DAIN - Default Answer is No!

 

Matthew 9:9-13, 18-26

Proper 5 / Year A

As Jesus was walking along, he saw a man called Matthew sitting at the tax booth; and he said to him, “Follow me.”  And he got up and followed him. ^{Matthew 9:9}

I suppose with my retirement lurking it is only natural for me to wonder how I will be remembered.  I hope there are many things about me you will recall and treasure.  I know I will hold dear so many amazing experiences and moments I have been blessed to be a part of in my time with you.  Please, please, please, do not forget this about me: “Every time someone invited me to lunch after church, I said ‘No!’”  When my name comes up, when someone remembers me fondly, in the highly unlikely event you look at a future rector and think, “Why couldn’t he or she be more like Keith?”, please, either in the silence of your heart or with a booming voice, say, “Whenever we asked him to join us for lunch, he declined.” 

Are you familiar with the acronym FOMO – Fear of Missing Out?  Social media has made us so aware of what everyone else is doing.  FOMO is a state of mind held by a person who suspects someone out there is having more fun or a better time than you are.  JOMO (Joy of Missing Out) is its opposite.  “I am so relieved I didn’t have to go to that!”

As a person who is capable of being alone without being lonely, there are times I am definitely a JOMO.  But, as is the case with the lunch invites, most often I am a DAIN.  What is a DAIN?  Don’t know?  Haven’t heard of it before?  Feeling left out or left behind on the latest lingo?  Well don’t be because I just made it up to describe me.  DAIN stands for “Default Answer Is No!” 

I first became aware of my DAINness sometime after I became a single father.  My girls where always asking me for things or to do things with them or to allow them to do things and, at some point, it occurred to me 99% of the time my answer was No!  Now, some of the their requests were absolute non-starters. “No, we are not going to Lowes at 8:30 on a school night to buy a can of paint so you can repaint your room.”  Other times, it simply was not the time to say yes… like when my daughters suggested we spend a quiet night at home watching movies and I said, “Well, I can’t because its Christmas Eve and I have services to do.”  But most often I said “No” just because I couldn’t be bothered.  There was no reason I couldn’t have said yes, and no reason I shouldn’t, but I am a DAIN and that put an end to that.

Brené Brown cautions, “Joy comes to us in moments – ordinary moments.  We risk missing out on joy when we get too busy chasing down the extraordinary.”  While some people need to hear to hear a sermon on the importance of taking time to stop and smell the roses, not us DAIN types.  We need to be reminded – and reminded often – what the motivational speaker Jim Rohn preached: “Often, the most extraordinary opportunities are hidden among the seemingly insignificant events of life.  If we do not pay attention to these events,” he said, then “we can easily miss the opportunities.”  

In today’s gospel reading we hear what is known as “The Call to Matthew.”  Matthew is sitting at his booth doing his work when Jesus appears and says, “Follow me.”  You know how the DAIN in me would have responded.  Of course, Jesus is not proposing something as banal as “Wanna take a coffee break?”  His invitation, if excepted, will be life changing. 

I’d like to think this story starts off a little more innocently than this.  I’d like to think it is written well after the fact Matthew has embraced discipleship and, in retelling the story, makes this moment more dramatic than it is.  If I walked into a bank for the first time, went up to an attractive teller, and said, “Come with me.  Let’s get married”, most likely she would call the security guard.  We know from human nature Matthew’s experience must be more of a transition than an instantaneous transformation.  Most likely the “call” we read about today falls somewhere in the midst of transition, somewhere between meeting Jesus for the first time and becoming a revered Apostle, after the opening scene and well before the final act.

No matter what transpired on that day Matthew was collecting the taxes, the thing which captures my attentions is he said “Yes” when Jesus invited him to follow.  I can’t prove it, but I’d like to think Matthew was a DAIN like me.  Every fiber in his being must have been screaming, “We don’t want to be bothered!”  If he was not a DAIN, then those same fibers were yelling, “This is not at all a good idea” and “Look before you leap” and “What he is suggesting is really scary.”  “No!” would be a perfectly understandable answer, be it out of default or well-reasoned analysis. 

But he didn’t say “No.”  He said “Yes” and we might want to ponder what would have happened if he had said “No.”  What would Matthew have missed out on if he had responded differently?  Well, for sure, he would have missed out on an opportunity to embrace Jesus and experience him more deeply in his everyday life.  That would have been a part of the cost of saying “No.” 

