And then, here in chapter ten, there is a startling turning point in the gospel. Like a skilled filmmaker who suddenly changes the focus of a lens, bringing what was blurred in the background of the shot into clear focus, Matthew reveals that he is not simply telling the story about Jesus, but about his disciples. They’ve been there the whole time—following Jesus from synagogue to synagogue, town to town, house to house. They’ve been watching him teach, hearing him proclaim the good news of the kingdom of heaven, and then they’ve watched him act out that sermon by healing the sick, casting out demons, and offering forgiveness. They’ve been here the whole time, but always in the background. But now, Matthew twists the lens, and they suddenly jump from the background to the front of the story.

It’s one of those moments that makes you go back and rethink the movie. Everything Jesus has been doing now becomes a rehearsal for what he’s calling them to do. Notice what he tells them in verses 7-8: “As you go, proclaim the good news, ‘The kingdom of heaven has come near.’ Cure the sick, raise the dead, cleanse the lepers, cast out demons.” It sounds a lot like what Matthew’s been telling us Jesus did, doesn’t it? It’s a radical turning point in the story—the disciples are not just to watch Jesus or even to merely go on learning from him, but are to go out and replicate his ministry to others. The last few chapters have been a barrage of stories that demonstrate that Jesus has authority—now he gives it away. “Then Jesus summoned his twelve disciples and gave them authority…”

This provokes a new, different kind of faith question. Up until now, all the stories have been about what people believed Jesus could do for them:

“Do you believe that I am teaching you the truth?”
“Do you believe I can heal your servant?”
“Do you believe I can protect you from this storm?”
“Do you believe I can forgive you?”

It’s a radical turning point in the story—the disciples are not just to watch Jesus or even to merely learn from him, but are to go out and replicate his ministry to others. As somebody in our small group said last week when we read those words, and were imagining what it was like to be sent on that mission by Jesus, “These are life-changing words.” Now, all of a sudden, the question for the disciples is not “What do we believe Jesus can do for us?” but “What what do we believe Jesus will do through us?” That is a tremendous difference.

But even while we recognize the difference, it’s important to recognize that even though this is a different kind of question, it’s still a faith question. It’s not a question of what the disciples are capable of in and of themselves. Jesus can’t give them authority unless he truly has it himself. There isn’t even a question of the gospel beginning at this point—this moment depends on their faith in everything that’s happened before this. Matthew doesn’t begin in chapter ten, (and there’s no Acts without Luke). Christian mission is never about what we are capable of or not—it’s about what God is capable of. It exists in the tension between what God is at work doing and what we are at work doing. But both of those work together—God is at work through us.

The challenge implicit in all of this is: “Are we ready to be agents of the gospels?” Are we willing to take on the mantle of what Jesus was doing, and take his mission to be our own? Are we content to be recipients of the gospel, or are we ready to become participants of the gospel?

That’s an important question in the gospel, one that I think is implicit in this story. And normally, this is the point in the sermon when I would dramatically hold out my hands and ask you to seriously consider that challenge…but not this week. At this point in the gospel, in chapter ten, we’re still not ready for it. This story, where Jesus sends his disciples out to replicate his ministry, is incomplete. Sure, the mission as it is would be enough to keep their hands full, and it’s full of the gospel—but it’s still an incomplete gospel. After all, the story Matthew is telling doesn’t end here, but ends in another sending story, what we call the great commission. Matthew is a tale of two commissions, or two sendings, and what happens between the two is incredibly important.

So far, Jesus’s disciples have learned about his power, but they have not yet seen him become powerless. They’ve seen him in strength, but not yet in weakness. Between the two commissions, stands the truth of Jesus’s suffering. Before they can receive the great commission, they have to follow Jesus on the road to the cross—and so do we. Because it’s on that road that we finally can  experience the full gospel of Jesus in his life, death, and resurrection—the gospel that we are called not only to receive, but to participate in.

Here’s a preview for the sermon this Sunday.  (January 29, 2012)

Now, to be fair, our assumption is that the reason all of those questions were important is because they affect the kingdom by affecting him and his capacity to serve the kingdom in particular ways—and I think that assumption is true. Each of those points has implications for how the education process might expand or frustrate kingdom service. However, the more I thought about it, this is the kind of assumption that we need to be in the habit of explicitly naming and considering.

I want to be in the habit of making decisions through kingdom criteria, and helping my friends do the same.

Sometimes the sermon comes easier than others. This week’s had to go through a lot of wrestling, but in the end, after a lot of listening and struggle, I’m extremely excited to share it with the church.

