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When I did my stint as a student teacher, I had three classes of eighth-graders. I chose to do a unit on poetry with them. And guess what? Most eighth-graders don't particularly love poetry. Unless it's in the form of pop music which depends mostly on the use of challenging, thought-provoking rhymes like "girl" and "world" or "baby," "maybe," "you drive me "crazy." "Bye, bye, bye."
Nevertheless, I still love the language of poetry. And, based on what the Gospel writers seemed to remember of Jesus, he was a kind of poet. Read the Gospels. Almost everything Jesus is recorded as having said makes use of the figurative language of poetry, particularly metaphor.
As you may (or may not) remember from high school English, a metaphor is
a
term or phrase that literally means one thing but is used to describe
something else. For example, a poet might write something like "my love is
a red, red rose – including the thorns." Or perhaps a better example comes
from my favorite poet, Emily Dickinson, who wrote,
"Hope" is the thing with feathers
That perches in the soul
And sings the tune without the words
And never stops at all,
And sweetest in the gale is heard;
And sore must be the storm
That could abash the little bird
That kept so many warm.
I've heard it in the chillest land
And on the strangest sea,
Yet never, in extremity,
It asked a crumb of me.
Her comparison of "hope" to a sweetly and freely singing bird is a metaphor.
Of course, one problem with metaphors is that they can be easily misunderstood. Back in the 1920's – during the time of the temperance movement and the great prohibition against the trafficking of liquor – one particular temperance campaigner had a favorite visual metaphor he loved to use. He would set up two glasses, one containing water and the other containing alcohol. Into each glass he would drop a worm. While the one in the water was unaffected, the one in the alcohol would frizzle up and die. One night, while giving this little demonstration to a gathered crowd, the man declared, "The lesson from this is clear." But before he could continue, a voice from the crowd called out, "Yeah...if you have worms, drink whiskey!"
Jesus often preached using images and metaphors that were wrapped up in little stories known as parables. And he was often misunderstood. He tried to explain to people about God. He compared the realm of God to "a pearl of great price" and to "a mustard seed" that eventually grows into a tree and to "yeast" that has been worked into flour to make rising dough. But lots of times, folks just didn't quite get it.
Thus, Jesus constantly found himself being confronted and challenged by the local religious authorities who may not have understood all that he was saying, but they knew for sure that they didn't like the sound of it! The people were getting way too interested in what Jesus had to say. The words we just heard read are part of a longer passage in which Jesus is responding to the hassles of those who opposed him as he, once again, tried to help people understand what our relationship with God is intended to be.
The two little parables recorded in today's Gospel use metaphors to describe the role that Christ plays in our lives. One of the images is of a shepherd and his sheep. Now at the time Jesus lived, that was an extremely apt and contemporary illustration. But, here in 2002 St. Louis, Missouri, I gotta ask you: how many of you currently own a flock of sheep? For that matter, how many of you grew up on sheep ranches?
Obviously, we don't understand all that was involved in a shepherd's caring for his sheep, but we probably get the general point. Almost everyone is at least vaguely familiar with that most well-known of all the Psalms, number 23: "The Lord is my Shepherd; I shall not want." We get the idea...green pastures, still waters, restoration, safe passage through dark valleys. We may not fully comprehend the depth of the care required and the complications involved in shepherding sheep but we get it: Christ is the shepherd, we're the sheep and those particular words are supposed to make us feel better at funerals and stuff – end of story.
Well, not exactly...but, for today, rather than focusing solely on the metaphor of Jesus as the Good Shepherd, there is another metaphor in the reading that I think we need to take some time to better understand. Verse 9 reads, "I am the door. Whoever enters by me will be saved, and will come in and out and find pasture." Other Bible versions say, "I am the gate for the sheep." It's all the same idea.
Now we all know that there are all kinds of doors, many of which only open in one direction. Sometimes there are doors we go through only to discover that they lock behind us, and we can't get back in. Once some friends and I were wandering around a dormitory and we got trapped in a stairwell because of a door behind us that locked when it closed and a door in front of us that required a special code to enter. (If you've ever wondered how emergency-alarmed doors get opened and set off when there's no apparent emergency, now you know!)
