Sermon: 26 April

Saint Margaret’s Anglican Church Budapest, Hungary Acts 2:42-47; 1 Peter 2:19-25; John 10:1-10; Psalm 23 I am the gate. Whoever enters by me will be saved and will come in and go out and find pasture. Most English-speaking people will be familiar with the old expression, “Good fences make good neighbours.” Its origin is obscure, but it dates back to at least seventeenth century England; and the thought behind it exists of course in other languages and cultures as well. It just seems to be a universal observation or truism. American poet, Robert Frost, gave the proverb new life decades ago with his well-loved poem, Mending Wall, in which two neighbours work collaboratively to mend the wall, or fence, which separates them; and in so doing somehow cement the friendship which binds them. Yet, the recurring refrain of the poem remains, “Something there is that doesn’t love a wall.” Here at Saint Margaret’s, we have no walls or fences to speak of, none to mend. In fact, as far as I know this church building belonging to our Lutheran friends is open 24/7 for prayer and reflection. So, our gate, it seems, is always wide open, as it no doubt should be. For instance, we welcome with us this morning at worship, and will again later in our Annual General Meeting, people from nearly all corners of the world. Fifteen nations, at last count. Our walls, if we have them, are sometimes, as with all people at all times and places, more of imagination and fear than of stone and plank. Hungarians, by the way, are apparently also great believers in walls and boundaries; but to their credit also ardently believe that for every barrier in life, for every fence, for every bureaucratic roadblock, there is always somewhere a backdoor or tiny hidden garden entrance called in Hungarian the kiskapu, the little gate. They may be right. There is no telling of course if the people of ancient Palestine at the time of our Lord also had their own kiskapu, their own ideas, customs, and proverbs about fences, walls, cages, and pens. Likely, they did too. Jesus, in our account today from the Gospel of John, speaks of a sheepfold, a kind of pen or barrier within which to gather the sheep, presumably at night, for protection and safety from wild animals and, as our Lord here suggests, from bandits and thieve, who are always keen to steal and run off with that which is not theirs. Some things never change. Still, it is hard to imagine any pen or sheepfold, any barrier, without an aperture or gate of some kind, kiskapu or nagykapu, little gate or big; a means in other words by which to come in and go out. Even gaols and prisons have gates, after all. Now, Jesus describes himself variously throughout the Gospel of John as, the Bread of Life; the True Vine; the Way, the Truth, and the Life, among other things. And as the Good Shepherd, hence the description of today’s festival day, Good Shepherd Sunday, even though that term does not specifically appear in today’s Gospel passage. But perhaps the most surprising of John’s eight or nine such so-called I AM sayings or self-appellations of Jesus is this one: “I am the Gate for the Sheep.” It seems at first glance, at least to me, a rather infelicitous metaphor for the Son of God. Surely, I almost think, a slip of the divine tongue. And, while there are plenty of depictions of Jesus as the Good Shepherd going back even to the catacombs, you will not find many artists or poets brave enough to render our Lord as some sort of weathered old sheepgate, complete with rusty latches and squeaky hinges. But that in effect is what Jesus says he is. “I am the Gate.” And, when you stop to think about it, it may be an apt image after all. While the gate or door is arguably an essential element of any pen or enclosure or even building, it is also the point of greatest vulnerability. Just ask any thief or bandit. Without a gate, each of us poor sheep becomes either a prisoner of the sheepfold or a creature outside and without a place or shelter to call our own. So, perhaps we should rename this festival day today Gate Sunday and save the comelier name, Good Shepherd Sunday, for another occasion. Christ, precisely as Gate, precisely in his vulnerability, becomes for us the portal of all our hopes and the threshold of eternal life. In Christ, we are no longer prisoners of sin but children of the one Father. Sheep of the Great Shepherd. As Christians, we come in and go out in this world but only through Christ. There is no other way. Yet in his own vulnerability, Christ challenges us to open the barriers of our own hearts and minds and enter into the world of the other; the world of the needy and frightened; the poor and the suffering; the migrant and the refugee, the homeless and dispossessed, the prisoner and the modern-day slave, the sick and the dying. For, they too belong to the same sheepfold as do we. Our world today remains as full of thieves and bandits as was the world Jesus knew and inhabited millennia ago. They can be found in high places and low. They take nations to war over land and property disputes, and they willy-nilly steal their neighbours’ valuables and possessions. But we must not allow the evil of the age to cause us to hunker down, to head for the sheepfold and forever lock the gate behind us. As poet Robert Frost has his narrator tell us, “Before I built a wall, I’d ask to know what I was walling in or walling out, and to whom I was like to give offense. Something there is that doesn’t love a wall, that wants it down.” But like the two neighbours of Frost’s poem, our separation, our walls such as they are, must become for us that which brings us together in the common task at hand, the task of mending the world of which we are a part, building and rebuilding the Kingdom to come. Of opening the gate to Christ, the One who ultimately sets us free “to come in and go out and find pasture.” Amen. The Revd Canon Dr Frank Hegedűs