“They sow the wind, and they shall reap the whirlwind.”

]]> http://www.stevenhovater.com/wordpress/2011/07/preaching-on-power/feed/ 1 http://www.stevenhovater.com/wordpress/2011/07/thoughts-on-mission-trips/ http://www.stevenhovater.com/wordpress/2011/07/thoughts-on-mission-trips/#comments Mon, 11 Jul 2011 20:04:55 +0000 stevepvc http://www.stevenhovater.com/wordpress/?p=432729127 Continue reading →]]> This past week I joined my brother Jeremi and some new friends in Antigua for a mission trip. Over a week the team found itself in all sorts of kingdom work, from medical work, a construction project, a soccer camp and a lot of time teaching kids about God in VBS settings.  Of course, within and beyond those projects there were relationships being formed that I hope embodied something of the love of Christ. I hope some of those relationships will continue.

I’m a fan of the mission trip process. I’ve had several opportunities to go over the years, particularly in my time in youth ministry. I really been able to see what I think is kingdom work taking a lot of forms in those trips, as the church partners with people in communities to help address some of the brokenness of the world. Sometimes that comes in the form of concrete progress in some sort of building project, some times it’s been highly relational, and of course a good bit of it has been simply showing love to children. I really do think in all of that God’s kingdom finds expression—healing comes, at least in part—to the things that are broken in the world. Sometimes the effect is substantial, and I think permanent. Often, it’s just a glimpse of the way the world could will be, as the evil which creates hostility between people is put aside.

Beyond the good that happens in the physical places we travel to, I think substantial good also happens within our own hearts. A lot of the things we want to accomplish in terms of spiritual formation are just difficult to move forward while we remain in our typical spheres of experience. A cross-cutural mission trip can open us up to new experiences and perspectives, and help us escape the selfishness that so often consumes us before we ever realize its power. That’s been true in my own experience, and, I think, in the lives of a lot of people that I’ve been able to travel with over the years. (Barna has some statistics suggesting it is broadly true for mission trip participants.) In other words, it gives us a taste of what life under God’s reign can be like, and I think we typically find that to be an incredible experience–so much so, that we come back with a renewed desire to live in God’s reign all the time.

Both of these effects—the kingdom work at the mission site and that within our hearts— need to be held in balance.  The first set keeps us from being exploitative—we need to make sure we are actually doing real good, or mission trips devolve into an ironic selfishness by which we take advantage of others for our own spiritual experience. On the other hand, making sure we think through the formative aspect can help groups become more prepared to join God’s work wherever they find it, and perhaps better prepared to do more real good throughout their lives.

This time of year, lots of trips like this are going on. May the church be prepared to continue the process of transformation that such trips initiate and intensify, and may God’s kingdom continue to break into our world as we learn what it means to partner with him—all the time—in healing the brokenness of the world.

(Thanks to the people at CrossPoint for letting me tag along!)

The final element—and if I’m honest, this was at times the most important element of all—was that I was looking, quite simply, for a woman who would love me. For a while Kelly wasn’t sure about that, and eventually, this was not just a peripheral issue, but THE issue. If she did in fact love me, we’d get married. If not, we were probably done. I knew I loved her, but if it didn’t go both ways, I just wasn’t willing to go any further.

I suppose that isn’t that uncommon. If you peel back the surface of what we all chase in relationships, it comes to this: we want somebody to love us.  We just want to love someone and be loved back. All the world’s tragedy and comedy comes down to this.

And so we can only come to Hosea’s story with bewilderment. While Hosea’s marriage to Gomer was introduced in the first chapter, there it is essentially the context for the children and their prophetic names, in an account told by a third person narrator—”this is what happened to Hosea”. In chapter 3, it takes center stage, in a first person account. This is Hosea saying, “This is my story.” The first verse is enough for us to start with: “The Lord said to me again, Go, love a woman who has a lover and is an adulteress, just as the Lord loves the people of Israel, though they turn to other gods…”

God invites Hosea to dive into God’s own heart by entering into a relationship which he knows will be unreciprocal. God wants Hosea to love someone—not just marry them, but love them!—in the knowledge that his love will not be returned.

You ever been there? Maybe not on purpose, but have you ever found yourself completely in love with someone that just wasn’t that into you?That is simply one of the most painful things that can happen to humans—and it happens to most of us at some time or another.

