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The Call To Authenticity
John 10:1-10
May 15, 2011

“Very truly, I tell you, anyone who does not enter the sheepfold by the gate
but climbs in by another way is a thief and a bandit. The one who enters by
the gate is the shepherd of the sheep. The gatekeeper opens the gate for
him, and the sheep hear his voice. He calls his own sheep by name and
leads them out. When he has brought out all his own, he goes ahead of
them, and the sheep follow him because they know his voice. They will not
follow a stranger, but they will run from him because they do not know the
voice of strangers.” Jesus used this figure of speech with them, but they did
not understand what he was saying to them. So again Jesus said to them,
“Very truly, I tell you, I am the gate for the sheep. All who came before me
are thieves and bandits; but the sheep did not listen to them. I am the
gate. Whoever enters by me will be saved, and will come in and go out and
find pasture. The thief comes only to steal and kill and destroy. I came that
they may have life, and have it abundantly.’

This was a quiet a week in many ways and for many reasons, but on a
personal level, it was the action of my former denomination, my former faith
tradition, that really stood out for me.  I think most of you know that I was a
member of the Presbyterian Church (USA) for all of college and most of my
seminary years, but I left the denomination when it became clear that I could
not serve within it as an openly gay man, not without either hiding that fact,
and being inauthentic to myself and presenting a false self to the future
congregations I would serve, or by promising celibacy for the rest of my life.   
Well, this week, my former denomination, the Presbyterian Church, lifted its
ban on the ordination of non-celibate gay and lesbian pastors, something I
am not sure I thought would ever come about.  They join our own
denomination, the United Church of Christ, the first mainline church to do so,
and the Episcopal Church and the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America,
the largest branch of Lutherans, in doing so.  When the news broke, I had a
lot of joy but also a bit of sadness that it had taken so long—and I
remembered the night in seminary when it really hit me that there was no
way I was going to ever be a Presbyterian minister, not without
compromising what I felt was true and real and authentic, about myself and
the Gospel I was called to proclaim.  And yet, in so many ways, God is so
good, so faithful, and works in so many mysterious ways—I find it amazing
that I find myself here in the United Church of Christ, a tradition, a church,
that I love more deeply than I ever did the Presbyterian Church, in so many
ways.  You know, God gets us home, one way or another, but where home
is, in the end, may end up being a surprise, an unexpected place.  

And yet, the challenge to be authentic, to be our true selves before God and,
of course, before each other, is a huge one, and we pastor types, we fail so
often—I fail so often, of course, in many ways.  Many of you no doubt heard
the story of the Pennsylvania pastor who lied about serving in the Navy
Seals, a elite combat group that was in the news for the killing of Osama bin
Laden.  The pastor had served in the Navy, but not the elite Seals, and when
his congregation misinterpreted a plaque in his office honoring the Seals as
an indication that he had once served as one of them, he never corrected
their mistake.  Eventually, a local paper was doing a story on local Navy
Seals, and his name came up, and when they approached him about doing a
story, he continued to let them assume what was not true.  Eventually, an
actual Navy Seal exposed his lies, and to the Pastor’s credit, he came clean to
the local paper, and his congregation, admitting that his ego had gotten the
best of him, and the adulation he received for being someone else, well, it
was too tempting.  There are some pictures taken by the paper during his
confession that showing how clearly embarrassed and ashamed he was by
his behavior, as he should be, of course, but I have to say that I had a bit
more compassion for him, because I do understand the temptation to not be
yourself in order to be welcomed or celebrated, or admired, or even
accepted.  

And yet, also, this pastor’s sin is not so different than many of our own
attempts to put on airs, to put on façade, to put on a mask, so that people
will think we are not who we are, because, in some way, we actually don’t
think who we are is good enough for each other, for our spouse, maybe
friends and family, maybe for each other in the place.  Sadly, the reality is
that a lot of people put on masks especially for church, because they feel
that it is actually the one place we can’t really be who we are, we can’t be
truly authentic with each other, because if they really knew us, well, maybe
we wouldn’t be so welcomed, so wanted in this place.  Nothing, truly nothing,
saddens me more than this reality, that church is actually the one place some
people feel they can’t really be who they are, and as someone who has been
tempted by the church to put on the mask, years ago in the Presbyterian
Church, I can’t tell you how death dealing, how soul numbing such a choice
to not be authentically yourself can ultimately be.  Church really is the one
place where the truth should be shared, even the difficult truth, and the one
place we really should be who we are, and know that we will be loved and
accepted as such, even in our beautiful imperfection.  I know, I know,
perhaps unrealistic, but I’ll stick with my unrealism because I think it is true,
and that is it possible, in our better moments.