The legendary actor and comedian Dick Van Dyke said this in an interview: “Anyone who doesn’t sing and dance at every opportunity is missing out on the joy of life.”  He might say to me, “Every time you go into your DAIN mode you are missing out on something.”  Matthew might say to me, “You know, when your friends went out to lunch, Jesus sat at the table with then, so when you said “No” you lost out on the privilege and pleasure of being with him.”

So please, down the road, long after I am gone but before I am forgotten, when someone speaks of me or askes what I was like, whatever you tell them – the good, the bad, the ugly, and the embellished – please remember to tell them, “Whenever we invited him to join us for lunch he said ‘No.’”

The Trinity as Exclamation & Question Mark

 

Matthew 28:16-20

Trinity Sunday / Year A

The eleven disciples went to Galilee, to the mountain to which Jesus had directed them.  When they saw him, they worshiped him; but some doubted.  ^{Mt. 28:16} 

Janet Hunt, a Lutheran pastor in Illinois, tells a story about a high school Baccalaureate service.  One of the graduating seniors spoke about a time when her friend was diagnosed with cancer.  It called into question everything she thought about her faith.  She was angry, confused, helpless.  The young woman described what it was like to be at his side when he took his last breath.  Quite unexpectedly, it was a moment of profound peace and the speaker related how her prayers moved her to acceptance and gratitude, allowing her to understand God was present in that moment.  Later in the ceremony, one of the clergy members in the community addressed the class about the importance of keeping the faith.  He told them of a time he prayed with a friend who had cancer and how it left him never to return.

Hunt then states she much prefers the witness of the student than her colleague because…

“she told her own true story of a journey from faith through doubt to faith again.  And not because God bowed to her yearning whim.  But simply because God made God’s own self known to her in the darkness.”

The story invites us to ponder which experience of God rings more true to your own experience of life.

Today is Trinity Sunday, a moment in the church year dedicated to an idea, a doctrine.  At its heart, this day invites us to ask, “What is God like?”  “What is God’s true nature?”  The only way to begin to answer this question is to ask, “How have I experienced God in my life?”  “When have I sensed God was present, what happened in that moment, and how did it shape what I believe about God?”

The word Trinity is not found in the bible, although within twenty years after Jesus’ ministry we find Paul ending his letters with a reference to the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit.  Trinity is first used by Tertullian, one of the church fathers, in a document written almost two centuries after Jesus was born.  In fact, it did not become the official teaching of the church until the Council of Nicaea over 100 years after that.  One critic wryly observes the church tells us God is two men and a bird.

But the church never arrived at the Doctrine of the Trinity because it wanted an intellectual, incomprehensible way to describe God.  We got here because it is the best, most faithful way to describe our experience of God. 

The Rev. Dr. Carl Gregg, a minister of a Unitarian Universal church, writes this:

Early Christians experienced God was beyond them, “as utterly transcendent.”  They recognized that the fullness of God is beyond our language, beyond our knowledge, and beyond our experience...

They also experienced God as with them, “as present historically in the person of Jesus.”  This became known as the Incarnation: that Jesus embodied the ways of God in his life.  Over time, because his followers saw the ways of God so clearly in his life, this itinerant Jewish rabbi known as Jesus of Nazareth, became known by some as Jesus the Christ.

And… the early Christians… also experienced God as within them, “as present in the Spirit within their community.”  So, although there was a transcendent aspect of God, that would always be beyond their experience and even after Jesus was no longer physically with them, early Christians still experienced the immanence – the closeness – of God that is… “closer yet than breathing.”  They call this aspect of God “Spirit.”  

The gospels were not written to make an accurate record of an order of historical events, but rather to tell a story.  In Matthew’s gospel, the eleven disciples have heard reports Jesus is alive, but when they gather on the mountain in Galilee, it is the first they see him after the resurrection… and it is the only time they see him.  This is the setting where they worship, but some doubt.  Matthew offers a candid description of the disciples’ experience in that moment.   

The Greek word translated here as doubt is found only one other place in the entire New Testament.  It occurs when Jesus walks on the water and approaches the boat where the disciples are struggling at the oars.  You remember the story.  At Jesus’ invitation, Peter steps out on the water, looks around, and begins to sink.  Jesus grabs him, they get into the boat, and says to Peter, “Why did you doubt?”

