Tomorrow’s Sermon: Healthy Communities, Toxic Communities

John
10:1-21[1]

Introduction
I have in my congregation at Broomfield a man who is a Freeman of the Borough
of Chelmsford. He thoroughly deserves it, as for decades he has gone out in
rain and snow to collect for worthy local causes.

I don’t know what rights were conferred upon him with the
honour, but it is well known that if you receive the freedom of other towns or
cities, you are entitled to drive your herds or flocks without hindrance across
bridges.

However, although I drive past one or two farms on my way
here, I’ve never noticed anyone expecting to conduct their sheep without let or
hindrance along the A130. And even what farmland we have near here will be
under threat as the housing expansions near Broomfield, Beaulieu Park and
Boreham are built.

All of which means that we are further isolated from
biblical metaphors about shepherds and sheep, making it difficult to enter the
world from which Jesus spoke. Even our culture’s approach to herding sheep is
different: we drive from behind and use a sheepdog, Palestinian shepherds lead
from the front.

And not only that, Jesus mixes his metaphors! One moment he’s
the gate to the sheepfold, the next he’s the shepherd.

So without spending too much time discussing ancient farming
methods, how can we connect with John 10? At the very least, we can set it in
context and look for the points Jesus is trying to make.

Why should we explore it, though? That’s where context comes
in. To state the obvious, John 10 comes straight after John 9. In chapter 9,
Jesus has healed a man born blind. To the disgust of the religious leadership,
he has done it on the Sabbath. For that terrible act, Jesus has been condemned
and the healed man has been excommunicated. For Jesus, this raises the issue
about proper leadership of God’s people. That’s what John 10 is about: what
kind of leadership is healthy, and what is toxic?

And it applies not only to the leaders, it applies to the
whole Christian community. What is a healthy Christian fellowship, and what is
an abusive one? Some of us have known in other places what it means to be in a
damaging church, and have wanted to escape. It’s all very well putting some
distance between ourselves and an unhealthy congregation or leader, but
sometime we need to be part of a life-giving community. I believe John 10 helps
us in the discerning process. And even if we haven’t had that painful history,
it is still important to give ourselves a health check. So what does John 10
say to us about healthy churches and leaders?

1. Life
In verse 10 Jesus says,

‘The thief comes only to steal and kill and destroy; I have
come that they may have life, and have it to the full.’

Many years ago, the house church leader Gerald Coates
once said that we have so re-ordered the church that we have replaced Jesus’
words that he came that we might have life and have it more abundantly with the
idea that he came that we might have meetings and have them more abundantly!

There is a choice, says Jesus, between the kind of community
that gives life and the kind that destroys. Life versus death. We talk of the
Gospel, the Good News. If Jesus came to bring life, then the Good News needs to
look, sound and feel like Good News. The American Christian writer Philip Yancey recently told the Church Times,

If it doesn’t sound like good news, it’s not the gospel. If
it’s not setting you free and enlarging life, then it’s not Jesus’s message.

There is a sense in which the Gospel proclamation starts not
with Good News, but bad news – the bad news that we all are sinners, and that
our sinfulness cuts us off from God. But the poisonous church or leader dwells
mostly on sin and making people feel bad or worthless. You come away from their
company feeling you are a miserable and worthless worm. Worse than that, the leader
and the congregation manage to come over as effortlessly superior to mere
mortals like you or me.

The healthy church or leader is different. The bad news isn’t
absent. They are clear about the seriousness of sin and judgment, because it’s false
good news to couch the message in terms of ‘I’m OK, you’re OK.’ We’re not OK,
and the healthy church knows this. But the people of the healthy church also know
that God is rich in mercy and generous with grace. God’s grace is more
plentiful than human sin. The healthy church is therefore a safe place for the
wounded. To quote Philip Yancey again from that Church Times interview:

If you had asked what I’d like my influence to be, I’d answer
that I would like to give companionship to those who doubt, sympathy to those
who suffer, and grace to those who have felt little of it from the Church.

If we are a healthy church, then wounded people will find
life and love here. We will find healing for our own wounds. We will know pain,
but will not be miserable wretches. We will have strong commitments to certain
ethical standards, but even the actions we refuse to do will not be a dour,
black-suited ‘Thou shalt not’, but a grateful recognition that God knows best
for us.

No, there will be a joie
de vivre about us. We will even laugh. As Oswald Chambers, who wrote the
devotional classic ‘My
Utmost for his Highest’, said,

When God makes you holy He gives you a sense of humour.[2]

2. Sacrifice
As some of you know, I suffered a (then) mysterious neck injury when I was
eighteen. I remember sitting one night at a renewal meeting. I was in such pain
that I looked for the most comfortable chair in the room. I felt a long way
from God and his purposes. An elderly, kind Baptist woman called Peggy read
words from John 10 to me that evening. I remember the ‘good shepherd’ material,
and had to ask the biblical reference.

