The Gospel Lesson John 10:22-30
At that time the Festival of the Dedication took place in Jerusalem. It was winter, and Jesus was walking in the temple, in the portico of Solomon. So the Jews gathered around him and said to him, “How long will you keep us in suspense? If you are the Messiah, tell us plainly.” Jesus answered, “I have told you, and you do not believe. The works that I do in my Father’s name testify to me, but you do not believe because you do not belong to my sheep. My sheep hear my voice. I know them, and they follow me. I give them eternal life, and they will never perish. No one will snatch them out of my hand. My Father, in regard to what he has given me, is greater than all, and no one can snatch them out of the Father’s hand. The Father and I are one.”
Sermon Text
Every family, I believe, has some way to find each other in a crowd. My father has a very specific cough. I remember once I was at the state capital, for the Golden Horseshoe (humble brag,) and my mother and I could not find my dad and step-mom anywhere. Then, far away from us we hear that telltale cough, rising up across the crowd. We found him within the next five or so minutes. My mother has a very specific whistle, and when I hear it go, low and then very high, I know two things – I better hurry to where she is and exactly where she is.
Those little identifies, the things that mark us as connected. We do not have as many of them as we used to. We are a paranoid culture, we are less concerned with finding people we can relate to and more concerned with finding out if we do not agree with people. In the book of Judges, there is a story of Ephraimites and Gideonites. The Ephraimites are defeated in battle and try to flee across the Jordan river. The Gideonites are unable to determine who is an Ephraimite or a Gideonite just from looking from them. So they came up with a test, “See how they pronounce Shibboleth.” We don’t know what the difference in pronunciation would be, but it was something significant. It is like asking people to pronounce “Appalachia,” to see whether they’re from one corner of the mountain range or the other or seeing if they call a group of people, “y’all,” or “y’inz.”
In our social life, we do not look anymore for commonalities for productive reasons – but to bolster our own worldview and comfort. We mention off handedly political ideas and gauge the response of the people around us. We mention movies or controversies to see if people are “on our side,” and only after we are absolutely sure that we are in a place of uncritical normalization of our own ideas, do we allow ourselves to let out a deep breath, and tolerate the existence of the people we have proven aren’t “one of those people.”
I do not want to sound like I am oblivious to the fact that there are folks who need this sort of confirmation of safety. There are many reasons why you, especially when moving into a new area, need to check that you are in a safe place. You want to be sure that no one opposes your existence, believes you do not exist, or generally hates you out of principle. That I get. However, we then sequester ourselves further and further until we are starved for any real connection. If we define our community only by the lack of people who disagree with us, then we will never find a group of people we can truly belong to. You cannot build a community off of a negative principle – e.g. not being “one of those,” and expect anything good or productive to come of it.
In Jesus’s time, like ours, there were a great many sects and political parties to align oneself with. Are you a moral pillar of the community, more focused on daily goodness than strict doctrinal correctness? Then you would be a pharisee. Is worship more important than anything and the Bible limited and literal? The a Sadducee will make you feel right at home. What if your more political? The sicari are willing to kill for their ideas. Zealots, Essenes, Herodians, Hellenists, and so many more were all around.
These were the kind of folk who tracked Jesus down one day in Jerusalem. Jesus was celebrating “the Festival of the Dedication,” a commemoration of when the Maccabees won Judean independence from the Seleucid empire. The feast, and the associated miracle of oil lasting for eight days, would evolve over the next few hundred years to be what we now call “Chanukah.” In Jesus’s time there would not be dreidels or menorah, at least not the same kind of menorah used today, but the festival still celebrating God delivering the Judeans and liberating the temple from Hellenistic impurity.
Jesus, going to celebrate this moment that united his people, found that there were people interested in learning if he was the messiah, the ultimate hero of God’s people. Some did so out of genuine curiosity, but later context tells us the full scope of the questioning. After Jesus gives his answer, some in the crowd turn on him, because Jesus identified himself as one with the Father. This statement of Jesus’s divinity angered some of those in the crowd, Jesus failed to provide the right answer. He said “shibboleth,” in a way that identified him as the enemy in their eyes.
Yet, Jesus’s answer is confirmed in their rejection. “You do not believe me, because you are not my Father’s sheep. My sheep hear my voice. I know them.” For the people who know Christ, and whom Christ knows, then the truth of Christ’s word is self-evident. We hear Jesus, and we know that Jesus is the one who gives us life. When we hear those words, when we are truly revived in our soul – that is when we are able to fully live – only when we accept the truth of Christ and, more than that, accept that we are part of Christ’s flock.
What I cannot stand about the Church is that we are so prone to factions. We want pastors who preach exactly as we agree with and denominations that have no rough edges. We want to come into Church and get exactly what we wanted and we want to go home and go one social media and be told exactly what we already believe to be true about the world and be perfectly content to live and die in a bubble of homogeneity. We do not desire the true communion of God’s Church. We do not desire to see people of all races, nations, and creeds, gathered in the same flock. We want to create for ourselves criteria that define God’s people as nearly identical to us, and then to apply that cookie cutter definition to everyone else.
Again, there is room for discernment in find the right group of people. Churches exist that do more harm than good, and there are social groups that no one has any right being in or associating with. The problem is that we have defined our opposition to people so well, that we cannot find our commonalities. When we all hear the sound of our Shepherd, we should be able to move toward him in, even approximately the same direction. Yet we pull and kick and beat each other, just to go our own way, just to destroy whatever unity there ought to be in Christ.
I believe that the Church can find a new way of being – one that sees that “those who are not against us are for us.”[1] However, it takes a mortification on our part. We have to let go of some of those code words we listen for, to some of those indicators of one thing or another that let us make immediate judgments of who is “in,” and who is “out.” Really, unless something indicates malice or hatred – people yelling slurs or putting white supremacist or other hate signs on their body or property, abusing other people, generally causing trouble etc. – we should at least try to relate to one another on a deeper level.
When we get to Heaven, we will find people there we do not expect. I know I will. Even as hard as I try to maintain hope for all souls and an equality of grace in all I do, I have written people off that God has not. There are people who, when they hear the call of God, will make their way to the throne of grace and receive it in full. I do not believe they will be hateful people, hate cannot live alongside Christ nor can anger cohabitate with the Gospel. Yet, they may be people I cannot relate to and maybe, worst of all, who I disagree with.
If we truly believe that we are made Christians by our answering of Jesus’s call, then we need to stop coming up with other things a Christian “must be.” Because, if you read this book, really read it and try to understand it, there is much more latitude and grace than definitions and strictures. Let us listen close for the call of our shepherd, and not focus so much on the shibboleths we have prepared for war. – Amen.
[1] Mark 9:38-41
Teach us to Number our Days 