Let Me Count The Ways

Sermon Title: Let Me Count The Ways

Poolesville Presbyterian Church

05.11.14; Rev. David Williams

Scripture Lesson:  John 10:1-10

We’ve started reaching the point where I’m struggling to help my kids with their homework.

Perhaps I should rephrase that.  We are reaching the point when they’ve both grown up so much that I can’t help either one of them with their work.  

I was never exactly the best of folks when it came to getting homework done.  I’d developed a profound skill at looking like I was doing homework, though.  I would diligently settle into my room to read, immersing myself in the vital study of Camus and Sartre and Doestoevsky, which would have been great if they’d had anything to do with any class I was actually taking.  I would sit there with my geometry textbook on one hand, and a piece of paper on the other.  There I am, ready to study.  But somehow when those equations passed from the text through my brain and out my hand onto the page, they came out on the page looking like pencil drawings of jacked-up ‘71 Chevelles.  The human mind is an incredible thing.

When it came time to get around to getting my work done, it’d tend to be a frantic rush on the bus or in the five minutes before class started.

Hey...what’d you get for question three?  Cool. That’s just what I got!  What about questions four through ten?

I finally mastered high school math well after high school, when I had to reteach it to myself to take grad school exams.  And there, the way I learned on my own was to find the replicable pattern for any particular type of equation.  Look at one problem.  Look at another problem.  Grasp the principle that moves you from one step to another, and bam...every problem after that is remarkably straightforward.

It’s a clear path, the cleanest and simplest way to get from the problem to the resolution.  Which, as I see it, is the whole point of doing a math problem in the first place.  Find the path to the outcome.

My older son has already moved well past my outer threshold mathematically, but I also struggle with my younger one’s work.  What’s most challenging is finding that simple rule, that most elemental solution, as I work my way through the thickets of complexity in his textbooks.  I can do it, still, but I don’t recall it being as hard to find the basic patterns.  Here’s one way to to it, the text says.  Here’s another way.  And wait, here’s a way to write it out.  And here’s a concept map.  And here’s a clown, acting it out with puppets.

Eventually, it’s in there, but there are so many different ways presented that getting through to the simplest solution path seems like a struggle.

The idea, of course, is that there are many different ways that human beings learn.  Some learning is more visual.  Some folks operate more conceptually, and some are more kinesthetic.  The challenge comes when we try to find our way when there seem to be a thousand different possible paths.  How do we get down to that which is the most essential?  How do we get to where we’re yearning to be in life, if we’re not even quite sure where we’re headed or how to get there?

That’s the peculiar tension that plays out through the reading from John’s Gospel today, where we see Jesus wrapped up in conversation with Pharisees.  This little passage picks up where the last story we heard from John left off.  He’s just been in the middle of a conversation with a blind man that had been healed, a conversation that seemed to slam the Pharisees, when some Pharisees nearby interjected.

And suddenly, Jesus is sort of telling a story.  Sort of.  This is John’s Gospel, after all, and the way that John tells us about Jesus is different from the way that the other three Gospels pitch out that message.  If it’s Mark, Matthew, or Luke...particularly Matthew and Luke...the stories come fast and furious.  

There’s one parable after another, headspinning tales about the nature of the Reign of God, meaning what the world looks like when we all are living according to the love of God.  Those stories force the listener to think and to use their imaginations as they try to grasp the message that Jesus came into the world to deliver.  It was a standard method of rabbis of the time, a way to force their students to learn what was most essential by actually using their brains.

But John doesn’t usually roll like that.  Instead, this much more intimate Gospel tends to record challenging and highly symbolic conversations.  Unlike Mark and Matthew and Luke, the focus of those conversations is not God’s Kingdom here on earth, but Jesus talking about how he personally is living that out.  This is who I am, Jesus says.  This is how you can be.

Here, though, he tells a story.  That makes this little section of John unusual, because it almost...almost...is a story.  Jesus begins with the story of a sheepfold, an enclosure in which livestock would be kept safe from predators over the course of an evening.  There was just one way in, and one way out, and as Jesus spins out the story, he presents himself as a shepherd leading sheep into the fold.

The gate is opened, and the sheep follow the voice of their shepherd, and...a hand goes up in the back of the room.

“Um, Jesus?  We...er...ah...don’t quite get what it is you’re talking about.”

“Excuse me?”

“You know, the gate thing.  And the sheep.  Are we the sheep?  Are you the shepherd?  What is the sheepfold?  And if you’re the shepherd, who’s the gatekeeper?  Does the gatekeeper look like Sigourney Weaver?”

It’s clear that they don’t get it, not at all.  And so Jesus takes another swing at it.

“I am the...um...gate for the sheep,” he says, completely changing metaphors.  He then makes reference to “all those who came before” as being thieves and bandits, which most scholars take to mean those messianic figures that came before him.  “Enter by me,” he says.  “Have life, and have it abundantly.”

Our passage wraps up there, but if you go on one more verse...well, he’s right back to talking about being the good shepherd again.

What’s fascinating about this little passage is that there’s a peculiar tension.  

On the one hand, throughout John’s Gospel Jesus gives us images of a single path, a single Way.  He is clearly presenting himself, his person, his Way of being, as the Way to stand in right relationship with God.  Follow this teaching, he says, and all will be well.

That’s great, we say.  Tell us the one thing we need to know, and we’ll be done with it.  We like things nice and simple and straightforward.  Do this, do that, do the next thing, and then you’ll have reached the solution.

“I am the Way, the Truth, and the Life,” says Jesus, elsewhere in John.  Christians are particularly fond of that passage, because it’s really simple, and it makes us feel we’ve got the answer right and everyone else is just out of luck.  We like that.

But then there’s the other hand.  Jesus makes a point of describing this one great truth in dozens of different ways.  He explains it using story after story, image after image.  They are all different, each one framing the same great Truth from a different perspective and using a different image.  He does not hit us with one slogan, over and over again, like Don Draper trying to get a brand identity stuck in our heads.  The Kingdom of God!  I’m loving it!  Just do it!  It’s finger lickin’ good!

That’s not how he teaches.  He gives us stories and symbols, and comes at who he is and what he taught from dozens of different angles.

In that tension between one simple path and the many ways of telling it, we find the challenge for our own faith and our own journey.

We are to follow that path, but each of us with our own gifts and in our own way.

Let that be so, for you and for me, AMEN.