Meeting Jesus the Shepherd Gate
Notes from www.billbrucewords.com
4th Sunday of Easter, April 13, 2008
Text: John 10:1-10
The York Region Police are making available a “GPS”, or ‘Global Positioning Satellite” tracking device, for people suffering from Alzheimers’ disease or other dementias. It’s like a wristwatch, and allows the police to pinpoint the location of the person, if they wander off and get lost. After media publicized the programme, there were many calls to the police, parents asking for GPS devices for teenagers, and suspicious spouses asking for GPS for their partners!
What if everybody in this congregation were wearing a GPS device? What would it show about our traffic patterns? Many of you have these things in your cars – but many of you travel around the world for business and for recreational tourism all the time. I mentioned a couple on Sunday. What if we could light up a map with the location of each of us and all of us at any time, during any period? What would we see? Imagine it as a sort of ‘Gods-eye-view’ of us.
It’s not such a stretch to imagine this perspective. I used to live over the Gardiner Expressway, and guests would marvel in the middle of the night at the constant flow of arterial traffic. I still take the TTC streetcars and subway most days, and VIVA buses of York Region Transit. Have you ever seen the flow of humanity through Union Station at rush hour, from GO and TTC to the bank towers? God forbid you step in the path of those commuters heading for the PATH system!
From space or the sky, we look like ants in an anthill, insects flowing in traffic patterns. We continue the habits in less visible ways inside the big buildings where most of us work and shop. Fortunes are spent by marketers on advertising to divert our traffic, mining data to sort us into tribes and markets. Are we simply passive shoppers, consumers, or labour market participants, obedient slaves to manipulative geniuses? Are we ants in an anthill, or rats in various mazes?
It’s ‘Good Shepherd’ Sunday, a week in Easter season each year when we hear bible texts read and sung like the 23rd psalm and John 10. This year, it’s Jesus the gate, through which other shepherds lead the sheep. Do you feel like sheep, docile and stupid and obedient? That’s hardly fair to sheep! Church is more like herding cats. Anyone who thinks church is authoritarian doesn’t live with church, or just remembers it from their adolescent rebellion and departure days.
You see, I don’t think we are ants in an anthill, slavish workers and consumers, victims of grand controlling conspiracies. I don’t believe it about our urban life and traffic. I don’t believe it about our consuming and working. And I don’t believe it about religion. I think we are actually pretty smart at accepting or rejecting influences, keeping our identity, integrity, authenticity. We are more than rats in a maze, or sheep milling about a slaughterhouse.
You can smooth traffic flows, or divert them, but you can’t make us go where you want. You have to be persuasive, not coercive. People will recognize their own: choosing, testing, and trusting. It’s true for commerce, transportation, politics, and religion. In the end, each one of us figures out what path we will follow. You can be tracked by a GPS device or by any observer, showing ‘what is the gospel, according to you’.
Easter is also the season for religious publishers, it seems, to release their annual barrage of conspiracy theories. Harper Collins must have it mapped out in their marketing plan, and news magazines from Time and McLeans through the daily papers cooperate. As I reread my notes from the past decade, I see Dan Brown, Tom Harpur, books on James’ tomb, and Judas’ gospel. This year, it’s Barrie Wilson’s How Jesus Became a Christian and Gretta Vosper’s With or Without God. They are all in our church library, and many of you have read them, as I have.
Are you feeling sheepish and scammed again this Easter season? Then our grand conspiracy to control your brains is still working! Apparently I was supposed to be patronizing you and keeping you in the dark in perpetual ignorance, about the secrets taught to all religious leaders which prove it’s all a big lie. I missed the memo, or the meeting, or the secret decoder ring. You may still be feeling lots of cognitive dissonance and uncertainty about this whole resurrection thing, but not because I suppressed the conversation!
In 1975, at Victoria College UofT, I enjoyed a comedy routine one Saturday night with a bunch of theological students, and I have been rehearsing the thing in churches ever since:
And behold, Jesus saith:
“I am the vine… I am the bread… I am the gate… I am the shepherd…”
And then Peter saith:
‘What was that, man? I was not listening.’
And Jesus saith:
‘Never mind, man, it was not important.’
And behold, Jesus went,
and sat in the corner, and would not speak to anyone,
Yea, verily, not even the chicks.
We all got the joke in 1975, and you got it today. We are not afraid of cognitive dissonance. Bultmann shaped many United Church preachers of the 1950’s and 1960’s, starting from actual experience, and calling God ‘ground of our being’ and faith ‘courage to be’. William Hamilton, teaching for our church in 1966, published ‘death of God’ theology. Mary Daly wrote Beyond God the Father in 1973. Should we be sheepish that we have not resolved cognitive dissonance yet, or just if our faith is childish, not childlike!
