Abundant Life

John 10:1-10
Acts 2:42-47


Rockville United Church
Rev. Dr. Duncan D. Newcomer

April 13, 2008

The abundant life that Jesus promises through him is found in the pasture, out from the sheepfold. The sheepfold, behind the gates: that is a good place to sleep and to rest. The gate keeper keeps out bandits. But the gate keeper will open the gate for Jesus. And in a bedlam of trust, sheep gather to his voice and he will lead his flock to green pastures, still waters, sources for abundant life: life that restores the soul.

There are some things we cannot do all by ourselves. One of them is to restore our souls.

One way to see the sheep in the sheepfold is that they are poor in spirit. We struggled with that beatitude this morning in adult education with Frank Molony. How could it be a blessing to be poor in spirit? A blessing to be soul-depleted, soul-hungry, soul-thirsty?

Well, if the good shepherd doesn’t wait too long to come to our sheepfold, if the bandits haven’t climbed over the gate fence and hurt or misled us, being poor in spirit, we’d certainly have the blessing of being ready, of being open, needy, excited for Jesus to come and lead us out to green pastures.

Being poor in spirit can mean being God-ready, ready for the spirit.

In the gospels, even following Easter’s resurrection, the disciples are terribly poor in spirit. They are afraid. They are disoriented. Their foundations have been shaken down to the molten red ball of fire at the center of the earth.

Yet it is to this soul-sick, bereft, group of followers that Jesus comes, Jesus appears; Jesus just shows up, again and again and again. To Cleopas and friend, dispirited, on the road to Emmaus. To Thomas, doubting, and the others locked in a room. To Peter, who has given up and gone back to business as usual, a dispirited place for sure, at the charcoal fire breakfast on the shores of the Sea of Galilee. Jesus coming to the poor in spirit.

So then, from the point of view of spiritual life, let us recognize, accept, that there is nothing wrong, at all, with being poor in spirit. It is an opportunity, if, if that condition is paired off with faith, paired up with hope, faith and hope that the Good Shepherd will come, find us in our gated sheep fold, and will come in and let us gather to his words and follow his voice out to abundant pastures.

Now most of the time in life we play the part of the good shepherd. We assume the role of the provider, providing something for those without. Our education and life achievement, as parents and/or professionals and workers, is to be able to lead someone to something they do not have, but can gain through us. Indeed it is a sacred, a sacramental way of looking at our lives, to see how we participate in the holy drama of the good shepherd and the poor and hungry sheep.

We also like this role of good shepherd. It is very vivid in our life with animals, usually pets. Whether we have a horse at a stable, a dog or more at the door, a cat under the bed, or a bird in a wire box, we are happy that they are so happy to see us. Finally, at the end of the day, a day of some dispiriting activities, a day in which not everyone recognized our beautiful soul, finally some body, some almost-body, sees us for who we really are:

A good shepherd, glad to come through the gate, glad to raise the spirit, raise the anima and animus, the animation of some animal life. It does our spirits good to role-play Christ, the Good Shepherd, and to take the dog(s) out for a walk, to dish out some Friskies. Of course playing Jesus is a dangerous business, but one of the greatest joys of my life has been that when my cat Scout was alive it was to me and to my voice alone that she would come. Without me, she was pretty poor in spirit!

It is, of course, a lot harder to be Scout, to be the needy, dispirited, dependent one, the waiting, gated one, poor in spirit, counting our blessings on one paw! It is hard to be the sheep. For good reasons: who knows if that is Jesus coming through the gate? Who knows if that’s our master’s voice or not? We’ve all been victimized by Victrola-fraud. We’ve all gone through the gate and out into a pasture only to find out that we’d been misled, followed a mistaken voice, or just gotten lost on even the right paths. And some abundance was lost, or not found, and we wandered back into the sheepfold, hungry and still poor in spirit.

So let’s try to find the right path here, the paths of righteousness that bring us, lead us, to that abundant life imaged in green pastures and still waters, imaged in “He restoreth my soul.” Let us do a path-search. And if, as religions teach, we have to leave the gated sheepfold, even while we are poor in spirit, and follow God, what might that really look like; and let us see if we could recognize, and hear, Jesus.

These are our questions. What’s the vision of abundant life Jesus’ voice is calling us to? Where’s that green pasture? Righteous path? Who’s the gatekeeper and how do we know that’s really Jesus leading us?

Well, first of all we’ve all gotten off on the right foot. I mean we all made it here, here to real life. As lost as we might be, individually, or as a society, we have a lot of life to work with here and that is a grace to be realistically grateful for! I mean more than that we all made it safely down the birth canal, but I don’t mean less than that!

