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First Presbyterian Church, Bridgeton, NJ
Richard E. Sindall, Pastor
Sermon for the Fourth Sunday of Easter, April 13, 2008
Lessons: Genesis 2:4b-9,15-25 and John 10:1-11
That They May Have Life
I took our reading from the Gospel of John one verse further than the suggested lesson for the Fourth Sunday of Easter. If I had stopped with verse 10, the reading would have ended on a high note, with Jesus saying, “I have come that they may have life, and have it abundantly.” What better Easter message could there be than the assurance that God wants us to have life, and not meager existence that is cramped and mean, but life that is abundant? So, get out there and enjoy it. Live the day! Take what God so freely gives. Prosper and flourish. With Jesus, every day is a fresh Easter, a new spring, a resurrection of hope and possibility, right? Ours is an upbeat faith that shakes off the gloom of negative thoughts, is it not? In verse eleven, that one verse more than the lesson for the day, Jesus declares:
I am the good shepherd.
The good shepherd lays down his life for the sheep.
What I would like to accomplish this morning is an affirmation of life we can make without putting on blinders, without averting our eyes from human shame and suffering, without taking a flight of fantasy that raises us artificially above the struggles and injustices down here on the ground. I see no good that can come from affirming the wonder and beauty of life by denying the way life really is for earth’s people. We have hope that will not fail because the good shepherd laid down his life for the sheep. Today is the Easter of our deliverance from death because and only because Jesus gave himself to suffering, humiliation, and death for us – because God loves us too much to permit us to perish and be gone forever.
Jesus did not come and just hand us life; to give us life and hope, he had to give himself to death and despair. He did not merely open our minds to the possibilities inherent in human existence, but suffered and died to change our minds and open them to new and very different possibilities. Our understanding of what “abundant life” would be needs to be redefined by Jesus’ self-sacrificing love before we can even hear rightly the promise he makes us. If you turn on your television and surf the channels at certain hours, you can hear promises of God’s blessings in the form of wealth, prestige, good health, and power – of success and abundance with no cross required. These are worldly messages disguised as Christian. They are scams. Jesus did not come so I could be rich, influential, comfortable, and self-satisfied. His is not the gospel of the pretty people with fine homes and expensive cars whose quest in life is for the best tax shelter. But, neither did he come so I could spend my days and nights fretful over my guilt, frightened of eternal punishment, and suspicious of anything in life that smacks of pleasure, curiosity, or creativity. No, Jesus does not want us to be worldly, but neither does he call us to be world-hating. There is a third choice. We do not have to flee from life and hide in the shelter of religion. We are not to abandon earth. We do not need to despise the life of our mortal bodies in order to embrace the life of the mind or the life of the spirit, either.
I find the second chapter of Genesis wonderful in the way it pictures the care and intimacy of God’s creative work to make us and our world. To some, the imagery seems primitive and naive, but I find it beautiful and awe-inspiring. No, I don’t take the imagery literally; I take it more than literally, not less. I find it deeply life-affirming and profoundly true with a truth that challenges all attempts to degrade our humanity, beat us down, and turn us against each other.
God creates the human to be the steward, the caretaker, of the earth but not as a mere functionary or slave but as a person with a deep, built-in need for relationships with others, starting with God. We are creatures of earth. Genesis 2 shows God scooping up some “dust of the ground,” some soil of the earth to mold it like clay into a creature that would bear the soil’s name, earth’s name, as its own. The play on words does not carry over into English, but the word for earth’s soil, ademah, Genesis relates to the word for human being, adam. Having formed the creature of clay, God puts “his” face close to it and breathes into it God’s own breath of life, and the creature of earth’s soil becomes a living “soul,” a person.
But a person cannot be alone. If I were truly alone, without even memory of other people and relationships with them, I would be more a solitary animal than a human being. What good is the ability to develop language with no one to speak with but myself? What is life with no more than breath and bodily function for survival? Yes, I need air, water, food, clothing, and shelter to maintain my existence as a creature, but I need much more to be a person. So, God puts into our essence, our very being, the need for relationship – for God and for other people. This need of each for others in order to be a person is, certainly, the source of all our troubles and griefs in life, but it is also the source of all our possibilities and hopes for true humanity. The philosopher Jean Paul Sartre said famously, “Hell is other people.” Yes, it can be, hell on earth. But so is heaven on earth to be found in our need for other people.
God makes the human a steward, tiller of the soil from which we came and caretaker to earth’s creatures. Carefully, we are placed between God and the animals whose bodily form we share. They do not know God, and so we are placed on earth to represent them to God and God to them, to share God’s delight in their variety and beauty and to keep the land hospitable to their life. We are stewards of the earth which belongs, not to us, but to God.
The other night in a meeting, one of us spoke of the way just seeing her grandson takes her breath away with thankfulness, leaving her speechless to express the wonder she feels looking into his face. That’s the intimacy and miracle of life Genesis 2 begins with God’s looking into our faces, breathing life into us face to face.
One key word in Genesis 2 is “delight.” That word is eden. God creates humanity to live in the Garden of Delight. God does not want our lives to be cramped, restricted by poverty, worn down by worry and drudgery. The Bible’s concept of salvation includes the idea of being lifted up out of a pit or released from a prison cell and set down in an open space where we can stretch, move freely, and grow. Sartre got it wrong. Granted, it is easy to conclude that hell is other people when we see what people do to each other, and we need to see that hell, wherever it occurs, in Jesus’ crucifixion, in what people did to him. We need to see his humiliation in the shaming of any person, his suffering in each one’s grief and pain, his dying in every death. But hell is not other people; it is our solitary confinement in the self. “It is not good for the human to be alone” may be the Bible’s first great understatement. God built into us our need for love, friendship, and community so we could be human.
“The thief,” Jesus says, “comes only to steal and kill and destroy.” Each time we decide anew that life is to take from each other greedily, rather than to receive from God thankfully, we find fresh ways to steal and kill and destroy. Jesus came to give rather than take, to serve rather than be served, to heal instead of hurting, and to liberate people instead us using them as living resources, labor-slaves, or drones in the systems of generating wealth for the privileged few. God created us to delight in earth and in each other. In sin, we choose instead to ravage earth and use each other. Scorn replaces delight and the respect of each for the other. Thankfulness gets twisted into greed. Human dignity gets degraded into competitive pride. The strength to care becomes the power to control. Passion turns to lust, and pleasure to self-indulgence. But, let us not scorn what God made good because sin corrupts it. Evil creates nothing but only twists and spoils what God made.
As Jesus’ disciples and together as his church, we can look at earth and its creatures no longer with eyes of contempt and at people and their living bodies no longer with eyes of scorn. We can look with the eyes of Christ which see in people what God longs for them to be. We can celebrate life by embracing this world in hope for its salvation. We can stop seeing the life of earth as disgusting, put our faces closer to it and love it as God does, longing for its healing and liberation from the corruptions that hurt and destroy. The hired hand runs away when trouble comes because he does not care for the sheep. The good shepherd lays down his life for the sheep – “that they may have life.” Amen.