Click Here To Read Past Sermons  

Sermon for Easter 4A                                                                                April 21, 2002

Jesus said, “I came that they may have life, and have it abundantly.”

Today is the Fourth Sunday of Easter, a Sunday that traditionally is centered on the image of Jesus the Good Shepherd. Today we give thanks that Jesus calls us by name and leads us into life, and today we renew our own promise to follow, like a flock, where Jesus leads the way. Today is Good Shepherd Sunday.

Today is also the Sunday closest to the Feast of St George, the festival of our own patron saint. The actual commemoration of St George is on April 23—so we are a couple days ahead of schedule—but on this Sunday we recall George’s witness and ministry, and we reflect together on how our witness and ministry carries on the good work that God made manifest in George and that God continues in us. So today is St George’s Sunday.

And today is the day when we as Christians celebrate Earth Day, just as yesterday was Earth Sabbath for some synagogues and Friday was a day of prayers for the Earth in some mosques. This is a day for us to proclaim the good news that in Christ’s resurrection the whole Earth is given the promise of new life, and it’s a day for us to reflect on our call as Christians to be stewards of the earth and priests in the sacrament of creation. So today is Earth Sunday.

Good Shepherd Sunday, St George’s Day, Earth Day—any one of them alone would make a fine theme for the day, and here we have all three. So I am going to try to weave them all together into one sermon, and the thread that will weave them all is the one verse, “Jesus said, ‘I came that they may have life, and have it abundantly.’”

That promise of abundant life is the heart of the image of the Good Shepherd. In the Gospel today, Jesus says that he is the good shepherd who calls his sheep by name and leads them out to pasture: he is the living compassion of God made manifest in human life, who knows each of us from the inside, in the most intimate way, and who calls each of us to that particular work and the worship that will fulfill our own most genuine desires. Jesus is the good shepherd who goes ahead of us, who enters into all the possibilities and potentialities of human experience so that he may be God-with-us always and everywhere. Jesus is the one who goes ahead of us even into death, so that we may follow his way that transforms suffering into resurrection. Jesus the good shepherd is the one who opens up the gate—the one who is the gate, the one who is the Way and the Truth and the Life—the one in whom we find the way to pasture, the one in whom we find the way to the things that really nurture us, the things that really feed us, the things that really sustain us and help us to grow into whole and genuine people.

All those images of the Good Shepherd cluster around that central meaning: that Jesus is the one who shows us how to live a genuine life; that Jesus is the one who shows us how to live a life where we give what we have and receive what we need in generosity and grace, in well-being and peace; that Jesus is the one who shows us how to live a life that is abundant in the abundance of God’s love. Jesus says, “I came that they may have life, and have it abundantly.”

That same theme of abundant life is woven all through the story of St George. Most of you know the basic story: George is a Christian knight who in his travels comes to a city that is being ravaged by a terrible dragon. The dragon lives in a swamp, and between its poisonous breath and its fierce appetite it has destroyed all the farms around the city and is beginning to threaten the city itself. The townspeople feed it several sheep a day to keep it at bay; but the dragon’s appetite grows worse, and it eventually demands a human meal. The mayor’s daughter is chosen by lot to feed the dragon’s hunger. And just as she is being taken out to the dragon, George rides up, and George confronts the dragon, and George commands the dragon in the name of Christ—and in most versions of the tale George kills the dragon, but in one version of the story dear to this parish’s heart, George tames the dragon and everyone ends up friends—but in every version, the threat of the dragon is brought to an end, and the city can live in peace.

Of course to us nowadays, the whole story has the air of legend and folktale about it; but on a symbolic level, the story speaks to us that same message of abundant life. The dragon is an image of everything that is destructive of life: fears and worries and anxieties that can poison our capacity for joy; angers and hatreds and self-destructive habits that can eat us up and consume our energies and abilities; injustice and oppression that make us want to be sure to protect our own, even if someone else must pay the price for us. The dragon destroys life; but George, and especially George’s faith in Christ, is the symbol of that which restores life. George’s faith gives him the strength to confront the dragon, just as faith gives us the strength to confront fear and anxiety, hatred and anger, injustice and oppression. George’s faith gives him the strength to break the power of destructiveness and to give the city a chance for a more abundant life, just as faith gives us the strength to persevere in resisting the power of destructiveness, and to bring the chance for more abundant life—more affordable housing, more accessible healthcare, more available food, more equable living—to our city, our community, our state, our nation, our world. The story of George and the dragon is a story of working for well-being in the larger human community. And that too is part of what Jesus means when he says, “I came that they may have life, and have it abundantly.”

Finally, today we are also observing Earth Day. And Earth Day draws our attention to well-being in community, not just for the human community, but for the larger community of which humans are just one part—the community that includes people and animals and plants and insects and microbes; the community that includes cities and forests and prairies and oceans and atmosphere, the community of which we are citizens by nature, whether we recognize it or not. I think all too often these days we human beings are more like the dragon in the George story: we’re the ones whose poisonous breath from cars and factories and power plants is contaminating the air; we’re the ones whose ravenous appetite for energy and resources is gobbling up everything in sight. The observance of Earth Day is a call to us to be less dragonish in our relationship with the earth community.

But the message of Earth Day is not just a negative “Don’t do that!”—the message of Earth Day is also a positive call to abundance of life in well-being for the whole world. We today are rediscovering with scientific precision a truth that has been part of the ancient wisdom of many peoples and many cultures: the truth that all life is linked together, that all creatures are connected to each other, that what hurts one part of the body hurts the whole body and what heals one part of the body heals the whole body. The message of Earth Day is that we enjoy our own lives more when we are more tuned in to the richness and the well-being of our natural neighbors. There is joy in turning off the TV and dousing the electric lights and paying more attention to starlight. There is joy in buying and eating foods that are fresher and more locally grown, and that require less packaging and processing and transportation before they come to us. There is joy in learning how to surround ourselves with less stuff and engage ourselves in more life. To be sure, living more simply on the earth will involve substantial sacrifices from us, especially for us in the materialist West; it won’t be easy for us to change our lifestyles so that we use less energy, and conserve more resources, and give in less to the indulgence of our greeds. But the paradoxical good news is that a simpler life can also be a more abundant life, as we learn to live in communion with the people and animals and plants and things around us, and not just to use them as resources to be consumed. Communion and consumption are very different things; and the Gospel tells us that one of them has a future, and one is a dead end. And that too is part of what Jesus means when he says, “I came that they may have life, and have it abundantly.”

So today we observe Good Shepherd Sunday, and St George’s Day, and Earth Day, all wrapped up together, all woven into one in Jesus’ promise of abundant life. Let it be our prayer today that we may receive that abundant life and we may live that abundant life and we may share that abundant life, as Christ’s faithful in the flock, and as Christ’s witnesses in the city, and as Christ’s co-workers in the new creation.

In the Name of God: Yahweh, Jesus, and Holy Spirit. Amen.