I take some solace in my shortcomings as a parent when I reflect on today’s Gospel. Jesus tells a story with God cast as the reluctant, sleepy one. A friend knocks on his friend’s door long after he has gone to bed. He asks for bread, not for himself, but in order to provide hospitality for someone who has shown up unexpectedly. And the man in bed really doesn’t want to get up, even though it is the right thing to do to respond to a friend in need. In biblical times, there was a social expectation and a religious requirement to offer hospitality, so this seems like a strange story for Jesus to tell. But the point, he explains, is not about the failure of the man in bed to respond on the first knock, but about the persistence of the friend trying to rouse him. Persistence.

Consider the relationship between doing for and being with [1]. Both can look quite similar in outward appearance. Both can be facets of faithful service. Both can be rooted in good intentions.

But, at the end of the day, doing for another and being with another are fundamentally different in one key respect – where the focus lies.

The lawyer in today’s Gospel recites the Summary of Mosaic Law when Jesus asks him what it says about inheriting eternal life. “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and all your strength, and with all your soul, and with all your mind; and your neighbor as yourself.” And then being the persnickety lawyer that he is, he asks “and just exactly, who is my neighbor?” But instead of giving him a direct answer, Jesus tells him a story, as he so often did, a story that shocks him and challenges him to think more deeply. Far from being a tale with one, simple point, the Parable of the Good Shepherd has many perspectives for us to ponder today.

These past 2+ years have been the hardest that most of us have ever lived through. The pandemic kept us apart from one another for so long. And everything going on in our culture from the erosion of women’s rights, to concerns about other freedoms potentially being at risk, to challenges to our beloved democracy, all of these things have created so much instability and uncertainty for everyone. Forces are still at work that threaten to pull us apart. We know that as members of the Jesus Movement, we have to resist those forces, we have to make a conscious decision to come together for worship, to be strengthened and empowered to go back out into the world to work for justice and peace.

Anger is not an evil in and of itself; there are many things in this world that provoke anger in us that is justified, but unbridled anger is a very dangerous thing indeed. And that is where the work of the Holy Spirit comes in. That happens in two ways. First, through prayer and meditation, getting quiet, allowing ourselves to feel our feelings, but then asking God to transform them to help us not to be devoured by them. Breathing in, breathing out, breathing in the fruit of the Spirit and breathing out. You may even want to slowly repeat Paul’s list; love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control. Second, by taking a purposeful step that will put our prayer into action.

And yet we didn’t stop there, she says. We built upon it, creating a practice where the contradiction became so prevalent and happened so often that people begin to think it normal. “This is what systems can do. They can lead us to believe that what is wrong is actually right.” [8]

We may have not built this system. Our parents may have not built this system. And we all have varying degrees of power and privilege within the system. And yet, we cannot afford to deny the existence of the system or to see the very real impact of the system on our common life.

Slavery in one form may be over, but there are many ways to enslave and to be enslaved.