In both uses, doubt is not the opposite of faith, but a part of it.  It is not a mark of failure, but rather a response to an experience… one that in the moment is difficult to incorporate into one’s understanding and system of belief.  “Can I really do the amazing things Jesus is doing?”  “Jesus is alive [exclamation point/question mark]”.  “My friend is dying of cancer and there is nothing I can do about it.”

On this day when we celebrate the Doctrine of the Trinity, we are not so much saying here is an idea which is a rock on which we can stand and never be shaken.  This day is more a recognition that faith is more like a journey; a pilgrimage which sometimes takes us through tranquil settings and other times is like scaling a steep mountain and then again there are moments when we feel lost in a deep valley or a dark, dense forest.  Worship is a part of the journey.  So too is doubt. 

To have faith is to acknowledge God is beyond us, a mystery we can never fully comprehend.  To have faith is to realize God is with us, seen and known in human flesh and action.  To have faith is to sense God is within us, individually and collectively.  To have faith is to accept life’s path will take us from faith to doubt to faith over and over again. 

Never forget that when the eleven first saw Jesus they worshiped him, but some doubted.  That was that moment.  Each one of them went from the mountain experience and traveled to the ends of the earth making disciples of all people.  No matter what you have been through, not matter what questions you carry, no matter what takes you high or what sinks you low, you too can do the same.  You have everything you need to live and share the Christian life as best you can.       

Why This Birthday Gift?

 

Acts 2:1-21

Pentecost Sunday / Year A

Happy Birthday everyone!  Did you even know it is your birthday today?  Or, I should say birthdays!  The Christian Church first came into being on this day – Pentecost Sunday – fifty days after Jesus’ Resurrection.  Before he ascended into heaven, Jesus promised to send “another”, a “comforter”, to take his place.  As we just read, this happens when the Holy Spirit falls on Jesus’ disciples as they are gathered in a room in Jerusalem.  That was nearly 2,000 years ago, around 33 AD it marks the beginning or birth of the Christian Church.

Today is also the day we here at St. Paul’s celebrate the establishment of our parish by an act of the Virginia General Assembly in 1642.  One of three parishes founded in what is now the city of Suffolk, we were known then as the Parish of the Upper Nansemond.  Because we know only the year this happened, but not the exact date, Pentecost seems an appropriate time to celebrate our local historical origin.

And we have one more birthday to celebrate today.  This is the 131^st anniversary of our first service of public worship in this space in 1895.  It took place on Pentecost Sunday, which in that year was June 16^th, but we fix our celebration to the Liturgical Calendar.  We have on display in the Chapel the Parish Registry of Services dating back to our first Sunday here.  It was lost to history for some time, then it fell out of the ceiling of my bathroom when I was doing demo work several years ago! (the house I own initially was built by the church in 1935 to serve as its Rectory… so who knows what other important documents are tucked away in its walls!).

One Sunday, three birthdays.  We are closing in on 2,000 and we are 384 and 131 years old… take your pick. 

I am so glad we have the Olde James River Jazz Band here to help us celebrate.  And I am glad we got to sing the old African American Spiritual He’s got the Whole World in his Hands because it fits in perfectly with the very first question ever put to the Christian Church.  We heard it just moments ago:

Amazed and astonished, they asked, “Are not all these who are speaking Galileans?  And how is it that we hear, each of us, in our own native language?”  ^{Acts 2:7}

Since the first Pentecost, God has pushed, prodded, cajoled, admonished, and begged the Church to embody fully God’s dream for all people.  It has not always been easy for us and we are not yet there, but ours is a story of a pilgrimage to a holy destination which is a way of life emulating Jesus.  With every day and every step, we are getting closer. 

The first big step for the Church involved a simple question about the of the limits of God’s love.  With whom should the first disciples share the Good News of God in Christ?  Who did Jesus want to welcome into his Kingdom?  From the very beginning we learn Jesus does not intend for the Church to be a private club for his first followers.  Why else would the Holy Spirit give them the miraculous ability to be heard in the languages of such a diverse group.  “How is it each can hear what is being said?” – the very first question asked of the Church.  The answer, “Because the Good News of God in Christ is for all people.  No exceptions.  No one is to be left out.” 

I’ve told you before my core theology:

God exists as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit in perfect relational harmony.  And God invites all people to join in this relational harmony, thus drawing us into ever-widening circles of fellowship.