But possible is not always reality, and the text warns about those of us who
wish to become Christ’s disciples without doing the work of coming clean
before God, and ourselves, and sometimes, even each other.  Of course, you
heard our text today, a familiar one for many of you, the one in John where
Christ says he is good shepherd, and we are his sheep—actually, it’s quite a
messy text in many ways, because the metaphors are all over the place: one
second, Jesus is the good shepherd, or the gatekeeper and in another
second, he is the very gate of the sheepfold.   And there is the voice of the
shepherd, the one whom the sheep recognize as being the one who takes
care of them—one needs to remember that often sheep of different herds
were corralled in one pen, and so the voice of the shepherd was crucial when
it came to that moment of moving your particular flock out of the sheepfold,
and not mistakenly making off with someone else’s animals.

But, of course, there were those who did want to steal and destroy, who
would step over the sleeping shepherd in the dark of the night—sometimes
the shepherd himself would be the gate, especially if he used the natural
world, a rock hillside, etc, around him to make a makeshift pen, he would be
the one laying over the natural exit and entrance to the pen, he would, quite
literally, be the gate.   These thieves and bandits would come in another way,
or maybe even stepping over the sleeping shepherd, deep in the night, and
try to make off with the sheep that were not their own—or they would simply
kill them for the sake of killing them, a brutal act of mischief.  They didn’t
want to be seen or heard, or identified, of course, because they would have
been severely punished if they had been found out, and so they put on a
mask, either literally or figuratively, so as to get entrance into that place of
safety, the one tended by the good shepherd.  

And yet, ironically enough, it is the masks that God seems to want us to
throw away, those things, those traits, those falsities that we think will get
us in, into the sheepfold, into the church, into the upper middle class,
whatever.  The Gospel of John is especially focused on doing away with the
masks, because at the very heart of the larger text is God’s self-revelation,
God taking off the mask, in this Jesus.  In the beginning was the Word, says
the writer of John, and what he likely means by that is that what God is
saying into the universe is embodied in the life and words in this Jesus of
Nazareth.  If you want to know who God really is, and what love looks like,
then look upon this one, this Word, this revelation God has given to us in
this One from Nazareth.  The whole Gospel of John is all about God saying,
“here I am, as I am,” and now I’m asking you to be who you are, because I
am, because I shared all of who I am through my Child, my Son, this One
from Nazareth.”  And frankly, all our attempts to not be who we are, to not
be our authentic self before God, to try to get into the sheepfold by
pretending to be someone else so that then others will like us and love us,
either God or human and sometimes both, it will not work.  If God has said
here I am, in Christ, and shows us everything in Christ, then we are asked to
the do same, to go through the Gate, the Shepherd, and not through
another way, the way of thieves and bandits, the ones who want in by other
means, and who ultimately destroy themselves and others by not being who
they really are, by using a false voice, or a mask of some sort.  Anne Lamott,
the fiction writer, and ironically enough, a wonderful Presbyterian layperson,
spoke these words in an interview some years ago:

I was raised to keep all the family secrets and present myself in such a way
that people would be either envious or approving. But keeping up a façade
like that takes so much energy.  When my friend Pammy was going through
chemotherapy, and I asked her if the dress I was wearing made me look fat,
I was making a fuss about the dumbest things, and Pammy looked at me
and said, "Annie, you just don't have that kind of time." It was so profound,
it was like I was in a cartoon and somebody conked me over the head. I got
it.  Pammy died seven years ago. But I still live by her words: You don't
have time to live a lie. You don't have time to get the world to approve of
you. You only have the time to become the person you dream of being. You
only have the time to clean out your mean and ugly spots, areas that drag
you down and hurt other people. You only have the time to accept yourself
as you are and start getting a little bit healthier so you can be who God
needs you to be. In a way, it's exhilarating to say, "This is really who I am,
and I'm not going to pretend just because I have the sneaking suspicion
I'm not good enough."  God meets you where you are. (Mary Ann O'Roark,
an interview with Anne Lamott, reprinted from Clarity magazine.)

