Homily | 🔊 Strangers, Thieves, and the Voice You Can Trust

4th Sunday of Easter

Christ Lutheran Church in Aptos, CA

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There’s a version of this morning’s gospel that a lot of us have heard before, and some of us have run away from. It’s a version that goes like this: Jesus says “I am the gate” and what he means is: I am the toll booth. Pay the toll (the right belief, prayer, moral performance) and you’ll get through to safety. Don’t pay, and you’re on the outside, with the goats and the wolves and the unfortunate.

In this version, the gate becomes a credentialing checkpoint. Jesus becomes the bouncer. And Christianity becomes, basically, a lifelong anxious negotiation about whether you’ve paid enough.

Most of us in this room would say we’re past that. We’d say we left that Christianity behind. Or we were never really in it to begin with. We’re mainline. Progressive(-ish, at least). We’re the ones with the Welcome Statement who use inclusive language and believe God’s love is bigger than any toll booth. We’ve deconstructed, and we’re proud of it, and we’re not afraid of this passage anymore.

Amen to THAT!

And now... (You knew this was coming...) I want to invite you to look in the mirror anyway.

Because the gospel has a way of not letting us off the hook just because we’ve figured out somebody else’s bad theology. Luther said the Law is a mirror. And the mirror doesn’t care what denomination you belong to. The mirror just shows you what’s actually there.

And if we look honestly, I think most of us would have to admit that we’ve simply traded in the old gates for newer, more tasteful ones.

The first one that comes to my mind is the gate of political righteousness. The gate we pay tolls at every time we scroll, every time we seethe, every time we tally the political rightness of ourselves against the people around us.

There’s the gate of family, where we ache to have done it right by the people we love, to leave behind children and grandchildren who are okay, and we lie awake at night counting the tolls we couldn’t pay.

There’s the gate of self-acceptance, that lifelong project of trying to be okay with the person in the bathroom mirror, where the inner critic is waiting with a clipboard and a rap sheet.

Those gates vary for each of us. But at the bottom of every one of them — if we keep digging — we find we share the same gate, and it’s the one none of us want to talk about at coffee hour: the gate of mortality.

Death awaits all of us, and worse, it awaits the people we love. Every surface anxiety we carry is finally fed by that underground spring. The political dread, the family grief, the diagnosis we’re waiting on, the phone call we’re dreading... Press any of it hard enough and it bottoms out in the same place: we are going to die, and so is everyone we love, and we don’t know what to do with that.

That fear is the thief’s favorite weapon. Every stranger-voice in our culture is feeding on it, monetizing it, turning it into clicks and outrage and purchases and votes. The thief doesn’t need you to believe in hell. The thief just needs you to be afraid.

The thief comes, Jesus says, to steal and slaughter and destroy. And the thief’s business is booming these days, in every zip code, at every gate.

This is where we are. We thought we’d left the toll booths behind. But it turns out, all we’ve done is just built quieter, more tasteful ones, and we’re standing in front of them, paying and paying, and still exhausted.

And into that exhaustion, this morning, the Risen Christ says: I am the gate.

He doesn’t mean: I am a better toll booth. He means: I am the opening. I am what allows you freedom of movement. A gate in an ancient sheepfold was not infrastructure for extracting payment. It was a living aperture — a place where the flock moved freely, every day, between shelter and pasture. In and out. Back and forth. When Jesus says “I am the gate,” he is saying: I am the way your whole life opens up. I am the going in, and I am the going out. I am what makes pasture possible.

He doesn’t promise a walled compound where nothing bad ever happens. He promises pasture. He promises, in the phrase The Voice translation gives us this morning, “liberation” and “life with joy and abundance.”

The thief’s economy is subtractive. Smaller. More afraid. More compliant. More exhausted. The Shepherd’s economy is additive. Overflowing. More than enough. Not the minimum viable Christian existence, but the feast.

The gate is already open. It was never closed. Every toll booth you’ve ever built in your imagination — or every toll booth you’ve allowed other voices to build there — fundamentalist or progressive, theological or political or familial or private — every one of those gates is a hallucination. The Shepherd has walked through the rubble of all of them, and he stands there, calling your name.

Because the Shepherd’s answer to the fear underneath all the fears isn’t a political program. Or a self-improvement plan. Or even a better ideology. The Shepherd’s answer is his own body, laid down between us and the abyss. The Shepherd’s answer is: I have already walked through the valley of the shadow. I have already been to the bottom of it. And I came back calling names. Yours is next.

This is what the Risen Shepherd is doing in the world right now, this Eastertide. He is walking through every locked door, every gated community, every toll booth we keep trying to pay at, and he’s calling us out to pasture. Again, not out of danger. But out of smallness. Out of the diminished and terrified life the stranger-voices want us to settle for.

He is the gate. And the voice you’re hearing, underneath all the other voices, the one that knows your name... that one is his.

And it will follow you forever. Just like a good shepherd does.

Amen.