Sermon delivered Sunday, May 7, 2017 (Fourth Sunday of Easter, Year A), at The Episcopal Church of St. John the Baptist in Aptos, CA, on my first Sunday serving that congregation as rector.
Sermon Text(s): John 10:1-10
“I came that they may have life, and have it abundantly.”
Jesus, in using the image of himself as a shepherd, says that he came to give the sheep “abundant life.” He doesn’t say he came just to protect them from the thief, just to keep them alive. He came to give them abundant life – lots of life, more than they already had.
The kind of “life” Jesus is talking about here is more than literal, physical life, more than a beating heart and breath in our lungs. He’s talking about emotional life – lightheartedness, joy, excitement, love, resilience, fulfillment. Jesus came to give us more than breath in our bodies; he came to give us joy in our souls, the kind of joy that is unshaken by the ups and downs of life, an abiding joy that lives deep down, that connects us to the Source of all that is, the Source that tells us, in the words of Julian of Norwich, “All shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well.”
I can’t think of a more perfect passage of scripture to begin our lives together as priest and people than this line from John’s Gospel about abundant life, because this is what the Church is all about: receiving and celebrating the abundant life that Jesus offers to us.
It’s sort of a personal mantra of mine that people should feel as comfortable in their church as they do in their own living rooms, and what I mean by that is that the church should be just as safe of a space for them as their private home is. It should be a place where they feel completely free to be themselves. Too often, the image people get of “the Church” is that it is a place of judgment, a place where they have to put on a certain face, keep up appearances, be presentable. But I take the view that, as the saying goes, the church is not a club for saints, but a hospital for sinners. It’s a place where we stand before the Almighty God to whom “all hearts are open, all desires known, and from whom no secrets are hid,” as our Collect for Purity says. It’s a place we come to lay bare the whole truth about ourselves and to reckon with what we find there. For some of us, it’s a lot easier to do that in front of God than in front of other people. But if you’ve ever been to a 12-Step meeting or a support group of any kind, you know that that kind of vulnerability and intimacy, the kind that leads to the healing of wounds and the ability to live your life to the fullest, is possible within the context of a gathering of flawed human beings. And I believe the Church should be about creating those kinds of spaces for people, spaces where people can experience the abundant life that is possible in Christ.
On Wednesday, I shared part of my spiritual journey with the Episcopal Church Women at the luncheon they held to welcome me, and I mentioned that although I was raised in church, I didn’t come to know Christ and commit to follow him until I was a teenager. In the first few years after that “conversion experience,” I listened to a lot of contemporary Christian music. One song I heard during that time, a song by Ginny Owens called “Free,” gave me an image of the kind of life that could be possible for me if I could truly embrace the gift of God’s grace. Nearly 20 years later, I’m still working on letting go enough to truly experience this kind of freedom, but I have tasted moments of it, and I deeply believe this is the kind of abundant life to which Jesus calls us. The song starts with a description of what the author’s life was like before she embraced God’s grace:
Turnin’ molehills into mountains
Makin’ big deals out of small ones
Bearing gifts as if they're burdens --
This is how it's been
Fear of coming out of my shell
Too many things I can't do too well
‘fraid I'll try real hard and I'll fail --
This is how it's been
‘Til the day you pounded on my heart's door,
And you shouted joyfully,
“You're not a slave anymore!
You're free to dance --
Forget about your two left feet!
And you're free to sing ---
Even joyful noise is music to me!
And free to love
'Cause I've given you my love and it's made you free…
Free from worry
Free from envy and denial
Free to live, free to give, free to smile!” [1]
This is what “abundant life” looks like to me: Singing and dancing with abandon because I know I am accepted as I am. Giving freely because I know I have more than enough to share. Radiating love to all around me, drawing from that internal well of joy, unshaken by the ups and downs of this world, that comes from knowing that Christ has given me his love and it’s made me free. I don’t claim to be a perfect picture of that in every moment, but it’s the image I hold in my mind of the kind of life that is possible if I allow God’s grace to work in me.
Because although the world operates out of a mentality of scarcity, hoarding things because we believe there is not enough to go around, the message of the Gospel is one of abundance. In God’s economy, the concept of “scarcity of resources” does not exist. The gift of God in Christ is more love, more grace, more mercy, more soul food than we can possibly consume on our own. In the face of such abundance, we are compelled to share – because as that grace continues to flow into us even after it has filled us up, it overflows out of us to everyone around us. There is so much grace available that we literally cannot keep it all to ourselves. As the psalmist says, “our cup is running over.”
What does this look like in practice? The image of the early church in our passage from Acts 2 this morning gives us an example:
“All who believed were together and had all things in common; they would sell their possessions and goods and distribute the proceeds to all, as any had need. Day by day, as they spent much time together in the temple, they broke bread at home and ate their food with glad and generous hearts, praising God and having the goodwill of all the people.”
That intangible, internal sense of abundance can be translated into an experience of external abundance as well. The church is meant to be a place where we all share what we have to make sure that the needs of all are met. To the extent that we do that, the church community itself becomes a sacrament – “an outward and visible sign of an inward and spiritual grace,” as the Book of Common Prayer defines it (BCP 857). And as with all sacraments, both aspects must be there for it to be truly sacred – the outward sign is meaningless without the inward grace, and the inward grace is meaningless if it does not manifest in an outward sign.
So as we come together today as priest and people, I pray that our lives together will be sacramental: manifesting through outward and visible signs the inward and spiritual grace that we know through our relationship with Jesus Christ. I pray that our community will be known as one of abundance – abundant life, abundant gratitude, abundant compassion, abundant giving. Through our gratefulness for the abundance of God’s grace, I pray that we too, like the early church, will distribute our plenty to any among us who have need – and I hope we’ll sing and dance with abandon while we’re doing it.
[1] Ginny Owens, "Free," from the album Without Condition. ℗ 1999 Sony Music Entertainment Inc.
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