First Presbyterian Church of Watertown

John 10

“What Have I Gotten Myself Into?

The Rev. Dr. Fred G. Garry

April 13, 2008

During seminary as part of my fieldwork I was a chaplain in a psychiatric hospital. By and large this meant I would go to the hospital twice a week and meet with patients. Most of the folks there were just like you and me. They had families and lives and careers; they had hometowns and good things in their past and bad things.

This kind of common ground doesn’t present itself right off. You need to sift through the Mick Jaggers and the daughter’s of Jesus and Frank’s sincere conviction that he invented tinfoil. (Which is always a fun moment in a psych hospital as I still don’t know who invented tinfoil and it may just as have been Frank, but I am still convinced he was just using this as a coping skill for his very low self-esteem.) After you sift a bit you find that folks with schizophrenia are sons and daughters, people with clinical depression are someone’s mother or father.

In addition to the usual rounds and meetings, once a month I would lead a worship service at the chapel on the hospital grounds. The deal was you showed up at 8:30 and helped the local Catholic priest lead a service and then after he left myself and another chaplain would lead a Protestant service.

The worship services there were, shall we say, always an adventure. I learned early on and the hard way to never ask a rhetorical question in a sermon. Folks there felt free to answer and the answers were never really where I was going in the sermon. It was always intriguing to see the way the “order” of service would occur. It wasn’t willy-nilly; but it was never a kind of uninterrupted flow we expect here each week.

Driving up to Potsdam on Thursday I was brought back to these services by the question of a caller to NPR. The caller asked the all-Roman Catholic panel assembled to discuss the upcoming visit of Pope Benedict why he was not allowed to take communion? He was a former Catholic now Protestant and it bothered him each time he took his sons to Mass that there was a big warning on the missal about his not being welcome to partake of the Eucharist. His comments took me right back to the psych hospital.

I was taken back to the services the priest led before our Protestant service. There were two things there were really intriguing about this guy, the priest. One was that he could preach. He offered the same weekly homily he would give at his church to the patients and they were good, which is not a distinguishing characteristic for much of Roman Catholic preaching. But the other distinct memory is that he always offered us communion. He said, don’t tell anyone, as it would mean a certain transfer to Arizona. Yet, he offered to us along with everyone else. Now that it’s twenty years later and I think he’s safe to talk about it.

I am not a big ecumenical guy so this act of kindness and solidarity wasn’t a spiritual awakening or affirmation of the larger church for me. And I don’t think it was offered to be such. (I don’t think this would have been extended at his parish.) The reason why I believe he took this risk, and it was a risk, was that at the hospital in the midst of such life shattering disease and brokenness any false boundary, any artificial distinction just doesn’t ring true. It doesn’t make sense.

There is something about life being really broken creating a sense of solidarity. You might see it in a disaster. Pecking orders, decorum, rules it’s not that they don’t matter its that they don’t make a whole lot of sense there. Each time I was in the psyche hospital singing some really bad hymns a cappella seated next to a woman wearing five pairs of sunglasses singing her own song, there was a kind of peace and calm and reassurance that was about being one, being human. There were no boundaries expect being people hoping for blessing. Somehow, the woman with the glasses, the priest with the good sermon, Frank and the daughter of Jesus and me, well, we were all praying together, trying to find salvation together.

The caller who wanted to know why he couldn’t take communion was given a pretty good response. You’re Protestant. Protestants were born, made, created to protest the mass not receive it. We put this warning in the missal lest you forget who you are and please know that you are always welcome home once you no longer desire to be a Protestant.

In the psych hospital it wasn’t that the boundaries between Catholic and Protestant didn’t exist. Again, I don’t think the priest would have been as accommodating in his parish. It was just in the context of the hospital our distinctions met a kind of trump card of life, a kind of get out of the jail of your self-importance free card.

It is one of the cruelest of ironies it would seem that the church is ever forgetting it was born not of perfection, or the absence of risk, but sacrifice and brokenness. A part of me wants to believe that it’s just not easy to hold together that we have been given the truth of life and yet we are still broken beyond belief. This could be called a paradox, but I like to think of it as a kick in the pants. We sing about amazing grace and then demand a kind of error free life; we are fine saying God loves you and me and everyone, but find it darn near impossible to live this out for us.

I can remember taking a group of teenagers down to Mexico who played a wicked game. They took turns saying horrible things to one another. But it wasn’t just an insult. The mean saying had to embody the irony of our divisions, our inability to love all. These were some sophisticated kids. I will never forget one of them saying, “Jesus loves you which is good because no one else does.” I was about to intrude when the one who was so shunned replied, “I need to speak the truth in love,” and then smiling said, “You’re a selfish, evil person.” Now it was said in jest, but it was too close to life to be funny.

The Gospel of John is about divisions and irony and how challenging it is to live up to the mandate of Christ, to embody his life. Mainly though the Gospel of John is just a kick in the pants. Read in isolation our passage this morning is not really all that challenging. Jesus says, “I am the gate; I am the way unto life and abundance.” Yet, once we find out the people to whom Jesus is speaking it gets a little funny and even wicked. It’s even a kick in the pants.

Jesus is talking to the Pharisees who have just interrogated a man he healed. The Pharisees were mad that Jesus healed on the Sabbath and that he was not one of them, he was not following the rules, and mostly that he hung out with the less than acceptable rabble. Jesus, just before he makes his parabolic claims about sheep and gates and voices, has just told the Pharisees that they are sinners because they don’t think they are sinners. He is angry with them that they intimidated the parents of the man born blind from birth to in essence betray their son so they might stay in good standing with them and with the synagogue. So when Jesus says “I am the gate,” it is a rejection of their authority.

