November 20, 2005
Texts: Ezekiel 34: 1-16, 25-31; Matthew 25: 31-46
Rev. Stephen H. Phelps
This past Thursday evening, the rulers in the House of Misrepresentatives passed a bill to cut student loans for working class families, medicaid for the poor who are sick, food stamps and WIC (the special food program for Women and Infant Children), foster care funding, and child care support for working mothers and fathers. Fifty-two billion dollars are to be saved, they preened. Mr. Hastert, the speaker of the House, actually said that this cut was made for our children’s sake–not to burden the next generation with excessive debt. Can hypocrisy reach higher? After four years of cutting hundreds of billions of dollars of taxes to enrich the wealthy, and throwing uncounted billions in debt onto the backs of future generations–unbearable millstones; after three years of waging optional war without asking anyone to pay for it except those future generations, the seventeen thousand American wounded and dead, and the scores of thousands of Iraquis shot and maimed; and just days after the President promised to veto a bill put forward to place a one-time tax on the oil companies’ windfall profits from the hurricanes to help fund the reconstruction of lives and jobs ruined by the great storms, that loathsome lie slipped like a lizard over the Speaker’s lips: We’re doing this for our children’s sake. “This sets a whole new meaning for the idea of putting women and children first,” said Rahm Emmanuel, a representative from the minority party, not one of whom voted for this bill. As one hundred fifty thousand people are lined up to be pushed off food stamps, Augie Fernandez of Detroit’s Gleaners Community Food Bank called this legislative action the “food stamp massacre of 2005.”
But the rulers in Washington did show the compassionate side of conservatism, too, for they do have a package of large tax cuts prepared for passage and these had been slated for action right after Labor Day, but because of Katrina they had felt a need to delay action. Now–how kind: so as not to turn poor people’s stomachs any more, not just before the holiday–they thoughtfully delayed action again till after Thanksgiving, when the tryptophanes will have put us all back to sleep, so they can slip the big green bills back into fat pockets without anyone waking to complain.
A spirit of evil has landed in the hearts and minds of this nation, and it is projected large on the screen of leadership in Washington D.C. These leaders are called upon to be the shepherds of the people, wise men and women who take care, who represent those least and lost with no voice, who see to it that that Lady standing in Upper New York Bay does not utterly lose her moral clothing and her lamp, as the words inscribed at her feet fade from memory:
Give me your tired, your poor,
from “The New Colossus,” by Emma Lazarus, a poem inscribed on a plaque at the base of the Statue of Liberty
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tossed, to me:
I lift my lamp beside the golden door.
There’s no nuance in this judgment; Ezekiel got it thousands of years ago.
You eat the fat, you clothe yourselves with the wool, you slaughter the fatlings; but you do not feed the sheep. You have not strengthened the weak, you have not healed the sick, you have not bound up the injured, you have not brought back the strayed, you have not sought the lost, but with force and harshness you have ruled them . . . Therefore, you shepherds, hear the word of the Lord . . .I will rescue my sheep from their mouths, so they may not be food for them . . . I myself will be the shepherd of the sheep. I will seek the lost and strengthen the weak and bind up the injured, but the fat and the strong I will destroy. I will feed them . . . with justice!
Now, for three Sundays, we are talking about abundance. It is a plain fact of history that America has generated unmatched abundance on earth . . . as it is in heaven! It is a tragic fact of recent history that, well into its third century, America now hardly pays attention to the fact of abundance. Not gratitude but scarcity-thinking is the order of the day in the halls of government: cutting taxes, cutting off the poor, cutting environmental protections, privatizing social security, making war, raising the crayon-color of threat, insisting on the need to torture and incarcerate wretches without trial for the rest of their lives. Day after day, year after year, this government appeals to instincts of fear and scarcity. Shepherds? The good shepherd has abundance in mind and heart. The good shepherd is liberal with everything. Our shepherds are wolves. “And I am against the shepherds, says the Lord.” Which side are you on?
Ezekiel’s prophecy presents a puzzle, though. As he heard the Spirit of God’s Word, God was so sick and angry at the shepherds that he had determined to give up on them. “I myself will search for my sheep . . . I myself will be the shepherd of my sheep.” I myself. But how? How is infinite justice to come down and squeeze herself into our halfway hopes and unhappy arguments about power without burning out our eyes with sovereign beauty and freedom and liberality and wrath? How can Love eternal appear here among us, who never speak the word in halls of law and power? What means this God: “I myself will be the shepherd?” By what means, God? Don’t make promises you can’t keep.
