One of my favorite things to do every day is play racquetball. At 5:30 Monday through Friday I play racquetball for about an hour and 15 minutes. It’s a great way to exercise without feeling like you’re exercising. I suspect there are at least 50 people there every day at that hour and most of them aren’t playing racquetball. They’re running on the treadmill or lifting weights or swimming. Recently I saw one of the regulars who was celebrating the fact that he had just completed a full year of exercising every day.
Not everyone values exercising at all. Phyllis Diller said, “My idea of exercise is a good brisk sit.”
Joan Rivers said, “I don’t exercise. If God had wanted me to bend over, he would have put diamonds on the floor.”
Fred Allen said, “I like long walks, especially when they’re taken by people who annoy me.”
All kidding aside, exercising the body is a good thing and more and more people do some sort of exercise at least some of the time because they know it’s good for you.
The season of Easter and especially this Good Shepherd Sunday, in addition to being about the resurrection, is really about the Church, and how important it is in the whole drama of salvation. Everything that Jesus says in today’s Gospel must be understood within the context of the Church.
As shepherds tended their flocks 2000 years ago in Palestine, they would “bring them down from the hills to protect them at night when the wolves and mountain lions were hunting their prey. At night, the shepherds gathered their sheep together and led them into large pens, called sheepfolds. These sheepfolds had large walls that were made out of rocks and were about five feet high. On top of the four stone walls were briars or prickly branches, rather like the barbed wire today on top of walls.
“Now the doorway was about two feet wide, and there was no door. The Shepherd himself was the door. At night, the Shepherd would sleep in the small opening of the rock wall, by the fire, with his rod and staff, and if any mountain lion would come, the shepherd would fight it off with his weapons, his short stocky rod or his long pointed staff.” “Thy rod and thy staff, they comfort me.”
Thus, when Jesus says, “I am the door of the sheep,” this is what he’s referring to. “If anyone enters by me he will be saved, and will go in and out and find pasture….”
Jesus uses the imagery of the shepherd to describe the relationship that he wants to have with the Church. It’s not a new concept with Jesus. In fact, the image that Jesus uses is found in the book of Numbers. There we read, “Let the Lord, the God of the spirits of all flesh, appoint a man over the congregation, who shall go out before them and come in before them, who shall lead them out and bring them in; that the congregation of the Lord may not be as sheep which have no Shepherd.” In this passage from Numbers, the congregation is the people of Israel. For Jesus the Good Shepherd, the sheepfold is the New Israel, the Church.
The shepherd and the sheep are in the sheepfold. Christians, as a body, are in the Church with Christ. Central to the functioning of the body is at least weekly nourishment from the Body and Blood of Christ, corporate prayer, learning, and fellowship. The result of living in this way, according to Jesus, is nothing less than life itself, and not just any kind of life—abundant life. Another way of saying it is it is salvation.
We have a strange attitude in this country that salvation is a very private thing between the believer and God. It’s not uncommon to hear someone say, “I have a good relationship with God. I know I’m saved. I don’t have to go to church.” How can you be joined to Christ, through whom we have salvation, and not be joined to his body, which is the Church? It’s an impossibility. Saint Cyprian in the third century said, “He can no longer have God for his Father, who has not the Church for his mother. If anyone could escape who was outside the ark of Noah, then he also may escape who shall be outside of the church.”
Why do we have so many Christians who do not believe the Church’s teaching or perhaps do not even realize what that teaching is—that worship, and specifically the Holy Eucharist, is essential to the Christian life? Indeed, isn’t the Christian who simply chooses not to worship on the Lord’s day for no good reason committing a sin of omission?
Perhaps you’re thinking, “Why is he saying this to me? I’m here. I come every Sunday.”
I’m saying this to all of us because the Church is the body of Christ and this matter indicates a great sickness in the body. We have just kicked off a huge building campaign to build a building that will help to deal with this problem. We’ll be adding greatly to the amount of space we can use for education. By bringing more and more adults into our Christian formation program we’ll be strengthening the fabric of our Christian community. We have a beautiful church in which to worship Almighty God. What we do not have is enough space on a Sunday morning to have a full program of Christian education and formation. I said last Sunday night at our kick off, this new building is going to allow Redeemer to take Christian formation to a whole new level.
Exercising the body is important, whether we’re speaking of keeping our physical bodies fit or exercising our spiritual body, the Church. Exercising our spiritual body, however, prepares us for eternity.
Sermon preached by the Very Rev. Fredrick A. Robinson
Church of the Redeemer
Sarasota Florida
4th Sunday of Easter
7 May 2017