April 15, 2005
Doors
Easter 4A / Jn 10.1-10
When my youngest son Scott was about three, he would sometimes come in from play and, if no one was in sight, stand facing inside through the doorway and call out, “Hey, somebody, I love you.”
The church, like the sheepfold in John’s parable of the Good Shepherd, is to be a safe house, a place where one can seek wholeness to become the human being God imagines us to be, receive love and care and compassion, and learn, if necessary, the meaning of trust. These things, at least, and not judgment and condemnation and orthodoxy, comprise our ministry to one another.
When Jesus speaks of himself as “the door” in this story before he speaks of himself as the “shepherd,” I think he means that we must come into this relationship, this “family” not through convention or respectability or because it is “the thing to do,” but through him, if it is to be a place of nourishment at all.
We have no right to call others to adopt our traditions or to follow our manner of life. It is too easy to assume that what seems to us good must be the will of God. We make our plans for God’s work, even ask God to prosper them. But they may be seriously flawed with our prejudice, ignorance, and shortsightedness. We so want to be right and can never see in advance that the way to final success often lies through immediate failure.
How then may we avoid these things?
Again, by coming through Jesus as “the door.” Why do we this pastoral work, exercise this influence with others? Through love of power or fame or repute or partisanship and the desire to win adherents for our own special bias? Nothing can give us the credentials for the sacred responsibility of deliberately influencing another except that we approach that other through Christ as the door.
This means at least three things: 1) to come to the task and every part of it in prayer, 2) to refer all of our activities to such basic guidelines as those laid down in the Baptismal Covenant, and 3) to accept whatever happens as nearer the will of God than our own planned outcome would have been. It is this “door” that opens both into the “fold” and out again to the world.
In the aftermath of the horror wrought every day in this world, our minds and hearts are filled not only with searing pain but with searing frustration of how we may truly shepherd a peaceful world. We’ll quite rightly tighten all the rules, stiffen the penalties, ban the guns, trust no one, and hope, knowing all the while that this, too, will fail.
I remember the irony of a war hero like General Dwight Eisenhower, when he became president, naming his presidential airplane not with a militaristic aphorism like the current “Air Force One,” but instead, “Columbine.” The word means “dove,” the worldwide symbol for peace. And I remember how when he left office warned us to be wary of the so-called military-industrial complex and its lust for power and control. And I remember today how we’ve never learned that lesson and are paying today with our money, our environment, our health, and our lives as a consequence.
If there is any answer to this agony run wild, any peace, any justice, it is here, in sheepfolds like the church is called to be, where children and everyone else can know how deeply they are cared for and what treasures they are, where Jesus is the doorway in which we all can stand, and say, “Hey, somebody, I love you.”