Ever-widening circles of fellowship part can be a challenge.  The early Church thought it extended only to Jews, to God’s chosen people.  Take any controversial thing the Episcopal Church has faced in our lifetime, put it on steroids, and you won’t even come close to the kerfuffle that erupted after Peter baptized Cornelius and his family.  They were first Gentile converts and when Peter baptized them – something happened unthinkable at the time… the Holy Spirit was manifested in them as it had been among the disciples on Pentecost.  When Peter reports all of this to the Apostles huddled in Jerusalem, they explode.  They held Gentiles are unclean, not worthy of God’s blessing, and certainly are not to be welcomed into the movement founded by Jesus.  Yes, the circle is ever-widening, but often the stretching involves pain for the Church because God’s love extends beyond our comfort zones.

Out of curiosity I Googled this question: “What are the limits of God’s love?”  It led me to several sites, each of which told me God’s love is limitless; citing specific bible verses to back this up.  But those same sites, perhaps uncomfortable with no qualifications, each added something to the effect of God is going to punish unrepentant sinners and those who do not confess the truth, again citing verses. 

Like at the Church’s birth, we are still uncomfortable with the expansiveness of God’s love, especially when it welcomes in those we struggle to love.  Let me confess the circle of fellowship I am naturally inclined to draw has its limits, just as I suspect yours does.  Still, God does not let us rest in our oasis of provincial comfort. 

While the audience at the Church’s first sermon asks “how” it was possible for each on them to hear in their own language, we in the Church should be asking “Why is it possible?”  Why is God giving us this ability and what does God want us to achieve?  Here is a clue offered by the Reformed theologian Lewis Smedes:

The God who has the whole world in his hands has grace for the whole world in his heart. 

When God sends another, the Comforter, this Spirit brings to us all the mercy, grace, and love that lies deep in the heart of God.  It abides in us and dwells in us and becomes every bit as vital as breath is to the body.  Yes, at times we fight it.  But the Spirit moving in us moves us proclaim God’s grace and to manifest it in and through all we do.  It is God’s birthday gift to us and we cannot help but share it with all who enter this place (as we have for the last 131 years), with all of Suffolk (as we have done since 1642), and with the whole world (which we have been doing for nearly 2,000 years).

The Hour has Come

 

John 17:1-11

Eater 7 / Year A

Jesus looked up to heaven and said, “Father, the hour has come…” ^{John 17:1} 

The word hour appears seventeen times in John’s gospel.  Early in his ministry Jesus says, “My hour has not yet come.”  Sometime later his enemies attempt to seize him, but John tells us they fail because Jesus’ “hour had not yet come.”  As he travels to Jerusalem for the Passover, Jesus begins to say, “the hour is coming.”  And then today, at the Last Supper, he says, “The hour has come.”

“The hour has come.”  This phrase feels much more consequential than, say, “It’s time to go.”  It feels more like a meeting with destiny than, say, moving on to the next item of an agenda.  If you are running errands and the children are getting restless, you might say, “We only have two more stops before we can head home.”  You don’t say, “The hour has not yet come so our work must continue.”

“The hour has come.”  I am confident you can name experiences in your life when you had a sense of the weightiness of the hour at hand.  I have.  College graduation, for example.  I sensed I had achieved something significant, but at the same time I knew it was the end of a life I loved.  Another time… I was married in Cleveland, OH on a cold day in January.  That morning I went for a swim in hotel pool (yes, it was indoors).  I remember how surreal it felt to be swimming in the dead of winter on my wedding day.  How odd, I thought, to be doing something like this when the hour of one of the most significant moments in my life was so close at hand.

The bible has two distinct words we translate simply as time.  One is chronos, the time we measure in seconds, minutes, hours, and days.  When someone asks how long it takes to drive from point A to point B, they are asking about what chronos describes.  The other word is kairos, which refers to the meaning and the significance of the moment.  Say you pay off your mortgage.  When you have the deed in hand, if you say, “This has been a long time coming”, you are not referring the 360 months of payments.  You are talking about reaching one of life’s great milestones.  The bible uses the word kairos to describe such a moment.

Biblical scholars tell us that for Jesus the kairos hour refers to the climactic moment in his earthly mission, the threefold event of his death, resurrection, and ascension.  These are not three separate times of chronos, but a single act Jesus refers to as his “glorification.”  In today’s reading, he says the hour has come for him to be glorified.  For him, this kairos has three distinct parts:

·     The death of his life as it had been.

