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Pentecost P.11 July 19, 2015
2 Samuel 7:1-14a Psalm 89:20-37
Ephesians 2:11-22 Mark 6:30-34, 53-56
We may have the habit of being compartmental eaters in our table habits. You know, you eat all of one item before moving on to the next. So things don't get mixed in our mouths even though we know that everything eventually gets mixed together.
We cannot always be compartmentalists in life experience even though we try to exert control on the kinds of things that we want to happen to us at any given time. If modern life requires us to be multi-taskers, the life of faith requires us to be faith managers of varieties of human experiences.
Jesus told his disciples to take a vacation even though there was a crowd of needy people who wanted to follow them to get help. When you want to take a vacation, people still get sick, accidents still occur and death is no respecter of vacation time. As Jesus and the disciples went on vacation, Jesus saw the crowd and there is the commentary upon the crowd of needy people: They were like sheep without a shepherd. And so Jesus began to teach them and heal them and the vacation had to wait.
Sheep without shepherd might sum up what we often observe in the failure of humanity to take proper and adequate care of everyone. In another Gospel, Jesus is quoted as saying, "The poor we always have with us." And he said this to justify the woman who anointed his feet with expensive perfume when she was criticized for her excess.
King David was worried that he had such a nice place to live in but there was not a Temple to be a beautiful sacred space for the worship of God. God told David that it would have to wait for his son Solomon to build the Temple.
St. Paul was finding success with the message of Christ but mainly within the Gentile populace and he was having a difficult time blending Jewish and Gentile followers of Christ. The different communities had lots of cultural baggage to over come.
Poor people, ignorant masses, sick people without care, community disagreements, and a King who wants to build a nice house for God: these are only portions of what get juxtaposed in the diversity of life experience.
Faith means that we learn how to live with the diversity of life experience and not get cynical, or misanthropic or escapist or denying and fatalistic or become an isolationist.
The crowd was like sheep without a shepherd. This is the great dilemma in life. Many people fall through the cracks and do not get care. We can wax eloquent about why it is happening and who is the blame and what everyone should be doing about it and all of this may just be our own denial or our own tendency to blame others when faced with the insurmountable.
The sheep do not have enough shepherds. People who have the education, power and the wealth do not get matched properly with people who can benefit from them. The sheep do not have enough shepherds. This is not a problem that can be solved like the plot of an action adventure movie. There is no Super Shepherd to arrive on the scene and fix the situation.
People become dependent sheep through ignorance and neglect. In our world we do not have rational procreation with every child being brought into a world of caring shepherds who know they have the ability to ably provide for and take care of their children. We have many, many kleptocracies in our world consisting of those who have the power and wealth and knowledge to exploit the needy and completely neglect them. We have lots of comfortable people who throw up their hands and say, "It's not my responsibility." We have prophets on behalf of the poor who make the poor into saints; and the poor and ignorant are not automatic saints.
And we still have to take vacations. We go to concerts. We build expensive stadiums and churches. We buy pipe organs. We exercise manifold activities in our leisure time. And we know that leisure time can be expensive. And we justify using leisure money for such purposes even while we know that there are many sheep without shepherd.
It is the human condition of freedom that there are not perfect matches of befriending for all of the people in this world which would allow for adequate care always to be experienced. Sometimes liberals and conservatives use the Bible to blame others or simply establish a political position. I believe the truth of the meanings of the Bible is to present a full variety of the ambiguity of the human condition to us, and then challenge us to accept the life of faith as the best way to live given the hodge podge of all that freedom allows to occur in human experience.
Are we going to solve all of the problems of the sheep without shepherds in our world? No, we're not. Should we take vacations even though there always will be sheep without shepherds? Yes. Should we honor the aesthetic dimension of our human lives through music and art and worship? Yes. Should we activate our capacity to play and enjoy the play of others? Yes. And we have to do all of this while living with the dire conditions of human need in this world.
This requires of us a life of faith which is versatile and finessed. It requires of us to have wisdom to "pick our battles" in how we prioritize what we can do and what we need to do to maintain ourselves so that we can be effective shepherds of others.
Our lives of faith need to be dedicated in part to shepherding the people in need in our world. Our faith needs to be prophetic? We need to be prophetic about waste. We are told that 4-6 trillion dollars or more have been spent on wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Have these effort improved the conditions for their people or for us or have they created more human need? We have had recent financial fraud in our country of incredible magnitude? Such debacles have harmed pension funds and more. In our lives of faith we need to be more creative in solving the problems of human need than we are at developing schemes for promoting the further financial wealth of but a small group in society.
The life of faith has to be able to diversify to advance the call to be shepherds in a world full of needy sheep, and we have to do it while acknowledging all of the other facets of our intellectual, educational, cultural, aesthetic, religious and spiritual lives. The life of faith needs to be embraced as the ability to juggle the incredible ambiguity of the free conditions of life without succumbing to isolationism and escaping from the true problems of a world of need.
The Gospel today is this: by faith you and I are challenged to do it all. We develop strategies of shepherding for the sheep of this world even as we maintain the full balance of the things which we need to enrich ourselves and keep us effective in human fellowship to do the work of the church together.
So, I hope you enjoy your vacations, your leisure time, your aesthetic events, your play even while we hope that having balanced lives of faith will help us be strong and resist the despair that we could know if we focused only upon human need.