What is amazing is that God experiences this in his own heart. This is the most fundamental story we tell about God and his relationship with humans—God loves us, knowing that we often won’t love him back. Indeed, this isn’t accidental, but God created us with this precise possibility. God created us to live in community with him, but also created us with the possibility that we could choose to walk away from him. We often say that God did this so that our love would be of a certain kind—love freely given is the only kind that really matters, after all.  I suppose there is a good bit of truth in that, but I think that this Hosea story reveals a deeper truth.

The metaphor here works not because Gomer is going to love Hosea in a particularly powerful way after her faithlessness, although that is a possibility. Gomer’s love simply isn’t the point. It’s all about Hosea’s love—which of course means that it’s all about God’s love. See, God doesn’t just give us freedom only for the sake of making sure that our love is free and thus particularly powerful. Even more, our freedom works to show us the incredible power of God’s own love. God’s love is a powerful “even though” sort of love that loves despite going unreturned. God loves even when repeatedly rejected.

And yet, God’s love always pursues us. God relentlessly chases us, desiring to draw us into relationship with him. God desires for us to respond to him, to freely come and join him. His desire in this text is that Israel would—eventually—come to love him, that eventually Israel would seek God out and join him.  He desires the same of us, that as Ephesians says, we may have the power to comprehend the breadth, length, height and depth of God’s love for us, and that perceiving that we may be live in the fullness of God, firmly rooted in his love.

Radically, we might even take this further. Not only does he desire that we realize his love and return it to him, but God’s vision for his people is that we join him in loving the world. Jesus roots his command that we love our enemies in exactly this, that this is how God loves the world. He knows it is different than how the world thinks about love—that’s his point!

“You have heard it said, ‘you shall love your neighbor and hate your enemy.’ But I say to you, love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, so that you may be children of your father in heaven; for he makes his sun to rise on the evil and on the good, and sends rain on the righteous and on the unrighteous. For if you love those who love you, what reward do you have? Do not even the tax collectors do the same? And if you greet only your brothers and sisters, what more are you doing than others? Do not even the Gentiles do the same? Be perfect, therefore, as your heavenly father is perfect.” (Mt 5:43-48)

God loves even when his love is unreturned, and Jesus calls us to learn to love in exactly this way.

Do we have the audacity to mimic God’s love in our own lives—can we learn to love those who simply do not and will not love us back? Can we stop using our love simply as a tool to gain love back for ourselves? Once, God called the prophet Hosea to put his love—God’s love— on display by loving someone who would not love him back—now he calls the church to do the same. We are called to be “Hoseas.” Despite the knowledge that it will often be unreturned, we are called to love all—even our enemies. We do it in the hope that such love might communicate the unbelievable, relentless love of God—in the hope that even our enemies may be redeemed by God. And yet, even as we hope for their redemption, we are called to love regardless whether it ever has that effect or not. We are called to become like God, to break away from the limited nature of our natural way of loving. We are called to become, by the working of God’s own spirit, capable of loving with God’s own love.

Thus the story of Hosea is a story of the gospel, that God loves us furiously. But that gospel is never for us alone. As soon as we grasp its meaning for ourselves, we are drawn into living it out for the world around us. We love with God’s own love, for the sake of God’s own glory.  Amen.

We normally think of repentance as being about the past. We avoid it because we think it means a reliving of our worst mistakes, but nothing could be further than the truth. In repentance we confess and name our sin—not as a way of reliving it, but as a way of moving away from it. Repentance is about freedom from the past. Repentance is a consequence of hope.

It grows out of two convictions about the future, convictions which Hosea leads us into by sharing God’s mind with us.

First, God owns the future. God declares the future through Hosea, not because he has some secret power of prediction, but because the future consists of the actions of God. God does not predict sports scores or the playing cards of a magician’s trick, but is simply stating what he intends to do, with the knowledge that he can and will in fact do these things. While humans have plenty to say about what will happen in the mean time, the future—the ultimate future—will be as God wills.  And so, God can declare that Israel will be exposed, that they will be stripped of all that they hold dear, that they will be confronted by the futility of their quests for power, security, and independence from him—not because it’s a magical prediction, but because God himself will act to do these things.  “I will strip her naked…I will expose her as in the day she was born…I will make her like a wilderness…I will turn her into a parched land…I will kill her with thirst…I will hedge up her way with thorns and I will build a wall against her, so that she cannot find her paths…I will take back my grain, my wine, my wool and my flax…I will uncover her shame…I will put an end to her celebrations…I will lay waste her vines and her fig trees…” God can make these announcements because they are his actions. God is free and powerful to act in whatever way he wills. God owns the future.

