A sermon on 1 Peter 2:19-25 & John 10:1-10 by Nathan Nettleton

“I have come that you may have life, and have it in abundance.”

Life in all its fullness. If you want a short punchy mission statement for Jesus Christ, for his purpose in life, that would be it. “I have come that you may have life, and have it in abundance.”

And if you want a snap shot vision of life in abundance, you probably can’t go past Psalm 23, as I said about six weeks ago when it last popped up in our readings. It is probably the all time classic summary of the deepest desires of the human heart. Beautiful, tranquil resting places. Spirits revived. Sure paths and a clear sense of direction, of purpose. Security, even in the face of the powers of death. A table always laden with sumptuous food and a cup that never runs empty. Goodness and love surrounding us all our days. Being forever enfolded in the loving presence of God. Ask anybody what sort of life they long for and their answer will probably echo something in that list.

“I have come that you may have life, and have it in abundance.”

But there is a big difference between Jesus’ quest to give us life in abundance and the quest of many human beings to gain life in abundance. When Jesus seeks to open the way to fullness of life, he seeks to open it for everyone, for all of creation. We are more inclined to seek to grasp it for ourselves, without regard for anybody else. Even at the expense of others. Just listen to talk-back radio any time someone proposes that we increase immigration. The lines flood with callers talking about how it will put our environment at risk, our life style at risk, our welfare at risk. And you probably won’t hear one caller point out that our environment is actually part of a single global environment and it’s not even possible to protect our environment by confining over-population to the other side of a border line. And that’s even before we ask whether our environment, our life-styles and our welfare are actually any more important than those of the rest of the world.

You see it’s not even possible to achieve fullness of life while it is denied to everyone else. If you live with everything while everyone around you lives with nothing, not only will you be relationally impoverished, but you will have to live behind walls and razor ribbon and armed guards to keep the have-nots off your stuff, and I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but the people who live behind walls and razor ribbon and armed guards are not actually happy. Walls erected to keep others out cause a crippling anxiety about possible security failure. As Dorothy Day once said, the only way to have real security is to live as close as you can to the bottom, because then you have no fear of a fall.

Jesus came that we might have life, and have it in abundance. All of us. And one of the biggest obstacles to the fulfilment of that mission is our desire to hoard it for our family, our group, our country. That greed, which is the basic operating principle of our entire economic system, tramples over the basic means of life for millions upon millions of people, and even those societies which ostensibly benefit from it are collapsing under the weight of anxiety, depression and their social consequences of community disintegration.

But as long as greed and the lust for power continue to hold sway, the quest for true abundance of life will be seen as a dangerous and subversive quest. Vested interests masquerading as moral principles will rise up spitting venom and stop at nothing to crush those who act and call for access to abundant life to be opened to all and not hoarded by a few. And when that happens it quickly sorts out the dreamy idealists from those who are willing to pay the price of freedom.

When he was abused, he did not return abuse.
When he suffered, he did not threaten.
He himself bore our sins in his body,
so that free from sins, we might life for righteousness.
By his wounds we have been healed.

We gather this morning to worship one who did not just speak nice words of justice and peace, who did not just say “I have come that you may have life to the full” but who stood firm in the face of the horrific oppositon to that quest. We gather to encounter the one who not only faced those horrors but who turned them back so that his suffering itself became redemptive, became the means for prizing open the door of life. And we gather to worship the one whose risen life is the guarantee that the powers of death do not have the last word, but that life in all its fullness cannot even be stopped by the grave. We gather round this table today, not pretending that the world is all sweetness and light and that sin and war and death are no more, but we gather in faith that life will have the last word and we gather in our woundedness to share in the medicine of life given to us by the one who is opening to us life in all its abundance.