The Episcopal Diocese of Tennessee



The Fourth Sunday of Easter, Year A, 2008, April 13, 2008, Church of the Good Samaritan Franklin West (evening)

“I came that they may have life, and have it abundantly” (Jo. 10:10).

It’s the “grand opening” of the Church of the Good Samaritan today, an Episcopal community of faith in West Franklin that is “aware”, “prepared”, “willing”, and “serving”. God has brought each of us here for a purpose today, because God is involved in our lives and desires good things for each of us. God’s call finds everyone in a different place, but in spite of this he has brought us to a common destination today. God’s hope for us is community and mission, a common life and a common call to serve the world.

Jesus says in our Gospel today that he has come into the world so that we may have life, “and have it abundantly”. What does abundant life mean to you? Does it mean having your needs met and your hopes fulfilled? Most likely it does, and there’s nothing wrong with that. But abundant life is a life with meaning, not just a life of getting, because life is so much more than that. “Abundant life” is “overflowing life”, life that flows out of us because it cannot be contained within. God invites us to share life in community, with others, and to reach out to our neighbors. That “reaching out” defines a Good Samaritan, in “willing” and “serving” the neighbor. It’s what “abundant life”, “overflowing life”, is all about.

There is a saying in the African Church, “I am because we are”. Each of us finds our place in community, our identity in community; each of us is a neighbor to all and tied together by our common humanity. And if we go further, we can also say, along with African Christians, that “We are because he is”, because of what Jesus has done for us, for all of us (“The Anglican Church of Kenya” by Grant LeMarcquand in The Oxford Guide to the Book of Common Prayer). He has made us neighbors, and taught us to see each other as brothers and sisters in him. That’s also part of the abundant life that Christ has given us.

What is it like to live a life that is not abundant? Some words occur to me: meager, scarce, constricted. There’s not enough to go around, and people end up hoarding that kind of life and keeping it to themselves. But who really wants to live that way? Is that really living?

There is an old life, and there is the new life. Abundant life is marked by gladness and generosity, as in our reading from Acts, “Day by day, as they spent much time together in the temple, they broke bread at home and ate their food with glad and generous hearts…” (Acts 2:46). There’s no scarcity or meagerness in the new life. We come today so that we can be filled with a gladness and generosity that are ultimately rooted in what God has done for us.

God has been generous to us in Jesus Christ, giving us a new life when we were still in the grip of death, caught up in the old life defined by what we have and what we can acquire. The story in Acts, with its community of abundance and generosity, stands foursquare against the ethic of scarcity! Life centered on what we have and keep to ourselves is pretty deadly, trivial and without much meaning. But the new life is significant, meaningful, and eternal. It is the source of gladness and generosity, because of the gift that God has given and his generosity in giving it to us. Jesus Christ has been raised from the dead, and that means new life for us.

The Rt. Reverend John Bauerschmidt, Bishop of Tennessee

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