May God grant us the rest and the leisure to become more effective shepherds in our world of needy sheep. Amen.
We cannot always be compartmentalists in life experience even though we try to exert control on the kinds of things that we want to happen to us at any given time. If modern life requires us to be multi-taskers, the life of faith requires us to be faith managers of varieties of human experiences.
Jesus told his disciples to take a vacation even though there was a crowd of needy people who wanted to follow them to get help. When you want to take a vacation, people still get sick, accidents still occur and death is no respecter of vacation time. As Jesus and the disciples went on vacation, Jesus saw the crowd and there is the commentary upon the crowd of needy people: They were like sheep without a shepherd. And so Jesus began to teach them and heal them and the vacation had to wait.
Sheep without shepherd might sum up what we often observe in the failure of humanity to take proper and adequate care of everyone. In another Gospel, Jesus is quoted as saying, "The poor we always have with us." And he said this to justify the woman who anointed his feet with expensive perfume when she was criticized for her excess.
King David was worried that he had such a nice place to live in but there was not a Temple to be a beautiful sacred space for the worship of God. God told David that it would have to wait for his son Solomon to build the Temple.
St. Paul was finding success with the message of Christ but mainly within the Gentile populace and he was having a difficult time blending Jewish and Gentile followers of Christ. The different communities had lots of cultural baggage to over come.
Poor people, ignorant masses, sick people without care, community disagreements, and a King who wants to build a nice house for God: these are only portions of what get juxtaposed in the diversity of life experience.
Faith means that we learn how to live with the diversity of life experience and not get cynical, or misanthropic or escapist or denying and fatalistic or become an isolationist.
The crowd was like sheep without a shepherd. This is the great dilemma in life. Many people fall through the cracks and do not get care. We can wax eloquent about why it is happening and who is the blame and what everyone should be doing about it and all of this may just be our own denial or our own tendency to blame others when faced with the insurmountable.
The sheep do not have enough shepherds. People who have the education, power and the wealth do not get matched properly with people who can benefit from them. The sheep do not have enough shepherds. This is not a problem that can be solved like the plot of an action adventure movie. There is no Super Shepherd to arrive on the scene and fix the situation.
People become dependent sheep through ignorance and neglect. In our world we do not have rational procreation with every child being brought into a world of caring shepherds who know they have the ability to ably provide for and take care of their children. We have many, many kleptocracies in our world consisting of those who have the power and wealth and knowledge to exploit the needy and completely neglect them. We have lots of comfortable people who throw up their hands and say, "It's not my responsibility." We have prophets on behalf of the poor who make the poor into saints; and the poor and ignorant are not automatic saints.
And we still have to take vacations. We go to concerts. We build expensive stadiums and churches. We buy pipe organs. We exercise manifold activities in our leisure time. And we know that leisure time can be expensive. And we justify using leisure money for such purposes even while we know that there are many sheep without shepherd.
It is the human condition of freedom that there are not perfect matches of befriending for all of the people in this world which would allow for adequate care always to be experienced. Sometimes liberals and conservatives use the Bible to blame others or simply establish a political position. I believe the truth of the meanings of the Bible is to present a full variety of the ambiguity of the human condition to us, and then challenge us to accept the life of faith as the best way to live given the hodge podge of all that freedom allows to occur in human experience.
Are we going to solve all of the problems of the sheep without shepherds in our world? No, we're not. Should we take vacations even though there always will be sheep without shepherds? Yes. Should we honor the aesthetic dimension of our human lives through music and art and worship? Yes. Should we activate our capacity to play and enjoy the play of others? Yes. And we have to do all of this while living with the dire conditions of human need in this world.
This requires of us a life of faith which is versatile and finessed. It requires of us to have wisdom to "pick our battles" in how we prioritize what we can do and what we need to do to maintain ourselves so that we can be effective shepherds of others.
Our lives of faith need to be dedicated in part to shepherding the people in need in our world. Our faith needs to be prophetic? We need to be prophetic about waste. We are told that 4-6 trillion dollars or more have been spent on wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Have these effort improved the conditions for their people or for us or have they created more human need? We have had recent financial fraud in our country of incredible magnitude? Such debacles have harmed pension funds and more. In our lives of faith we need to be more creative in solving the problems of human need than we are at developing schemes for promoting the further financial wealth of but a small group in society.
The life of faith has to be able to diversify to advance the call to be shepherds in a world full of needy sheep, and we have to do it while acknowledging all of the other facets of our intellectual, educational, cultural, aesthetic, religious and spiritual lives. The life of faith needs to be embraced as the ability to juggle the incredible ambiguity of the free conditions of life without succumbing to isolationism and escaping from the true problems of a world of need.
The Gospel today is this: by faith you and I are challenged to do it all. We develop strategies of shepherding for the sheep of this world even as we maintain the full balance of the things which we need to enrich ourselves and keep us effective in human fellowship to do the work of the church together.
So, I hope you enjoy your vacations, your leisure time, your aesthetic events, your play even while we hope that having balanced lives of faith will help us be strong and resist the despair that we could know if we focused only upon human need.
May God grant us the rest and the leisure to become more effective shepherds in our world of needy sheep. Amen.
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