John’s gospel presents a version of Jesus who keeps pontificating ‘I am’: I am the true vine, I am the resurrection and the life, I am the truth, the way, and the life, I am the true bread, I am the good shepherd – and today, I am the gate. I am. The other gospels, Matthew, Mark, and Luke, present Jesus saying ‘the reign of God is near’, the ‘kingdom of heaven is coming’, and this is what it is like, or will be like. God’s reign is contrasted to Rome’s reign, and put just beyond our reach in time and space, but close enough to taste and see and hear, for those alert and aware.
These gospels are not trying to write biographies of personality. Barrie Wilson’s book claims to know way too much about Jesus’ inner subjective state of mind. It’s trying to tell you what’s most important, not simply of the teachings of Jesus, but ‘Christology, the person and work of Jesus Christ. Mark’s Jesus is a deer in the headlights, surprised at what happens, and at how stupid the disciples are. John’s Jesus is a pompous speechifier. Which is accurate? Both are true.
This is the first of three weeks where we hear ‘I am’ lessons. Next week, it’s the ‘way, truth, and life’ one, and then ‘bread’ on Foodgrains Sunday, when Terrie speaks. These texts all raise the risk of coercive exclusivity, the spectre of authoritarian religion, claiming and assuming the voice of ‘I am’. As the old CBC joke goes: “I’m Adrienne Clarkson – and you’re not”. John’s dualism and polarizing polemics, frame the gospel in choices between ‘him or me’, ‘them or us’. John’s anti-Jewish rhetoric, claiming to trump the Torah, is read in our church by changing “Jewish” to “religious” to better convey the imagined opposition, who may be within each of us. And yet, the joy of John’s gospel is to skate so close to the language of spiritualized Gnostic secretive elitism, or religious obsession or fetish, and then subvert both those siblings with a big dose of incarnation, flesh and blood. That’s worth reclaiming, from within, in my opinion.
The thief comes only to steal and kill and destroy.
I came that they may have life, and have it abundantly.
We began at the end of the lesson today, and I invited you to remember what we set out to do together: to have life, and have it abundantly. Is your religion working against that standard? The unreflective life is not worth living, but the unlived life is not worth reflecting upon! We gather, and seek our sanctuary and safety, and follow lots of social conventions. Some of you say this is the only hour of your week without electronic noise and distraction, a chance to let your mind wander as I speak and music flows around you. Then we scatter, to face the week and the world, with courage to be, to take risks, in the rhythm of ritual and community connections.
Part of the dilemma in the investigative sensationalism is that academics and bureaucrats are naming religion, and journalists are restating what they think they hear. I can at least commend Gretta Vosper’s book as sounding closer to our own context and voices, though we draw differing conclusion from many similar premises. I am less sympathetic to sinecured academics like Harpur, Wilson, or Wyatt claiming to be above and beyond our parochial concerns.
Are all sheep victims in the slaughterhouse, and are all shepherds thieves set to steal, kill, and destroy? Are you not able to distinguish among them? Of course you are able! Does it give you abundant life? Can you find words here, to use there? Look, if you are just here to give me salary and benefits, let’s fold up now, and I’ll go do something else. As profiteering or scamming you as helpless marks, like Elmer Gantry or a TV evangelist, it sure isn’t working!
I think that we gather in the fold, seeking sanctuary and a safe place to wonder and reflect – and then we scatter to our own fields, to risk and act. I think that there are some shepherds, some sheepfolds, and some gates, that serve that sanctuary and rhythm or exploration and action. I do not think that it must be coercive or authoritarian, or treat you as ants in a hill, rats in a maze, consumers to be manipulated or controlled with marketing.
Is Jesus the shepherd? Is Jesus the gate? This is not referential, literal descriptive language, but poetic and allusive speech. It’s not simple allegory, either, where ‘this stands for that’. But it has meaning. It does not confuse mystery with mystification. You judge the shepherd. You make something of the gate, that luminal, transformational Jesus Christ through whom we connect spirit and flesh, sanctuary and open fields. You test the abundance of life. How’s it going?
