Saturday, June 20, 2015
Easter 4, 2015
SERMON FOR THE FOURTH
SUNDAY OF EASTER
April 26, 2015
HOLY TRINITY
& ST. ANSKAR
…the wolf snatches them and scatters them…
+In the
Name of God, the Holy and Undivided Trinity.
The wolf scatters. The Good Shepherd gathers. I want to
suggest a possible interpretation of this famous metaphor: a Trinitarian one
about human consciousness. All the world
religions seem to be about getting together, overcoming our apartness, our sin, the Teutonic root of which means apart. Sin is, first of all,
not a misdeed but a state of consciousness.
Our misdeeds arise out of our congenital sense of being apart. The Wolf scatters us. The Wolf drives us apart; the Good Shepherd
gathers us. The Good Shepherd brings us together.
In the parliament of the great world religions, Christianity
has to offer the revelation that apartness is overcome not by dissolution into
the One, but by interpersonal communion as revealed in the Most Holy And
Life-giving Trinity. The gathered flock
is one, but there are still many sheep. As individuals, we go astray. "All
we like sheep have gone astray; we have turned every one to his own
way." That is the definition of individual. What if this silly, ovine scatteredness is about
our self-consciousness? Not our transgressions, but our sense of being apart?
The wolf scatters. The Good Shepherd gathers. How does He gather? By "laying down His life for the
sheep.” The Blood of Christ overcomes
our apartness. The Blood of Christ makes
Communion. Blood is life. The Blood of
Christ is the Life of Christ. Since Christ is one with God, His human Blood is
the Life of God, the Life God now shares with us, and through us with the whole
cosmos. The Blood of Christ is the Life of the New Creation.
John the Divine says that, as Christ laid down His life for
us, so we ought to lay down our lives for one another. Obviously, John did not mean that we all
ought to try to get ourselves crucified!
At least not literally. I think what he did mean was that we ought to
renounce our sheepish, individual sense of life as separate, scattered selves
in favor of the Life of interpersonal Communion. Probably that is what Jesus meant when He
said that those who are willing to lose their life will find life. What they
find is Eternal Life in the Fellowship of the Holy Spirit, which is to say the
Church, Christ's Body , now living on Earth in history, quickened by His Blood,
and at the same time already participating in the Life of the Three Divine Persons
by the same Spirit — the Spirit that filled The Holy Apostle Peter, causing him
to inform the high priests that “There is salvation in no one else, for there
is no other name under heaven given among mortals by which we must be saved.”
Does that mean that perdition and destruction await those who
do not know the Name? I don’t think so. Just the opposite, in fact. Jesus is
quite clear that He has plenty of sheep “who do not belong to this fold.” But
they listen to His voice and he knows THEM by name. Still, it is only through
the One Who gathers – through the Good Shepherd – that we can be saved. Salvation means perfect health – the
wholeness that the cured cripple symbolizes. Wholeness means gathering as
opposed to scattering. Whatever their cultural and conceptual framework, any
who gather in love gather in the Name
of the Good Shepherd, Who defeats the Wolf’s scattering depredation. To be
whole is to be gathered. That is what it means to be saved.
We are not saved by any other Name. We are not saved by
defining ourselves as other than
anyone else. We are not saved by holding ourselves – or our group – apart. We
are saved by the Good Shepherd who overcomes our apartness and gathers us into
one flock together with sheep of all those other folds, who also listen to His
voice and follow Him, though they may not know His Name.
ALLELUIA!
CHRIST IS RISEN FROM THE DEAD,
TRAMPLING DOWN DEATH BY DEATH,
AND BESTOWING LIFE ON ALL IN THE TOMBS!