And, why does this truth telling matter, really?   Certainly we have met
people along the way whose whole life was a series of lies—maybe not to the
degree of the Pennsylvania Pastor, but still, there was a willingness to not
face the truth about themselves, or others, or whatever, and so the lies, the
masks continued to be worn, the voices that are not their own continued to
be uttered, and in the end, we wonder who they were, and we ask ourselves,
did we ever really know them?  Truth telling matters, being an authentic self
matters, because, first, Christ knows his sheep, and for us to know Christ as
deeply as we are known by him, we have to be open to that authentic voice
that calls to us in the chaos of our lives.  But secondly, and perhaps more
importantly on a practical level, is that the reason that Christ revealed God’s
self to us is not just so that God could be self-revelatory for the sake of
being self-revelatory—authenticity for authenticities sake—but because to be
an authentic person, a real person, a person who knows that there is no time
in this life for the lies, is to be a person who has an abundant life, the one
that Christ himself came to give away.  It’s ironic that Pastor Cathy this past
week reminded us that Jesus’ own personal mission statement is found in
the very last words of our text today, something I did not know she would
bring up at the Family Night Supper—I had actually already chosen this text
for this Sunday, not knowing she would use these very words on
Wednesday.  I came that they may have life, and have it abundantly.’ Jesus
says here.  There is a richness to a life lived truthfully and honestly that leads
to abundance, to a richness that one finds even in the difficult times, the
ones created by that very honesty, that choice to be who you are.  Ask
anyone who has gone through Alcoholics Anonymous about the power of
honesty, of what it means to let go of the masks at an AA meeting, and
know that you are met by others who will not judge you because they too
have revealed themselves in that place, they too have been authentic before
each other.  

Eugene Peterson, the, once again, Presbyterian pastor, has said in one of his
books that a pastor has to ask two basic questions they must always ask,
the first of which is this basic one: who are these people that I pastor, and,
the second question is this: how can I help them to be people God called has
called them to be?  (The Contemplative Pastor)  Who are they authentically,
truthfully, without varnish, who are they behind the masks they wear that
they and we all think will save us or protect us?  Some 157 years later, this
pastor, one in a long line of pastors who have served you even before the
Civil War, is asking these questions of you during this critical time, this time
of contemplating what the next decade or two will bring us in terms of
ministry.  Whatever it is, whatever ministry God has for us, requires all of us
to bring our authentic selves to this place, because that is what is asked of
us, because that is what was first done for us in the Christ, the Good
Shepherd.  Do you remember that little fact I shared with you a few years
ago about the two main images you find in churches, in the first 900 years of
the life of the church?  Remember—it wasn’t Christ crucified on the cross,
something that would later come to dominate Christian iconography—no, the
two images that you find on the ceilings and walls of the churches is, first, a
picture of Christ hosting his disciples around an abundant table full of food
found in paradise, and the second most popular image were the ones where
Christ is portrayed as the good shepherd, with us being his sheep.  
Whatever work God has for us, in the coming years, what we have is a good
shepherd who will keep us safe, whose voice we know, a truth that is so
important as we are ask for guidance on what direction this particular flock
should go.   But that work begins first in being authentic with ourselves,
being honest with ourselves, on a personal level—all of us know that truth,
the truth cancer stricken Pammy tells Anne, "Annie, you just don't have that
kind of time."   We don’t—not as people, and not as a church—but I don’t
want us to forget the more important truth, and that is that the Christ
remains with us, steadfastly beside us, behind us and before us, faithful to
us, in every moment over the past 157 years as a church, in every moment
of our lives personally, and that is because, you see, he is the Good
Shepherd, and we are his sheep, the ones completely known by him, both in
our shadow and light, and, still, he calls to us, and we know his voice,
because it is a real voice, an authentic voice, the voice of love itself.  Amen.