Second, God wants us to share his future. Hosea’s word is ultimately one of invitation—God intensely desires for Israel to join him in the future. All of the judgments issued are for this purpose, and point toward the day of its completion, the day when Israel is restored to God. God acts to provoke a repentant response in Israel, so that she will come to freely love him and live in a covenant with God marked by peace, righteousness, justice, love, mercy, and faithfulness.

What’s remarkable about Hosea is the kind of language that God uses to describe his passionate desire for Israel to have a part in this future. God won’t force Israel into repentance, but he will do almost anything else. Besides the prophetic word of warning, God flirts with Israel, gives her gifts, tries taking them away, exposes her other loves as frauds, finally draws her back out into the wilderness—like a husband who takes his wife back to the site of their honeymoon. He speaks softly to her, whispering, “we can just start over.”

His goal is the day when she responds with repentance, when she sees that he alone truly does own the future and yet offers her a place in it. His goal is a day of dramatic reversal, when all the pronouncements of judgment find their fulfillment—which is not to say, the destruction they foretell. No, Hosea’s warnings only find their fulfillment in the repentance they are meant to provoke, whether or not that occurs before or after the impending calamity. His goal is the day when Israel responds with repentance, and all that is wrong can be made right.

Hosea plays off of the warnings of chapter 1 to describe he dramatic reversal, flipping each name from its message or warning to one of hope. The stigma of bloodshed that brought about the name “Jezreel” will be replaced by the word’s linguistic meaning—”God sows”—and God will plant the people in the land, establishing her with peace and abundance from his own hand, not as a result of her political or religious manipulation. To those whom he gave the name, “no mercy”, he will now have mercy, and to those whom he called “not my people”, he will again say, “you are my people.” The renaming is completed, not by a word from God, but one from the people, as they finally and dramatically will say, “you are my God.” God paints the picture of this future, seeking to inspire hope in Israel—for where hope lives, repentance is possible.

Repentance happens in the lives of those who understand that God owns the future, and who believe they have a place in God’s future. Reading Hosea now, some 2700 years later, and reading it on the other side of Jesus, we know that God has taken a dramatic step to bring about this future. While we wait for the final scene to begin, God has invited us to share in his future…now!

God declares that his rule will be over all the earth, and in repentance we begin to live in that future now; we join God now, leaving the past behind and orienting ourselves by a future that redeems the present.

And so it is that within these words of warning there is also a seed of hope, the promise of God’s willingness to honor repentance, his burning desire to take back what belongs to him and make right what has been broken. I urge you to heed the warning that the future belongs to God, to take on the hope that he has a place for you within it, and to let it that hope bring forth the repentance by which God may enact his reversal.

The parents expression darkens—the mother turns away, finding something else to do. The father’s eyes narrow, and he steps closer. Pointing straight at the little girl, he says, “We call her ‘unloved’. Unloved.” Not knowing how to respond, the man shuffles his feet a bit, and finally says, “And the boy?”

“Not mine.”

“Oh, I’m sorry, I thought…”

“No, that’s his name.  His name is ‘not-mine.’ ”

Hosea is a shocking story. It does not allow for passive bland reading, and I assure you it does not consist of passive, bland writing. It opens with the story of Hosea’s family—a family whose very existence could not but shock literally everyone who met them. The book of Hosea consists mostly prophetic poetry. Not the poetry which many of us have in mind—the dry tedious metered verses we labored to understand as school kids. This is the kind of poetry that Walter Brueggemann describes as “shattering, evocative speech that breaks fixed conclusions and presses us always toward new, dangerous, imaginative possibilities.” (Finally Comes the Poet, 6) Hosea is full of wrecking-ball language, the kind that comes to destroy the peace of the present for the sake of the future.

The book opens with a narrative, but the story is just as disturbing as the poetry that follows. In fact, we might think of the story as a setting for three brief, super dense poems—the names of the children. After all, even within the story, it’s the word—the word from the Lord—that really matters.

So in what was already a weird marriage (more on that when we get to chapter 3), three children are born, and given names that are extremely disturbing.

