Sermons

The Door of Opportunity

Roderic Frohman                              Third Presbyterian Church
April 17, 2005                                John 10:1-10

Doors and gates are all around us. There is the garden gate, door to our home, the parking ramp gate, our office door, the gate to Frontier Field, the door of the church. We walk in and out of gates and doors many times a day without so much as thinking about what they mean. But they can mean much. "A door or a gate functions in two ways, as a protection and as an opening." (Killinger, John “I Am The Door of The Sheep" Presbyterian Survey, Jan 1984, p. 52.)

As protection a door is crucially important. Every evening before going to bed I check all the doors. My wife thinks me obsessive-compulsive about this matter. I have been known to get out of bed and check the doors again if I cannot remember if the door was locked. If once out of 100, I find the door unlocked, my obsession is reinforced. There are so many horror stories we know in which burglars simply walk in an unlocked door to steal, pillage and rape. Burglary is one of my greatest fears. We live a society that is infected with the urge to be secure. We have to be. Doors have to be locked or monitored. Tragically, even church doors!

But gates and doors are also openings. We go through doors to the future and through our doors comes the future.

Parents know the excitement of the first day of school when we sent our little ones out the door to get on the bus. We smiled and we cried. And then it seems a few weeks later we helped them pack their bags to go out the door and off to college. We smiled and we cried. Then they move out through another door into their own independent life. We smile and we cry.

Sometimes folks have had to walk out of the door prematurely. A relationship collapsed. Someone decided to open the door to infidelity and got lost in the labyrinth of two loves.

Then, of course, there is the door of disease. Our immediate family has 4 female friends, all around age 50, who are struggling with cancer. From one of our friends in Minneapolis we received last week the outline for her memorial service. It may take place in a couple of months.

For us all there will be the time to go out the door permanently, to move out of the house that had been home for 20, 30, 40 years, and into an apartment, or assisted living, alone. A spouse had died.

And then we drive by the old house and see the door that used to be the threshold to so much happiness. We smiled and we cried. We can't go in or out that door any more.

Doors and gates are thresholds to change. They protect against change and they open to change. It is the change that is the rub.

In our Gospel text of the morning we read the words of Jesus, “I am the gate of the sheep.” Interestingly enough that is what it says in English, but in Greek it really says “door.” There is a Greek word for gate, but in this case it is a door. Perhaps this only matters to me. Regardless, it is a rural metaphor. The sheep door or gate to the ancient Palestinian corral functioned in two ways, as a protection and as an opening to pasture lands. When the sheep pass through the door at night it is to come into the safety of the fold. When they pass out in the morning, it is to find pasture.

There were two kinds of sheepfolds in ancient times. One had a roof for use during the winter in which one kept the family flock. But during the spring and summer and fall, the sheep of the whole town were kept in a large square sheepfold without a roof. The sheep were surrounded by walls to be protected from wolves, bears and thieves, and the wall also kept the sheep from straying. There was a single entrance to this ancient enclosure through which all of the sheep had to pass, coming in and going out. (Gail R. O’Day, “The Gospel of John”, in NIB Vol. 9, p. 672) “At night [and this is the crucial point to the biblical metaphor] the shepherd himself would lie down across the opening and no sheep could get in or out except over his body. Thus, in the most literal sense, the shepherd was the door. There was no access to the sheepfold except through him.” (Barclay, John, The Gospel of John c. 1958, Vol. 2 p. 67)

In the Gospel of John this door/shepherd metaphor which Jesus drew was originally quite pointed. In the story line sequence Jesus has just completed healing of the man born blind on whom the Pharisees played the all too familiar game of “blame the victim”. This story is part of the building confrontation between Jesus and the religious establishment, those who understood themselves to be the shepherds of Israel. So when Jesus said "I am the door of the sheep.... All who came before me are thieves and robbers...the sheep hear the shepherd's voice...they follow him because they know his voice," Jesus is emphatically declaring himself be the true shepherd of Israel and the religious leaders as false. We might wince at these stark contrasts, but like it or not “polemic and Christology are interwoven” in John’s Gospel. (Haenchen John, Vol. 2 p. 52)

They are interwoven by a series of “I am” sayings which I am sure you recall. Actually there are 7; these “I am’ sayings function in John’s gospel as mileposts in the story line. They begin with the feeding of the 5000; “I am the bread of life”, then, “I am the light of the world”; “I am the door;” “I am the good shepherd”; “I am the resurrection and the life”; “I am the way, truth and life”. The sayings end at the Last Supper with “I am the true vine.”

The contrasts are dramatic. If Jesus is the bread of life then what others offered must not have been all that nourishing. If Jesus is the light of the world, then the world must have been a pretty dark place. Why the polemic? Why the contrast? Because there were a lot of false shepherds.

The anonymous compiler of this gospel was the leader of a group sometimes called “The Johannine Circle”, a group of Christians that fled Jerusalem after it was reduced to rubble by the Roman General Titus in 70 AD. They lived east of the Jordan River or perhaps in Syria. They lived in an intellectually rich, multi-cultural environment composed of Greeks, Jews, and Italians. They were Christians whose roots are traceable to the famous Hellenistic Christian Stephen who was stoned to death. Their past life was gone. They were an exile community among many religious and cultural groups. There was official Judaism of the Pharisees alive and well in many synagogues, Palestinian Judaism, Hellenistic Judaism, Samaritan Judaism, the followers of John the Baptist, the Essenes of the Qumran community who kept the Dead Sea Scrolls. Then there were the Gnostic Christians, the North African Christians in Alexandria gathered around Clement who was issuing epistles of his own. There were the followers of the Shepherd of Hermas, and the philosophy of Mandaeanism. Of course there were the dozen or so Greco-Roman mystery religions. This environment, the great New Testament scholar Oscar Cullmann says, was the “home ground” of the Gospel of John (Oscar Cullmann, The Johannine Circle, Westminster , 1975 p. 30-38. This was the life setting, the context, the furnace in which this polemical gospel was forged.

