Jesus the Good Shepherd
April 13, 2008 (Easter 4)
"I am the Gate" (John 10.7)
Rev. Jennie M. Anderson

Lord, make us stewards of ourselves, that we may be servants of others, Take my words and speak through them, take our minds and think through them, take our hearts and set them on fire, for Jesus' sake. Amen.

What do you think Jesus is telling us in this passage? Let's take a closer look at the image of Jesus as a "gate" in this passage. What does a gate represent in our own perspective in today's world? How do we understand the statement, "I am the gate?" Do we consider gated communities? Do we think about the gate into the garden? How about the gate that is actually a verb, as in the horses gait in the race she ran? Or what about the gate that is the switch for the water on the fire truck or at the hydrant? The gates we encounter at work and play are many: there is the gate to the parking garage at the hospital, the gate at the entrance to the hockey game (too bad for the Bruins last night…), there is the gate in the courtroom, and the gate to the military base, the manufacturing plant or the construction site. There are lots and lots of gates that we encounter and that's not even considering the name… as in Bill Gates! I want to offer three little stories of encounters with gates in my life and then conclude with some final thoughts.

When you were children, did you walk on the top of fences around the perimeter of some enclosure? My brothers and I did. In the city there were fences made of stone, brick, cement and my favorite, giant links of nautical chain where each link was bigger than my foot and the supporting posts were giant pillars made of stone! In this particular image that I was remembering though, the fence is in the country, the seashore actually, down on the Cape, and the gate is an interruption in our smooth journey balancing on the narrow top of a cement fence that surrounds one of the largest properties of that small village and all with an astounding beach view. My brothers and I, we walk in a row, stepping very carefully and then we are confronted with a gate. Now depending on how wide the gap in the fence was, we would get down, go around and them get back up and continue walking. One section of the concrete fence had a gate that marked the stairwell which led to rolling fields and the ocean beyond. The gate had two pillars, also made of concrete that were separated just far enough to make it a challenge to leap across. We couldn't resist and would spend hours lining up to leap the gap that was the gate. How many of us in our adult life are found walking the fence? How many of us receive the courage from our prayers to leap across, through the arms of the interrupting gate? Was Jesus talking about such a gate, such a journey for us? Do sheep ever jump across the gate? Jesus said, "I am the gate."

In my first two years of high school, I was blessed to have the experience of actually raising sheep (and chickens and cows and pigs!) Sheep are not very bright and are mostly frightened animals. Jesus wasn't necessarily very complimentary with his description of us as sheep. Just picture the pastures and wonderful, dirty, smelly sheep and see in your minds the lost ones, the bossy ones, the pushy ones, the indignant ones and the frightened ones. There are all kinds of sheep. In my time at school, I got to help with the lambing and then got to be responsible for a little lamb. I named my lamb Barney. He was so sweet and his mother was very good. Not all sheep that give birth are good mothers, some reject their young. On the 300 acres that was the Mountain School, there were fences but the pastures were very wide and the fences were mostly made from simple wire. Vermont is a pretty peaceful state and most of the wild animals then weren't great predators. My little lamb was taken by a coyote one night though and killed. The fences didn't do enough, the coyote found his way, like a thief, and went through the fence… not through the gate. The story has a redeeming part to it in that, one of the other mother sheep was rejecting her lamb and by giving that little lamb the hide that Barney wasn't using anymore, Barney's mom accepted the lamb and fed it heartily. I still wonder about what Jesus meant when he said, "I am the gate?" This story certainly helps me to understand about the thief. Jesus said, "I am the gate."

