“Liberated by the Gate”
John 10:1-10
4th Sunday of Easter – April 12/13, 2008
Pastor Chip Winter

            Grace to you and Peace, from God our Father and from our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ, Amen. The text for our sermon is the Gospel lesson appointed for this fourth Sunday of Easter, Good Shepherd Sunday.
            My dear family in Christ, do you pay attention to gates? If you look at gates with some seriousness you’ll find that they send different messages. Some gates are perpetually open, only closed when something inside the gate - a dog, a horse, and a child - needs to be kept inside temporarily. Other gates are perpetually closed, only open for a few seconds to let in what is to be protected from what's outside, like cattle to be kept off the highway. Most gates are attached to fences, serving as the access point between what is in and what is out. They are a breach in the security of the fence, but such gates fill the gap momentarily and allow for both security and movement.
            Amazingly, there are even gates that have no fences. There stands, at the edge of a yard, or on either side of the driveway, a decorative gate; a striking feature, but no fence is attached. I’ve never really understood that kind of landscaping, but whenever you see such a gate perhaps it can serve as a prompter to pray, "Lord, if ever our street is besieged with a criminal element, let it be a genius of a crook – one that is foiled by such a gate as this."
            Jesus, however, is not a decorative gate; not the way He describes Himself in our text for this weekend’s services.  As gates go, Jesus may seem like an odd choice, but He is not decoration. He describes the role of the gate clearly - it's the entrance to safety, the threshold between security and threat, and the place of division between what should be let in and what should be kept out.
            Jesus says, "I am the gate." He is the barrier between the thieves who want to steal, kill, and destroy and the hapless sheep of the Good Shepherd; sheep who need His protection from those who would bring harm, destruction, even death.
            Jesus is the gate who divides the realm of life from the realm of death through the sacrifice He offered of Himself on Calvary’s cross.  From which sacrifice, He rose in triumph!
            Some friends were returning from the beach one afternoon. They took a break at the convenience store and were making their way to the restroom when one of them heard a "hey, you!" There were only two options of who that "you" might be and something told one of them it wasn't his friend – the friend’s long legs already had him at the back of the store when the clerk had called out. So, the man stopped, turned around, and saw the cashier walking toward him at what he took to be an unfriendly pace.
            "You just blew my mind," she said. "Turn around, I have to read that again." The man, a pastor, looked down to see what tee-shirt he was wearing - high school had been the last time he had any mind-blowing tee-shirts and that was some time back. It was one of those “witness wear” tee shirts, not exactly the risqué material that the cashier would see throughout the summer, near the beach. In fact, that's what startled the pastor most: all summer she sees what sunburned vacationers wear on their long journeys home, proudly displaying how they have generously kept Nike, or Hooters in business and she stops him for a witnessing tee shirt.
            The shirt had words written in a circle on the back, the words that blew her mind. "Serve the world" alternated with "Worship God" three times in a particular script with arrows connecting them like the symbol you see on recycling bins and other green advertisements (though recycling is in a triangular form). "Worship God . . .  Serve the world . . . Worship God . . . Serve the world . . . Worship God . . . Serve the world." It was more than she could take, apparently. As she had said, it blew her mind.
            "I just don't see how you can do both," she said. "The way I see it, if you worship God you can't serve the world because the world is too tempting; it's too evil. It's nothing like God wants it to be."
            As best the man could in the candy aisle of a convenience store, while hoping to quickly resolve the issue for which he and his friend had originally stopped, he talked about service to the world as a demonstration of our love of God and God's love of God's creation and everyone for whom Christ died.  But there are limits to convenience-store theology, particularly in that moment after sitting in a car for a couple of hours.
            But the mind-blowing slogan on the tee-shirt was, essentially, the question of the gate - how much of the world do we risk encountering knowing that there are portions of the world that steal, destroy, and even kill? How high, how strong, and how impenetrable do we want the gate to be in order to be insulated from the world? How can we live in the world without letting the world claim us; without letting it determine who and how we are?
            When William Malhambri was in college, the campus minister had a way of drawing the students of the chapel outside the gate of the college community. Occasionally, as William tells it, he would find himself eating lunch at the soup kitchen that was housed at a church. The chaplain had this idea that there were plenty of people handing food to the hungry, some people should share the meal with them. So there they sat, healthy, taut-faced, well-fed, well-dressed, clean college students eating lunch with smelly, dirty, disheveled, hard-living hungry people.
            Many of them were cordial, several were endearingly sweet, a few were angry, bitter, and mean. One day, sitting in awkward silence, William decided to ease his discomfort by engaging one of the men nearby. He doesn't remember what he said, but whatever it was, the man saw through it - he saw through the young college boy.
            "You kids come over here from your pretty little campus, where you live safely behind that fence, and think you've figured out the world by reading a few books. You have no idea - and you'll never have any idea - what it's like to live like me. While you sleep tonight, warm, full, clean, and safe, I'll be on the streets somewhere, cold, hungry, dirty, and God only knows what will happen to me. So don't talk to me, just go back to your island and pretend to know about the real world."
            William did go back to the island, back to the pasture, back to the safety behind the campus gate, but with more to think about than just what he’d read in the books. There were other times when he ventured, just like there are times when you and I have ventured beyond the gate to see and hear a few more angles about life, some perspectives other than what we got growing up, in the classroom, on the campus, in this sanctuary. Going outside of the gate adds depth to what happens inside it, but what happens inside it informs how we experience what happens outside.
            Gates do a lot of things. Some hold us in. Some keep others out. Some mark a place of transition. Gates can be the point of demarcation where what we were is no longer what we are nor what we shall be.
            As gates go, as I said at the start, Jesus is an odd choice. If He keeps any out, it's those that everyone thought were locked in - the self-righteous pharisee, the chief priest. If He keeps any in, it's those that everyone assumed couldn't get in - the Samaritan woman, the Roman official, the woman caught in adultery.
            But as strange as His choices are about who gets in His pasture and who is kept out, that He lets us come and go is even stranger. Shouldn't He lock us in before the thieves and bandits get us? Shouldn't He hold us tightly before we're lured away by yet another voice?
            It turns out that the gate, Jesus, represents more than a barrier; He's a threshold, a passage to new life. Jesus knows that ever since we crossed into the gate, ever since we were claimed by Him, ever since we came to faith, we are changed. Who we were before we came to the gate and were washed in Baptism’s living waters, who we were before we were introduced to the cross-bought gift of redemption, and who we are since we entered are not the same people. Yes, we remain imperfect, subject to temptation, and continue to disobey, but we are not the same persons that we were before we entered the gate. Everything has changed.  We have been forgiven through Jesus’ passion, death and resurrection.  We have been given life, with God, as His children, without end.
            And because we are changed, the gate no longer need lock us in. We no longer need cower behind the gate's impenetrable walls. Rather, assured that the gate has claimed us, we are free to live in both realms - to love God and to serve the world. When we do live in both realms, we are not so much choosing to put ourselves at risk of destruction, as we are putting the destroyers at risk of coming to the gate, Jesus Christ, the Lord.
            As gates go, Jesus is an odd choice, but that's because there is no other gate like Him. He is the gate that leads to abundant life, both in this realm and the one to come. He is the gate who enables us to worship God and to be secure in our service to the world in God's name. There's no other gate like Him. Thanks be to God. Amen.