May 7, 2017
Fourth Sunday of Easter, Year A
The Rev'd Richard Smith, Ph.D.
There are two sides to every story.
Today’s gospel comes just after Jesus heals a blind man on the Sabbath. Healing that blind man gets Jesus in trouble with the religious leaders. There are two sides to this story.
The official story from the religious leaders is that the man would not have been born blind in the first place if he or his parents were not sinners. And, furthermore, Jesus is a sinner, too, for violating Jewish law that clearly forbade one from healing on the Sabbath. That’s one side of the story, the official version.
But the man Jesus cured tells a different story: “Never since the world began has it been heard that anyone opened the eyes of a person born blind. If this man were not from God, he could do nothing.”
Two sides to the story. How do you sort this one out? Whose testimony should you accept here? Can you trust the official story from the religious leaders, the shepherds? Or should you run with the man who was cured?
This is what Jesus is wrestling with in today’s gospel where he refers to himself as the gate to the sheepfold. He doesn’t refer to himself here as a shepherd--he uses that image for himself later in the gospel. But today, in this passage,he refers to himself as the gate to the sheepfold.
It’s the gate to a large protected corral. Through that gate, each evening, all the shepherds from the region would lead their flocks, bringing all the sheep together where they’ll be safe through the night. Then in the morning, each shepherd would gather his own flock, by calling each sheep by name, then lead them out to the nearby pastures to graze.
“I am the gate to the sheepfold”, Jesus says. The gate symbolizes Jesus own path of compassion and justice, of care for the poor and the outcast, his hope and joy and sheer delight in the world.
A shepherd who enters the sheepfold through this gate shares in Jesus’ own work of bringing life in abundance to his sheep.
Any leader, religious or otherwise, who does not approach the sheep through this gate is no shepherd, but one who brings destruction and death. You should not trust such a leader.
It’s a matter of recognizing the difference between good religion and bad religion, between good religious leadership and bad.
Archbishop Tutu was once asked whether he thought religion was good or bad. He said the word “religion” itself is neutral. It’s like “politics” or “art”.
Politics can sometimes be good, leading to greater equality and freedom and peace. At other times it can be bad--enslaving people, dividing them against each other, plunging them into poverty.
Art can sometimes be good, opening unexplored regions of your heart to beauty in the world and in people. At other times it can fuel violence, racial hatred, misogyny, homophobia.
As with politics and art, religion can be good or bad. It can serve either life or death, human flourishing or human and planetary destruction.
The trick is to recognize the difference between good religion and bad. It’s a matter for discernment.
The word religion comes from two Latin words: re meaning again, and ligare, meaning to connect. We get our English word ligament from that Latin word, ligare. So, religare means to reconnect. This is what religion is meant to do.
The idea is that over the course of the week--going to work, feeding the dog, shopping for groceries, dealing with all the ups and downs of our relationships and of life, we can lose touch with something vital. We can lose our zest for life, our passion and purpose. We can lose touch with our own hearts’ deepest desires, lose our connection with other people and the larger universe.
We look to good religion to reconnect us, help make us whole again. This is the purpose of our religious practices--our feasts and fasts, our seasons and holidays, the rituals and the prayers and the music and songs--all meant to reconnect us with ourselves, each other, the world. This is what good religion offers us--whether Jewsih, Christian, Muslim, Buddhist, Hindu.
This good religion is lived in the lives of Archbishop Tutu, Dorothy Day, the Dalai Lama, Dr. Martin Luther King, Mahatma Gandhi, Mother Theresa, the Sufi mystic Rumi, Pope Francis, Rabbi Abraham Heschel, Oscar Romero and the many priests and nuns that were killed serving the poor in El Salvador. There are many shining examples of good religion.
Then there is bad religion--religion that disconnects us, alienates us from ourselves and others. It includes preachers who condemn women and gay people for following the promptings of our own hearts and our bodies. Such preachers alienate us from ourselves; they preach bad religion. And bad religion includes religious leaders who condone or remain silent in the face of human cruelty, poverty, violence, war. It includes “Christian” prosperity gospel politicians who tell you, as some recently have implied, if you lead a good life, you will not need health insurance because you will never get sick or have an accident. If you’re good, they tell you, you will always prosper.
Bad religion leads not to life in abundance, but rather is embedded in today’s violence against gay men in Chechnya; the exploitation of women; the enslavement of people of color; many Crusades and “holy” wars down the centuries; many people forced into in poverty; and many, many suicides.
Good religion, bad religion. One that serves life, one that destroys and crushes. Important to recognize the difference.
Oscar Romero described what being church and providing religious leadership looked like in his own context, and his words give us a clue about what they might look like--and not look like--in our own US reality today. Romero wrote:
It is very easy to be servants of the word without disturbing the world, a very spiritualized word, a word without any commitment to history, a word that can sound in any part of the world because it belongs to no part of the world. A word like that creates no problems, starts no conflicts.
What starts conflicts and persecutions, what marks the genuine church, is the word that, burning like the word of the prophets, proclaims and accuses; proclaims to the people God’s wonders to be believed and venerated, and accuses of sin those who oppose God’s reign, so that they may tear that sin out of their hearts, out of their societies, out of their laws – out of the structures that oppress, that imprison, that violate the rights of God and of humanity. This is the hard service of the word.
A church that doesn’t provoke any crises, a gospel that doesn’t unsettle, a word of God that doesn’t get under anyone’s skin, a word of God that doesn’t touch the real sin of the society in which it is being proclaimed, what gospel is that? Some want to keep a gospel so disembodied that it doesn’t get involved at all in the world it must save.
Christ is now in history. Christ is in the womb of the people. Christ is now bringing about the new heavens and the new earth.
This gospel passage speaks to official religious leaders, but also to each one of us. Because each of us is a shepherd in our own way--as parents, teachers, artists, activists, or as friend or in one of the many other roles we may play. Each of us called to enter--and invite others--through the gate of compassion and hope, the gate that leads to life in abundance. The gate we Christians call Jesus.
One minister, Victoria Safford, reflects on what this feels like to stand at that gate leading and inviting others in. I’ll close with her words.
Our mission is to plant ourselves at the gates of Hope — not the prudent gates of Optimism, which are somewhat narrower; nor the stalwart, boring gates of Common Sense; nor the strident gates of Self-Righteousness, which creak on shrill and angry hinges (people cannot hear us there; they cannot pass through); nor the cheerful, flimsy garden gate of “Everything is gonna be all right.” But a different, sometimes lonely place, the place of truth-telling, about your own soul first of all and its condition, the place of resistance and defiance, the piece of ground from which you see the world both as it is and as it could be, as it will be; the place from which you glimpse not only struggle, but joy in the struggle. And we stand there, beckoning and calling, telling people what we are seeing, asking people what they see.
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