Can't We All Just Belong?

The following is a sermon I prepared and delivered for my introductory preaching course, taught by the Rev. Dr. Dale Andrews at Boston University School of Theology.

Note: This sermon was delivered on May 1, 2007. Let me caution you here: This sermon has serious structural and theological difficulties, not to mention rhetorical flaws from a pastoral perspective, that I have been unable to work out, so I present this sermon as it was preached, warts and all the rest of its unsightly blemishes. (I have deleted one and a half sentences, but that is all.) Perhaps the kind reader will offer some constructive feedback.

A reading from the Gospel According to John, Chapter 10.

Jesus said, 27 “My sheep hear my voice; I know them, and they follow me. 28 I give them eternal life, and they shall never perish. No one can take them out of my hand. 29 My Father, who has given them to me, is greater than all, and no one can take them out of the Father’s hand. 30 The Father and I are one.”

These are beautiful words from a beautiful Gospel. But these words are also bittersweet. The community that created this Gospel was at odds with almost everyone—with the Jewish authorities, with the wider world, and even with fellow Christ-believers. Nobody really understood the glory of Jesus Christ except the community of the Beloved Disciple, its members claimed. They were the true sheep; they alone heard Jesus’ voice. Brothers and sisters, when I look at our divided School of Theology community, I see the sad drama of the Johannine community playing itself out again. Students, angry and fearful about the direction of the changing Church, are ready to expel fellow students from their midst over wrong doctrine or wrong practice. Worse, students have fallen victim to violent rhetoric and have been threatened by violent actions from their peers. It grieves me that so many people are hurt, and each new fracture of the body troubles me. We are neither one nor whole.

We must understand why all this is happening. In light of our struggle to be one body in Christ, and in light of this beautiful passage from the Gospel, I will answer two urgent questions. First, what does it mean for God and Jesus to be one? Second, who hears the voice of Jesus, who calls himself the Good Shepherd?

On the first question, let us arrive at a basic point of agreement. Jesus says in verse 30 that he and God are one. He says this in the Temple at Hanukkah in response to the Jewish authorities’ demand to know whether or not he is the Messiah. His stunning answer reveals that he is more than a Messiah, more than the political liberator of Israel. He claims a unique relationship with God as the bearer of divine power and the embodiment of the divine will. It is in this sense that Jesus is called the Son of God. Jesus justifies this unparalleled unity by pointing to what he does for his disciples—he gives them eternal life so that they will never perish. This discourse in the Temple follows the discourse of the Good Shepherd, and the evangelist has Jesus employ the language of that metaphor again in this richly theological text. Jesus is the Good Shepherd, the noble guardian of the sheep, the hero who lays down his life so that others may have life. Jesus knows his sheep; he speaks to them the words of life, and they respond to his voice. Jesus models God’s justice through his loyalty to the sheep and models God’s love through his obedience to God. He can do this because the God of Israel is the source of Jesus’ words and actions. It is this God who gives the sheep to Jesus the Good Shepherd, and no one can take them away from Jesus because no one can take them away from God. The words and works of Jesus are nothing less than the words and works of God.

What does this mean? It’s a funny coincidence, but tomorrow is the feast day of St. Athanasius, who sparred with Arius and wound up victorious in the Trinitarian controversies of the 4th century. They fought furiously over the meaning of today’s text, and I can hear Arius shouting, “You see? Jesus says ‘My Father is greater than all!’ ” and old Athanasius roaring, “Don’t you see? Jesus says ‘The Father and I are one!’ ” Now I’m not particularly interested in their argument about persons and essences, and the fact is neither was the evangelist nor his community. John is telling a story, not defining a doctrine. This Gospel is firstly revealing the relationship between God and Jesus. John is teaching us that when Jesus performs mighty works and speaks with authority, we experience the reality of God. This Gospel secondly reveals our relationship to God in Jesus. When we do the works of God and speak the Word of God in Christ’s name, we experience the reality of God and Jesus as one, and we share in that unity.

The believers in the community of the Beloved Disciple did not quarrel about whether the unity between God and Jesus was a metaphysical unity of natures or essences or strictly a moral unity. They experienced this power of this unity firsthand—they were grasped by it, and that’s all that mattered. This leads to my second point, which sits between my two questions. Because Jesus’ words and works are the words and works of God, we can follow Jesus Christ. But even the ability to follow Jesus Christ is itself the work of God. We follow Jesus because we are led to believe in him by the inspiration of God. We did not attain faith through our own efforts! Faith is hearing the voice of the shepherd who speaks first—and then responding. Faith is not asking Jesus if he is the Messiah and then deciding whether or not to go along with him, as the religious authorities did when they confronted him in the Temple at Hanukkah. We do not get to anoint Jesus the shepherd! In fact, we don’t get to make ourselves the sheep. Even Jesus did not make us the sheep. Today’s Scripture is saying that God made Jesus the shepherd, God made us the sheep, and God made both for each other.

So God made us to follow Jesus, and God makes it possible for us to follow Jesus. Let me draw out this theme just a little further. I propose that God made us to believe first and to know second. Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel said of the prophetic office, “The principle to be kept in mind is to know what we see rather than to see what we know.” We follow Jesus in faith. We believe, and then we know what we see. The authorities in the Temple wanted to know first who Jesus was, but they had no interest in believing in him, much less following him. Jesus susses out their true intent—they are looking for a reason to indict him—and so he tells them they do not belong to his sheep. He does not say they do not know him—he claims they do!—but that they do not believe him. On the other hand, the sheep in this text recognize that the works Jesus has performed are a testimony to God. Like Dostoevsky’s Grand Inquisitor, the religious authorities in John have known, but they do not believe. Meanwhile, the sheep believe, therefore they know.

