Apr 24 | “God is all in,” (Sermon, April 17th 2016)

Note: This was the sermon I preached on the first Sunday after my mentor, a beloved priest who had served his parish for nearly fifteen years, left to pursue ministry at another parish.

 

At that time the festival of the Dedication took place in Jerusalem. It was winter, ²³and Jesus was walking in the temple, in the portico of Solomon. ²⁴So the Jews gathered around him and said to him, ‘How long will you keep us in suspense? If you are the Messiah, tell us plainly.’ ²⁵Jesus answered, ‘I have told you, and you do not believe. The works that I do in my Father’s name testify to me; ²⁶but you do not believe, because you do not belong to my sheep. ²⁷My sheep hear my voice. I know them, and they follow me. ²⁸I give them eternal life, and they will never perish. No one will snatch them out of my hand. ²⁹What my Father has given me is greater than all else, and no one can snatch it out of the Father’s hand. ³⁰The Father and I are one.’

John 10:22-30

 

In the Godly Play curriculum, when the seasons of the church year change, we begin our stories with, “Everything has changed.” We’ll say, “Now is the time of the colour blue,” or the colour purple. It is a way to encourage our children to notice the changes in church, and to give them a vocabulary to center them in the Christian faith.

Today, dear friends, to encourage and support you in naming the changes in our family, and to give us a vocabulary to center us in the Christian faith, I say:

“Everything has changed. Now is the time of the interim minister.”

As much as we will surely come to love John Bailey, who will be an excellent and stable presence for us, it will not be the same. Everything has changed for us, Jesus’ disciples, today in Dunbar and yesterday in Jerusalem. The one who was friend and shepherd is no longer with us. We are scattered – literally once, metaphorically now, in our heads and hearts.

But this is as it should be.

Easter is not a simple time. Sometimes we shout Alleluia to add to the echo of that momentous shift in the fabric of the universe. And sometimes we shout it because we feel like the echo is all that’s left. Easter is messy that way. We weep at the physical absence of the one whom we loved, but rejoice in the ministry of the one who goes bearing a piece of us, having been with us for a time.

In today’s Gospel reading, we’ve rewound a bit and Jesus is walking in the portico of Solomon. If the Gospel of John tells you where something happened, that’s never just a throwaway line. Same if it tells you what time it is. Everything is essential for our interpretation.

We believe that the portico of Solomon was the only part of Solomon’s temple that was not destroyed by the Babylonians in their siege of Jerusalem in 586 BCE. It held tremendous spiritual significance for the Jewish people living there – a link to a glorious time when they felt as if God was very close and active in their history; a time when they were under no foreign rule but only under the rule of the great I AM who had liberated them and made of them a great and holy nation.

That’s the place.

Now the time. It was close to the Feast of Dedication. This is one of the names for the festival of Hanukkah. We might know the story of a one-day supply of oil miraculously burning for eight in the temple. But Hanukkah, like that portico, was another piece of culture that had ties to a radical time in Jewish history. Hanukkah commemorates the day that the Hasmoneans, led by Judas Maccabeus, liberated the temple from the pagan Seleucid monarchy and rededicated it after it had been closed and polluted under their rule. This was a landmark victory, and it occurred barely two hundred years before Jesus was born. The fire of that victory still rested in the hearts of many Jewish people, who, now under Roman rule, proclaimed the coming of the Messiah, who would liberate the people and their ancestral home. This was the belief of the Zealots, who played a key part in the First Jewish-Roman war about fifty years after the death of Jesus. Their targeting of Romans and Greeks made the chief priests of Jesus’ time angry and fearful. They had good reason, based on past experience, to believe that open revolt would gain little to nothing at the cost of much blood. This might give us a context for why they were so wary of Jesus. This, I think, is what Caiaphas meant when he said, “It is better for one man to die than the whole people.”

So, Jesus walks, through the cloisters that stubbornly proclaimed the glory of God’s people, during the festival where God’s people stubbornly remembered the glory of God’s temple. He walks and is accosted by some folks; folks who heard that he had done great things, but perhaps had not seen them firsthand, or were unable to believe it could be possible; folks nursing old wounds of destruction, nurturing the fire of past victory, yearning and burning for the promised salvation; folks who then say, “Be straight with us. Are you the one? Are you the healer who will bind up these old wounds? Are you the gasoline for that victory fire? Are you the one who will save us from Rome?”

These are all real, heartbreaking questions, and I bet they sound familiar.

We come to Jesus, remembering old wounds, nurturing past victories, uncertain about the future. We come and we catch him here, in this place which has seen joy and victory and pain and loss. And we say, “Be straight with us. Are you going to step up? Are you going to be with us while we walk the pilgrim path? Are you really going to bring the right person to us, someone who will love us and care for us in the way that we have come to know and count on?”

And he answers, and it’s a pretty scary answer. “I have told you, and you do not believe.”

That hurts.

But you know what? For me, sometimes, it’s 100% true. I don’t always know for sure if God’s going to step up – and sometimes I don’t like the way God steps up! And even if I know in my heart that Jesus walks with me through every part of life, sometimes he’s really hard to see. And we may believe that God is working wholeheartedly in our canonical committee, but this is a huge position that we are trying to fill.

Sometimes the truth hurts. Sometimes the truth, like Easter, like joy, like resurrection, is messy.

But there is hope.

Jesus goes on to say, “My sheep hear my voice. I know them and they follow me.”

We are known.

“I give my sheep eternal life.”

We are loved.

“No one will snatch my sheep out of my hand.”

We are cared for, and there is nothing we can do to escape that.

Now a sheep isn’t exactly a glamorous animal with which to be identified, is it? In fact, “sheep” among our individualist Western society these days is basically a slur. But do you know what Wikipedia calls sheep? “A prey animal with a strong gregarious instinct.”

Have you ever heard a better description of a Christian? We may not be literal prey today, the way we once were in the arena, but we are prey to all of the things everyday people are prey to – fear, uncertainty, selfishness, apathy. We are also by nature of our baptism prey to other forces. We are prey to those who can’t comprehend why it would better to serve than to be served; prey to a culture of self-aggrandizement and promotion that can’t possibly imagine why we would try so hard to regard others as better than ourselves; prey to an increasingly loud culture which claims the world goes down the toilet every time someone chooses vulnerability or empowerment of the weak rather than judgement and bootstrap thinking.

Prey animals with a strong gregarious instinct.

Oh do we Christians have a strong gregarious instinct. We broadcast our story of death transformed into new life to each other and the world, even when no one is listening.

Isn’t that strange? Why would we do that?

Because we think it’s important.

Because we think it might be the most important truth the world has ever heard.

It’s so important, that Jesus told us we would not be left to do the work alone. We have an Advocate – the Holy Spirit, who moves in us and in the world.

It’s so important, that God entered human flesh and said to us, “Okay, children. These are the promises. I’m all in. What about you?”

Promises were made – at the beginning of time in the middle of swirling chaos; two thousand years ago in an occupied backwater nation; ninety years ago in a little neighbourhood on the west coast of Canada.

These are the promises. God is all in.

What about us?