Sunday's Sermon

Shepherds.

I'm told to smell like them there leaders of smelly lambs, sheep!  Pope Francis says his priests should smell like the sheep.

Go figure.

How true.

Like the Good Shepherd, Jesus the Lord.

Jesus went after the lost lamb.

One.

A single sheep gone astray.

Hired hands are paid shepherds like me, a clergyman.

True shepherds lay down their lives.  Not counting the cost.

While in line at the Department of Public Works in Warren, Michigan, lines of people with pets waiting for immunizations for those four-legged creatures of God.

I wondered if we wait with the same love for our young children, the lost persons we meet daily, the addicted, the lonely elderly next store?

Would I?

Then, a founding father of this great nation who helped fashion the mission of these United States in its infancy when settlers arrived and natives faced them, Benjamin Franklin penned a newspaper piece, notes the Founders' Bible: The Origin of the Dream of Freedom (Signature historian David Barton), explaining:

"I am for doing good to the poor, but I differ in opinion of the means.  I think the best way of doing good to the poor is not making them easy in poverty but leading or driving them out of it.  ....There is no country in the world where so many provisions are established for them.

Franklin gave a litany of "bad fruits that resulted when the Biblical method of care for the poor was not followed:

An increase of poverty, ungratefulness, laziness, higher taxes with no resulting benefits, etc."

Yep. True leaders, in retrospect are those who don't seek their own well-being and flourishing but the well-being and flourishing of those who are entrusted to their care.

This is the path Jesus lays out for the fullness of life and its abundance.

It is.

How to do this, however, is complicated if love goes unpracticed.

God's love.

And, that of the Good Shepherd.

And, you.

And, me.