no one will snatch them out of my hand (on John 10)

My sister has a much, much better memory than I do. I regularly have to get her to fill in the details of some hazy remembrance of mine, and it is such a RELIEF, every time she confirms that yes, that thing really did happen, no, that absurd memory you’ve been toting around all these years isn’t some figment of your imagination, yes, we really did grow up that way, no, you are not the only one who thinks/believes/acts/assumes that thing about the world that seems obvious to you but baffles people whenever you bring it up.

This weekend, for some reason, we were talking about the first time we got hell-shamed (yes, we are FUN!). Maybe you know what I’m talking about: when churches pile on unbearable amounts of fear and shame in order to get people (children!) to “commit their lives to Christ.”

Leah and I grew up in church, surrounded by church people, at the church building multiple times a week, immersed in church culture and activities. But nowhere along our formative spiritual journeys at First Church of the Brethren did we encounter that kind of theological abuse (well, there was that one weird youth minister who tried to shock us into evangelicalism, but he didn’t last too long.). We knew church as the place where our friends were, where we laughed a LOT (sometimes too much?), where people told stories and made jokes and kept up with each other, where we were embraced and welcomed and loved and TREASURED.

a bunch of treasured babies

I sometimes think about how many people in that congregation contributed to instilling in me that absolute, indelible, incontrovertible knowing that I was not only welcome but downright *cherished,* and the list gets very long, very fast. There are twenty names floating through my brain right this minute, and I know the actual tally is approximately five times that.

Church was a place where we were loved, absolutely, unconditionally.

kids who know they’re cherished

So it was very, very strange and very, very upsetting when we went out in the world and discovered that our friends’ churches were telling them something VERY different. My moment came when an elementary school friend invited me to her church’s vacation bible school and the closing assembly included a hellfire and brimstone altar call about two little boys who fell off a cliff. The one kid who had accepted Jesus as his Lord and Savior went to heaven. The other kid, who had not said those particular words in a specific context, went to hell. I cried myself to sleep.

Leah told me this weekend that her moment came later, in high school, when she and her friends went to Scare Mare, a church-sponsored Halloween haunted house where after you walk through the entire terrifying thing, the very earnest evangelicals of Lynchburg, Virginia explain to you that if you don’t commit your life to Christ, everything you just experienced will be REAL. In HELL. Leah told me she was so angry that she left the campfire where that bullshit was being peddled and threw up in the woods.

Those hell-shaming moments of fear-mongering and manipulation upset us so much partly because they’re just gross, fear-mongering manipulative tactics and we recognized them for what they were, but also because we KNEW that those things were NOT what it meant to follow Jesus. We knew people who were following Jesus, and none of them every even implied that this kind of terrifying, hateful stuff was part of it. We knew what Jesus’ voice sounded like. It sounded like Paul Alwine’s voice in the pulpit, like Lois Hylton’s lullabies in the nursery, like Jones Keller’s laughter in the narthex. We knew - because we had experienced it since before we were born - that Jesus was LOVE, not condemnatory manipulation.

In the gospel lesson for this week, Jesus is walking across the temple portico when some people interrupt him and demand that he tell them, once and for all, if he is or is not the Messiah. Jesus, who has just finished giving this extended reflection on how he is the Good Shepherd whose sheep know his voice, who knows his sheep and whose sheep know him, is pretty frustrated with their question.

“I have told you! Everything I’ve done - feeding people, healing people, casting out demons, hanging out with the last and the least, LOVING YOU - has been a testimony to who I am. You aren’t paying attention, and that’s why you’re asking for clarification. My sheep know me, they know the sound of my voice. They know who I am, and they follow me. No one will snatch them out of my hand.”

I think about this a lot when I listen to my friends who are parents share how hard parenting is. I’m not a parent, but I know that it is a grueling endeavor packed with unforeseen challenges and impossible decisions. The best response I can give to my friends navigating all of it is to tell them the thing I am sure and certain of: kids know who loves them and who does not. Kids can tell, even when you’re in deep conflict with them, that you love them, that you are committed to them, that this struggle is born out of the desire to love, support and protect them. I *get* that it probably doesn’t feel that way most of the time, but I was a youth minister once upon a time and I watched kids move like moths to flames toward the people who genuinely cared about who they were and how they flourished. Kids know.

When Jesus says “my sheep know the sound of my voice, and they follow me,” I think he’s talking about that kind of knowing. Especially if we were lucky enough to be taught at an early age that we are beloved creatures worthy of being cherished simply because we exist, we have an innate KNOWING about who really loves us and what love really looks like. If we follow that knowing, we won’t need hell houses or bible school preachers to put the fear of god in us in order to follow Jesus. We won’t need signs or wonders or verbal confirmation about who is or who is not the Messiah. We’ll hear Jesus’ voice and recognize it for what it is: love.

The older I get, the more I understand what a precious gift it was to have grown up in a church that cherished me, that cherished each other. The more I learn about the world, the more I understand how few places and people are able or equipped to live that kind of love with an embracing broadness. I strive, myself, to embody and enact the kind of belonging that I experienced, to treasure others in the way I have been treasured. It is not easy. Being around other people who are also trying helps, a lot.

I pray that every one of us can hear that voice of the Good Shepherd and know it for what it is, without fear or shame or manipulation, without needing external confirmation or extra validation, to know in the depths of our being that we are loved and that love is worth following.

And as for all that other, manipulative, performative, fear-based, shame-inducing bullshit? I pray that every one of us has a loving parent who hears us crying about it in the middle of the night and comes in to assure us that it is, in fact, a stinky pile of dog poo. And if that’s not available to you, well, you have permission to leave the stupid campfire and vomit it all out in the woods.