An Open Table where Love knows no borders

Adding to the Flock

A sermon on John 10:11-18 & 1 John 3:16-24 by Nathan Nettleton

It is quite common, when visiting a Baptist church on the occasion of an Infant Presentation rite, to hear a sermon explaining why we are not baptising the child. Of course, the irony of this is that the preacher usually ends up having a lot more to say about what is not being done than what is being done, which is probably an indication that we often have very little idea what we are doing. I’m not going to say much about either tonight, but I wanted to raise it, because I think it illustrates a pretty important issue from tonight’s Bible readings, and it is an issue which, while not specifically about Infant Presentation rites, is quite important to our general understanding of what it means to connect people to the church, infants or otherwise.

In tonight’s gospel reading, we heard Jesus speak of himself as the “good shepherd”, “the good shepherd who lays down his life for the sheep.” The most common, and most tempting thing for a preacher to do with this passage, is to begin contrasting the “good shepherd” with the bad shepherds. The oldest form of this approach said that before Jesus, the people of God had been under the care of the Jewish religious leaders, but that these leaders had failed to properly care for God’s flock, and so God had sent the “good shepherd” to replace them. So now the chosen people, the true flock of God’s sheep, are not the Jews, but the Christians. It was a pretty crude approach that has given birth to all sorts of anti-semitic atrocities down through the years, and it is easy to see how much it was driven by a desire to locate ourselves in the right camp, just like those hostile sermons about infant baptism verses infant presentation.

A somewhat improved approach focussed not on the religious leaders before the time of Jesus, but on those within the church since, to shine a searching light on the all-too-often corrupt and power-hungry antics of church leaders and church institutions. This is certainly something that needs to be done. Things like the current royal commissions into the failures of church institutions and their leaders to protect children in their care must be taken seriously, and we need to learn from our failures and ensure that they are not repeated. But if we are going to manage to do that, we need to own that they are “our” failures, and far too much of the preaching about bad shepherds is actually another form of “us” and “them” thinking that delights in condemning others while gloating over our own status as the sheep of the good shepherd who are therefore beloved by God and so so much better than “those” people who are different from us, which of course means “wrong”.

If we were to take such an approach to our understanding of the good shepherd, then our celebration with little Tara tonight, regardless of whether we baptised her or enrolled her as a junior catechumen, would be all about celebrating our proud belief that the group she was being joined to, “us”, was the group that was more right, and beloved by God, and more truly the one true flock of the good shepherd. But if we did that, we would be doing violence to the words of Jesus and inflicting more grievous wounds on his body, the Church.

And yet, we can’t escape the questions that have often led in such directions. Of course we want to know what it means to be saved, and to be forgiven and beloved by God. And of course parents want to know how their newborn children are to be gathered into the life and love of God. Both infant baptism and infant presentation rites began in the church’s attempts to answer such questions. The questions are not wrong, but the aftermath all too often degenerates into fractious disputes over who came up with the best answer, and such disputes are a blight on both answers.

Within this same passage, Jesus clearly foresees and challenges our tendencies to try to draw lines around our own groups and define ourselves as the one true chosen flock. He says, quite explicitly, “I have other sheep that do not belong to this fold. I must bring them also, and they will listen to my voice.” Do you hear that? They do not belong to this fold, but they are still my sheep. Whichever fold you are in, it is not the only one whose sheep belong to Jesus.

And you can see this writ large throughout the life and ministry of Jesus. Nearly every conflict he found himself in, including those that led to his death, were about his refusal to accept that any one group had a monopoly on who was saved and beloved by God. Over and over and over he was criticised and condemned for welcoming the wrong people, eating with the wrong people, forgiving the wrong people, and celebrating God’s love with the wrong people. Everyone wanted the blessings of God reserved for their special group, and Jesus insisted on spreading and sharing out the blessings of God as though they were for everyone, insiders and outsiders alike.

But if the church is not the special group of Jesus’s insiders, what is it? What are we doing here, and why are we deciding that this child should, at least until she is old enough to know better, be brought up within its shared life? If it does not guarantee that we’re right where others are wrong, or we’re saved where others are damned, what is the point?

Well, what Jesus stated on a number of occasions, and what our reading from the first letter of John restated tonight, was that you can summarise God’s expectations of us in one word – love. Love one another, as Jesus has taught us, and as Jesus has loved us. As Jesus put it on another occasion, people will know that you are his followers, not by which group you belong to or which set of rituals you practice, but by the way that you love one another. Now some people will quite rightly object that that sounds a bit too simple. Love one another can sound a bit in-house. What about love others, and even love your enemies? Yes, these are crucially important and clearly part of what Jesus taught. But he started with love one another, and surely he knew what he was saying. You see, learning to truly love others, and especially truly loving our enemies, has to start somewhere. Sometimes we kid ourselves that we can love our enemies while we are really keeping our distance from them and loving in theory only. It is always harder to love the people who are close enough to be irritating. We gather here, not because we are the right group, or the most wonderfully loving and Christlike people around, but because we need to commit ourselves to sharing our lives with a specific group of people who frequently get on our nerves, and hang in there with them, for better or for worse, while we learn what it means to really love one another as the good shepherd loves us.

So when, in a few minutes, we sign little Tara up as a part of this congregation, we are not doing so because we think that that puts her into the loving hands of God. We are doing it because we recognise that she is already securely held in the loving hands of God, and because this is the place and these are the people with whom we are learning together what it means to surrender ourselves to that love and be transformed more and more fully in the shape of that love, and we truly hope that she will come with us on that journey.

The good shepherd is known by his willingness to lay down his life for the sheep, and if we are to truly follow him, we too will be known by our willingness to give our lives for others, not by our concern to secure our own rightness or chosenness in opposition to others. The good shepherd lays down his life for you and for me and for Tara, and it appears that he couldn’t care less which flock you come from – he will recognise you as his own regardless and call you to follow him, in company with others, deeper and deeper into the fullness of life and love. And so it is to sharing in that journey that we now come to welcome Tara.

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