Sermon on the Good Shepherd

 

“Why do you make me see wrong-doing and look at trouble?”

Habakkuk, prophesying shortly before Judah was conquered by Babylon, looked at his world around 600 BCE and saw violence and trouble and wrong-doing on all sides, including an imminent war that his country was going to lose.

Two and a half millennia later, I look around at my world, and I see environmental destruction and political violence, strife between citizens here, and contention over land and resources there. And God doesn’t have to make me see it. I can doom-scroll at 3am all on my own. It’s bad news, as far as the algorithm can see. Everyone is blaming someone else as the law becomes slack about the crimes of the rich but tightens its noose around the poor. It becomes a toy in the hands of the ambitious, and the wicked surround the innocent in search of someone or something to punish for the problems they themselves often created.

Yet the psalmist tells us not to fret ourselves. They use that phrase three times, in fact, in this poem:

“Do not fret yourself because of evildoers…

Do not fret yourself over the one who prospers…

Do not fret yourself; it leads only to evil.”

This is hard advice to live up to. Evildoers do make me fret. I see power being abused. I see people being abused by the powerful, and I fret. Yes, I know that even rulers with absolute power will eventually return to dust, as Habakkuk says, like the grass in my drought-stricken lawn, but before their doom falls, they can do a lot of damage. And so I fret.

The psalmist’s antidote to fretfulness is this: “Put your trust in the Lord and do good.” Or as Dory the fish would say, “Just keep swimming.” Have you seen those movies, Finding Nemo and Finding Dory? Dory is a blue tang fish with a short-term memory disability who helps a father clownfish find his stolen son. I love Dory. She’s so brave. Dory has a faith I wish I had, that little mustard seed Jesus was talking about, the faith that can relocate trees. Somehow Dory is certain, despite her obvious difficulties, that the path she swims will lead her where she needs to go…if she just keeps swimming and doesn’t fret. As she swims, she helps others and is endlessly kind. In a climactic scene in the second movie, she helps to free a whole truckload of ocean creatures who are being shipped from California to Cleveland. By trusting and doing good, Dory is able to not only get where she’s planning to go, but to improve the world with her positivity along the way. Wherever she finds herself is where she needs to be.

Let’s look at the lesson from Second Timothy. Paul says that “God did not give us a spirit of cowardice, but rather a spirit of power and of love and of self-discipline.” In other words, fearfulness and fretting do not come from God. Those are not what the Spirit gives us.

I remember memorizing this verse in the King James when I was an evangelical kid, and in that version it reads, “a spirit of timidity” —a wonderful pun on the name of the addressee, Timothy—not one of timidity, but of “power and of love and of a sound mind.” I don’t usually prefer the King James to more recent and better-informed translations, but this is one verse where the old-time poetry really sings for me. To be of sound mind, to be in one’s right mind, is to trust God and to love. Love and trust are sanity, and sanity is the opposite of fear and fretting.

St. Francis, whom we celebrate today, would probably also have liked a determined, trusting little fish like Dory. That guy had mustard seeds in spades. Legend has it that Francis once had a fearless chat with a renegade wolf. He spoke to the animal with love and compassion and listened to the wolf’s needs, and they say the wolf listened to him and stopped terrorizing a village.

When Francesco di Pietro di Bernardone first started preaching about renouncing the world’s systems and seeing the divine in nature, the townsfolk of Assisi must have said, “There’s something wrong with that boy. He’s not in his right mind.” He is said to have stripped naked in the public piazza to give back all the fine silks and velvets that had made his dad Pietro so rich. They probably kept saying it when the rich man’s son started wandering as a beggar on the outskirts of town, when he started working as a house cleaner, when he was begging the neighbors for stones to rebuild a ruined chapel with his own hands, when he started hanging out with the local lepers, and especially when he took to preaching without any authorization from the Church. When a bunch of other clearly nutty people started following him around, preaching and begging and walking to Rome, at first Pope Innocent the Third thought they all had a screw loose, but eventually his successor Honorius decided that this lunatic with the helping hands and the begging bowl was onto something and he let Francesco call this ragtag group an order.

Francesco and his friends, now known as the Order of Friars Minor, took vows of poverty and trusted God for everything they needed to live. To earn a meal, they would volunteer to help farmers in their fields and do other odd jobs. And God and the people they helped took care of them. When they entered a town, the Friars Minor knew nothing, not where they would sleep, what they would eat, or whether anyone but the birds would listen to their message. That’s what I call a mustard seed. That’s what I call “just keep swimming”. They trusted that with God’s power and love working through them, something good would happen, that wherever they found themselves was where they needed to be. That doesn’t make them crazy. It makes them of sound mind.

You may know I’m going in later this week for a knee replacement. You may also have heard that the place I was planning to recover fell through at the last minute. I felt briefly a lot like a Franciscan friar, not knowing where to turn or what would happen, but being forced to trust and to keep swimming toward that surgery date. I’m afraid I was not as peaceful about it as the friars, nor as chipper as Dory. It took all my mustard seeds not to break out in panic. Eventually, after some persuasion, my father said I could use the family cabin later into the Fall than usual, and I thanked God for keeping me afloat.

Now if I could just apply that kind of faith to what I see in the world. That’s a lot harder, when you know that while you’re waiting on the Lord, people are going to suffer. They’re going to lose their healthcare, lose their homes, lose a fight with cancer, lose the war. They’ll be shot or blown up or starved. Some will fall into despair under the brokenness of their world and die at their own hands. Sometimes the Babylonians are going to invade no matter what we do. Meanwhile, those evildoers keep on prospering.

For now.

“Wait for it,” said Habakkuk, and we all ask “How long must we wait?” Maybe what we should be asking instead is how we can make ourselves useful while we’re waiting. You might not be able to avert a mass famine, but you can feed a hungry neighbor. You might not be able to stop a speeding bullet, but you can comfort survivors of violence. If you can’t restore the ruins all at once, you can work away at it one rock at a time. And maybe some other nuts in their right minds will join in. So be like Dory. Be quick to love, and make haste to be kind. Water those mustard seeds, because that mulberry tree is going to grow legs if we JUST KEEP SWIMMING.