It starts off with a son, who Hosea is told to name Jezreel. Hosea is prophesying during the reign of Jeroboam II, somewhere in the middle of the eighth century BC, in the northern Kingdom that we normally just call Israel. In the southern kingdom, which we call Judah, there had been stable dynasty for over two hundred years—the descendants of David. But in the north it had never really been like that. It was a country born out of rebellion, and which had seen it’s share over the years. One of the most vicious upheavals had been at the hands of Jeroboam’s grandfather Jehu. Granted, the dynasty in power before then (you remember Ahab and Jezebel, right?) had it coming, but when Jehu took up the sword to seize the throne he went above and beyond The site where all this went down was the city “Jezreel”. So Hosea names his firstborn son after the site of a famous bloodbath, with a finger pointed straight at the king. “It’s your turn, Jeroboam. The same violence that began your family’s reign will soon put it too an end.  It’s time for another Jezreel.”

While the historical specificity of the name “jezreel” may protect us from the cold challenge the word contains, our own reactions intensify with the name of the second child.  I mean, seriously, who would name a child “unloved”? The second child’s name—”Lo-Ruhamah”—means exactly that.

In 1920 a young woman named Josephine Dickenson worked hard to be the best housewife she could be, spending a lot of time on that one task of getting supper ready for her husband, Earle, before he got home from his job as a cotton buyer.  Unfortunately, she was a little accident prone, and was constantly nicking her fingers with knives and getting little burns. Earle’s first job when he got home was usually to help her dress the wounds. Finally he decided to come up with a way to make it possible for her to do this by herself before he got home, by rolling out a long strip of adhesive tape and placing little squares of cotton at intervals, so that she could just cut off a piece, wrap it on her fingers, and keep going.  After that proved to be a great solution, he took his idea to his employer, Johnson & Johnson, and so was born the “band-aid”.  Sales didn’t go too well at first, but WWII picked things up, as did the company’s brilliant move in 1951 to start making band-aids with cartoon characters on them. After all, what kid can resist a sticker that comes with compassion?

Part of my role as “daddy” is “band-aid dispenser.” Now sure, there are times when I just kiss the supposed boo-boo and try to convince the child that it’s not that big of a deal, but sometimes, when a kid is just absolutely certain that the wound is a matter of life and death, the best thing to do is to get the band-aid on and give some hugs and kisses, right?

And that’s just the small stuff. How many of us would refuse to give care to a child—any child, not even our own—if we went outside in this very moment and found one gravely injured? Who among us would just shake our heads and walk away? Who can refuse compassion to a child?

That’s why the second name is so shocking. “Lo-Ruhamah.” The prophetic word means “uncared-for”, “unpitied”. God, who has always acted with mercy, pity, compassion for Israel since the day he heard their groaning in Egypt, will do so no more.

That sense is intensified with the third name, “Lo-Ammi”, or “not my people.”  Israel’s fundamental identity was the covenant people of God, whom God had specially chosen, and called as his people. God’s covenant was summed up in the phrase “You shall be my people, and I shall be your God.” Now that is reversed—the very identity of the nation is reversed!—and God declares, “you are not my people.” This prophetic word disowns the people.

That is intensified by a fourth name here, one that is somewhat masked by the translation. In Hosea 1:9 most of the translations read something like “For you are not my people and I am not your God.” That’s not a bad translation, but it masks some of the punch. What the second part of that sentence says is kind of awkward in Hebrew, but literally reads, “And I am not ‘I am’ to you.” God takes back his own name! God doesn’t just put these odd names on the children, but changes his own name here, revokes the name which he had revealed to Moses at the burning bush.  This is the ultimate message of the names—the world you live in is about to be undone. Everything from the seeming security of your monarchy to the relationship you have with God, even the very name which you know God by—all of it is undone by your sin. All of it is coming apart.

The names provoke us. Why? What’s the big deal? Why all the fuss? The names shock us. The question, “Who would ever name their kid that?” gets our attention so that God can look us in the eyes and speak to us about how serious sin is.

And yet, even within these names and their word of judgement there is the seed of grace. Hosea will speak to the people of a repentance that can change the future, so that “Not my people can once again be called simply, “my people”, and “unloved” will be called simply “loved”. Hosea will offer a word of eventual reversal, when what is wrong will be made right. But don’t read ahead to all of that, not just yet anyways. First, let this word of judgment break into your world, and ask yourself, “What is it in my life that needs to be undone.” That word of redemption can only be heard once we hear the word of judgment and digest its reality. So today, we’ll let that seed of grace wait for its time, and hear this single important word from the Lord—to walk away from him means death. Digest that reality.

And then, the God who changes reality can act.

