Fourth Sunday in Easter

Acts 9:36-43; Ps 23; Rev 7:9-17; John 10:22-30

The Rev’d Dr. Deborah Meister

Have you ever been lost? As in, really lost? It happened to me when I was a little girl, traveling with my parents in Peru. One day, we went to a town market — one of those fabulous agglomerations of stalls selling fruit, cheese, meat, soap, fabric, clothing, handicrafts — all the things you could need, in one chaos of color and sound and bodies in motion. Sooo many people! As we were pushing our way through the crowds, out of nowhere, a huge person pushed me aside. I stumbled and became turned around, in the course of which a few other people pushed me out of the way. By the time I had recovered my balance, I had lost my parents completely. I cried out for them; I peered through the crowd as best I could on my tiny legs, but there were grown-ups everywhere and I could not see above their waists. I tried to find them; I tried to wait for them — nothing. In an instant, I had become a small child alone in a strange country, unable to speak the language or to find my way home.

Fighting back panic, I remembered that the market was on a steep hill, and decided to work my way to the top of it, hoping I’d be able to look down and see my father, who was taller than the average Peruvian. I climbed through the people all the way to the top, and then stopped there, weeping. There were people everywhere, but none of them seemed to see me. Finally, after about an hour, I heard someone scream my name, and saw my parents heading toward me. It was a moment of profound relief: I had people again. People to whom I belonged. I was not alone, helpless, abandoned. Someone was on my side.

When we speak of Jesus as our Shepherd, that is the kind of relationship we mean: a relationship of deep belonging. In the tenth chapter of John, Jesus says, “I know my sheep and my sheep know me (John 10:14); he is talking about the intimate relationship that comes from sharing our life with one another. A shepherd cares for a lamb from the day of its birth; if it is born in a season of cold or storm, he will take the lamb into his own home. He knows the favorite places of each sheep; which ones prefer what kind of forage; leads them to pasture; nurses them when they are injured. Day by day, over the course of a lifetime, he earns their trust, and when he calls their name, they can hear his voice amid a multitude of others, and know whom to follow.

That is the relationship we enter with Jesus the day we are baptized, as Summer will be baptized today — a relationship of deepest belonging. And that belonging is reciprocal: it’s not that we become Jesus’s possessions, but that we belong to one another. Day by day, over the course of a lifetime, we grow into Christ, revealing ourselves to Christ more and more deeply as he reveals himself to us, learning to hear and to trust both Christ’s voice, and the work of the Holy Spirit in our lives. Once we have been baptized, nothing can sever that connection. The choice is irrevocable; even if we walk away from God, God will not cease from calling our name.

And yet, paradoxically, we can have trouble hearing Christ’s voice. Like the crowd in today’s Gospel, we find ourselves demanding, “If you are the Messiah, tell us plainly!” (John 10:24) What, do you think, that plain and direct telling would look like for them? What would it look like for you?

By this point in the Gospel, Jesus had taught, had healed, had fed — and yet, neither his words nor his actions were enough to bring these people along. And before we sneer at them, we should, perhaps, consider: we have all those things, too, and yet, sometimes, we also struggle to believe.

So often, we are told that belief is a matter of the mind: We believe that Paris is the capital of France. We believe that the oceans are warming. We believe that 2 +2 = five. (Yes, we can believe things which are mistaken!) But all of that is a shallow kind of believing; it does not change our lives. To believe, in the Scriptural sense, is to give our heart to someone. Not to believe “that,” but to believe “in.” And that’s where the crowd, where we, sometimes run into trouble. The only way I can believe in you is to live it: to be there as your friend, your confidante, the person who will not walk away. Jesus asks us to give our heart before we “know” Jesus, and it is only in that self-giving that we are able to know Jesus’ love.

That belonging changes everything, both because it is ours, and because it is not given only to us. “I know the sheep and the sheep know me” sounds narrow and exclusive, like a family or a marriage. But Jesus transforms belonging itself, broadening it out from something exclusive (you are my sweetheart) to something vastly wide and free. St. John writes, “After this I looked, and there was a great multitude that no one could count, from every nation, from all tribes and peoples and languages, standing before the throne and before the Lamb.” (Rev 7: 9) Jesus’ love comes with some serious coattails. If we belong to Jesus, we belong also to all those others who belong to Jesus. We do not lose our sense of belonging to one nation or people, but we are opened to an expanded belonging, in which no people or land is truly a stranger to us.

This week, the world watched the election of a new Pope. As the doors of the conclave were sealed, a vast crowd gathered in St. Peter’s Square, people from many nations and languages, ranging from the deeply faithful to tourists who just happened to be around. And when the smoke turned white, we were presented, not with a man, but with a kaleidoscope: An American. A Peruvian. A guy from Chicago. A Creole of mixed heritage. It came to seem as if this one man, Leo, was in his own body and life a meeting-place for half the world — which is what each of us is called to be: a life in which Jesus touches the places we pass through, one conversation, one gesture, one act of mercy at a time.

And yet, shepherds exist because the world, in all its bright beauty, is also a place of danger. They are there to protect the sheep, but Jesus does not protect us in any obvious way. Instead, he lays down his life for the sheep. He gives us the assurance of eternal life, which is to say, he gives us the courage to walk out our doors into the world as it is, to live lives of courage and beauty even when darker things seem to be carrying the day.

When John of Patmos sees his vision, he asks, “Who are these, robed in white?” And the angel replies, “These are they who have come out of the great ordeal.” (Rev 9:14) Tradition identifies these people as martyrs, but while that’s probably true, it’s the kind of truth which can lead us astray. The goal of Christian life is not heroism, but mercy — not a glorious death, but a faithful life. Few of us will die for Jesus, but each of us can live for him. Each of us, like Tabitha, can see the needs around us and make people’s lives just that much better, shining a small light into the encroaching darkness.

St. Augustine writes of the ordering of love; it’s been the subject of a recent kerfluffle down South, when J.D. Vance used it to describe a hierarchy of responsibility going out in concentric circles from those we might “naturally” be concerned about (family, friends), who (by his reckoning) deserve most of what we have to offer, then to neighbors, then strangers, then to people in foreign lands, for whom (he believes) we have less responsibility and who might be allocated what is left over when we have taken care of “our own.” But that is not the teaching of Augustine, and it’s not the teaching of Jesus. It might arguably be a way for a nation to prioritize the use of its assets, but it is not how a Christian is called to live their life. Augustine taught that in a world in which so many people and causes make competing demands on our time and our heart, we need to put God first: above the clamor of family and nation and friendship. Only then do the rest of the demands fall into some kind of order — not an earthly order, in which we help those who can help us, but a heavenly order, in which what cries out is need and what responds is Love.

Even so, my friends, when we cry out with our own need, we are heard by the One whose name is Love. We may not be able to explain it; we may not be able to logic ourselves into believing, but when we go into the waters of baptism, we are clothed with an unbreakable love. We are given, not the knowledge of Christ, but a life with Christ — with Christ and with all Christ’s wild and shaggy family, people from every nation and language and people and tongue, people in bellbottoms and people in suits and people who will never know our name. And we are given this earth, the place of our belonging, a belonging so deep and so wide that it takes a lifetime to begin to understand.

Thanks be to God.