“Practical Thanksgiving”
Ezekiel 34:11-24
Allen Huff
Jonesborough Presbyterian Church
11/23/14
Reign of Christ Sunday
When most western, Judeo-Christian, grocery store-fed minds
hear the word shepherd, they conjure
up rather romanticized images – images of the Lord as a shepherd delivering us
from want, and of shepherds keeping watch over their flocks by night. Many of
us have also been told that shepherds were a grimy, bawdy lot, and maybe
there’s some truth to that. But these may have been the shepherds Jesus calls
“hired hands,” ones who are apt to abandon their flock in the face of acute
threat. These are not true shepherds.
Old Testament professor Wil Gafney reminds us that shepherds
were businessmen who held multifaceted interest in their flocks. Dr. Gafney refers
to sheep as “mobile currency and primary source of nutrition [which shepherds
would] regularly breed, sell, and eat.”1
It’s interesting, the word “pastor” derives directly from the
Latin word meaning “shepherd,” or “to feed.” So, folks like me are often
referred to as shepherds of a flock, aren’t we? What if I brought to
the session a detailed program through which I began to select certain ones of
you for marriage – and breeding? Then I designated some of you as having either
too much or too little value to keep, so I took you to market and sold you or
traded you away to other shepherds. Finally, I mean a man’s got to eat. So others
of you I, well, invited home to dinner.
If the session approved that pastoral initiative,
it would somewhat modify your concept of shepherd,
wouldn’t it?
In Ezekiel’s day, kings were often regarded as shepherds. And
if not literally, then in a very real
sense, selfish kings tended to treat their subjects the way I just described. When
it began to happen to the Hebrews, prophets made it clear that Yahweh had no
intention of getting fleeced like that.
Ezekiel 34 opens with a scathing condemnation of kings:
“Ah, you shepherds of Israel, who have been feeding yourselves! Should not the
shepherds feed the sheep! You eat the
fat, you clothe yourselves with wool,
you slaughter the fatlings; but you
do not feed the sheep.”
Through Ezekiel, Yahweh hammers away at those who abuse,
ignore, scatter, and otherwise “consume” God’s sheep.
“Thus says the Lord God,
I am against the shepherds.”
Old Testament scholars argue over whether these violent shepherds
are Israelite kings or foreign kings.2 It seems to me, however, that
for our purposes, trying to make that distinction becomes a distraction. Ezekiel
was attempting to make a particular point to particular people, but the point scripture now makes applies to all people
who hold responsibility of leadership over any
of God’s creatures – whoever and wherever they may be. Regardless of one’s office,
one cannot maintain a position of leadership by feeding himself or herself at
the expense of the sheep. One cannot maintain credibility and respect by
fouling the sheep’s pastures and still waters with his or her feet.
An irony surfaces: Sheep are never stronger than when, by
the negligence of a self-serving shepherd, they find themselves lost,
scattered, injured, and weak. Having nothing to lose, they will rise up. And they
often prevail.
Yet another irony: When sheep achieve freedom through the
same means by which they were overcome and oppressed, they will eventually
become abusive shepherds themselves.
Through Ezekiel, God makes a new promise: “I will feed them.
I will seek the lost…I will bring back the strayed…I will bind up the injured…I
will strengthen the weak…[and] I will feed them with justice.”
There’s the difference – justice. In systems energized by competition, fear, and greed – all
of which are forms of violence – true justice is the scarcest commodity of all.
There may be laws and law enforcement, but in violent systems, justice is
reduced to retribution, to seeing that law-breakers get their just desserts. Old Testament stories
make it clear that eye-for-an-eye justice was standard for the old law. But we
have been called to a new way of life. Our new way of life is not only changed
and transformed, but a way of life that becomes transforming for others, as
well. It is, of course, the Good
Shepherd, the King of Kings who
calls us to and leads us in this new way of life. My dad calls it the life of
“practical thanksgiving.”
The life of practical thanksgiving is a life lived for the sake of others. What makes this
life so difficult is the fact that it demands us to be continually attentive
to, responsive to, and grateful for not
just people we already know, and love, and trust. Practical thanksgiving challenges
us to live for the sake of everyone
around us. Living in the kingdom of gratitude allows us to see the eternal
impact of extending loving care for what Dad calls “the ultimate and
particular,” for the specific person with whom we are engaged at any given
moment.
The Greek word for the ultimate and particular is eschaton, which is the root word for eschatology. The Church has reduced
eschatology to the study of end times, to doomsday discussions littered with citations
from the Revelation to John and from brimstone prophets. But that eschatology limits
our understanding of ultimate to the last days. It ignores the particular,
the earthy, gloriously God-imaged creation before us here and now.
Dad’s onto something. Biblical eschatology opens the door
of the real and present Kingdom of God which we enter through living gratefully
with and for one another in the joys and horrors of the present, palpable
moment.
Through the life of practical thanksgiving we find
universal consequence – we experience salvation – in acknowledging and welcoming
the stranger, and in connecting with the holiness of creation in all its ordinariness
and all its magnificence. Practical thanksgiving humbles us into the
paradoxical realization that we are both more and less important than we once
thought. Every one of us is truly, deeply, eternally loved by God, but we are
not loved any more than those whom we dislike, fear, and ignore. And as
followers of Jesus we do not live the life of practical thanksgiving by our own
wits and wills. To live with and for the sake of one another in gratitude and
love, is to live under the reign of Christ in this world.
Perhaps only Jesus himself surpassed St. Francis of Assisi
in living the life of practical thanksgiving. St. Francis left us with
memorable wisdom that calls us to our new life: “Start by doing what's
necessary,” he says, “then do what's possible; and suddenly you are doing the
impossible…If you have men,” says St. Francis, “who will exclude any of God's
creatures from the shelter of compassion…, you will have men who will deal
likewise with their fellow men.”3
Do you hear the scandalous particularity in those words? Do
you sense how we touch the eternal, how we live eschatologically by embracing
the mundane, by tending and feeding the sheep within us and beside us at any
given moment? To live in the realm of the Good Shepherd, the King of Kings does
not mean walking on streets of gold with good people who have done it right. It
means, in the words of Micah, doing
justice, loving kindness, and walking humbly with your God, in your home,
in your community.
Today.
1 Wil Gafney, “Theological Perspective,” Feasting on
the Word: Year A, Volume 4, Westminster John Knox Press, 2011, p. 316.
2Denise Dombkowski Hopkins, “Exegetical Perspective,” Feasting
on the Word: Year A, Volume 4, Westminster John Knox Press, 2011, p. 319.
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