God Is With(in) Me
“God Is With(in) Me”
Psalm 23 John 10:1-10
Fourth Sunday of Easter, Year A, May 3, 2020
First Presbyterian Church of Sandpoint, Idaho
Andrew Kennaly, Pastor
Perhaps you’ve heard stories of people who suddenly have a medical condition. They’re pretty healthy, yet something happens that prompts them to see a doctor. Whatever that condition, it turns out that it’s treatable; yet, while dealing with the condition, something even more severe is discovered, an ailment they didn’t even know they had. It seems unfortunate for them to get sick, yet had they not been prompted, they may have missed that more substantive revelation. Although the diagnosis and treatment options may be a painful process in themselves, at least they caught the more severe condition early, before symptoms became noticeable or irreversible. Through awareness, now they can take appropriate steps leading forward. Now they can focus on the healing they didn’t even know they needed.
That’s the dynamic of these scripture passages about sheep and shepherds, figures of speech; quaint images pointing to deeper truths intended to qualitatively open us to the depths of life and the infinite love of God.
The 23rd Psalm is one of the most recognized scriptures in the world and people turn to it for comfort, solace, and encouragement, especially in times where we feel want, where the shadow of death is frightening. As life’s uncertainties push their way, we can feel overwhelmed. That’s when many people pull out Psalm 23, to help with grief, distress, and struggle. It’s comforting images remind us that God Almighty pays attention, cares to take action on our behalf, and holds us forever; the LORD as shepherd is a loving image. And in John, having Jesus talk about sheep and shepherds, and being the gate that saves; this really speaks to many people. The skills of the shepherd, the care of the gatekeeper; these lead to the health and well-being of the sheep. Although it’s a harsh environment, there are provisions. The shepherd knows what’s needed, and the sheep benefit.
We tend to assign values to the images. Sheep seem innocent. The shepherd is diligent and knowledgeable. The gatekeeper is a leader who is trusted. Thieves and bandits are the bad guys. Jesus gives life. Seems like it’s all cut and dried. Everyone in their places, things working out well, especially for those of us on the inside. We could leave it at that. (and most people do)
There are cultural aspects to these images, like the gatekeeper opening the gate for the shepherd, whose sheep know their voice. In that culture, shepherds took their sheep to find pasture during the day, but at night, various flocks were brought together and put into a fenced area, with one gate. This protects all the sheep at night, and allows the shepherds, who were mostly young boys, to return home knowing the gatekeeper is keeping watch. In the morning, the shepherds return, and of all the sheep in the pen, only the ones that recognize their shepherds voice will follow their leader out into the day. Kind of like someone else not able to use the voice commands on your cell phone, but you can; phones have voice recognition. So do the sheep.
When Jesus says, “I am the gate,” he is using this image. No harm comes to the sheep because the gate keeps the sheep protected, both from external threats and from their own straying. The gate keeps things out, but it also keeps the sheep in. The cultural aspect of this is that the gate keeper uses their body as the gate. They lay down across the entrance. This Incarnational image of Jesus giving himself as the gate intensifies his earlier figures of speech, which were much more general. He uses, “I am,” which is another way of referring to God’s Presence. In another intensification, he moves from random thieves and bandits to saying, “all who came before me are thieves and bandits.”
The images he uses are loaded in ways that capture everyone. Thieves are people who steal, but this could be noticed or not. Pick pockets are thieves, but you don’t notice it happening. Burglars are people who steal when no one is there. Bandits, however, are blatant, showing up all of a sudden, like an ambush, and force their way on others, taking what they want. Using thieves and bandits, Jesus is covering all possibilities. He also does this in a way that hooks us in. Rather than pointing at “the bad guys,” Jesus doesn’t let anyone off the hook. “The thief comes only to steal and kill and destroy.” Stealing, killing, and destroying. Loaded terms that hook us all, especially if we think they don’t include us.
The Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. is known for his “I have a dream” speech where he talks about racial inequality and his vision of justice and a society that values all races equally. But in addition to racism, Dr. King is also known for standing up against two other major cultural evils, injustices practiced by individuals and systemically through policies and social structures.
One of these is materialism, as a production/consumption culture makes things, stuff that accumulates, creating comparisons, which leads to continual dissatisfaction, the loss of contentment and simplicity, and the degradation and destruction of nature by viewing the earth and other people through commodification, as resources to be used and exploited for personal gain or profit. Poverty, widely defined, is a result of materialism as greed has its way with society.