But it’s also more. It’s a disdain of their authority and what they had made the synagogue and how they had abused the people under their care. There are different theories about this disdain. A number of scholars for many centuries have tried to find out why John’s picture of Jesus would have so much irony, so many pitfalls, and why it seems to undermine the very church it was meant to inspire and instruct. After much thought my belief is that John’s Gospel is filled with a disdain over what the church had become. The young church was becoming divisive and exclusive. In short order it wasn’t that you believed in Jesus, it was whether you believed what you were supposed to believe about Jesus.

I believe this is the perennial challenge of the church. The faces and issues change, but the failure remains the same. We divide the church, control the church, exclude others and ever are reluctant to embody the sacrifice the Gospel was meant to inspire. This is what makes John’s Gospel ever relevant, yet also what makes it so hard to preach. As a pastor I believe I am only effective, able to fulfill my calling as I love the church- there is no love in disdain. Imbedded in John is a deep undercurrent and disdain that never sits right with a love of the church. And yet, love is what John talks about the most and claims the church is meant to be.

When Jesus tells the Pharisees he’s the gate not them, he’s saying, “I love these people. You don’t love them. So they are mine.” And by inference he is saying, if you don’t love them you’re a thief and a robber or a hireling who does a job but has no heart; gets money but gives no love. John’s a kick in the pants.

I want to say it was the psych hospital that opened up the dilemma of love for me in terms of ministry and the church. In the precarious world of delusions and phobias and paranoia and hallucinations there is no room for a hireling. The patients would literally weed out chaplains they deemed as clock punchers. You didn’t tread this ground expect with love. To do this they would say the most outlandish things and put you in the most of uncomfortable places to see whether or not you really cared or if you really needed a job. After a time this became clear- the hazing that is. And then it stopped and the truth began to flow. All of sudden there were friendships and a good deal of laughter.

The Gospel of John is a kind of hazing. In this Gospel Jesus says the most outlandish things- cryptic and bizarre- he tells his disciples they need to drink his blood and gnaw on his flesh, but he also says the most honest and kind: I have come to make your joy complete, or as we see in our text, I am the gate through which people will find life, and a good life. But whether he says lovely things or outlandish things his voice is sharpened by John to cut to the heart of a church losing its way. Zeal has been replaced with control, freedom has been sacrificed for power, and most sadly the experience of righteousness with the demand to be right and not forgiving.

The only way out it would seem for John is that we look to each other, to the people all around us the way Jesus does. Maybe this would shake us out of our fogginess and we would remember God gave us his son and he gave us his life. Can’t we do the same for one another? We will still struggle with what is right and wrong, we will still try to achieve a kind of perfection as the absence of what is wrong instead of the presence of what is good. But we will love each other. Again and again in his gospel and his letters the foil to our foolishness is love.

While I was working in the psych hospital a mentor of mine told me a story of his first parish. He told me of how he was the pastor of a Congregational church in New England, which meant he did the preaching and the elders did the running of the church. This came clear one night when he was rousted from sleep by the clerk of the session. The clerk said he was heading to the jail, there was a bit of problem. He was welcome to come if he wanted.

Outside the jail the sheriff described how a group of teens had decided to get into some mischief, they spray painted the house of the town crank. As they were in mid spray the sheriff pulled up and then invited the boys to enjoy a free ride in his squad car. None of their parents had been notified. He thought the clerk would want to know first.

When they reached the inside of the small country jail they were greeted by a rather whooped bunch, heads down, all in one cell together. The clerk spoke and said, “I need to know one thing of you. How many of you boys are baptized?” There was a moment of confusion as they all looked to each other to see what the next would do. Finally one after another they raised their hands. With all their hands aloft the clerk swore and waived his hands in frustration. “Well,” he said, “if they’re all baptized then we have to pay for them all. They are ours.”

And they did. They bailed them out, brought them home and then back to court the next day where the judge agreed to suspend any sentence if the elders agreed to take the boys out and paint the house. My mentor said, they did this.

Now, this is what John wants of the church. He wants people to feel a sense of oneness and love and responsibility for one another. He wants brokenness and mistakes to be met with grace not wrath.

It’s a fine line that keeps the opposites of irony at bay, in tension with one another. John wants us to say of each other, “they are ours; we will take them.” Yet he also knows this moment often comes with things we don’t like or would rather not have. When Jesus says to the Pharisees you’re robbers and thieves and hirelings he is saying you will not love people unless it suits you; you won’t lay down your life for these, for the church.

In our refinement we can’t help but re-create this kind of sacrifice and love into something fuzzy, negotiable, a matter of contract; in our traditions the divisions that keep us apart are all too clear and self-fulfilling. In the Sundays at the psyche hospital I was given a glimpse of an image of the Church John tried to convey, to inspire. Sitting next to the woman with five sunglasses, one on top of another, or hearing the man who felt the robins were a sign of his mother’s disdain I couldn’t help but feel like a common pilgrim, a lamb hoping that Jesus is the gate because that was the only way we were getting in.

I hope Jesus was laughing when spoke to the Pharisees. I hope he said, “I am the gate.” Because sometimes our brokenness is only endured with laughter. I don’t believe we are yet the church of which John dreamed and wrote. But I can hear his voice. Can’t you? Who is not our brother and sister? How can we not love? What is the point of being a church if it is not so joy can be complete? Jesus said, “I am the gate.” Oh, thanks be to God. Amen.