4 Easter

 

April 26, 2026

John 10.1-10

+ I was in a grocery store the other day, and was asking a clerk where something was.

All of a sudden a long-time friend of mine came running up me and said, “I knew it was you!”

 “You knew it was me?” I said. “How was that?”

 “I heard your voice and said to myself, ‘that’s Jamie Parsley!’”

 Somebody knew my voice!

 Which I think is funny

 Because when I was a teenager, I hated my voice.

 I was so self-conscious of my voice.

 When I was younger, before my voice changed, whenever I would answer the phone, people thought I was my mother.

 I remember being so embarrassed by that!

 Then, later, when my voice was changing, I went through a period of great self-consciousness.

 One day, in German class, I was called on my by the teacher and I responded, which my weird, teenage, cracking guy voice.

 My voice just made that cracking, Peter Brady kind of sound.

 Some kids in front of me started laughing, as kids often do.

 I was so embarrassed that for several years, even after my voice changed, I didn’t even want to talk.

 Which, I know, you are sitting there thinking, “Father Jamie didn’t want to talk? How can we make that happen again??”

 But I went several years just hating the way my voice sounded.

 Well, that’s not a good thing for a person who wants to be priest.

 So, I started making a concentrated effort to work on my voice.

 I worked on things like inflection and emphasis and how to enunciate.

 And now, people in grocery stores run over to me from the next aisle because they heard me asking a clerk a question.

 Let’s face it, our voices are kind of like our names.

 They define us in a distinctive, unique kind of way.

 They become a part of who we are.

 And if you don’t believe me, just think for a moment about the voice of your parents or someone you have lost.

 Think about how important the voice of your mother is.

 It’s the first voice you would’ve hear heard or responded to.

 If your mom is no longer with us, do you remember their voice?

 Because one of the hardest things in the grief process is the day you suddenly realize you don’t remember your parents’ or your loved one’s voices.

 So, our voice is important.

 And today, in our Gospel reading, we hear about a Voice that is equally important to us.

 Jesus tell us, “The sheep hear the Shepherd’s voice. He calls his own sheep by name and leads them out.”

 And I think most of us—if we’re honest—have spent a good part of our lives trying to sort out which voices are worth following, and which ones are just noise dressed up as authority.

 Because there are a lot of voices in our lives.

 And not just audible ones.

 There are voices in our social media and our communication.

 We hear voices in our emails and in our text messages.

 And we sure hear some voices from those who are supposedly in authority in this country and in the world.

 We want to hear the voice of the Good Shepherd.

 But sometimes it’s the Bad Shepherd’s voice we end up hearing loudest of all.

 Sometimes that voice promises us safety, but what it really means to do is to control us.

 Some voices promise belonging, but what they really offer is conformity.

 Some voices promise life, but what they deliver is exhaustion.

 And Jesus, characteristically, doesn’t argue with those voices on their own terms.

 He doesn’t try to out-shout them.

 What does he do instead?

 He tells a story instead.

 He talks of a sheepfold.

 He talks of a gate.

 He talks of a shepherd.

 And then he says something we don’t expect to hear.

 He says,  “I am the gate.”

 He doesn’t just say he’s the shepherd, the one who leads.

 No, rather he says he is the gate itself.

 The threshold.

 The place of passage.

 The place of decision.

 The place where you decide whether you are going to live inside fear, or step out into something wider, riskier, more alive.

 “I am the gate,” he says. “Whoever enters by me will be saved, and will come in and go out and find pasture.”

 Notice that: they will come in and go out.

 This is not a locked enclosure.

 This is not a prison disguised as piety.

 This is not a system designed to keep you small and manageable.

 The life Jesus is talking about has movement.

 Breathing room.

 It has grass under your feet and sky over your head.

 It’s a life where you are not owned, bur rather known.

 Now, that sounds nice.

 It’s sounds great!

 But, is it?

 It’s actually a hard thing.

 Because being owned is simple.

 Someone else tells us who we are when we are owned.

 Someone tells us what to do or where to go.

 We don’t have to listen very closely.

 We just have to obey.

 We just have to be obedient.

 But being known?

 Actually being called by name?

 That requires listening.

 That requires actually hearing.

 That requires trust.

 That requires the slow, sometimes painful work of learning the difference between the voice that gives life and the voice that diminish it.

 Jesus is blunt about the stakes.

 “The thief comes only to steal and kill and destroy.”

 Now, we tend to imagine that in dramatic terms.

 Some external evil, something obviously evil.

 But more often than not, the thief sounds reasonable.

 Respectable, even.

 The thief is the voice that tells you “your body is a problem to be solved.”

 The thief is the voice that tells you “there is no place for you unless you become someone else first.”

 The thief is subtle.

 And patient.

 And very, very good at sounding like truth.

 And then there is the voice of the Shepherd.

 It’s not coercive.

 It’s not frantic.

 It’s not shaming.

 It’s steady.

 It’s persistent.

 It’s familiar.

 Our name is vital to who we are.

 It is our essence, kind of like our own distinctive voice.

 Calling us by name means we matter.

 I matter.

 You matter.

 It means we actually exist.

 And here’s the thing Jesus insists,

 “you already know that voice.”

 Maybe not clearly.

 Maybe not all the time.

 But somewhere deep down, beneath the noise, beneath the fear, beneath all the ways we’ve been told to mistrust ourselves, we know the sound of the voice that leads us toward life.

 And Jesus names that too:

 “I came that they may have life, and have it abundantly.”

 Not minimally.

 Not just barely.

 Not just enough to get by.

 But, abundantly.

 But I want to stress, it also doesn’t mean we have it easy.

 It doesn’t mean safe in the way in which there are no dangers.

 Sheep still walk through valleys.

 Shepherds can’t eliminate every danger.

 Rather what do they do?

 They accompany us through it.

 They lead us through the hard times.

 Abundant life is not the absence of risk.

 It is the presence of relationship.

 It is the freedom to come in and go out.

 It is knowing that we can rest when we need to rest, or to move when we are called to move, to trust that the One who knows our name is not interested in confining us, but in leading us into something larger than ourfear.

 So many of us need to hear that right now.

 Because a lot of us are tired.

 We are tired of the noise.

 We are tired of trying to prove we belong.

 We are tired of trying to sit down at tables to which we aren’t invited.

 We are tired of all those voices that take more than they give.

 And Jesus does not respond to that exhaustion with a demand.

 He responds with his voice.

 His calm, soothing voice.

 And what is that voice saying to us?

 It’s calling us.

 By our very own name.

 Not to trap us.

 Not to use us.

 Not to make us into something we’re not.

 But to lead us, slowly and patiently, into life.

 Real life.

 Abundant life.

 The kind of life that can’t be stolen.

 The kind of life that doesn’t run out.

 The kind of life that, once you begin to recognize it, you realize has been calling you all along with a voice so familiar it sound almost like a song.

 

Amen.