In our quest-journey for abundant life—forgetting that we cannot create it all by and from ourselves—we (also) forget that we have a lot of life going for us. A lot of us struggle as if we are starving, when we’re really just hungry, thirsty and poor in spirit. We try to earn our abundant life and we have a long list of internally recited negatives, reasons why what is wrong with us is why our life isn’t so abundant, or abundant enough. “If only I were smarter, more disciplined and made more money, then my life and my family’s life would be more abundant.” So we start out on our path semi-hating much of the life we already have.

Nothing makes this more real than death or disaster. In the face of losing life or limb we are suddenly grateful for the life we already have. Making it through birth and into life is a miracle of abundance already. Even Jesus came down through the womb, regardless of what miracle put him in there in the first place, no?! So having not fallen off the path on the way into life let us quest for our vision of abundance filled with gratitude for the life we already have.

We who would have what Jesus promised, life and life abundant, are already halfway there: we have life!

For Buddhist enlightenment, in fact, that’s the whole of the journey. In Zen Buddhism when you pass through the gateless gate you’ve awakened to the vivid reality that you’ve always been there. In Buddhism abundant life is life, life is abundant life, the path is the pasture, the journey is the goal, and you are the Buddha-nature and the Buddha-nature is you.

We could at least be as grateful for real life as the Buddhists! In Buddhism the glass is always half full. Westerners mistake that for pessimism. It’s not because Buddhism knows the simple reality that when you drink the water it moves up to the top of the glass and you couldn’t drink if the air of nothingness didn’t hold the water as well.

But, Christianity, Christians, have two reasons not to stop with such simple gratitude that life is life-abundant. Reason one. Psychologically it often doesn’t feel that way. Our lives really often don’t feel all that abundant and our anxiety, or our depression, or our fears and terrors are psychologically real to us.

A second reason why we might want to stay with the Christian hope of Christ’s abundant life is that politically and economically life is not all that abundant for a lot of people. In other words, peace and justice are necessary for abundant life in Christianity.

My view of most of the young elite Americans who become so enthralled with Buddhism is that they already have enough economic success in their family line so that they can afford to forget economic justice. And they aren’t going to be in the army so they don’t have to worry about peace. (Now two of my very best life-long friends are American Buddhists and deeply authentically so.) But Carol Bossert mentioned Ojai, California last Sunday in her splendid testimonial. Now Ojai is a meditation (as she said, “spiritually convergent”) center in the world. I would hazard, having also been there several times, that the ratio of Buddhist meditators to Porsche drivers is almost one to one. And you just cannot buy a bottle of cheap wine in Ojai! It is a place of a certain kind of American upper middle class spiritual hypocrisy. Ojai is not Bethlehem, and Nazareth is nowhere near.

So for us abundant life must take our anxieties, our depressions, our fears, and terrors seriously. Those won’t just get enlightened-away, nor will Christ touch them with a magic wand like Tinkerbell. But listen to Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount—start with “Blessed are the poor in spirit”—and let Jesus voice his words to you. To do that you must listen to him. We cannot listen to the voice of Jesus when we are abundantly preoccupied with our cell phones, our Ipods, our bluetooths, and our pursuit of happiness--which is not abundant life.

That is why in my vision of life here at RUC, I emphasize spiritual practices. Forms of piety. Forms of faith. Prayer. Passing the peace. Walking the labyrinth. Bible reflection. Conversations about death and dying, mind-body healing, health and wellness. In short, the psychology of abundant life is part of a vision I have for our life.

And we are not going to be on the path out of the sheep- fold following Jesus long before we pass the man who was beaten and robbed on the Jericho Road, before we find the lepers, and the blind, and the woman caught in adultery, and the centurion, and the tax collector and the rich young ruler all joining with us on the road when we follow Jesus. To receive abundant life we are soon in the company of the afflicted and the powerless. And we are soon giving abundantly, giving abundantly and thus receiving abundant life in the way that Jesus gives: through sacrificial love. That then is our covenant relationship with peace and with justice—to be the givers of peace and to be the makers of justice. This, my friends, is also my vision for expanding the mission of this church into a multiplying series of partnerships. Building on this church’s great ability to create partnerships with organizations like Habitat for Humanity, organizations like CMR. We would be creators and receivers of abundant life, not only in our spiritual practices but in our partnerships of the spirit, with organizations and places and causes that we can choose and relate to: locally and globally.

Because we are blessed with so much life. Because God in Christ wants to lead us. Because we want to and can follow. Let us step through the gate of the rest of our lives together, giving abundantly, living abundantly, receiving abundantly life as Jesus Christ promises.

When Christ, the Good Shepherd, is our gate and we walk with him and through him, and he through us, we connect to the spirit that enlivens us, gives meaning and a vision for the future. We will be walking through the gate of our own inmost being, the center of what has become our true best self. And we will have the abundant life of Christ using us as his gate to re-enter the world again and again and again, just as we have come to his pastures through him, again and again. Amen.