The voice of love

Sermon for the Fourth Sunday of Easter (April 21, 2024) at St. James’ Episcopal Church in Hyde Park, NY. View the scripture readings and the Collect of the Day.

Latimore, Kelly. Good Shepherd, from Art in the Christian Tradition, a project of the Vanderbilt Divinity Library, Nashville, TN.

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Jesus said, “I know my own and my own know me… and they will listen to my voice.” from John 10:11-18

Edited Transcript

May only truth be spoken here and only truth be heard. In the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. Please be seated.

So yesterday I was out with my son, running errands. We were in the CVS parking lot down on Route 9. And at one point I was coming out of a row of parked cars and there was another car stopped, perpendicular to us.

My son asked me a question and I turned and started talking to him. And there I was sitting in the parking lot and the car beeped at me. Oh! I guess I'm supposed to be driving now. As we started on our way my son asked, why did that car honk? I said, well, I wasn't paying attention and I was distracted.

And they were waiting and they were impatient. So they honked.

Now there's a moral to this story. The moral is don't honk at the preacher.

I was feeling a little self-righteous. "People are so impatient these days. No one has any time for anybody, and we're all just so hair-trigger quick to honk our horns!" But even as I was kind of giving my son a mini version of my internal monologue, saying, "We should always be kind and patient to everybody..." And then I realized, truth be told, yesterday when someone cut me off in traffic, I'm pretty sure not the most charitable words came out of my mouth.

And so what this has me thinking about and remember is: there are just a million little times a day where we break the one commandment that Jesus has given to us. "By this they will know that you are my disciples: that you love one another."

People will know that we belong to Jesus when we show love for one another.

And I think if I were to take a piece of paper and just make a little hash mark for every time in the day that I was impatient with someone else, every time in the day when I let a contemptuous thought go through my head, every time in the day where I acted or spoke out of anger, I would find myself to be a real rule-breaker when it comes to this one commandment that Jesus has given us to hold us together and to show to whom we belong.

Through these next weeks of Easter, Jesus is going to be showing us some different images, some different metaphors for what it looks like to belong to him, what it looks like to be part of the body of Christ. How do we follow Jesus when we, unlike his first disciples, don't have the option to literally follow him down the road?

It's Easter, so Christ is risen and Christ is present... but we are learning how to follow Christ who is not here right in front of us in a way that is always tangible. We talked about that a little last week. The idea that we need the eyes of our faith opened so that we can see the presence of Jesus. And now Jesus is going to give us a series of metaphors: ways of understanding how to follow him, how to know how to trust that we belong to him.

We're going to hear him say, I am the vine and you are the branches. Abide in me.

But today the metaphor is I am a shepherd. I am the good shepherd. And my sheep, they know my voice, they follow where I lead, they listen to me, they hear my voice.

So the metaphor today is the ones who follow Jesus, the ones who belong to Jesus, are held together by being able to hear him when he speaks in our lives.

And there are a lot of other voices in this metaphor. There's a lot of other noise. The sheep are listening for the voice of their good shepherd. But at the same time, we have these other characters in the mix. We have, for instance, the wolf. The wolf is kind of skulking around the outside. I imagine we hear the growl, we hear the snarl of the wolf. The wolf is our fear. The wolf is all the things in the world that frighten us. And that voice is in there as we listen for the voice of Jesus.

And then we have also the hired man, the one who does it for pay, the one who leads the sheep because he or she gets something out of it. And those voices might be even more distracting than the wolf's. They might really get our attention! What are all the voices who are saying, follow me! Do this, do that. Believe this, believe that.

The point is that as we listen for Jesus, we aren't listening in a world where we have the benefit of perfect silence, no distraction. We're listening for Jesus amid this whole clamor of voices, people who would want to lead us, ideas that would want to distract us, fears that would take hold of us.

Jesus says, when I call you, I'm not going to eliminate the things that distract or trouble you. Just as we hear in Psalm 23: the psalmist says, You, O God, spread a table before me... Where? In the presence of all that troubles me. The table is spread, but the fear and the distraction and the noise are still surrounding us. The psalmist says, I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, but I'm not afraid. Not because we don't see the shadows and the things lurking in them, not because we don't see the grief and the suffering and the fear, but because we're not alone as we go through it.

But the promise of Jesus is never to eliminate the distractions, to take away the fear or to take away the voices, but rather that Jesus' voice will also be there for us if we can learn to listen.

And here is how we will know the voice. The voice says love one another. We know the voice of the good shepherd because the voice is the voice that reminds us, urges us, commands us to love one another. It is this that's going to bring us together. It's this that helps us know to whom we belong. The voice we listen for among all the other voices of fear, anger, contempt, urgency. The voice we're listening for is the voice of love. The voice that shows us how to listen to, care for, love one another. That's the voice to which we belong.

If we go back to that idea of noticing all the times when we break that commandment to love one another, then the words that we hear in the epistle from John today might make sense to us. John says, "God is greater than our hearts." Our hearts fall. Our hearts are incapable of following that commandment of God that we love one another. We break the rule a million little times a day because we're listening to a million other voices telling us what to do, what to say, how to act.

But we're always going to be invited to come back to that quiet voice of Jesus, in the midst of all the other noise of my life, of your life, of our lives. And that voice says love one another. That voice gives us the power to love one another.

I want to invite you this week to notice the voices, the sounds, the noises that surround you in your life. Notice: who is speaking in your life, what is speaking in your life? Where is fear speaking in my life? Where is impatience speaking in my life? Where is contempt speaking in my life. And in the midst of all of that, where is God? Where is the voice of love speaking in my life? That's the voice to which I belong, the voice to which I turn again and again to which I try to attend the voice of love amidst all the other voices.

And I have to say, I think it's more important than ever this year that we know to whom we belong, especially in this country. We're going into an election season that is going to be very noisy indeed. We are going to hear a lot of voices, and those voices are going to urge on all of us impatience, contempt, anger, fear. But the banquet to which everyone is invited is spread in the presence of all that troubles us. The voice of love, which says love one another, is calling to everybody, especially in the seasons of our collective lives, our personal lives, where the noise builds.

It's more important than ever that we learn to hear all the voices that are speaking to us and to distinguish the voice of God, which says love one another. By this, we know to whom we belong. Amen.