·     A resurrection opening a door to something beyond what was lost.

·     An ascension to a new life; a life not possible without the death of what had been before.

I felt this pattern very keenly when I left home to go to seminary.  I sensed all I was giving up – friendships, my home parish, the physical surroundings of where I grew up – and knew even if I went back it would never be the same because I would never be the same.  And then three years later the pattern returned as I graduated from seminary and the life I had grown to love but would no longer have.  Each was an experience of the hour has come.  Each began with a kind of death. 

And yet, as Jesus knew, each death is not a stand-alone moment, but part of a larger process which also includes resurrection and ascension.  Yes, death involves dying and dying means loss and loss gives rise to grief.  And then, in the tomb of grief, there sounds the triumphant call to resurrection.  It may be like a burst of light or it may be like the first hint of dawn after a long, cold night of darkness, but either as in a flash or through a gradual process resurrection happens.  Finally, there comes ascension, the embracing of a new life now possible only because you died to what had been. 

Mary Oliver writes this in her poem In Blackwater Woods:

To live in this world

you must be able

to do three things

to love what is mortal;

to hold it

against your bones knowing

your own life depends on it;

and, when the time comes to let it go,

to let it go.

C.S. Lewis wrote to a dying friend, “There are far better things ahead than any we leave behind.”  While I think this is true about the “hour of our death”, it does not always hold true for some of the devastating, unnecessary losses we suffer, the losses so painful we would gladly trade what life comes after it if we could only have again what was… but life doesn’t work that way, does it.  About them I might amend what C.S. Lewis wrote like this: “There are far better things ahead than what you will ever experience if you stay in the grave of your loss.” 

Our first experience of death comes at the moment we are born.  When we leave the womb we leave behind a warm, enveloping, nurturing world through a brief but painful and traumatic process.  We emerge into a world where the air is too cold, the lights are too bright, and the sounds are too shrill.  And then someone smacks us on the fanny and we cry for the first time.  You and I both know it will not be the last.  Who would ever voluntarily leave the womb for a world like this!  And yet, can you even begin to imagine what life would be like if you never left your fetal home! 

One of the reasons we walk with Jesus through Holy Week is so we can learn how to die to the life we love.  One of the reasons we step out of the tomb with him on Easter morning is to remind us death and loss never get the last word.  And one of the reasons we gather on the mountain with him and watch him ascend into the heavens is to learn how to embrace the wonder of what will be, not just in the next world, but also in the here and now.

Love your life, hold it close, and when the hour comes, let it go.  Let it go.  And when you let it go, keep in mind what Tom Hanks said at the end of the movie Castaway, you never know what the next tide is going to bring in.  But know this, it is bringing something.  All you have to do is open our heart to it.

Mother's Day 2026

 

John 14:15-21

Easter 6 / Year A

We here this morning share at least one thing in common… we all have or had a mother.  Perhaps just a few of us lost our mother when we were young and with a rare exception each of our mothers did a pretty good job of nurturing us to adulthood (and beyond).  Ann Jarvis certainly did.  She gave birth to eleven children, but only four survived into adulthood.  Being a woman of deep faith, Ann drew on her profound loss to fuel an incredible life of public service in mid-19^th century West Virginia.  She took care of sick neighbors, labored to improve sanitary conditions in her area, provided aid and comfort to the soldiers of both the North and the South, and after the war worked to heal her fractured community.

Immediately after her mother’s death in May of 1905, her daughter Anna began work to fulfill one of her mother’s lifelong dreams: setting aside one day of rest every year for those who bear the duties of motherhood.  Three years later, on the second Sunday in May 1908, her church – Andrews Methodist Episcopal Church in Grafton, WV – celebrated the very first Mother’s Day.  Unsatisfied with merely a local observance, Anna began a letter writing campaign so extensive and successful just three years later Mother’s Day was celebrated in every state of the Union and on four different continents.  It was an idea and movement so popular that in 1914, just six years after the initial church service, President Woodrow Wilson proclaimed Mother’s Day to be a national holiday.

Since then, as we say now, it has gone Viral.  Today is the busiest day of the year for florists and restaurants and marks the highest annual number of   phone calls made and greeting cards sent.  And typically, after Christmas and Easter, it is the most attended service of the church year.

And speaking of church services, even I, at a tender, young age, could sense our preacher’s angst on this day.  Because my childhood church did not adhere to the lectionary cycle, there always seemed to be added pressure on him to deliver the goods around national days of celebration; none more so than Mother’s Day.   

