Summer of Service

Proper 11, Year B, RCL

Jeremiah 23:1-6
Psalm 23
Ephesians 2:11-22
Mark 6:30-34, 53-56

"The Lord is my shepherd I’ll walk with him always. He leads by still waters, I’ll walk with him always."

In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, Amen.

Like sheep without a shepherd. Lost, confused, unsure, seeking any means of comfort to grab onto.

Jesus saw this condition in the people his apostles had sought to bring Good News to. They had gotten the word that someone did care for them, that someone did have a helping hand, that someone had come who would change things. The people, seeking a shepherd, came in hopes that this man Jesus could fulfill all those needs and more. Were they convinced? Were they certain? Did they know what they were getting themselves into? Probably not.

More likely they were hungry, hurting, and desperate for some sort of hope to reach out and cling to – even if it only meant touching the fringe of his clothes. Maybe, just that, would be enough.

Like many of you, I have not known this kind of desperation. I have not had to struggle with the question – where will my next meal come from? Where will I lay my head to rest tonight, how will I make the next car payment, and the one after that? The closest I’ve come was an experience I had last fall, when I drove to 3 different gas stations on a near empty tank, and wondering if I was going to be left stranded at any moment. I didn’t like the feeling – I didn’t like that something as simple as the fuel that I rely on, that I take for granted day in and day out, was suddenly not as accessible to me as it always had been. I did not want to drive to yet another gas station and face disappointment, and frustration, and walk away empty handed yet again.

But my brief experience of “desperation” does not compare to the concerns I was approached with this week, hands in need reaching toward me and toward Our Saviour in times of very real and immediate need. This week those hands came in the form a family seeking work so that they could pay their rent, a financial need in the midst of a difficult lawsuit, a phone message asking for prayers for loved ones struggling with addiction, a letter requesting funds to pay for a transplant operation in Uganda, support for grieving friends of an unexpected infant death in the Rock Hill community, a request for communion with a family whose loved one is dying. I didn’t realize how many needs I had encountered this week until I began to list them here, and it is amazing how many and how diverse these needs are, this just in one week. It would be easy to overwhelmed by the amount of need and the struggles that are being faced by just these few people who came forth this week. It gives new meaning to the imagery of the sheep without their shepherd in need of compassion, and care.

Our passage of scripture shows Jesus as one looked upon his people with compassion and reached back toward them with a power to heal their wounds – those visible and those invisible. He did this by choosing to be present with them. Choosing to make his place amongst the crowd, even in his own desire to step back and take a rest. The need was still there, and his response to that need was to love these people – to fulfill the Good News that had been promised to them. He reached out his hands toward theirs and allowed them to know healing.

The need for healing in the world has not gone away. The brokenness that we see in the reported news, and in our own families are very real. We are people in need of healing as well. But where do we reach out and feel that healing power? Where is the fringe for us to touch that holds that kind of power, that kind of transformation?

I began to wonder about where we reach for help in our times of sadness and struggle. For some it is in the bottle, a means of numbing the pain, and separating oneself from the reality of the situation they are faced with. For some I think it is in the magazines we reach for in line at the grocery store, where one can read of our contemporary “celebrities” and make judgments about others’ choices, rather than focus on our own disappointments and dissatisfaction in the way things have turned out. It would seem that another place we hope to disappear from ourselves and get caught up in the moment of another is in the distraction of sports – reaching our hands high in an attempt to collect an artifact of “glory.”

These temporal activities have their entertainment value, and certainly have their place in moments of leisure, and rest – we all must rest – but the more of us who use them as methods of escape, as methods of distraction from the real life struggles of our own and of others, the less present we are to the needs of the community that surrounds us, the needs of our brother and sister.
Rather than pushing away the hurts, rather than ignoring the need for healing – for ourselves, and for others, how might we reach forth our hands and put them into action, rather than distraction?

The theme for our Summer of Service youth program has been: God’s work, our hands. Each week youth from Our Saviour and Grace Lutheran put our minds and hearts and hands to work getting to know the needs of the community, and the ways in which our hands might be useful in serving the needs of others. Through this work we have sought to see Christ in others, reaching forward and serving others, so that they might see Christ in us. The result is a collection of young people creating pockets of healing in the world around them – and growing a deeper understanding that with loving hands reaching out toward one another we can be a people of transforming action in the world.

That transformation is found in the hands that reach out and touch the shoulder of the grieving woman whose husband is preparing to die – it can be found at Hospice and Community Care. That healing power is felt as arms of a small child reaches out to hug you—a child for whom touch has changed from source of pain, and to an expression of love – it can be found at York Place and the Children’s Attention Home. That curative force comes as hands clasped in prayer, call upon the name of Jesus to be present in the act of being a community together, through song and storytelling, and we experienced it as we played and learned together in Vacation Bible School this week. The hand is at work in the kitchen preparing meals, and hospitality for our Interfaith Hospitality Network guests. There are many other places where our own hands can be put to use as sources of healing for others and for ourselves. But the power comes in the act of giving it away, of allowing your hands to be strength for others, and allowing others touch your life as well.

We are called upon through the example of our teacher Jesus to see our neighbors in need, and to be the Good News to them, that healing comes, through relationship, through a community in action, through each of us being a source of healing in our world. The people who come looking for Good News, they have gotten the word that someone does care for them, that someone does have a helping hand, that someone will change things.

That someone is you, if you’ll let it be. Amen.

Delivered: Sunday, July 19, 2009