A message for the 4th Sunday of Easter:
What a joy to gather on a beautiful Sunday morning in this season of Easter—a season marked by celebration, renewal, and the unmistakable signs of new life all around us. Easter exudes a certain exuberance of brightness that invites us to notice all that is growing, what is awakening, and what is being made new. Even the music that fills our sanctuary rings with a joy that reminds us that this is not an ordinary time. Easter is a time of new life.
As we progress through the Easter season, you’ll notice a subtle shift in how we hear the story of Jesus. We move from the dramatic accounts of resurrection appearances in Luke and Matthew’s gospels into the rich and reflective language that Jesus uses in the Gospel of John to talk about life with God. Frankly, one of the more striking features of John’s Gospel is just how chatty Jesus is about that subject and the metaphors he uses to do it.
Again and again, Jesus returns to a central image: he is the shepherd, and we are the sheep. Others are represented as well – thieves, wolves, gates, pastures. This is not merely poetic language, but also a framework. Jesus is offering us a way to understand our lives, our place in the world, and our relationship to God and one another. And he does so, “that we may have life, and have it abundantly.”
Today we dive into what that means.
If we pause for a moment and consider the messages we receive every day—from advertising, from work culture, from the broader currents of society—we begin to notice a pattern. We are told, in countless ways, that life is a competition. That to live well is to get ahead, to win, to accumulate. Abundance, in this framework, is measured by success over others—more wealth, more status, more security.
Implicit in this vision is a simple equation: for me to win, someone else must lose.
It is a worldview built on comparison and scarcity. There is little room for togetherness, and even less for shared flourishing. It is, at its core, a story about separation.
But the framework Jesus offers is entirely different.
To understand it, it helps to picture the image he uses. Anyone who has spent time around farms knows that shepherding is no simple task. Moving sheep—getting them to go where they need to go—is difficult, unpredictable work. And yet, when it is done well, it can be astonishing.
I remember once, traveling through northern New Mexico, seeing a small group of cowboys managing what must have been a thousand sheep. With maybe three riders and a couple dogs, they guided the entire flock with remarkable precision. At one point, a group of sheep began drifting toward the road. A single glance from one of the cowboys toward a dog was enough. The dog moved around to flank the sheep, crouched low, fixed its gaze—and the sheep turned back as one.
What was most striking was not just the control, but the sense of unity – of wholeness. It felt less like separate parts being managed and more like a single, living organism moving together. Each part had its role. There was no uniformity—each rider, each dog, each sheep was distinct—but there was a deep, responsive coherence.
That image gets us closer to what Jesus is describing about life with the Divine.
In the life of faith, we are not called to lose ourselves, nor to dissolve into sameness. Rather, we are invited to recognize that we are part of a greater whole—a living, dynamic unity in which each of us has a place. We remain individuals, but we are also interconnected, responsive to one another, and attuned—if we are listening—to the voice of the shepherd.
And that, Jesus suggests, is where abundant life begins: not in competition, but in connection. Not in isolation, but in belonging.
The writer Annie Dillard offers a vivid way of imagining this wholeness. Reflecting on the natural world, she marvels at its sheer creativity and diversity—its wild, overflowing energy. The world, she suggests, is not a tidy machine where everything fits neatly into place. It is more like a rushing creek, full of movement and surprise, alive with what she calls a “free, fringed tangle.”
“Freedom,” she writes, “is the world’s water and weather… and the creator loves pizzazz.”
This is the world we inhabit: not rigid, not uniform, but vibrant and expansive. And we are part of it—not as isolated units striving to outdo one another, but as participants in a shared, living whole, each with our own essential ‘pizzazz’.
But what, then, is our role within that whole?
For that, we turn to the wisdom of Teresa of Ávila, a 16th-century mystic whose words resonate deeply in the Easter season. Reflecting on the risen Christ—no longer confined to a single human body—she offers a profound insight:
Christ has no body but yours,
No hands, no feet on earth but yours,
Yours are the eyes with which he looks
Compassion on this world,
Yours are the feet with which he walks to do good,
Yours are the hands, with which he blesses all the world.
Yours are the hands, yours are the feet,
Yours are the eyes, you are his body.
This is not the message the world typically sends us home with. The world wants you to take home a message of striving, competing, and winning—that abundance comes from outperforming others and securing our own place at the top. But the vision Jesus offers is different. It is a vision of belonging rather than rivalry, of wholeness rather than fragmentation. We are part of something larger than ourselves, something vibrant and interconnected, and within that whole, each of us has a role to play.
When we begin to embrace that framework—when we recognize that we belong to this greater whole and live accordingly—something shifts. Life is no longer defined by competition or scarcity, but by relationship and meaning. We find ourselves drawn into a way of living that is richer, fuller, and more deeply grounded in love.
And that is what it means to have life, and to have it abundantly. Amen.
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