His is a fate I do not have to share since we are a lectionary-based church and assigned readings often do not lend themselves to mothering.  This year, however, the Gospel of John pairs well with the moment at hand.  Consider what Jesus says and hear them as words, not just from him to his followers, but also from your mother to you:

·    “If you love me, you will keep my commandments.” – not as in “Do what your mother says, or else!”, but rather as in “Mother knows best.”  If you want to live a good life, follow your mother’s advice because she knows what is best for you and will never lead you astray.  Likewise, Jesus’ commands are not arbitrary tests of obedience.  They are lanterns in the darkness and guideposts pointing the way for us to experience life in in all its fulness. 

·     “You are in me and I am in you.”  I don’t know if it is accurate to say your mother knows you better than anyone else, but certainly your mother knows you in ways no one else can.  And only you know how much of your mother you carry within, even years after she is gone.  The mother/child bond is an intimate, intertwining relationship of unparalleled depth and importance.  It is similar to how we experience Christ in our lives; a mystical connection of knowing and being known.  Both relationships help us to form the maps we use to chart our course through life.

·    “I will not leave you orphaned.”  Did you know within moments after being born a baby responds to its mother’s voice?  Or when a mother holds her baby to her chest, the child hears the mother’s heartbeat, recognizes it from the womb, and is soothed by it?  Or that a mother’s hug releases hormones in her child which promote feelings of safety and comfort?  Or the love and affection a child receives from its mother early in life leads to better cognitive and emotional development throughout life?  These physical responses of our mother form an unbreakable spiritual bond not unlike what Jesus promises to his followers.  After he is gone, he tells them, he will send his Spirit to abide in them forever.  He promises not to abandon them or leave them alone.  Long after our mother is no longer a daily presence in our lives and certainly long after she is gone, her love and her wisdom and her example remains with us and in us as a spiritual reality.

I am so glad Vestry members Dan, Bob, Grier, and TD are hosting this year’s Mother’s Day Brunch and I am especially looking forward to seeing all the pictures you have shared of your mother.  I suspect they will be sacramental – outward and visible signs of an inward and invisible grace.  And it will not surprise me at all if this becomes an annual Mother’s Day tradition here at St. Paul’s.

I have never been sure if this day is to be called Mother’s Day or Mothers’ Day.  It can be argued either way, I suppose, but perhaps Anna Jarvis should have the final say-so (after all, she started all of this).  Anna said this is to be Mother’s Day because it is meant to honor and recognize your particular mother, not Mothers’ Day as a focus on all mothers.  Her distinction, I think, is especially helpful because while not all women have given birth, we all, as I said, have or had a mother.  This morning we pause to honor and give thanks to the one who loved us so deeply she shared with us her “commandments”, who remains in us, and whose witness and presence returns to us over and over again.

Jesus the Map

 

John 10:1-14

Easter 5 / Year A

The Apostle Thomas said to Jesus, “How can we know the way?” 

Since I was a boy I have been fascinated with maps.  I remember spending hours on endless summer vacation drives studying maps of the places we were visiting.  I guess I was drawn both to their symbolic representation of the world and to the feeling of being oriented… of knowing where I was in relation to everything else.

Did you know the oldest map we have is on Babylonian clay tablet and dates back to 2,300 BC (almost 500 years before Moses and the Exodus)?  A Roman map from 300 AD depicts the known world from a bird’s eye point of view, which is pretty amazing given no one was able to get off the ground and look down from above.  Claudius Ptolemy, who lived in Alexandria in the second century, created what is arguably the most influential map in human history.  It accurately depicts over 8,000 locations. 

Ptolemy made several assumptions that influenced his map.  He rightly believed the earth was a sphere, but wrongly held all land existed above the equator.  Historians account for this error because explorers were reluctant to sail where they could not see the North Star.  He also believed the western edge of Europe basically met the eastern edge of Russia, so his map shows the Euro-Asia landmass stretching across the entire document.

Giovanni Verrazano produced one of the earliest maps of our east coast.  More of a nobleman than a sailor, he was uncomfortable navigating too close to land.  His 1503 map fails to locate the Chesapeake Bay or any of the great harbors on the Atlantic Seaboard because he never got close enough to shore to find them.  Passing the Outer Banks he could see the Pamlico Sound on the other side, but not mainland North Carolina, so he assumed the New World was no more than a narrow strip of sand.   Future explorers took his map as gospel until someone brave enough (and skilled enough) to sail up rivers like the James used their new information to produce more accurate maps. 

