Sheep and Mission

            There is a lot of reference to sheep in the scriptures.  Ezekiel quotes God as saying that he will come and gather up his scattered flock and give them good pasture on the mountains of Israel.  Psalm 100 tells us that the Lord is God and we are His people and the sheep of his pasture; and then there is that powerful passage from the 25^th chapter of Matthew’s Gospel, which I think is the crowning teaching of Jesus to the people of this world.  He tells of the final judgement, when the Son of Man will come with all of his angels and sit on the throne of his glory.  He will separate humanity into two groups: the sheep and the goats.  To the sheep he will promise everlasting life and glory because when he was hungry and naked, in prison or sick, they provided for him.  The people ask when this happened, and the Son of Man tells them that whenever they did this for the least of His people, they did it for him.  Then to the goats, He says: depart into the flames prepared for you because you never took care of the needs of my people.    

            I can’t imagine a better summary of the teaching of Jesus while he was in his ministry, travelling through the countryside caring for all of the need that he found in his path.  He healed, he comforted, he visited, he fed and he did this constantly.  There is that momentous time after the death of John the Baptist when Jesus simply needed to get away and grieve, but the people followed him, eager to hear him speak.  He took the time to speak to them and when the hour got late and his disciples told him that the people needed to go somewhere and get something to eat, Jesus told them: “give them something to eat yourselves.”  They were stunned until he asked them what resources that they had and they told him of the young man who had five loaves and two fishes.  Jesus asked that they be brought to him.  He blessed them, broke the bread and there was enough for all of them to eat with twelve baskets left over.  That is what Jesus was asking of his disciples.  Take what you have, even though it doesn’t seem like much and make do with it and feed and take care of the people before you. 

            That is what we are still asked to do in this world.  That is a quick summary of the mission of the church.  We work on mission statements, we craft them and make them sound very good, but this twenty-fifth chapter of Matthew’s gospel is what it is that God expects from all of us: to feed, clothe, visit, comfort and care for the people in our path.  After all of the theologians have their say, after all of the evangelists proclaim their salvation story, this is the command of our God that we love and take care of one another.  There is no higher calling than this.

            Sometimes, I get tired of the church.  We spend a great deal of time arguing over small things like whether or not women can be ordained, or whether people of the same sex can be married, or participate in our common life.  We have a constant bombardment of moral issues that we are expected to comment on and decide for the rest of society.  It is interesting that the English church just decided that women can be bishops.  I think that we already knew this.  The Roman Catholic Church is trying to come to terms with a raft of changes in society.  The Pope seems to be trying to effect changes that will be far ranging.  I wish them all well.  These things are really on the fringes of what we are called to do. We focus on them because it takes our mind off the mission that we have been sent to accomplish.  We are the agency created by our Lord to make the Gospel come alive in the world; to take care of the needs of those who are left out by the rest of society.  That is why we have soup kitchens, clothing drives, chaplains in prisons and hospitals and do all of the things that we do to make life better for those who have nothing at all.  We all live with the need every day.  That is why there is so much violence on our streets and in our homes.  We are constantly trying to find solutions to these things.

            Religion isn’t something that we say with words.  It is something that we do with our lives.  When people see the goodness that we are able to create when we care for those who have nothing, they see our religion.  They see the hand of God working in this world.  We are the hands of our God.  That sounds awesome to me when I say it; but it looks awesome to me when I see it at work. 

           

            We are in the stewardship season of the church, when we appeal to all of our people to be generous with their contributions.  The reason that we do this is because the church is a place with limited means.  It has always been a place of limited means.  But our limited means are not an excuse for doing nothing.  We are called to use whatever we have for the sake of the Gospel.  That is the only measure that we need to apply to what we do as the people of God.