Wednesday August 17, 2022
Waiting at the border
           (click here to listen to or read today’s scriptures)
As I live, says the Lord God, I swear I am coming against these shepherds. I will save my sheep, that they may no longer be food for their mouths. I myself will look after and tend my sheep.
When I went to Valparaiso University in 1967, seventeen bright and sunny years old, my parents passed on my oversight to the university fathers and mothers. For decades, this philosophy was called in loco parentis. It didn’t work very well.
My life quickly changed, and wine, women and song filled my nights. I studied in the morning, but still ended up with a D in biology. Stories like this are rife among my friends and Margaret’s.
I also think of the parental attitudes of government toward the poor and homeless in their cities. Sometimes they ask their “children” what they need, sometimes they don’t. Often (always?) what is finally rarely gets below the surface of the need.
And Ezekiel tells us the same story. God is fed up with his children of Israel ignoring his jubilees while the rich get richer and the poor get poorer.
I drove through the heart of west Austin to visit my friend Shannon yesterday. I left the affluent north side, drove through the university area and into the equally affluent south side, skirting the downtown skyscrapers. There were beautiful forests, seemingly endless, on both sides of Highway 1. I passed by Barton Springs and Deep Eddy, two municipal pools fed by springs, which use no chlorine because they are filled each day with clean, new water. I wanted to stop and swim, but the traffic patterns precluded any quick dip.
I have read that there is far less forest canopy on the east side of Austin than the west. There is far less affluence there as well. While the concrete may be extending every which way, there is poverty in one direction and swimming pool money in the other.
Woe to the shepherds of Israel who have been pasturing themselves! You have fed off the sheep rather than pasturing them. You have fed off their milk, worn their wool, and slaughtered them, but the sheep you have not pastured.
God pulls no punches. God is angry. “The poor you will always have with you.” God will protect the weaker ones, no matter what. If you are not poor, He says, your responsibility is to them. Jubilee, during which all property returns to the original owner, has failed. We’re left only with almsgiving, and that is failing too. Everywhere there are turned up noses and downcast eyes. The shepherds are taking advantage. Why should this be?
The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want.
When I got back home I tuned in to a zoom centering prayer meeting with another friend, Mary Lou in Champaign, Illinois. We visited for a few minutes, read Sunday’s gospel using lectio divina, and sat in silence for twenty minutes. We broke our silence with the Lord’s Prayer and prayers of supplication before turning to a short reading from Henri Nouwen’s writing about gratitude.
Mary Lou prayed for the immigrants gathered at the border of Texas and Mexico. South to San Antonio, less than a hundred miles. West through Uvalde to Del Rio and Ciudad Acuna, not even one hundred and fifty miles more. The border is four hours away. Of course the daily temperature approaches and exceeds 100 there as it does in Austin. But air conditioning does not exist for the children or their parents while they wait for our borders to open for them.
That could be hours, but more often days, and probably weeks or months.
If at all.
It is never our job to look only at the negative facets of the jewel of life, no matter how many negative facets there seem to be. No wonder Jesus loved the little children, who forget the bad stuff as soon as it happens. Suffering just rolls off their back. They go back to playing, and trust that food and water will be there for them.
But with shepherds like those Ezekiel fingered, and sometimes like us, one of these days there won’t be.
(Ezekiel 34, Psalm 23, Hebrews 4, Matthew 20)
(posted at www.davesandel.net)
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