I said on Easter Day that we could be anything, and risk trying everything, till in the end, we end up something. That’s true for us, and for our kids. This is not authoritarian but true freedom. This not simply spiritual and idealistic, nor is it only flesh and materialism. This not only sacred nor is it only secular. This is a movement of ritual belonging, believing, and behaving, in which we gather and scatter, act and reflect and act again. If that is like sheep gathered in a fold and coming and going from fields and pastures, we urban folks might not recognize it. But we know we are more than ants in a hill, rats in a maze, or markets slavishly consuming and working.
Imagine that GPS device tracking each of you, and all of us, this week. What would it show and what would it tell? I keep telling you, in a variation on a text from Habakkuk, ‘you may be the only gospel your neighbour reads this week, so write the vision, and make it plain, that she who runs may read it’. Your choices matter, to your kids and to each other to start. I added another old bit of popular piety and doggerel poetry to close:
You’re writing a gospel, a page each day
with all that you do, and all that you say
People hear what you say, and see what you do
So what is the gospel, according to you?
Prayer
We don’t feel like sheep - docile, obedient, stupid…
We don’t feel like sheep – not most of the time…
But we do like company…milling about, flocking together…
We do like to gather with others, some of the time…
God knows the way we come and go… and who and what we seek, and follow…
God knows our green pastures, and still waters…and what restore our soul, into abundant life…
So we pray when we gather, and we give thanks for the table prepared before us,
The gifts of God, and the people of God, gathered here, and scattered in fields around us
And we pray when we gather, we watch and wonder, what word there is for our hearts this day
Thieves and bandits come and go around us
Seeking and following other things, other ways, with others –
And we get swept up, and pushed aside, and wish we could see them coming next time
And tune them out, and trust our own instincts, and not them
As we give thanks, we watch and wonder, why the evil prosper, and the righteous suffer
How the world works – and how it doesn’t - and why God lets it be – and why we do…
God knows, there’s lots to pray about, within each of us, among all of us, beyond any of us
In the city, the country, and the world
In the midst of this company, gathered in this flock, we call to mind those not with us here
Those of our own, unable to gather, those who travel, or gather with others
Reminded that they are part of who we are, remembering that they are part of whose we are
We gather in the echo of prayers people write and say, and hear and resonate with those rhythms
But we hear also the silences between the familiar, the prayers too deep for words
The gaps of what’s not yet at one, that won’t make sense, or all fit together
So we pause in the silence, and honour those prayers too…
In a mindful communion, waiting as a spirit moves – in a community of action and service
Notes from www.billbrucewords.com
4th Sunday of Easter, April 13, 2008
Text: John 10:1-10
The York Region Police are making available a “GPS”, or ‘Global Positioning Satellite” tracking device, for people suffering from Alzheimers’ disease or other dementias. It’s like a wristwatch, and allows the police to pinpoint the location of the person, if they wander off and get lost. After media publicized the programme, there were many calls to the police, parents asking for GPS devices for teenagers, and suspicious spouses asking for GPS for their partners!
What if everybody in this congregation were wearing a GPS device? What would it show about our traffic patterns? Many of you have these things in your cars – but many of you travel around the world for business and for recreational tourism all the time. I mentioned a couple on Sunday. What if we could light up a map with the location of each of us and all of us at any time, during any period? What would we see? Imagine it as a sort of ‘Gods-eye-view’ of us.
It’s not such a stretch to imagine this perspective. I used to live over the Gardiner Expressway, and guests would marvel in the middle of the night at the constant flow of arterial traffic. I still take the TTC streetcars and subway most days, and VIVA buses of York Region Transit. Have you ever seen the flow of humanity through Union Station at rush hour, from GO and TTC to the bank towers? God forbid you step in the path of those commuters heading for the PATH system!
From space or the sky, we look like ants in an anthill, insects flowing in traffic patterns. We continue the habits in less visible ways inside the big buildings where most of us work and shop. Fortunes are spent by marketers on advertising to divert our traffic, mining data to sort us into tribes and markets. Are we simply passive shoppers, consumers, or labour market participants, obedient slaves to manipulative geniuses? Are we ants in an anthill, or rats in various mazes?
It’s ‘Good Shepherd’ Sunday, a week in Easter season each year when we hear bible texts read and sung like the 23rd psalm and John 10. This year, it’s Jesus the gate, through which other shepherds lead the sheep. Do you feel like sheep, docile and stupid and obedient? That’s hardly fair to sheep! Church is more like herding cats. Anyone who thinks church is authoritarian doesn’t live with church, or just remembers it from their adolescent rebellion and departure days.