I will now be so bold as to put my finger on the problems facing the School of Theology. We face two crises—an identity crisis and a community crisis, and the first leads into the second. First, the identity crisis. Are we merely a school of theology, discoursing well on God and Jesus and the Holy Spirit and the Church but knowing nothing, or are we more—are we also a seminary, professing our faith in these? Writing in his blog for The New York Times, Stanley Fish said, “True religious knowledge is not something one delivers in precepts but something one performs at every moment, because its lesson and one’s being are indistinguishable.” Is Jesus Christ is being carried away from the altar table to the dissecting table? God forbid it! Let our knowledge of Jesus Christ guide us beyond a mere academic exercise, and let us follow all the way. If we seek the meaning of the Scripture, let us do so in faith. “The Father and I are one” is more than a Trinitarian statement. It is much more than a Christological statement. It is an existential declaration of faith in God, and God’s ways become our ways. God’s way of being becomes our way of being. The Father and I are one. The Mother and I are one. The Holy One of Israel and I are one. We live by our knowledge, and we do not merely study this stuff as disinterested students of the liberal arts. It does shape our world perspective! Ours is a vision to be lived! That is what is at stake, and we must at some point step out on faith! Forgive my radical presumption, but remember what brought you here: your love of God and your desire as a Christian minister to belong in word and deed to God. Verse 27 says, “My sheep hear my voice. I know them, and they follow me.” As important as it is for us to know, we must remember that we are believers first. We can follow Jesus Christ the Son of God because through Christ, in Christ, with Christ, God has known us, making us the faithful sheep of the shepherd. When we follow, we become one with Jesus Christ as Jesus Christ is one with the God of Israel.

I believe I have answered the second question. Who hears the voice of Jesus? Everyone that God has known as Jesus’ sheep. And here is my third point. God has elected us to be sheep, and while we may opt out, that does not change God’s decision for us. Nor does it nullify God’s power to determine who belongs to God in Christ. Now, if it is true that only God gives us to Jesus Christ and enables us to hear Jesus’ voice and believe in Jesus’ works, then who are we to determine who belongs to Christ and the Church that witnesses to the reign of God that Jesus proclaimed? I admire the community of the Beloved Disciple for living deeply into its knowledge of Jesus Christ, but I think it failed to heed the implications of the Good News. Its members had an antagonistic relationship with not only non-believers, but also fellow believers who did not confess the Christ or practice Christ-faith as they did. They broke off communion with many other communities of Christ.

Like the Johannine community, I think we misunderstand our place in the economy of salvation. At the School of Theology, this is where our identity crisis becomes a community crisis. Hear me out. There is a consensus gathering among dissatisfied seminarians that our collective classroom experience is too shallow. It is too academic, I hear—too much “seeing what we know,” not enough “knowing what we see.” We are still asking Jesus to tell us plainly whether he is the Messiah. Our courses are chock full of detached analyses of the truth claims of our kindred Christian traditions, killing the spirit of religion. Seminarians want to be transformed by what they know, not deadened by it. They want to be the School of the Prophets again. Many students are rising to the challenge to rouse our community from its stupor. And this is a good thing. However, some students have taken this mission to an extreme. Like ministering angels, they have come to defend Jesus Christ from blasphemous, belittling, or trivializing assaults. It’s funny, isn’t it, the sheep presuming they must protect the shepherd? Even save the shepherd?

They have also come to purify the Church on the one hand, or reconstitute it on the other. I worry whenever Christ-followers arrogate to themselves the privilege that belongs to God alone—deciding who hears Jesus’ voice and who belongs to the flock. This is not to say that Christ-followers may not call their brothers and sisters to account for their sin, for doing so is part of their prophetic office. However, many of us step beyond our responsibilities. It is one thing to call your brothers and sisters to repentance, but it is another to assert by word and deed that your brothers and sisters are not sheep. It is one thing to say that your brothers and sisters have heard the voice of the shepherd but don’t listen very well; it is another to assert by word and deed that they are deaf to the shepherd’s voice. The first is charity; the second is cruelty. Listen to the Gospel: “My Father, who has given them to me, is greater than all, and no one can take them out of the Father’s hand.” Yet I fear that is precisely what many of us are attempting to do, under the pretense of “making a stand” for the Church or by redefining the Church so as to push out those who are not ready to embrace their superior vision.

Are we willing to believe in a God so great and so mysterious as to grant that God speaks to our fellow brothers and sisters even when they wrongly impugn our faith and practice? And are we humble in the knowledge that God still speaks to us even when we wrongly impugn our brothers’ and sisters’ faith and practice? Can’t we all just belong? The Johannine community was unwilling to believe this, and so, apparently, are many of us in the School of Theology community. This is unfortunate. Have not all of us heard the Word of God and seen the works of the Lord and believed?

It is not for us to separate the so-called goats from the sheep, nor is it for us to usher the stray sheep back into the pen. I am surprised that some of our most enthusiastic brothers and sisters from the theological left and the right would not trust God enough to let Christ take ownership of all the so-called wayward souls in our midst. The Church does not need any more Holden Caulfields; it needs more leaders like John Mott, Pope John XXIII, and Bernice Powell Jackson. It needs models of koinonia like the Taize Community and the Community of Sant’Egidio.

Christ belongs to God, and we who believe belong to Christ. Only God knows who truly belongs to Christ. It is not for us to decide. Rather than play shepherd, let us be the sheep. Amen.