We’ve been scattered and separated for so long that it’s hard to come back together again, even though we want to. We’ve been divided and manipulated for so long that there’s suspicion and concern as we try to return to life as we once knew it. These readings from holy scripture invite us to envision ourselves responding to the God who is like a shepherd with a scattered flock of sheep. God gently yet firmly gathers us in, not to only find each other again, but to experience safety, equality, and wholeness together. A sermon based on Jeremiah 23.3-5; Mark 6.30-34, 53-56.
1.
Many of us love to travel. And according to my Instagram stream, lots of us are traveling. This last week I’ve seen some of you smiling at me from places like Tahoe, Yosemite, the Grand Canyon, Point Reyes National Seashore, and Austin, Texas.
While some of you have gone places you want to go, others have gone where they don’t want to go—like the hospital. And I saw some of you there too, but in person, not on Instagram.
Whether we leave home because we want to, or we leave home because we have to, most of us love to come home at some point; no matter how much we enjoy the adventure, we like to come home at some point to what we’ve known—our own kitchen, our own coffee maker and TV, our own garden, our own pillow.
In many ways these days, we feel like we’ve been away from home for a long, long time; gone from so much that we once knew.
The past eighteen months have been a forced dislocation, a disturbance, and a discouragement. We didn’t go away from what we knew and felt comfortable with because we wanted to or because we were on some grand adventure. We were forced into an experience we didn’t choose, something we weren’t prepared for, a trip that had no end in sight, and we don’t know what things will be like when we come home, back to normalcy.
There’s a general sense that this unwelcome trip may be coming to an end, but we’re not at all sure it really is. We can go to the store now without a mask. Some of us have gone to the movies. We’re eating in restaurants again. We’re getting together with people we didn’t see except on a screen for a year and a half. And yet, the Delta variant is on the rise. It’s a more contagious form of Covid and among the unvaccinated it is dangerous; this stage of the pandemic is now most serious among the unvaccinated masses and that threatens us all with the possibility of new variants that are vaccine-resistant. This last week, Dr. Aimee Sisson, the Yolo County Health Officer, pulled us back from the rush to reopen and recommends that “fully vaccinated persons resume masking indoors and to get tested after an exposure.”
We thought this long trip was coming to an end and we were at last getting back to normal, returning home. And then this shift back toward danger. We’re not home yet. We’re still scattered and vulnerable. In the words of the Bible, we’re like “sheep without a shepherd.”
2.
In the twenty-third chapter of Jeremiah, the prophet speaks for God saying:
“I myself will gather the remnant of my flock out of all the lands where they’ve been scattered, and I will bring them back to their fold, and they shall be fruitful and multiply.”
This is a promise of return spoken to people who worried they would be scattered forever. It’s a promise offered to a people dislocated from their land and culture, a people severely disturbed by the social and political struggles of their age, a people seriously discouraged and bereft from hope. The prophet speaks for God who knows what they have been through, who understands their yearning to come home, to return to what they once knew. The prophet speaks for the God who declares that a return will come and when it does, the people will “be fruitful and will multiply.”
Ahhhh. That’s a welcome promise—a promise we’d like to claim for ourselves. We too would like to receive a promise of return, to receive that strong assurance from God, and to sense that one day all this dislocation, disturbance, and discouragement will end and things will return to the way they once were.
But what if the “way things were” isn’t where God wants us to be when we come out of these crisis years? What if coming out of this season of crisis isn’t about going back, but creating something new? What if God wants something bigger and better than we once knew or even dared to imagine?
There are people who won’t be enthusiastic about that. Creating something new isn’t what they want; they’ve had enough of change. They want to go back. Anything else would feel like a loss of what they’ve known and enjoyed. These are the people at the center of society; life as they once knew it worked for them; they’d like it back, thank-you-very-much.
There are others who would embrace something different enthusiastically. Going back to what once was feels like a disaster. What they once knew didn’t work for them. Something new and different would offer the possibility of a new configuration of society and a change that could mean an improvement of their lives. These are the people who dwell not at the center of society, but on the borderlands, at the margins—kept, by the dominant forces of culture, on the sidelines, never really able to get in the game no matter how hard they might try.
