Abundant Life

“I came that they may have life, and have it abundantly.” What is “abundant life?” What is it that Jesus promises here, when he tells the crowd that he came so that people might have life abundantly? How would you know if you had life abundantly? Would you have a prolonged life? If you lived past 100, would that be living abundantly? If you were part of the 1%, rich enough so that you could buy everything you needed and have access to the finest medical care, would that be abundant life? If you were blessed with a large and attentive extended family, would that be abundant life? Actually today’s readings suggest that having life abundantly is none of these things, but something else altogether.

Despite his promise, neither Jesus nor the writer of the gospel according to John defines what “having life abundantly” means. Here I need to make the usual reminder about the fourth gospel. It was the last of the gospels, written in the ‘90s to a community of mostly Jewish followers of Jesus who were in conflict with the majority Jewish community. When you hear the contrasts in this passage, between the shepherd and the thief, or between the shepherd who protects the sheep and those who want to hurt the sheep, it’s all too easy to slide into anti-Semitism and hear a condemnation of all Jews here. That is emphatically not the case. If there is any implied condemnation in this passage, it is only of those religious leaders with whom the new followers of Jesus are fighting.

So what might the evangelist mean by Jesus’ promise of abundant life? Commentators have offered many different answers to that question over the centuries. Actually, most twenty-first century people don’t find the image of sheep in this passage very helpful. To begin with, probably none of us have kept sheep or even observed the work of shepherds. And who wants to be a sheep? Do sheep have life abundantly? Members of PETA would probably say “no.” Not being a sheep, I’m not sure. But I do know this: there is one very important aspect of sheep life that we should notice. Sheep are social animals. They literally flock together, and they get nervous when one of the members of the flock goes missing. In using the images of sheep and sheepfold, Jesus is talking about a flock that is a community, a flock that not only knows its shepherd, but also each other. These sheep are not isolated individuals. They are bonded to Jesus and to each other. It is those bonds that enable them to follow Jesus’ voice.

Our lesson from the book of Acts suggests what a community committed to Jesus might look like in human terms. The shape of community is a continuing theme in Luke-Acts. We can especially watch the formation of new Christian communities under Paul’s leadership as we follow his travels through the Book of Acts. We even have a hint of the importance of community in the story we heard last week from the gospel of Luke, of the encounter along the road to Emmaus. There we discovered that Christ comes to us walking and in the breaking of bread. And that’s the point: Christ comes to us. Even in that story we find a community, albeit a small one, of only two people, but they encounter Christ together. And their response? They rush back to Jerusalem to share the good news of their experience with the rest of the Jerusalem community.

In today’s reading we are in the aftermath of Peter’s speech on Pentecost. Last week we heard the end of the speech, and that 3,000 people had been baptized as a result. Today, we hear a description of what the communities of these new Christians might have looked like. To be sure, what we have here is probably an idealized picture. It uses some of the common descriptions of an ideal community, and it was probably what someone writing in the ‘80s had heard or believed about those first followers of Jesus.

Nevertheless, the author of Luke-Acts suggests important characteristics of the way of life of Jesus’ newest followers. First, we are told that these new followers continued to grow in their faith by continuing “in the apostles’ teaching.” They didn’t think they knew all there was to know about their new faith simply by having had water poured over them. Secondly, they continued to worship regularly. For them, that meant going to the Temple on the Sabbath, which was the form of worship that they knew. However, they also experienced Jesus’ presence with them sacramentally, i.e., by gathering together, most likely in each other’s houses, and sharing bread and wine. Finally, they were generous with each other. They shared fellowship over meals and they provided for each other’s needs. It’s a wonderful picture of abundant life: life shared with trusted friends, and time set aside for study, worship, sacrament, and a good meal.

It’s a picture of abundant life that has never lost its appeal. Actually, the ideal of life shared in community antedates the coming of Jesus. The Essenes, who flourished about the turn of the first millennium, and who left accounts of their community in the Dead Sea Scrolls, observed the same kind of community life that the author of Acts describes. In the fourth century AD, the Desert Fathers and Mothers were fed up with the rich and indulgent way of life of Christians in Alexandria. So they took off for the hills and caves of the deserts, where they lived a simple life in community and devoted themselves to contemplative prayer and study. In central Italy in the sixth century, Benedict of Nursia established monastic communities that encouraged a balanced life of study, prayer, shared work, and shared meals. Benedictines have flourished ever since. From them have come all the other vowed communities: the Franciscans, the Augustinians, the Dominicans, the Jesuits, the Cistercians, and all the rest. We even have vowed communities in the Episcopal Church and in the wider Anglican Communion. Here in Ohio, the Episcopal Community of the Transfiguration has been settled in Glendale near Cincinnati since 1906.

Pilgrimage, which I mentioned last week, is also a form of community, albeit a temporary one. Even so, study, worship, and generous sharing are important parts of the pilgrimage experience. And today we also have intentional communities of committed lay people who live together and share their time, prayer, food, and worldly goods with each other and with the neighborhood around them. And in Friday’s Columbus Dispatch I discovered a new kind of community of Jesus’ followers. There was an article about what they called “house churches.” These are groups of people who have formal worship in a church and then gather together in small groups in each other’s homes to discuss the lessons and sermon while sharing breakfast. Sounds like the community in today’s reading from Acts!

The truth is that there is a great longing in contemporary culture for true community, for communities not necessarily based on socio-economic class and geography, but on shared commitment to something larger than ourselves. In 2000, sociologist Robert Putnam wrote an influential book entitled Bowling Alone. In it, Putnam wrote about the collapse of community in the US and the decline of voluntary organizations, civic clubs, and religious communities. That collapse may well be even deeper today. We may have 24/7 access to social media, but do we have community? Are we perhaps finally reaching the limit of the individualism that is so rampant in our culture? Are we finally beginning to hear the lie in “Every tub on its own bottom” and “I’m all right, Jack?”

We long for authentic community. We may not be ready or able to run off to a convent or monastery, or even to form a new intentional community. But we long for true abundant life, of the life lived in community with other sheep, that Jesus promised us – and not just for an hour a week in a historic church building. Don’t we too want honest engagement with Scripture? Wouldn’t we like to deepen our relationship with God and each other through shared contemplative prayer? Perhaps this is a challenge that St. Peter’s can wrestle with in the weeks and months to come.

And more. Our abundant life in Jesus also calls us to reach out beyond the bounds of this parish, to see the welfare of others, and especially of those who are our immediate neighbors, as at least as important as our own. And we are called to do that together. African-American theologian Drew G.I. Hart describes the gathering of a group called to help people organize in Harrisburg, PA. After alluding to the “truth-telling, uninhibited joy, and extended grace” that the group experienced, Hart says, “Not all the insights that were shared were revelatory; some information could have been discovered more efficiently with a book or a Google search. Yet something is lost if our distinct bodies are never together, collectively participating in our Creator’s liberative activity for justice and peace.”1 Part of living abundantly is also acknowledging that we share this planet with everyone else on it, and their welfare ultimately has to be our concern as well. Which might also mean making a commitment as a parish to organizations such as Partners in Ministry in Liberia, Episcopal Relief and Development, or Doctors Without Borders, just to name a few. Choose your square inch of the world and embrace those who live on it as your sisters and brothers. Work against all those who would divide us.

Jesus has promised us abundant life. The life he holds out to us is life lived in community, in community where we can grow in faith, worship together, and share generously with each other. His promise still stands and still impels us forward.

1. “The Goodness of Gathered Flesh,” Sojourners, May 2017, p. 27.