The Story of More - John 10:1-10

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

Not long after the COVID19 pandemic began to spread across the United States and our lives suddenly became very strange, I heard about a new book on the climate crisis and decided it would be just the thing to read in this anxious time. Sometimes it helps to put a present pain in context and remember it is not the greatest challenge we’re facing.

The book I read is called The Story of More by Hope Jahren. It’s a simple but brilliant book that traces the incredible growth of abundance from the time Jahren was born in 1969 until now. That 50-year period has seen a vast rise in population, immense increases in agricultural productivity, and exponential growth in energy use. The reality is that we simply have more stuff and more power and space and food and material resources than any humans that have ever lived, and it is killing our planet. Jahren’s message in the book is straightforward: if more has become the source of our problem, then less is the only solution. We have to learn to embrace simpler lives individually and collectively or the earth will no longer be home to the abundance of all creation.

It is a paradoxical message, for sure. If we keep pursuing more in our human economy, we will live in an ever more impoverished world; if we learn to live with less, we will welcome a more abundant life for the whole of this planet. It is that paradox that I hear at the heart of our Gospel reading this morning.

John’s Gospel is not the easiest to follow. It lacks the straightforward narratives or simple parables of the synoptics--Matthew, Mark, and Luke. But at its center is the message we hear today--Jesus has come among us to bring abundant life. It is a life of love, a life in which we learn to wash feet and welcome strangers. It is a life through which we become children of God, joining our own lives with the Divine. Yet as we hear in today’s Gospel, not everyone is interested in bringing us into such abundance.

In the immediate context of our passage today, Jesus is teaching a group of Pharisees. Though they are often seen in conflict with Jesus we have to remember that their understanding of the scriptures and life with God is close to much of Jesus’s own teaching. Jesus knows that there are many in the group who agree with him and he is calling for them to come and join his movement in the open.

Opposed to Jesus and his movement is a group of elite religious leaders in Jerusalem that John calls “The Judeans,” a word often erroneously translated as “The Jews.”  These leaders were more interested in a bourgeois, domesticated religion than in truly welcoming God’s abundance. They were supposed to be shepherds of Israel, but in reality these leaders were more interested in exploiting their position to extend their own wealth and power than they were in caring for the people. These are the ones Jesus calls robbers and thieves, those who come only to destroy and to kill.

Think of the false shepherds, the robbers and thieves of our own time. Who are those who go about acting as though they are here to bring us into abundant life, but are feeding us only to prepare us for our slaughter? They are the false teachers and false gods, who tell us that the life of more things, more activities, more learning, more doing, more entertainment, more consumer spirituality is what we need. And all along they are taking it to the bank while we are left with diminished lives in a diminished world.

What are we to do? Run away, to start. It’s one of the only defenses sheep have and we should use it. When you see a false prophet coming down the road to promise you salvation through a better exercise plan or a kitchen remodel, those who want to draw you into a politics of us and them, those who say you can follow God but keep everything else in your life just as you like it--head the other way. Go toward the one who cares for you, who would die for you, who leads you into abundant pastures and beside still waters, even though you might have to go through the valley of the shadow to death to get there.  To follow this path we have to learn to know the shepherd who will lead us along it. We have to spend time learning the shepherd’s voice so that we can run toward him when we are in the dark and the sheep rustlers are coming over the fence.

These past several weeks I’ve been spending time running away. I didn’t intend to, but with so many of my normal tasks and routines disrupted it’s given my family a chance to recognize many of the robbers and thieves that were breaking in at the borders of our lives. We thought that so many things were bringing us joy and abundance, were filling our lives with more, but now in their absence we’ve been able to recognize that we are better off with a lot less. There are many good things that we want to return to, that we miss dearly, but the last thing we want is for our lives to just go back to normal. We’ve been learning through this forced retreat of COVID19 to hear the difference between the noise of the thieves and the gentle voice of the good shepherd.

Learning the voice of the Good Shepherd is the way of prayer. To learn to listen to the Good Shepherd is to find the path toward true abundant life, even amid our lack and suffering. The monastic teacher Martin Laird relates a beautiful story of this reality in his book on Christian contemplation, Into the Silent Land.

There he writes of a woman named Elizabeth who was an expert on irises. As a botanist she knew the details of their petals, the underground realities of their rhizomes. She studied irises in her lab and presented papers on them at international conferences. But an autoimmune disease brought her career as a botanist to an abrupt end. She could barely manage a walk in her garden and greenhouse.

Desperate for relief in the midst of her pain, Elizabeth turned to the practice of contemplative prayer. What had before been an intermittent practice that had been limited to “airports, train journeys, and enduring tedious sermons” became a ritual spread throughout her every day. Lying on her back, focusing her attention on her breath and prayer word, she gradually began to “distinguish pain from the commentary on the pain.” The hurt did not go away, but her focus upon it did. She was able to stop the chatter of her mind and to enter a space of silence where the pain could be held. It was in that silence that she found “a loving solidarity with all humanity.” She was learning the voice of the Good Shepherd and he was bringing her into abundant life, even as her life of more was being was diminished. This abundant life did not rescue her from her pain, like the solution of some snake oil charlatan, but it provided a loving and beautiful sense of God’s real and abiding presence in its midst.

Shortly before she died Elizabeth reflected on all that she missed from her work as a botanist, the research that would never be finished, the papers that would remain incomplete. But in the end she learned a new reality. “You know,” she said, “while I’ve been ill I’ve managed to discover something new about irises--I never knew they were beautiful.”

Jesus has come to be our shepherd, to care for us and lead us into abundant life. It is not the life of more, the life that eats away at the world and our souls and ultimately brings us toward chaos and death. The abundance Jesus brings is a life where we learn to be still, where we hear in silence the voice of the good shepherd who will lead us toward the nourishing places of our world. If we follow that voice we will find good pasture and still water, we may even stop our frantic movement long enough to see an iris and recognize that it is beautiful. Amen.