FOURTH SUNDAY OF EASTER – 16/17 APRIL 2005 - Sarah Bachelard, Ministry Student 

“Help us when we hear his voice to know him who calls us each by name, to follow where he leads”. 

The gospel reading and the reading from 1 Peter today give us promises and glimpses of an extraordinary new kind of life. Promises and glimpses like these are in fact everywhere in the New Testament, but we tend to become so accustomed to them as background that we forget to notice how strange and extraordinary they are. 

But listen again: “I am the gate. Whoever enters by me will be saved, and will come in and go out and find pasture … I came that they may have life, and have it abundantly”. You are “a chosen race, a holy nation, God’s own people” who have been “called out of darkness into his marvellous light”. 

There is great richness here and also mystery. What is it like to have life and have it abundantly? What is it like to dwell in “marvellous light”? Perhaps at times we have all had glimpses of what is being expressed in these passages – glimpses of true communion with others, experiences of profound love and connection, experiences of being at home and at one with ourselves, and fully alive to wonder and joy in creation. These are the times when we are most in touch with reality, with an experience of the truth. But then the glimpses fade, and we go back to what we tend to call the ‘real’ world – which might better be called the ‘unreal’ world – and the words of Scripture go back to being a kind of pleasant, ‘wouldn’t it be nice’ kind of wallpaper. 

I have just come back from a week-long silent retreat with the World Community for Christian Meditation, where that experience of being led into life in abundance, an experience of deep communion was very real. And what I learned from that week is what the readings for today also teach us – that this extraordinary connection with a new kind of reality is a fruit of discipleship and of deepening discipleship in a living relationship with God and with a community. So, what I want to share with you today are some reflections about discipleship and community that have emerged for me out of the readings and out of my retreat. 

Jesus in the gospel today is the good shepherd: he calls his sheep by name and leads them out, and they follow where he leads. It is a classic image of discipleship, but I think it is a more complex and layered image than we often recognise. 

Notice the imagery in this passage of the sheep being called by name. In a wonderful essay he has written on vocation, Rowan Williams draws out how powerfully the notions of calling, creating and naming are related in the Old Testament. He reminds us, for example, of Isaiah 40:26 where God creates the stars, calling them by name and how, when Jacob wrestles with an angel in Genesis, God calls Jacob and consecrates him to his service by giving him a name (Israel). Time and again, in the Old Testament, things and people are brought to being or recreated (think of the prophets) by being named. Williams also notes that although there’s nothing specific in the New Testament that says we should, we still reflect these connections by associating baptism, God’s grace calling people into Christ, with the giving of a name. 

So, Williams says: ‘in the most basic sense of all, God’s call is the call to be: the vocation of creatures is to exist. And, secondly, the vocation of creatures is to exist as themselves, to be bearers of their names, answering to the word which gives each its distinctive identity’. 

When we think about discipleship we know that is not enough to know ourselves as called: we must also know what we are called to. Discipleship has different expressions for different people – and how do we know what our expression, our distinctive identity, is? 

In other words, in reading today’s gospel passage, sometimes I think we focus only on the bit about us being ‘called’, and we don’t notice particularly the bit about our being ‘called by name’. But if we are called by name, then what that means if we are to hear ourselves called and to follow, is that we must recognise our names. And, I want to suggest that that is not necessarily an easy or obvious matter. 

Last year, as most of you know, I came to recognise or hear a call to ministry in the church – that was the particular call of discipleship on me. For me this was more of a process and unfolding, rather than a thunder-bolt, but when I finally let myself think the thought, or hear the call, the experience was as though I was finally letting myself be who I am. To put it in the language of today’s gospel, it was as though I finally recognised my own name – finally heard who I was. And looking back, it seems that God had probably been calling it out – yelling it even – for quite some time. 

I share that experience, because I think it illustrates that we don’t always know, in our conscious minds at any rate, what our names are. It is not as though we are all just milling about in the sheep-pen, perfectly clear about who we are and waiting for Christ to call us forth. No – the process of coming to hear what we are being called to as disciples is in part the process of learning who we are. We come to know more clearly what our ‘distinctive identity’ is (in Rowan’s words) as we hear ourselves called to be that. 

So, there is this double listening required if we are serious about discipleship. It is a listening both to ourselves – our recognising what gives us life, what we most truly are when we take various forms of unreality and distortion away. And it is a listening for God, with a willingness to surrender our ego’s ideas about what it is we are supposed to be doing, and a trust that when we truly listen for what God wants from us we will thereby discover our true identity and our true fulfilment. 

There are many reasons why we often do not hear God calling our name at first. Probably the main one is that we are not listening – we have our own plans, thank you very much, and they involve a decent superannuation package. Or, perhaps we think that we are not significant enough to have our own name – to be called individually. We thought we heard something, but that can’t possibly be right because the kind of person that would or could do or be that doesn’t look remotely like me. But the pseudo-humility of the ego is just as distorting as pride or refusal to listen, because it denies that we too are called to be fully alive in Christ. 

There’s something else to mention here: I think sometimes the word ‘discipleship’ has negative connotations – it makes us think we are going to have to give something up, make sacrifices, not be happy and enjoy ‘ordinary life’. It is true that discipleship involves discipline – a preparedness to enter more and more deeply into communion with God, and that that may indeed involve giving some things up or making some sacrifices. I don’t think that it means being unhappy – giving up the life we really wanted to have for the sake of some more dreary, difficult or drudgery life that God wants us to have. St Irenaeus said that the glory of God is the human being fully alive. Christ said he came that we might have life and have it abundantly. That isn’t just a metaphor – just something we are supposed, if we were ‘good’ to think more abundant, but really is not much fun. It is the truth, the promise – and it is in fact the experience of life once you recognise that the name by which God calls you is always your true name, always the fulfilment of your being. 

So, when I said at the beginning that our experience of ‘life in abundance’ is the fruit of discipleship, I did not mean that it is some kind of reward for being good, doing our duty, giving up the life we’d really like to have for some other kind of more difficult life that God thinks we should have. Life in abundance just is the life you have as a disciple, it is the joy of letting yourself be who you are. That is the strange mystery of it all – that something that looks like a losing of your life, is the finding of it! 

So what is the connection between all that, and community – the kind of community that the author of 1 Peter evokes so wonderfully. First, it is often through our community and in our community’s listening of us that we learn what our name is, or we are able to trust what we have heard for ourselves. If we are a community of disciples, then we have a responsibility to each other that each hear and is enabled to respond to their distinctive identity, their particular calling from God. Is it a question we ask ourselves often enough, as we sit next to one another in the pews – what is my neighbour’s true name and how can I help them discern it? 

And second, 1 Peter exhorts us to allow ourselves to be built as a temple of living stones. This does not or should not just mean that we are living just in the sense of still on deck – animate rather than inanimate building blocks. If we are to call ourselves living stones and see our community as built from living stones then we must be alive in the sense that Jesus meant – abundantly alive, fully alive to Christ and to each other. And the kind of discipleship that gives rise to that kind of aliveness is not just a one off event – not, ah yes, I was called once in 1982 to run the fete, or be a teacher, or to be a priest and now I’m doing that so I’m being a disciple. Discipleship is ongoingly being open to God’s word for us, now that we know our name – perhaps there is something new for us to do, perhaps some new adventure, some new and not yet imagined way of being alive for me. Perhaps, if I were listening for the call, there will be yet some further step to take into God’s marvellous light.

 Amen.