That larger story announces the reality of God’s reign in the world and his willingness to love and redeem the world. It is the story of how the creator God remains concerned with his creation, and is active within it. It is the story of how that God made for himself a people, by making covenant with Abraham, and with his rescued descendants at Sinai. It tells of God’s pursuit of Israel even when the covenant was broken. It tells how, in Jesus, God has made a new covenant with his people and opened the door for men and women of all nations to join Israel in becoming the covenant people of God. That story offers a way for humans to live within God’s reign, and warns of judgment for those who continue to live in rebellion against God’s reign. That story brings humans into participation in God’s plan to fight the darkness that has corrupted the world, and announces that his victory is certain, and what is wrong will be made right.

The church exists because of that story. It exists in that story. And it exists as an expression of that story.

When we talk about shepherds and elders, we can’t jump out of that story and imagine that we’re just dealing with a simple fact of ordering religious life. The shepherds actually function, like the rest of the church, within the context of that larger story.

As God’s announcement of his reign became known in the world through the ministry and resurrection of Jesus, it was made known concretely to a group of disciples who became apostles, carrying the word into new territories, establishing colonies of disciples who took on the story of God and began to live it out in community together, and in relation to their neighbors in the cities and towns where they lived. Those apostles and their coworkers were charged with delivering the story to the world around them, and were highly mobile. Because of that, as they founded new communities, it became clear early on that within each new community of disciples there would need to be people who could function as “stewards” of the story, who could take responsibility to oversee how the community of faith lived out that story as “church”. Those overseers (elders, bishops, pastors) became shepherds of the church, and bore several responsibilities in regard to the story that was driving the church. They still bear those responsibilities.

Shepherds tell the story. That means they should be able to share the gospel, be able to articulate the gospel story, and teach others what it means to live that story.  Both 1 Timothy 3 and Titus 1 refer to the need that those who become elders should be able to teach. That doesn’t mean they’re required to have great class management skills, but that they understand the gospel and are capable of sharing that story. Shepherds are storytellers, because the story of God’s work isn’t something we hear once and are done with, but we hear it over and over again, the church has to be immersed in the story, understanding the big picture and learning over time the finer points of what it means to live with God.

One of the reasons the shepherds have to be continually telling the story is because the story is always vulnerable to distortion. People subvert the christian story for a lot of different reasons, replacing it with stories of gods who are legalistic, absent, only interested with the spiritual, spiteful, or apathetic to sin. Therefore, beyond being tellers of the story, shepherds guard the story. When scripture uses the language of guarding the flock, and defending the truth, it says the church needs people who can make sure that the alternative stories that threaten to draw people away from the one true gospel story are challenged and defeated.  There is a definitive story that defines the church.  That story can’t be changed at whim.

The relationship between the shepherds and the story goes much further than the types of things they might say about the story, though. Perhaps one of their most important roles as stewards of the story is being an example to the flock of what it means to live out the story—shepherds display the story. They extend the story by showing what it means to live in God’s kingdom in work and play, within family and within a neighborhood. To say they are stewards of the story doesn’t mean they hold an abstracted truth within their minds, but rather it means that the story has become enfleshed in them. they are committed to living faithfully in family life, to restraining themselves in terms of greed or argumentation, and living fully aware—refusing to drunkenly numb themselves or lose control of their lives to anything but the will of God. In all of this and more they put on display what it means to submit to the reign of God, and what it means to walk in God’s presence and grace.

Good shepherds understand as well that it’s not all about them. they play a part in the story, but they are also mindful of what it means for the rest of their community to find its place in God’s story. They are aware of doing the work God places in their hands, but also of helping the other disciples discern what it means for them to play a part in the story. Shepherds draw their flock into God’s story. They can do that in some surprising ways.

When shepherds encourage someone among us to find their ministry, equip them to do the ministry, and entrust them to do the work God has prepared for them, they help draw us into the story, into participation with God’s work.

When shepherds stand with us in crisis, they are a reminder that God is with us and active in our lives, they draw us out into the story, helping us interpret the crises and their places in our lives as part of God’s story.

When shepherds mourn with those who mourn, they help that mourning be placed in context and draw people into God’s story—in which death loses its power.

When shepherds celebrate with those who celebrate, they help interpret the moment as having holy significance, like all moments do. In so reminding us, they draw us into the story which is not yet finished, but ongoing.

Shepherds are storytellers. they guard and defend the story, and display the story by living in such a way that the story is enfleshed in them. But they also draw us out with them into the story, so that it might be enfleshed in us as well.  May it ever be so, for the sake of God’s glory.  Amen.