And yet the promise is so beautiful. It is the lesson on abundance we were waiting for ever since we were scared and scattered from the garden. “I will rescue them, I will feed them . . . in good pasture . . . I will bring back the strayed, bind up the injured, strengthen the weak . . . send down showers . . . the fruit trees and fields shall yield . . . they shall be secure . . . for you are my sheep, the sheep of my pasture, and I am your God.” Such an appetite for promise we have, to have heard that word and not tossed it like a Hallmark card after a season, but kept it like a love letter inscribed to the nations, preserved in a frame, hung to be seen each day, each hour. If God shall be God, and not just our dream, this promise cannot go empty. Still, how can the Eternal come down and shepherd such sheep as we are?
A few years ago, a big billboard out on Route 33 got many chuckling. “Don’t make me come down there,” it blared in black and white. It was signed in the corner, “God.” Funny. But dumb. The whole hope of Israel is that God might come down here indeed. The good news of Israel’s children, the Christians, is that God has come down. Only a terrible misunderstanding of what God is imagines God still up there like a threatening parent or a hypocrite on the Hill.
Christians have an answer at the ready for Ezekiel’s great cry of protest against the shepherds, calling on God’s own Self to be the good shepherd. But to say Christ is that Shepherd comes as a too-easy answer, if it comes fast, for though Jesus was here a while, and though in one of the beloved stories Jesus calls himself the Good Shepherd, and though we call him Christ the King, especially on this last day of the church’s special year, still wolves come to the Hill in sheep’s clothing, robbing and stealing, lying and spreading violence and fear, and what’s Jesus gonna do? Isn’t this a strange game we play, talking salvation and blessedness and the fullness of our tables while the world’s poor, near and far, languish and die. The World Health Organization reported last summer that $9 billion is needed to provide safe drinking water to all the people of the world. Will that come from us? Hah! But it happens that the world’s wealthy, who have fine drinking water, spend $9 billion on bottled water every year. Is Jesus-the-Shepherd talk cheap grace?
When Jesus told the story we heard today, the hour was well advanced into the week of his passion. Not much time was left to him for being the sort of king he was, or shepherd, or friend. When he drew the image of the nations all gathered around the Son of Man, with sheep and goats separated on right and left, he drew his image from Ezekiel 34, which you have just read. Here is why he used the words of the old prophet again. Then as now, and no doubt for as long as time tocks, there are men who claim to love their God and their Bible as much as they love themselves, but who do not lift a finger to help the least and the lost. So Jesus, about to be hung to die like a useless promise, drew home the point. If Ezekiel’s promise of abundance shall flow freely through the Son of Man, it shall flow from me through you. The sign of resurrection–the absolute abundance of life without end except in God–will show up in you. “Just as you did it to one of the least of these who are members of my family, you did it to me.”
To bring the sign of everlasting life to life in yourself, practice giving stuff up. There is no other way to know God’s abundance, or to flow in the rivers of God. You need practice in giving up some of what you are attached to, for you are the pasture where the abundance of God will show up. Or not. This is why the emphasis has been laid on tithing down through the ages: it is spiritual guidance, that you learn to let the tenth go first, so that you may live like a symbol of God’s promise, rather than taking your life so literally.
Ezekiel’s word says of God, “I myself will search for my sheep.” And how does a good shepherd search, but by leaving the crowded flock behind, by going to the wild places, into the forbidding crags. God is searching out his shepherds for this time. You, who are not afraid of scarcity, nor terrorized by need for conformity or religious ignorance–you are sought out. You are where Christ would dwell. You are where Christ would give shelter. Beloved, grow a new branch for shade and shelter of the lost. Set for yourself a new sign of your freedom from attachment.
For it is in giving that we receive,
From the “Prayer of Francis of Assisi”
in pardoning that we are pardoned,
and in dying to ourselves that we receive eternal life.
delivered at Central Presbyterian Church, Buffalo, New York
©Stephen H. Phelps, September 2005
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