Another major focus for Dr. King involved America’s use of violence, and he confronted the myth of redemptive violence directly through non-violent resistance, knowing this is the only way to bring lasting cultural change from a higher plane of existence. Dr. King gave speeches about the war in Vietnam specifically, addressing America’s violence on a global scale. Violence and intimidation lead to killing. These are symptoms of the larger issue involving power and control, and violence within the human heart.
This is where we get sucked in. Steal, kill, destroy; these take place as egoic structures create positions which need defended. Jesus is not just talking about “the bad guys” out there. Jesus is making an existential observation about the human condition and our need for God.
One of the reasons Psalm 23 is so popular, it seems, is that we can read it, find encouragement, and not actually change. If we stick to the nice images of shepherd and sheep, we see this Psalm helping us keep the good parts of life that we like while getting rid of the parts we don’t like. Our ego is still in charge! From a separate and superior stance, we are still the reference point even as we say, “The LORD is my shepherd, I shall not want.” This Psalm mentions the Lord, he, or you, in referencing God, 12 times. But it mentions I, me, or my 18 times. People tend to interpret this Psalm in ways that help them feel good, but not for transformation.
Transformation doesn’t feel good! It is dying to your self! It involves pain. Here we are in the Easter season celebrating Resurrection as we praise God and celebrate Jesus who says, “Come, follow me.” We remember as he leads straight to the cross. Before you get to the empty tomb, the stone is rolled over the entrance. As Jesus says, “I am the gate. Whoever enters by me will be saved, and will come in and go out and find pasture,” many people use this in exclusive ways, which simply validate and reinforce the self-referential, egoic mind, patterns of tribal thinking, missing the expansive revolution Jesus is exploding on the world through this vision.
By dying to our selves, we find life. Jesus is showing us how to do this through his own life, not in an exclusive sense, but an archetypal sense. God is the gate, we need God to do this work in us; that’s why the word “save” is relevant. The Resurrected Christ is with us, indeed, is within us; this is what Jesus is making us aware of, so we can seek healing from the condition that sickens us, and find life that God gives as the infinite love of God’s Self, as everything else falls away.
That this is an internal process is evident by the image Jesus uses. Jesus says he is the gate, and this involves the sheep staying overnight. Sheep of many herds gather into one place, each with a different leader, yet the gate creates a holding environment all night long, like the core of our soul within us, God’s Presence held deeply. Darkness means there is nothing else, everything is laid aside, given up, relinquished as we enter into a time of rest and focus, trusting God’s Presence, the gate, holding us.
In Turning to the Mystics, a podcast, James Finley mentions the passage on Jesus giving “life abundantly.” He quotes Thomas Merton and mixes his own comments in, saying,
“Knowledge of God […] is not the work of […] uniting the soul with an object outside of itself. It is a work of interior union and of identification in divine charity,” as in divine infinite love.” This is the life Jesus is talking about, that “One knows God by becoming one with [God]. […] In other words, when Jesus says, “I come that you might have life and have it more abundantly,” that life is the life that is at once God’s and our own […] in a state of trans-subjective communion beyond thought, beyond emotion, beyond memory. […] [These] continue to rise and fall within us, but in this subtle, qualitative, interior, rich state, ever so delicate, this union arises unexplainably within us. […] Contemplation is the work of love, and the contemplative proves his love by leaving all things, even the most spiritual things, for God, in nothingness, detachment, and night.”
Then the clincher, saying
“But here, there’s a kind of a premonition of death that we’re here by kind of dying to everything that’s less than God, through quiet purity of love, we’re passing through the veil of death. By dying to everything less than an infinite union with the infinite love of God infinitely giving itself to us as the very depths of ourself […,] I’m not trying to measure up to something. I’m not trying to reach some attained state of loving God I can’t attain. Rather, I’m trying to realize that God in my inability to attain this love is attaining me and taking me to itself as infinitely precious in my inability to attain it. Hence the gift of tears. Hence the gift of experiential salvation, this luminous deification through love in this obscurity and subtlety of interior prayer.
(Turning to the Mystics, podcast by James Finley and the Center for Action and Contemplation, Season 1, Episode 9, April 19, 2020, Session 7 of Thomas Merton, 20:10-21:36 of 44 minutes, the passage on Jesus giving “life abundantly” in Point 5 of Merton. https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/turning-to-the-mystics-with-james-finley/id1494041647?i=1000472028896)
Dynamic scriptures using sheep and shepherds, figures of speech; quaint images pointing to deeper truths intended to qualitatively open us to the depths of life and the infinite love of God.
May the humble, vulnerable love of God continue leading us to greater awareness to what Christ is doing in our midst, even as we are held by grace that knows no end, both NOW, and forever. Amen.