How can we know the way?

Maps and cartography illustrate a broader psychological phenomenon of how people can get stuck on an idea or an orientation.  Certain behaviors characterize this stuckness:

· One is Polarized Thinking… getting locked into black/white, right/wrong, all-or-nothing mindset where you are dominated by an emotional process you do not notice or understand.  For example, when Columbus sailed people questioned the westward distance from Europe to the Far East.  Some calculated 3,000 miles, others 10,000.  As people divided into polarized camps and carried on emotional debates, no one ever conceived of a third possibility… that a new continent existed in the middle of the ocean waiting to be discovered and explored.

· Another characterization of stuckness is the Treadmill Effect where you assume you can solve a problem by working harder doing the same thing.  I remember how after a prolonged power outage caused by downed limbs snapped off by a winter ice storm, Dominion Power defended itself by stating it had adhered to the same tree-trimming policy it followed for the previous 20 years.  The Treadmill Effect.

· A final characteristic is a Focus on Answers rather than Questions… like trying to find the ‘answer’ of the Northwest Passage rather than asking the ‘question’ what value does this New World hold?

Perhaps you recognize that stuckness is not unique to early explorers.  It happens across ages and cultures.  It affects individuals, groups, organizations, and entire civilizations.  And while we chuckle at the obvious deficiencies of early maps, it is much more difficult to evaluate the emotional and spiritual maps we create for ourselves and from which we navigate our lives.  And make no mistake; we all make internal maps that are symbolic representations, not of geography, but life.  We use these psychological maps to orient ourselves so that we can have a sense who we are and where we are in relation to everything else. 

To the degree that you can recognize in your own life the treadmill effect, a focus on answers rather than questions, and polarized thinking then you can be confident the maps you make contain some errors.  They may be errors carried forward from the maps your parents used.  They may be errors you have picked up from cultural influences.  Or they may be errors of your own creation.  No matter what the origin, they negatively affect how you make your way through life.

Imagine if my parents used 1910 maps to navigate our 1960s vacations!  Now imagine going through life carrying emotional and spiritual maps you never had the courage or wisdom to update based on the ongoing journey of your life.  Even worse, what if you used only the maps you inherited from your family of origin or early Sunday School learning.  Yes, having a foundation on which you can rely is critical.  But you have experienced so much and learned much from it.  The map that you use to guide you needs constant updating to include this. 

How can we know the way?

The way out of stuckness, if you are an early explorer or a 21^st century pilgrim, is to reorient your life by embracing a spirit of adventure.  This reorientation has several components:

· The first is a willingness to take a chance, to embrace risk, and to welcome uncertainty.  Nothing is more characteristic of stuckness than predictability.  But chance, risk, and uncertainty seem to go hand-in-hand with serendipity, discovery, and new life.  There is a reason why no one discovered the New World while docked in a European harbor.  As they say, no risk, no reward.

· A second component is a willingness to make mistakes.  The longer you are stuck in the same place, the more accurate your map of that place will be.  It will be tried and true… the way it’s always been done.  If you embrace a spirit of adventure, mistakes are not understood to be failures, rather they are signs of movement and new life.  Do you know how the cleaning product Formula 409 got its name?  The inventor’s previous 408 mixtures didn’t get the job done.  If you aim to get unstuck, false starts and dead ends are opportunities for reflection and new learning, not reasons to give up or give in to the ridicule of those who say the old maps are good enough.

· And finally, to get unstuck you must be willing to cross emotional barriers… those notions or ideas that have great power over us; be it crossing the Equator or breaking out of a comfortable but stultifying routine.

The Apostle Thomas says to Jesus, “How can we know the way?”  He was asking not for a geographical map, but a spiritual/emotional map; a symbolic representation he could use to orient himself to life.  Jesus replies, “I am the way, and the truth, and the life” (or as I like to translate it, “I am the True and Living Way”).  It is a brilliant answer in that Jesus orients all of life around himself, rather than some fixed object like a holy shrine or a moral teaching.  The image of the way calls us out of stuckness and beckons us to embrace adventure.  It calls us to reorient our lives, to make new maps, and then, just when we think our maps accurately portray life as it is, to explore some more, make new discoveries, and create new maps.