Now the easiest thing would have been to say in this kind of rich buffet of religious and cultural choice was, “Take a little of this and a little of that”. “If you eat too well, demand Di-gel.” If you get too much Greek mystery religion, get back to the Essenes down by the Dead Sea for a spiritual purge.

Rather in the darkness of confusion of many ideologies the gospel writer reminds his congregation of what Jesus said, “I am the light of the world; whoever follows me shall not walk in the darkness, but shall have the light of life.” John 8:12

“Previously they heard that Jesus supplied the living water, [to the woman at the well, and] the bread of life, [to the 5000] now he offers the pasture of life.” ( Raymond E. Brown, The Gospel According to John I-XII p. 394 Doubleday 1966) “I am the door; if anyone enters through me, that one shall be saved, and shall go in and out, and find pasture. The thief comes only to steal and kill and destroy. I have come that they may have life, and have it abundantly”. (John 10:9-10) Pasture is the fullness of life as opposed the destruction of life which the false shepherd brings

There are many false shepherds among us today who compete for our loyalties. There are many voices calling us here and there, voices of promise. Preachers, politicians, financial wizards, all kinds of voices saying, "Come out here, this is where the action is... Follow me! You can trust me! I have your best welfare in mind. I am honest." These are somewhat easy to detect, especially if they sound like a used car dealer.

Harder to detect are the false shepherds embedded in our culture as values of middle class life. I am becoming more and more aware that the pasture on which we most frequently graze is the one called “standard of living.” To that pasture we are led by false shepherds of advertising. We are given poor models by the popular culture, and supplied with short term deadly financial nourishment; credit cards. We equate quality of life with quantity of possessions. George Carlin has framed this dilemma so nicely when he said, “Trying to be happy by accumulating possessions is like trying to satisfy hunger by taping sandwiches all over your body.” ( Roy, Jeanne and Dick, Choices for Sustainable Living, Northwest Earth Institute, Portland, c. 2002 p. VI-1)

Another false shepherd is the assumed right to consumption. If we can afford it somehow we think we have the right to buy it. I wonder how long this will stand the test of the real world. What happens to the planet when 1.3 billion Chinese exercise their economic “right” in a global economy to buy automobiles? What has happened to the planet when “just” millions of Americans did so? Population growth is now viewed as a problem by many governments and citizens. Consumption, in contrast, is almost universally seen as a good. We all feed on this pasture, or should we say “trough” of consumption.

To this we could add the value that many think we live on a planet with no biological limits. Or, given the current ecological crisis we will be saved by technology, or by business or by the government.

One the most powerful of all the false shepherds is not all that blatant or visible, our own fearful self, a self that would lead us to seek a life without pain, without the agony involved with growth and development. This is the shepherd who says to us, "Stay in the sheepfold, never venture out into new pastures. Don't take any risks." This false shepherd blocks the door to the pasture of opportunity and change and, unfortunately, admits the thief of low self-esteem. As a matter of fact, sheep of this sort have a hard time telling if they live in a coral, a home or a closet. Of course, depending where one is in one's life, there are some doors to be opened and some to be shut and never opened again, and some to be left open to permit ingress and egress. So we discover that we need help with the doors of our lives. We need a model, a mentor. We need a way.

Have you been to an elementary school recently? I love elementary schools. I love the way they always seem to smell of library paste. Almost every elementary school has door monitors to help the children in and out of school. Almost every school has a traffic patrol to help the children get across the street safely. In elementary school terms, Jesus is the door monitor or crossing guard of life.

It is a simple, yet astounding claim . The way to abundant life is to go through the door of Jesus. I cannot argue this empirically. One has to have tried it to know it to be true. And ultimately it is a matter of discernment. We have to first of all be captivated by the model of Jesus before we can trust our life's threshold moments to him. We have to trust that Jesus holds the key to the door of our lives before we will even stop at our door on the head long rush to get out and ask, "Is it the right time to go out now, or is there danger out there?" Of course there are many who by ignorance don't even know how to ask the question. Then there are those who know Jesus holds the key but don't want his advice.

What is the key of Jesus?

The key of the door of Jesus is seen in his life: a life of tolerance, healing, compassion.

The key of Jesus is seen in his death. "The good shepherd lays down his life for his sheep.”

The key of Jesus is seen in his principles, principles of standing with the poor and oppressed, with the different, of "doing unto others as we would have them do to us."

The key of Jesus is seen in his resurrected Spirit, a spirit of love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, faithfulness, gentleness, self control (Gal 5:22).

In short, the key of the doorkeeper is to imitate the doorkeeper.

There have been and will be doors of opportunity, doors of conscience, doors of death, doors love, doors of justice, doors of loss, doors of disease, doors of pain, doors of satisfaction, doors of heartache, doors of accomplishment, doors of failure, doors of embarrassment.

Doors function in two ways, protection and opening.

On the way out the door next time, it might be wise to look around and ask, [Here, the preacher fumbled for his keys, and showed them to the congregation.] “Hmmm……… Where did I put that Jesus key?”