YAHWEH instructs the prophet to speak out against the religious authorities, the shepherds who had lead the people into dangerous territory and allowed the flock to be scattered and lost.
They would have heard YAHWEH promising to send a proper shepherd, a good shepherd, who would gather the flocks, tend their wounds and restore them to good pastures. And they would have known that this Jesus was such a shepherd. And they would have rejoiced to have such a shepherd in their midst. And they would have understood perfectly why the religious authorities accused Jesus of being possessed. For surely the religious authorities were the shepherds who had lead the sheep into dangerous territory.
These metaphors are not an end in themselves, they are a way to understand Yahweh, the great I AM. And sometimes a simplistic understanding of Metaphors can lead us to adopt very limited understandings of YAHWEH and our relationship with the creative force of life. So while the image of the good shepherd can be helpful, so can that of the gatekeeper, and that of the lamb. However none of these Metaphors tell the full story, they are all a way for us to carry us forward in our understanding of Jesus and of Yahweh Who in the end cannot be pinned down.
This brings me to the second part of today's reading that seemed to me to be if great significance, but also open to misinterpretation.
I have come that they may have life and live it abundantly!
So while we start hearing about the dangers of thieves and bad shepherds, and the need for the flock to be protected, this section concludes with the large claim that Jesus is about life, and our role to live abundantly.
Abundance is defined as a large amount, or more than enough of something: Copious, ample, profuse, rich, lavish, abounding, liberal, generous, bountiful, large, huge, great, bumper, prolific, teeming, plentiful, bounteous. It's amazing how many synonyms there are for this word.
It turns up in a google search attached to all sorts of things
Financial advice companies, philosophers, churches, and as the opposite of sustainability. It has been adopted by some Christian churches as part of the prosperity church mantras. My favourite quote Rob Liano a life coach says: 'God will overflow your cup, so grab the biggest one you can find'
So what is this living abundantly? I think we only need to look around the world we live in, to realise that we are part of an abundant cosmos, which is teaming with the richness of life. We are part of a creation which reminds us constantly of the miracle of life, and the richness of the universe. And yet abundance is also caught up with the pressure on these resources with the hugely increasing population of people on this planet. And with our ever increasing habit of consuming and wasting these resources that are our our life source.
Human beings are in the words of Julian of Norwich, “not just made by God, we are made of God.”
What’s more, this amazing Cosmos is not something separate or apart from us, we are in and of the Cosmos.
The Cosmos is in God and God is in the Cosmos.
The sheer abundance of the Cosmos is beyond our comprehension and yet so very accessible if we but reach out and touch it, or open our eyes to see it, our open our arms to embrace it, or breathe deeply to draw life within it.
Carefully studying the book that our Creator has written which we call the Universe, it is clear, in the words of Thomas Berry, that:
“Our challenge is to create a new language, even a new sense of what it is to be human.”
Embracing the abundant life that Jesus lived to proclaim, requires the faith to open ourselves to the splendour of the Cosmos of which we are an intricate part. The ongoing revelations provided by the Cosmos are clear for those who have eyes to see and ears to hear.
As Berry so beautifully puts it, “in the unfolding dynamics of the universe, we can see with confidence the continuing revelation that takes place in and through the earth.
From the beginning the course of the heavens, lighted the sun, and formed the earth, if this same dynamism brought forth the continents and seas and atmosphere, if it awakened life in the primordial cell and then brought into being the unnumbered variety of living beings, and finally brought us into being and guided us safely through the turbulent centuries, there is reason to believe that this same guiding process is precisely what has awakened in us our present understanding of ourselves and our relation to this stupendous process.
Sensitized to such guidance from the very structure and functioning of the universe, we can have confidence in the future that awaits the human venture.”
The gospel, the good news written large in the very stuff of the Earth, in our flesh and bones, this good news that we are fearfully and wonderfully made, fit for abundant life.
Yes, we are still evolving into all that we were created to be.
Yes, this evolution can be fearsome and will break us in ways that are painful, as we are shaped and moulded by this compelling force pulling us deeper and deeper into the fullness of our being.
Yes, we are incomplete, but as we look to the Earth we see that the secrets of our evolution lie in our attraction to one another, our completeness is to be found in the ONENESS into which we are drawn by the very ONE we call God; the ONE in whom we live and move and have our being, this LOVE that we call God.
We are created for more.
The Good news of abundant life, is that the LOVE out of which we are made, lives and finds expression in us.
We had on Monday to sad experience of farewelling our much loved congregation member: Margaret Rose Kingsbury...and during that wonderful service, I think we were blessed to share with her abundant friends and family, what a life of abundance she led. And this was not a life of material abundance, and she was a woman who did not waste things. No her abundance was of the heart, in her generous person, her warmth and her laughter and love of life.
This is what todays reading is emphasising: that an abundant life, is one where we give of ourselves, we value creation, we are open to live fully.
As Jack Spong said so well:
True religion is, at its core, nothing more or less than a call to live fully, to love wastefully and to be all that we can be. That is finally where life’s meaning is found. All else is background music.”