You see, I don’t think we are ants in an anthill, slavish workers and consumers, victims of grand controlling conspiracies. I don’t believe it about our urban life and traffic. I don’t believe it about our consuming and working. And I don’t believe it about religion. I think we are actually pretty smart at accepting or rejecting influences, keeping our identity, integrity, authenticity. We are more than rats in a maze, or sheep milling about a slaughterhouse.
You can smooth traffic flows, or divert them, but you can’t make us go where you want. You have to be persuasive, not coercive. People will recognize their own: choosing, testing, and trusting. It’s true for commerce, transportation, politics, and religion. In the end, each one of us figures out what path we will follow. You can be tracked by a GPS device or by any observer, showing ‘what is the gospel, according to you’.
Easter is also the season for religious publishers, it seems, to release their annual barrage of conspiracy theories. Harper Collins must have it mapped out in their marketing plan, and news magazines from Time and McLeans through the daily papers cooperate. As I reread my notes from the past decade, I see Dan Brown, Tom Harpur, books on James’ tomb, and Judas’ gospel. This year, it’s Barrie Wilson’s How Jesus Became a Christian and Gretta Vosper’s With or Without God. They are all in our church library, and many of you have read them, as I have.
Are you feeling sheepish and scammed again this Easter season? Then our grand conspiracy to control your brains is still working! Apparently I was supposed to be patronizing you and keeping you in the dark in perpetual ignorance, about the secrets taught to all religious leaders which prove it’s all a big lie. I missed the memo, or the meeting, or the secret decoder ring. You may still be feeling lots of cognitive dissonance and uncertainty about this whole resurrection thing, but not because I suppressed the conversation!
In 1975, at Victoria College UofT, I enjoyed a comedy routine one Saturday night with a bunch of theological students, and I have been rehearsing the thing in churches ever since:
And behold, Jesus saith:
“I am the vine… I am the bread… I am the gate… I am the shepherd…”
And then Peter saith:
‘What was that, man? I was not listening.’
And Jesus saith:
‘Never mind, man, it was not important.’
And behold, Jesus went,
and sat in the corner, and would not speak to anyone,
Yea, verily, not even the chicks.
We all got the joke in 1975, and you got it today. We are not afraid of cognitive dissonance. Bultmann shaped many United Church preachers of the 1950’s and 1960’s, starting from actual experience, and calling God ‘ground of our being’ and faith ‘courage to be’. William Hamilton, teaching for our church in 1966, published ‘death of God’ theology. Mary Daly wrote Beyond God the Father in 1973. Should we be sheepish that we have not resolved cognitive dissonance yet, or just if our faith is childish, not childlike!
John’s gospel presents a version of Jesus who keeps pontificating ‘I am’: I am the true vine, I am the resurrection and the life, I am the truth, the way, and the life, I am the true bread, I am the good shepherd – and today, I am the gate. I am. The other gospels, Matthew, Mark, and Luke, present Jesus saying ‘the reign of God is near’, the ‘kingdom of heaven is coming’, and this is what it is like, or will be like. God’s reign is contrasted to Rome’s reign, and put just beyond our reach in time and space, but close enough to taste and see and hear, for those alert and aware.
These gospels are not trying to write biographies of personality. Barrie Wilson’s book claims to know way too much about Jesus’ inner subjective state of mind. It’s trying to tell you what’s most important, not simply of the teachings of Jesus, but ‘Christology, the person and work of Jesus Christ. Mark’s Jesus is a deer in the headlights, surprised at what happens, and at how stupid the disciples are. John’s Jesus is a pompous speechifier. Which is accurate? Both are true.
This is the first of three weeks where we hear ‘I am’ lessons. Next week, it’s the ‘way, truth, and life’ one, and then ‘bread’ on Foodgrains Sunday, when Terrie speaks. These texts all raise the risk of coercive exclusivity, the spectre of authoritarian religion, claiming and assuming the voice of ‘I am’. As the old CBC joke goes: “I’m Adrienne Clarkson – and you’re not”. John’s dualism and polarizing polemics, frame the gospel in choices between ‘him or me’, ‘them or us’. John’s anti-Jewish rhetoric, claiming to trump the Torah, is read in our church by changing “Jewish” to “religious” to better convey the imagined opposition, who may be within each of us. And yet, the joy of John’s gospel is to skate so close to the language of spiritualized Gnostic secretive elitism, or religious obsession or fetish, and then subvert both those siblings with a big dose of incarnation, flesh and blood. That’s worth reclaiming, from within, in my opinion.
The thief comes only to steal and kill and destroy.
I came that they may have life, and have it abundantly.