The kind of gate Jesus is talking about, however, is one that freely opens in both directions. Picture the swinging doors of a saloon in an old western movie or the doors of the kitchen in a busy restaurant, and you'll get the idea.
The door or the gate would have been the entry way to a sheep fold where shepherds could bring their sheep for the night to keep them together and safe. Jesus said, "I am the gate. Whoever enters by me will be saved and will come and go and find pasture." It's a metaphor. Jesus is saying, "Come to God through me and you will be both safe and free."
Going into the sheep pen meant safety for the sheep. The word that is translated in the reading as "saved" also accurately means, in the original Greek in which it was written, "safe...preserved and healed...made whole." When we speak of being "saved" in Christ, isn't that what we really mean? We become spiritually "safe" – nothing can ever permanently harm or destroy our souls or separate us from God. We are prepared for genuine, eternal spiritual wholeness – that's what "salvation" is.
But notice...Jesus didn't stop with the idea of us huddling inside the "pen" of safety. That's what some religious leaders throughout the ages have tried to get people to do. Stay "safely" out of the world...don't associate with "non-believers," only listen to "Christian" music, only read "Christian" books, only participate in church-sponsored activities. That's pretty convenient, actually. It's quite easy to control the sheep when they're kept only inside the pen. And that is, after all, what many religious leaders along the way have wanted to maintain in their churches and among their "sheep": control. But that's not what Jesus said.
He said that not only would we come into the pen but that we would also be free to go out, led by the Shepherd, to find pasture. And know this: sheep aren't meant to feed in only one pasture...and neither are we.
Phillip Keller writes, in his book, A Shepherd Looks at Psalm 23, "Sheep are notorious creatures of habit. If left to themselves they will follow the same trails until they become ruts; graze the same hills until they turn to desert wastes; pollute their own ground until it is corrupt with disease and parasites." He explains, "The greatest single safeguard which a shepherd has in handling his flock is to keep them on the move. That is to say, they dare not be left on the same ground too long. They must be shifted from pasture to pasture periodically."
Church, that is a profound truth that we really need to pay attention to both individually and corporately. With Jesus as our "gate," we are free to come and go – to turn inward to the comfort and safety of God and to look and venture outward...to be "fed" and "nourished" in all kinds of pastures. The Good Shepherd doesn't keep the flock in one pasture all the time – that would lead to spiritual scarcity, not the life of spiritual abundance that Jesus came to give us.
Spiritual abundance comes from regularly moving onward in our spiritual journeys together – finding new, fresh pastures in which to "feed." If anyone of us is still praying...still looking at the Bible...still understanding God exactly the same way we were 10 years ago...5 years ago...1 year ago – then we're not really following the voice of the Shepherd; we're hiding out in the pen of some impostor, barely subsisting on picked over stubble and laying around in messes of our own making!
If you want to equate my job as pastor with being the "shepherd" of this particular "flock," then you need to know that I see my job being to both direct you to the safety and rest found in Christ and to also lead you regularly to new pastures and changing landscapes. Even when we change how things are done...even when we introduce news ways of worshiping or praying or learning together...even if what we do may be like nothing you've ever done in church before, we are still being led by the same Good Shepherd; Jesus Christ is the gate by which we come and go safely between comfort and constant change.
Frankly, we need to let God – Creator, Christ and Holy Spirit – out of the small box religion has built. Over 40 years ago, the great Christian author, J. B. Phillips, wrote, "The trouble with many people today is that they have not found a God big enough for modern needs. While their experience of life has grown in a score of directions, and their mental horizons have been expanded to the point of bewilderment by world events and by scientific discoveries, their ideas of God have remained largely static. It is obviously impossible for adults to worship the conception of God that exists in the minds of Sunday-school aged children, unless they are prepared to deny their own experience of life. If, by a great effort of will, they do this they will always be secretly afraid lest some new truth may expose the immaturity of their faith. And it will always be by such an effort that they either worship or serve a God who is really too small to command adult loyalty and cooperation."
We are meant to be led by a God who offers both safety and freedom. Maintaining an intimate relationship with the Good Shepherd will guarantee that in times of both safety and change, we can recognize God's voice and experience a spiritually abundant life...courtesy of our "swinging door" Savior! Amen.
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