Sunday, July 18, 2021

What Kind of Shepherd Are You?

 


It’s raining outside and I am shepherd of an enchanted forest.

 

I have trimmed thousands of grapevines to keep the trees from being strangled, Last Sunday afternoon while it was raining I decided to walk alongside a deer trail to pick up the litter and garbage from the past hundred years. You see if you are a shepherd of people or land, someone has to pick up the garbage. Along the path, I find rubber tubing, glass bottles, electric outlets and assorted pieces of plastic. The path is slanted, I need to be hugging the ground with a trash bag in one hand and my other hands grabbing onto a limb or tree truck to prevent from falling. As I follow the deer trail, it reminds me of Our Lord who as our Good Shepherd leads the way.

 

However, God thunders against the human shepherds who are failures at shepherding. 

 

Every person has many of God’s children in their care.

 

Who are these miserable shepherds, these failures, with whom God is so indignant? Well, you can tell who they are by what God is angry at in them. They are the human beings who have not cared for the sheep, and those sheep are God’s people.

 

Well, what did the shepherds fail to do when they failed to care for the sheep? They didn’t help the sheep get nurture; they drove the sheep away. They led the sheep in wrong directions. They scattered the sheep, so that instead of being one flock, the sheep were divided against each other into diverse small groups.

 

So, think about it this way. 

 

Do you spend your time on foolish, frivolous things that help nobody? Do you babble about things in your family or church on Facebook that are not your business?  Do you think you are caring for God’s people when you do this? Do you gossip and undermine the reputation of others? Do you sow discord in your neighborhood, in your church, in your family? Are you a divisive presence in your community? Do you think you are caring for God’s children when you are doing this stuff?  This is like the trash that I was picking up in my enchanted forest. It had been put here by people who were not mindful that their actions would harm the land.

 

Surely no one of us is so stupid or ignorant as to suppose that God’s thundering against miserable shepherds is meant only for priests who aren’t good enough. We priests read about our feet of clay every day. However, that thundering is a warning for each one of us.

 

Every person has many of God’s children in his care. The people who collect your trash and recyclables on your street, the child in the row behind you who kicks your seat on the plane, the annoying non-stop talker at your dinner table, your grouchy parishioners who blame politicians for the Covid pandemic, your old and highly dependent mother-in-law, your very imperfect spouse—each of these is one of God’s children, and each of them is in your care—a little or maybe even a lot.

 

I had collected 40 pounds of trash when I came across a piece of wire on the ground, I pulled and another three feet came out of the ground. Next to this wire I spotted barbed wire wrapped around a tree trunk. I thought I had gotten rid of all the barbed wire. Yes, there always seems to be more trash that comes to the surface that needs to be removed. For this job, I would have to come back with some wire cutters to complete this cleanup.

 

I imagine that barbed wire is like all the people you are ask to shepherd especially, the ones that don’t bend and are hard to work with. But all things are possible with our Shepherd, whose grace we need to do it well.

 

Lord, I pray for all my Sonshine Friends that we be more careful not to be miserable shepherds. You are welcomed to borrow my barbed wire cutters anytime if you need to remove some nasty habits and trash from your life. May Our Lord bless you with the humility to admit your weaknesses and may we be grateful for His mercy that inspires us to be the best of shepherds to those in our care and to one another in this cathedral.