Doing Daringly Despite Doubt

How dare we even try?  The world seems so messed up, so far beyond our control, problems so much bigger than us.  Does this ever touch you, this sense of the response that aches to…?

Last night while we were having dinner with our neighbors who just returned from a winter away, a little bird thumped into the dining room window and fluttered, dazed, to the arm of a deck chair.  After a brief chorus of sympathetic “Aww’s” we found ourselves back in conversation.  But from time to time we would glance over, one or the other of us, and check on the little bird’s progress.  When at one point I looked over and it was gone, I shared the good news and we all smiled, relief displacing nagging but deferred sympathy.

In tomorrow’s Gospel,  the Good Shepherd has something to say about Bad Shepherds, remarking about “thieves and robbers”.  My friend Dave shared with us last Tuesday morning that Jesus was following up on some tough words from Ezekiel 34:

Are not shepherds meant to feed a flock?  Yet you have fed on milk, you have dressed yourselves in wool, you have sacrificed the fattest sheep, but failed to feed the flock.

You have failed to make weak sheep strong, or to care for the sick ones, or bandage the injured ones. You have failed to bring back strays or look for the lost.

My flock is astray on every mountain and on every high hill; my flock has been scattered all over the world; no one bothers about them and no one looks for them.”

"For the Lord Yahweh says this: Look, I myself shall take care of my flock and look after it.

Dave’s translation used the words “You pasture yourselves,” and the words thumped into my heart, and since then, I have been looking over from the dinner of my days at the poor and hungry and homeless outside the window of my safe, warm, secure house, the deferred sympathy nagging at me.

I don’t know that any of us at the table last evening would have known what to do with that little bird.  We may have done more harm than good.  And our relief may have been wishful thinking, with half of such birds dying later of brain injuries.  This link explains it, and gives us ideas about avoiding bird strikes.  

But what of the poor and hungry and homeless?  There are so many!  Where’s that manual on how to help them?  

Here we return to the message of Jesus: What now, that I am dead and risen and will soon return to my Father?  What now, indeed?  What do we do?  How do we even enter the world of so many to be fed, so many weak to be made strong, so many sick to care for, so many injured to bandage, so many lost to bring back?  So many!

I’m the way, Jesus says.  Enter through me.  Like Peter, he calls us from our boats of safety across the water to himself.  “Just look at me.”  Like Moses at Meribah, I doubt myself.  How could God possibly get enough out of this rock-self of mine to quench so much thirst!  And Jesus stands at the sheep gate of the sick, injured, lost world and calls me, and calls you, too, I think.  “Just look at me.  Don’t look down.”  And for God’s sake, don’t look away and go back to dinner-as-usual.

Perhaps it was not coincidental that at the table, our neighbor Gary mentioned a video about a runner not hesitating to get up and try the impossible, or we recalled the Derrick Redmond race.  Please watch it and listen to Josh Grogan’s song.

Raising up the fallen may be simply responding as we are called, doing what seems only natural.

Get up.