We began at the end of the lesson today, and I invited you to remember what we set out to do together: to have life, and have it abundantly. Is your religion working against that standard? The unreflective life is not worth living, but the unlived life is not worth reflecting upon! We gather, and seek our sanctuary and safety, and follow lots of social conventions. Some of you say this is the only hour of your week without electronic noise and distraction, a chance to let your mind wander as I speak and music flows around you. Then we scatter, to face the week and the world, with courage to be, to take risks, in the rhythm of ritual and community connections.
Part of the dilemma in the investigative sensationalism is that academics and bureaucrats are naming religion, and journalists are restating what they think they hear. I can at least commend Gretta Vosper’s book as sounding closer to our own context and voices, though we draw differing conclusion from many similar premises. I am less sympathetic to sinecured academics like Harpur, Wilson, or Wyatt claiming to be above and beyond our parochial concerns.
Are all sheep victims in the slaughterhouse, and are all shepherds thieves set to steal, kill, and destroy? Are you not able to distinguish among them? Of course you are able! Does it give you abundant life? Can you find words here, to use there? Look, if you are just here to give me salary and benefits, let’s fold up now, and I’ll go do something else. As profiteering or scamming you as helpless marks, like Elmer Gantry or a TV evangelist, it sure isn’t working!
I think that we gather in the fold, seeking sanctuary and a safe place to wonder and reflect – and then we scatter to our own fields, to risk and act. I think that there are some shepherds, some sheepfolds, and some gates, that serve that sanctuary and rhythm or exploration and action. I do not think that it must be coercive or authoritarian, or treat you as ants in a hill, rats in a maze, consumers to be manipulated or controlled with marketing.
Is Jesus the shepherd? Is Jesus the gate? This is not referential, literal descriptive language, but poetic and allusive speech. It’s not simple allegory, either, where ‘this stands for that’. But it has meaning. It does not confuse mystery with mystification. You judge the shepherd. You make something of the gate, that luminal, transformational Jesus Christ through whom we connect spirit and flesh, sanctuary and open fields. You test the abundance of life. How’s it going?
I said on Easter Day that we could be anything, and risk trying everything, till in the end, we end up something. That’s true for us, and for our kids. This is not authoritarian but true freedom. This not simply spiritual and idealistic, nor is it only flesh and materialism. This not only sacred nor is it only secular. This is a movement of ritual belonging, believing, and behaving, in which we gather and scatter, act and reflect and act again. If that is like sheep gathered in a fold and coming and going from fields and pastures, we urban folks might not recognize it. But we know we are more than ants in a hill, rats in a maze, or markets slavishly consuming and working.
Imagine that GPS device tracking each of you, and all of us, this week. What would it show and what would it tell? I keep telling you, in a variation on a text from Habakkuk, ‘you may be the only gospel your neighbour reads this week, so write the vision, and make it plain, that she who runs may read it’. Your choices matter, to your kids and to each other to start. I added another old bit of popular piety and doggerel poetry to close:
You’re writing a gospel, a page each day
with all that you do, and all that you say
People hear what you say, and see what you do
So what is the gospel, according to you?
Prayer
We don’t feel like sheep - docile, obedient, stupid…
We don’t feel like sheep – not most of the time…
But we do like company…milling about, flocking together…
We do like to gather with others, some of the time…
God knows the way we come and go… and who and what we seek, and follow…
God knows our green pastures, and still waters…and what restore our soul, into abundant life…
So we pray when we gather, and we give thanks for the table prepared before us,
The gifts of God, and the people of God, gathered here, and scattered in fields around us
And we pray when we gather, we watch and wonder, what word there is for our hearts this day
Thieves and bandits come and go around us
Seeking and following other things, other ways, with others –
And we get swept up, and pushed aside, and wish we could see them coming next time
And tune them out, and trust our own instincts, and not them
As we give thanks, we watch and wonder, why the evil prosper, and the righteous suffer
How the world works – and how it doesn’t - and why God lets it be – and why we do…
God knows, there’s lots to pray about, within each of us, among all of us, beyond any of us
In the city, the country, and the world
In the midst of this company, gathered in this flock, we call to mind those not with us here
Those of our own, unable to gather, those who travel, or gather with others
Reminded that they are part of who we are, remembering that they are part of whose we are
We gather in the echo of prayers people write and say, and hear and resonate with those rhythms
But we hear also the silences between the familiar, the prayers too deep for words
The gaps of what’s not yet at one, that won’t make sense, or all fit together
So we pause in the silence, and honour those prayers too…
In a mindful communion, waiting as a spirit moves – in a community of action and service
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