My third illustration of gate-like thoughts is one I have recently experienced quite often since just after my ordination, and that is the gates of jail, of imprisoned persons, of those rejected by our society and incarcerated by our legal system, of the lost sheep and lambs. What redemptive quality does this gate have? In this place never does one gate open, until another gate is properly secured on the other end of the passage. There is no easy means of access from one place to another in jail. There is permission required all the way at all possible intermediate or transitional places. The people kept in these fences are not part of our normal experience in the world. As a matter of fact, unless you know someone personally, there is likely no reason, in our culture today, that you would even have to think about the occupants of these fences with the loud clanging gates, except as perhaps some very distant echo of where one never wants to go. These gates are loud and clang in place when shut. They inspire nervousness in visitors as they open with great ponderous cranking sounds and click back to the open position almost like the punctuation of a question. After the visitors have passed through the doorway, the gate closes again and locks in place with those extra cracking reports, sounds of security, and the next gate opens to the passage back out into the world. We do have to think about these places when one of the occupants is our child, our parent, our cousin or even our friend. We may even find an opportunity to serve someone who is serving time. Of course, whenever we get the chance to minister or serve through mission like this, most often we are the ones who are ministered to through that work. Visiting people in jail is a chance to offer hope in a way that those who experience this use of gates, those in jail, don't always get to experience. Maybe even this "sheep gate" isn't without redemptive qualities. A quote from a former inmate offered a new understanding in that place about reaching out to Jesus who is the gate:

She said, "Prayer is the one door in the prison that never closes. It is the bridge that leads from despair to hope." (Rhina Carmen)

Jesus said, "I am the gate."

Gates are the marks of a transition. They are as much the passageway from the place of safety to the vast pasture land as we venture out into the world from our homes or our normal way of life. There is a big wide world, where, like sheep, we go out to feed, find our pasture, fill ourselves with the experiences of broader communities and the many ways that different people of faith encounter God. And there's possibly more.

When we are making the passage from this life into the next, or helping someone else to do so, the gate we pass through can be incredibly transformative. In reading Fred Alling's new book, Brief Flights, we can gain an important insight into the vastness of transitional nature of this passage. I would like to close this meditation with a small exploration of what that can mean to our faith and understanding. It may seem somewhat different from what went on before but let's try it out.

Sometimes our journey through the gate, especially the one Jesus was talking about, has a transcendent quality to it. We are traveling along in our lives and moving through the gates from our place of safety into the world and then back again into the place of safety, never thinking about the nature of "the gate" through which we pass. But sometimes, a glimpse of the very nature of that gate comes to us in a very confusing, awesome and sometimes fearful and sometimes blissful way. How do we reconcile an experience like that with our every day journey without sounding daft? Well, I don't think we do really, but I think we all are better served with a little daftness in our spiritual experience. And so, in getting at the mystery of life, in the prologue of his book Fred offers an interesting story about how this "transcendent experience," is modeled. This is a story about an encounter with an understanding of the vastness of the mystery involved in one man's meeting with life in nature. Fred uses a story by Loren Eiseley, a naturalist and poet, to help point out our limited understanding of our world as he describes how he once encountered a huge yellow-and-black orb spider and its web. Loren writes:

The web was her universe and her senses did not extend beyond the lines and spokes of the great wheel she inhabited. Her extended claws could feel every vibration throughout that delicate structure. She knew the tug of wind, the fall of a raindrop, the flutter of a trapped moth's wing. Down one spoke of the web ran a stout ribbon of gossamer on which she could hurry out to investigate her prey. Curious, I took a pencil from my pocket and touched a strand of the web. Immediately there was a response. The web, plucked by its menacing occupant, began to vibrate until it was a blur… As the vibrations slowed, I could see the owner fingering her guidelines for signs of struggle. A pencil point was an intrusion into this universe for which no precedent existed. Spider was circumscribed by spider ideas; its universe was a spider universe. All outside was irrational, extraneous, at best raw material for spider. As I proceeded on my way along the gully, like a vast impossible shadow, I realized that in the world of spider I did not exist.

There are many ways we encounter gates and passages in our time and place in this world. How we find the idea of Jesus as the gate to the sheep fold helpful for improving our faith in God is up to us, both individually and as a community. We can pray, read, look and listen and we can experience those normal parts of our life occasionally in a way that is a quite extra ordinary. As Christians, we look to Jesus to teach us how to have a relationship with God. He is our model of how our faith is found. Let's walk through the gate that is Jesus and continue to grow and mature in our faith and understanding of God and our world. Let's find it together and share our stories of what this is like in our lives. Jesus said to them, "Very truly, I tell you, I am the gate for the sheep. I am the gate. Whoever enters by me will be saved, and will come in and go out and find pasture. I came that they may have life, and have it abundantly." Amen