Dear Friends,
I run a Sunday School in what is essentially a suburb. It’s former farm territory, but compared to my last church home, there are a lot fewer chickens, never mind larger farm animals. In fact, it was always entertaining to tell stories like the Parable of the Sower at my last church because, let me tell you, those kids made it known that the Sower was going about it all wrong. That story was not a good description of how to plant a flourishing garden.
Of course, in most US-based churches these days, you aren’t going to encounter a lot of deep farm knowledge, among children or adults. We’re divorced from our food systems, land use is at a premium, and it’s just not how most members of our congregations make an income or feed our families. The Bible, on the other hand, is overflowing with stories about working the land – and that’s a challenge for our contemporary communities.
This is my friend Jimmy Pickett.
If his handling of this sheep isn’t evidence enough, I assure you that Jimmy knows more than a little about what it means to be in relationship with the land. That’s because, in addition to being a postulant, Jimmy is the 2022 Project Leader for Massachusetts’ Good News Gardens program, an intern at multiple farms, and, yes, a veteran sheep wrangler. So, when I looked at this week’s Gospel lesson, in which Jesus tells Simon Peter to “feed my sheep,” I immediately thought of him.
Of course, most of us are never in particular proximity to sheep. Jimmy literally feeds sheep, sure, but that wouldn’t have been a particularly valuable all-around message for Jesus to be delivering, whether to Simon Peter (who, let’s recall, was a fisherman not a shepherd!), or to the rest of us. Still, reflecting on when I started this newsletter and all of you that I write to, that was the underlying idea: I wanted to make sure that in (yeah yeah) unprecedented times, everyone was fed.
Speaking about his work at Mission Farm specifically and in the church more broadly, Jimmy once noted that “The church is called to feed people. And the church in general has a lot of land. So figuring out how to use that land that the church owns to follow our call to feed people has just kept me going.”
I’m not exactly in a place where land use is something I can work on personally, but land is just one kind of gift, a distinctly material one. And when we are good stewards of ALL our gifts, that’s when people are fed. So, what does that mean for us?
Today, I’m writing to you while also preparing to join Godly Play’s Equity Circle meeting for a few days, and one of the stories we’ll be reflecting on is Creation, which opens with the question of the biggest gift we’ve ever been given. Over the years, I’ve heard a wide range of answers to this question, especially because I typically teach tiny tiny humans, but we have in fact been given such enormous gifts, and they manifest as those things we feel most passionate about. As the famed Frederick Buechner quote goes:
Be on the lookout for this intersection, yes, but vitally, name it in others. Name it, especially, in young people. Use the language of ministry. We all desire to be seen and known and told what we care about matters to more than just us. That passion that becomes vocation is one of the greatest gifts we have ever been given.
Finally, as many of us approach the end of our program year, make sure that you are being fed, that even as you are the shepherd, you also allow yourself to be the sheep. Find what feeds you. Be a gracious and willing recipient - Be A Sheep!
Peace,
Bird