Sermon:  “Gatekeeping”

A Sermon for the Fourth Sunday of Easter, Year A

Acts 2:42-47; John 10:1-11

By The Rev. Matthew Emery

Preached at Second Congregational United Church of Christ, Rockford, Illinois

April 13, 2008

Some of you know that I was not here in worship last Sunday because I had flown out to Washington DC for the retirement celebrations for my internship year supervisor and mentor, the Reverend Chuck Wildman.  I rented a car for the weekend, and as I drove around, there were a few commercials I kept hearing over and over.  Now, one that I heard far too many times was for laser hair removal, but that’s not the one I want to talk about today.  No, instead, I kept hearing this commercial on the radio for a fence company, of all things—people that makes fences to go around your house’s yard, for instance.  At the opening of the commercial they brought up the old saying that “good fences make good neighbors.” 

              Now, that old saying may be true—it probably is in some cases and it probably isn’t in some cases—but true or not, it just wasn’t the sort of commercial I was expecting to hear on run-of-the-mill commercial radio—in Washington DC, of all places.  On the other hand, though, coming across fences and gates themselves in unexpected places, that’s actually fairly easy to do in the DC area.  There was the time, on my very first weekend living in the DC area that I took the wrong exit ramp off the George Washington Parkway near Arlington National Cemetery, and wound up with my car heading straight for the well-guarded gate of the Pentagon parking lot.  Let’s just say I got out of there just as fast as I possibly could!

              Well, in today’s reading from the Gospel of John, there too I find a gate not quite where I was expecting it.  As you’re reading along from the beginning of today’s passage, Jesus is talking and, at least to my ear, seems to be setting up this whole shepherd image.  “The one who enters by the gate is the shepherd of the sheep … the sheep follow him because they know his voice.”  And so Jesus is setting up all this shepherd language, and I remember that somewhere Jesus makes the statement “I am the good shepherd,” and so I figure that’s where he’s going with this.  But then, right after that, we get to verse 7, and Jesus says “Very truly, I tell you, I am the […] gate.”  Well, that’s not where I thought he was going with that.

              But, like me sitting in front of the Pentagon gates, here we are.  So what do we do with Jesus’ statement that he is the gate?  Well, historically, Christians have been known to use this statement as a virtual club to beat people into conversion, or at least as way to condemn anyone who wasn’t explicitly Christian.  And that use isn’t completely disconnected from what was probably going on in the community that John was writing his gospel for.  They were in the midst of a struggle that put the Christ-followers at odds with the rest of their community.  Eventually, the Christ-followers were kicked out of the synagogue, making explicit the separation between the Jews who were Christ-followers and those who were not.  And so, many places in the Gospel of John, we can see John writing a bit of a polemic that addressed his community’s situation. 

              Well, friends, we’re not John’s community.  Our situation is not the same as theirs was.  So, again, I ask, what do we do with Jesus’ claim that he is the gate?  Well, first of all, I don’t think we should fall into the trap that many Christians have for centuries of using Jesus’ words as a way to condemn non-Christians.  First, that’s not honest to our context today, but moreover, it’s simply doesn’t square up with everything else we know about Jesus Christ and God from the rest of the Bible.  Even in the Gospel of John itself, later on, Jesus tells us that he has other sheep that are not of this flock.  And elsewhere throughout the Bible, we hear of the God who gathers in all nations, the God who created all humanity in the divine image, and of the God for whom ‘neither death nor life … nor anything else in all creation will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.”  So, Christians in many times and places may have tried to use this passage in that exclusionist way, but we do not have to fall into the same trap.

              But, you know, there are other ways that we have appointed ourselves as the gatekeepers on this Jesus gate.  Let me explain.  If Jesus is the gate, as he says, then it would seem that perhaps that makes us, the Church, gatekeepers for this gate.  Or at least we have tried to make ourselves into gatekeepers quite often.  Recently, as we have been remembering the 40th anniversary this year of the death of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., together with the controversy over our sisters and brothers over at Trinity United Church of Christ in Chicago, I have heard a few people discussing a much earlier controversy about race and the church.  Way back in 1787, Richard Allen and his fellow African-American members of St. George’s Methodist Church in Philadelphia left that church because of the painful discrimination they endured there.  St. George’s had made themselves into gatekeepers, attempting to swing the gates closed to fellow people trying to worship God and be a part of Christ’s community. 

              Of course, there are other less overt, less sinister ways that we, the Church, have tried to close off the Jesus gate to people.  Whenever we get caught up in petty disputes over relatively insignificant matters, instead of focusing on inviting people into an experience of God, into relationship with Christ, then those gates get a bit more narrow.  Whenever new people are in our midst and we get bent out of shape about how they might in fact change us, instead of welcoming them on a journey where both they and us will be changed by God, then we make it pretty hard to find the open gate.  Whenever we put our own comfort with our way of life ahead of the demands of the gospel for mercy and justice, then those gates to what God is doing in the world slam shut.

              But friends, we are in the midst of the Great Fifty Days of Easter.  As Easter people, we know that with God, “slammed shut” is never the final answer.  In the resurrection, we see that even death itself cannot win.  The stone is rolled away!  Death is vanquished!  Christ is risen!  And in that power, we know that the gate that is Jesus is always being flung open to welcome us, where we will “come in and go out and find pasture” as Jesus says.  Christ “came that they may have life, and have it abundantly.”  This is the good news—Alleluia!

              In the Easter light of that good news, where does that leave us?  Well, first, I dare say we must repent of our attempts to be the kind of gatekeepers who shut the doors of the Jesus gate.  No more can we let ourselves try to block access to the riches that lie through those doors.  Of course, God is a god who makes a way when there is no way, so our gate closing attempts are bound to fail in the end anyway.  But, indeed, if Jesus is the gate, we must stop trying to close him off.

              But I’m not sure that I want to give up on the image of us as gatekeepers.  In fact, I think there may be an invitation here to be a different kind of gatekeeper.  If Jesus is the gate, then, as the Church, are we not called to be the kind of gatekeeper who stands there to invite people in?  The one who sees someone coming, and says “Hello, let me hold this door open for you.”  Maybe the word ‘gatekeeper’ isn’t best fit; maybe we think of this kind of person as an ‘usher’, someone who ‘ushers’ people in to experience the wonders they will find inside.  That is the invitation before us, to be ushers welcoming people into an “open-gate” community, to invite them into Jesus himself.

              Now, lest you think I have been too negative about what the Church has done in the past, there are wonderful examples of how we taken up this call, this invitation, as well.  When society was still struggling with slavery or the civil rights movement, it was many people in the Church who led on the side of mercy and justice in those struggles, holding open the gates to those seeking freedom and justice and love.  In our own Congregationalist tradition, we can look back with pride on things like the Amistad story, in which our forebears in the faith led the fight to free the Amistad captives.  Or in our life together now as the United Church of Christ, we have been at the forefront of flinging open the doors of the church to gay and lesbian people, extending an invitation to those who have faced far too many of that other kind of Christians-as-gatekeepers—and all of us, even here in this place, are richer for it. 

              So, again I say, we are called to be this second kind of gatekeeper, the ushering gatekeeper, the agents of God in the world inviting people in to experience all that God has in store for us.  And, you know, maybe like that company who’s commercial I heard on the radio, the one that builds fences, maybe we’re called to put up a gate in some unexpected places.  Except our gate, the gate that is Jesus, ours is the gate that is always open.  Our call is simply to put it up and hold it open, to others and to the world, so that all may be invited to enter in, to find pasture, to have life and have it abundantly. 

Blessing and honor, glory and power be unto God, now and forever.

Amen.