And we can do this with some confidence and courage because the object Jesus invites us to seek is himself… he, the one who promises never to leave us or to lose us, invites us to explore a life in him that perhaps we never dreamed existed.  How can we know the way?  Jesus tells us that we can know the way by using him as the map.  He invites us to reorient our life to his.

* Check out Edwin Friedman's book A Failure of Nerve if you want to explore the themes of this sermon in greater depth

Jesus the Gate

 

Easter 4 / Year A

John 10:1-10

Here is a statement so obvious it hardly needs saying: A walled enclosure erected in a field is designed to keep something inside and everything else out.  If it has a gate, this allows a small, managed egress from one side to the other.  When the gate is open, what is in can go out and what is out can come in.  When it is closed, no flow is possible.  Given this, what does Jesus mean when he says, “I am the gate for the sheep”?

As we learned in our Lenten study, Jesus makes seven unique “I am” statements in the Gospel of John: I am the Bread of Life, the Light of the World, the Good Shepherd, the Resurrection, the True and Living Way, and the Vine.  The seventh, “I am the Gate,” surely is the most cryptic of the group.  What are we to make of it?

Biblical scholars note John’s gospel has a particular literary pattern around seven significant miracles it records Jesus performing.  In fact, it refers to them as signs, not miracles, because they point to deeper truths.  Here is the pattern:

·    Sign (what Jesus does)

·    Dialogue (how people respond to it)

·  Discourse (Jesus’ teaching about the meaning of the sign and subsequent dialogue). 

Today’s reading is a part of the discourse which occurs after Jesus heals a man blind from birth.  The dialogue involves religious authorities confronting this person to determine 1) if he really was blind in the first place, 2) who healed him, and 3) why was this act done on the Sabbath in violation of their interpretation of biblical laws.  The dialogue ends with the religious leaders expelling the former blind man from the local synagogue.  Jesus’ discourse draws on the image of a shepherd to compare himself with the synagogue officials.  In the first part of his teaching, Jesus proclaims, “I am the gate for the sheep.”

In biblical times shepherds lead their flock in the field by day and then directed them into fold at night.  This structure typically was a stone wall enclosure.  And, while it had a narrow opening, most did not have a gate.  Once the sheep are inside, the shepherd himself acts as the gate, using his body to close the opening. 

In addition, most folds are communal, used by multiple shepherds to house their flocks.  And while you might think this arrangement would lead to chaos – such one person’s sheep getting mixed in with another’s herd – the sheep recognize their master’s call and respond only to it.  All others continue to do what they are doing until their shepherd calls them.

The part of the discourse when Jesus says, “Whoever enters by me will be saved” often is misinterpreted by holding the sheepfold represents heaven, thereby making Jesus to be the sole distributor of admission tickets for everlasting bliss.  Everyone who does not believe in him, so the interpretation goes, will be turned away. 

The full context of the Gate image points to something very different.  The broader picture tells the story of religious authorities harassing a person whose new sight they should be celebrating.  John’s readers have a special connection with the blind man even though they are reading his story decades later.  Just as he is expelled from the synagogue, so too they are being barred from their religious communities because they profess their faith in Jesus.  Those whom God appointed to shepherd them are harming them. Jesus, in his teaching, calls them thieves and bandits.

The image the gate conveys Jesus sets himself to protecting his flock, those who know his voice.  Like a shepherd who beds down in a fold’s opening, Jesus ensures the security and well-being of his followers by prohibiting anyone seeking to injure them from getting at them.  He calls his flock to come out only when it is safe for them to reenter the pasture.  

Given all of this, listen again to what Jesus says: “Whoever enters by me will be saved, and will come in and go out and find pasture.  The thief comes only to steal and kill and destroy.  I came that they may have life, and have it abundantly.”  Rather than pushing a kind of Christian exclusivity, Jesus’ words echo the spirit of the 23^rd Psalm.  He promises to lead us to green pastures and still waters, never leaving us alone when we walk through the valley of danger and death.

The image of the gate for the sheep reflects how Jesus leads the church.  We are called together into a community as a people who know the voice of our Shepherd.  We seek to follow him by emulating his example and living out his teachings.  He sees to our nourishment, nurtures us throughout our lives, and sets himself between us and what seeks to do us harm.  We in his flock experience life in all its abundance.  These are the truths we celebrate on Good Shepherd Sunday.  These are the experiences we share as his flock.