3.
Around sixty of us are enrolled in our summer course, Racial Equity as Spiritual Practice. And more than that have been reading and exploring and organizing for quite awhile around the call of God to create a place where racial equity is not only a spiritual practice, but is an existential reality. We want society to work for everyone, no one excluded, that’s part of the mission of the church of Jesus Christ—to help all people thrive; body, mind, and soul.
We haven’t thought about it this way, but what we’re about is living into the promise of God spoken through the prophet Jeremiah; we could very well say that we want to claim this promise as something we can claim and manifest today:
God’s promise for all who have been dislocated these past few years;
God’s promise for all who have been disturbed by the social cracks and fissures now pried wide open by the pandemic that’s assaulted us, the economics that has segregated us, the politics that has divided us;
God’s promise for all who have been discouraged from time to time, wondering what will become of us.
We’re leaning toward the promise that God will bring us home again. But if we’re spiritually and theologically wise, we’ll realize that God has no interest in bringing us back to what once was; God wants to shepherd us into what could and should be.
Let’s notice how God said this promise was to come about: “I will raise up shepherds over my scattered people,” declares the Divine. “The shepherds will guide my people into a new experience. Not a single one of them will ever be afraid again; not a single one of them will be dismayed ever again; and none of them will ever be marginalized, dehumanized, or minimized again. For I will give you shepherds who will deal wisely and shall bring forth justice and righteousness in the land.”
“Justice and righteousness in the land.”
Many of us want to go back to what was. But God wants to bring us home to the universal experience of “justice and righteousness” for all.
And who are the shepherds who will take us there?
The shepherds the people needed, the shepherds God wanted, never materialized. When the people finally came home from their dislocation, their exile, their separation from their land and way of life, the shepherds—the priests and politicians—didn’t manifest anything new. They all went back to the way things were. They were unwilling to leverage their privilege, to give it away, for the sake of others. They kept intact the stratification of society as they’d known it, some at the center getting most of the goods and the many on the margins scraping away, fighting tooth and nail, for the little they could get. They subscribed to the “trickle down” economic theory that manifests in billionaires vying for first rights at space flights because we assume their wealth makes possible our own. It doesn’t. Trickle down economic theory is just that, a trickle. There is no real flow of capital, at least not to those who need it most.
In a similar setting long ago, God promised to “raise up for David a righteous Branch.” And finally, from the lineage of David, Israel’s great shepherd king, came another though very different shepherd, born of Mary, in Bethlehem, and of the lineage of David. Jesus would shepherd God’s forgotten people and manifest God’s desire for all people.
The Gospel reading today tells us that Jesus, God’s “righteous Branch,” “had compassion for the marginalized, because they were like sheep without a shepherd.” When society was terribly stratified, when the wealth gaps between people were massive, when the poor had little to no access to health care and education and representation in governance, when they were scattered and segregated far from the center, God raised up this new shepherd who “dealt wisely with the people and revealed God’s justice and righteousness in the land”:
Jesus manifested a new future for those who were discouraged because there was no place of safety and no means for their lives and the lives of their children to flourish;
Jesus manifested a new future for those who were disturbed by the social inequities that assaulted them, segregated them, and divided them and their children from what they needed to thrive; and
Jesus manifested a new future for those who were dislocated from the center to the margins, where they were harassed with no shepherd to fight for them.
Jesus knew the whole society needed to be brought home to what God dreams home could be like. Jesus knew that the whole world was dislocated from what God dreams the world can be; Jesus knew that the segregation of society between the haves and the have-nots, those with privilege and those without, those with power and those without—stratified, segregated societies always lead to widespread discouragement.
And Jesus knew that he would have to disturb the status quo in such societies in order to bring about the kin-dom of God. Jesus knew that it would do no good to bring the people back to the way things were. What “once was,” was not home. What “once was” led to tyranny, injustice, and enslavement and to a deep and dangerous rot at the soul of society.
Jesus knew that a countercultural society, a society of “righteous shepherds” would need to rise up and learn to manifest a true reconfiguration of society so that everything that serves life flows more justly, more equitably, and more freely—the flow of money, the flow of food and water, the flow of education and housing and medical care.