I am the good shepherd. The good shepherd lays down his life
for the sheep. (Verse 11)

It meant a lot to me that evening to know that Jesus was a
good shepherd. Now, as I read those words, I recognise that the particular way
in which I know him to be a good shepherd is in sacrifice – in his willingness
to lay down his life.

How do we know the love of the Good Shepherd? By his
sacrifice. And the approach to sacrifice tells us a lot about which communities
and Christian leaders are healthy, whole and spiritual, and which ones are
snakes filled with deadly venom.

The difference is this: the healthy churches are willing to
sacrifice, but the poisonous ones will not. They are the ‘hired hand[s] [who]
care nothing for the sheep’ (verse 13). They, on the other hand, will demand
sacrifice of others. This, then, is how Jesus regarded the religious
establishment of his day.

About eight years ago, I watched a television documentary
about healing evangelists. It followed two of them. There was a bit of a slant
against them from the outset, but one came over as well-intentioned if
misguided but largely harmless. The second, however, was portrayed negatively,
and I believe rightly so. When one poor family brought a terribly sick child to
him for healing and the child was not cured, the evangelist told them the child
had not recovered because they did not have enough faith, and they should give
a further donation of a thousand dollars to his ministry. Did the child become
well? What do you think? The same evangelist flies the world in Lear Jets and
employs bodyguards. I’m not surprised he needs the bodyguards.

That may seem an obvious and easy example, and it is far
from most of our experiences. However, we need to guard against those
tendencies we might have to expect everyone else in the church to make the
sacrifices while we continue jogging along, just the same as we always have
done.

But let’s not only be negative here: what does a healthy
church look like in this respect? One gladly spends and gives up for others. It
is one where people barely have to be prompted to look out for their neighbours’
needs. I often think of an incident at my
first theological college. One of the international students, a Singaporean
woman, suddenly and unexpectedly lost her mother back home. She did not have
the airfare to go home. But the student community soon raised it – students on
very limited incomes made sure Christina got home to her family. No-one had to
tell the student body to do this, it happened almost instantly and
spontaneously. It was a case of Acts 2, where the disciples sold their
possessions to meet the needs of the poor.

3. Embrace
One other statement to explore, and it occurs in the middle of all the verses
about the Good Shepherd’s willingness to lay down his life for the flock. It raises
the question about how broad the flock is:

I have other sheep that are not of this sheep pen. I must
bring them also. They too will listen to my voice, and there shall be one flock
and one shepherd. (Verse 16)

The sacrifice, then, is not simply something that
characterises the existing community: it is something that expands it. Christians recognise this as being to do with the Cross
as the way into the kingdom of God.

Therefore, the healthy church or Christian leader will have
a passion for those who have not yet experienced the love of God in Christ. They
will not be content to stay as a private religious club: that is a crude
distortion of their fundamental purpose.

No, healthy Christians and communities will be committed to
outreach, including to people much unlike themselves. Nor will it be because we
need to raise more offertory to keep the building going, or to fill vacant
church jobs: both of those reasons suggest we do not love the people we are
trying to reach, but are only trying to manipulate them for our sake. And manipulation
and self-centredness are at the heart of toxic faith, not life-filled faith.

Healthy disciples and leaders will know that outreach,
embracing others with the love of God, is fundamental to the life of the
church. The theologian Emil
Brunner famously said that ‘The church exists by mission as fire exists by
burning’. This doesn’t mean merely that we need mission in order to keep the
numbers up. It means that mission is at the heart of what it means to be
church. The Resurrection stories have mission as central themes. In Matthew,
the risen Jesus gives the Great Commission to make disciples. In Luke, he tells
the disciples to wait for the Holy Spirit and then they will be his witnesses. In
John, Jesus sends his followers in the way the Father sent him.

There is no mistaking it. Mission is not for the
enthusiasts. It is not the deluxe optional extra. It is the overflow of hearts
bursting with God’s love. Filled with the life given by the Good Shepherd and
imitating his sacrificial love, it is a travesty to keep Good News to
ourselves.

Thus, shepherds cannot spend their entire time with the
existing pen, working only to meet their needs. True shepherds look to expand
the pen, and the flock welcomes this. It is healthy church life not to obsess
about ourselves, but to prioritise showing the love of God in word and deed in
the wider community. When our business meeting agenda are consumed only with
internal matters, something is out of balance. But when our priorities are
based on the embrace of those not yet in the fold, then the life and sacrifice
of the Good Shepherd have soaked into us, and we cannot be the same.

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