Homily 609 – 10 APE
Holy Transfiguration, Ames, Iowa
September 1, 2024
Epistle:  (282) – 1 Timothy 2:1-7 (Indiction)  (131) 1 Corinthians 4:9-16  (258) – Colossians 3:12-16 (St Simeon)
Gospel:  (13) – Luke 4:16-22 (Indiction)  (72) Matthew 17:14-23  (99) – Matthew 11:27-30 (St Simeon)

In the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit, one God.

In the Church calendar for this week, and next week, we have the confluence of three events.  Next week, the Nativity of the Theotokos, and the Sunday before the Elevation of the Cross, plus the Sunday after Pentecost.

Today, we have the feast of St. Simeon, the Sunday after Pentecost, and the Indiction, which is to say the beginning of the Church year.  Happy new year everybody!

So this week, and next, we have the rather unusual occurrence of three epistle readings and three Gospel readings.  And, to be honest, they don’t all relate to one another.

So, what I want to do is celebrate the new year by reminding us of who we are in Christ.  To do that, we’ll look at the final Gospel reading, for St. Simeon, from St. Matthew chapter 11.  A brief passage, but one that really summarizes what Jesus offers His followers.

He says in it, “Take my yoke upon you and learn from me because I am gentle and humble of heart, and you will find rest for your souls. Indeed, my yoke is easy and my burden is light.”  Now, I will speak for myself, but also suspect that most of you, would not call following Christ easy or light.

In fact, the opposite – we find it difficult and cumbersome, and it doesn’t necessarily feel very good most of the time.  From time to time, we might do well to consider why this is.

It can be a lot of things, but as I mentioned to some last week, we also tend to overthink things at times.  When we are overthinking things, overanalyzing things, we should take a step back and recognize that it is our “self”, our ego, getting in the way.  God doesn’t ask us to figure out His will.

Let me repeat that – God doesn’t ask us to figure out His will.  What He asks is for us to do His will.  Don’t have to understand why, or how it fits into a larger scheme, or really anything.  Just do it.

If we really think about it, the most frequent image used in the Scripture and in Christ’s teaching is that we are sheep.  Consider the sheep – they don’t question the shepherd.  They don’t try to understand the bigger picture.

Sheep do one thing – eat.  That’s really it!  And that is the will of the Shepherd.  He wants the sheep to eat, to grow the wool for shearing, and to be at peace.  The sheep don’t protect themselves, they don’t form defensive alliances, they don’t attack predators.  They eat – that’s pretty much all.

And we are sheep.  All we need to do is to consume Christ.  His is the food that no one sees.  The food that Christ spoke of in St. John’s Gospel, chapter 4, where he says I have good to eat that you know nothing about.”

That food is our food, too.  It is the presence of the Lord, the Shepherd, the Physician.

So while we are busy analyzing what to do, dealing with our boredom, dealing with our isolation from one another, we miss God’s will entirely.  He wants us to be part of His flock, and eat of Him, both in the Eucharist, and also in His presence.  We are never alone, we are never individual.

We should stress here that we are not just alone with our shepherd.  We are members of a flock.  Now I don’t know much about sheep husbandry, but the one assumption I’ll make is that the flock is really a family.  Maybe close, maybe extended, but family nonetheless.

What does this mean for us?  That may be an individual question that each of us has to answer, but the common element is that we all need to set our ego aside.  We have no control over the things in the world.  We only control our reactions to it.

Most of the reactions we have should be to perhaps notice something, but then return to eating.  Sounds ridiculous, right?  Well, to the society and world around us, yes, but to us, absolutely not.

We have a Shepherd to watch out for us.  We have a Shepherd who is watching the fields, watching the flock, protecting us from predators.  We have a Shepherd who will move us to a different grazing ground when the one where we are is depleted.

We don’t need to worry about anything.  Our Shepherd isn’t a hired hand, only doing it for the money.  Our Shepherd is one who bought and paid for the flock, for us, with His very life.  According to the hymn on Holy Saturday, we formerly belonged to Death, because of our sin, but He bought us with a price – the price of one who was betrayed and condemned, and ridiculed, and voluntarily paid for us with His life.

And now, we are His.  We are the most valuable things He has.  And He is our most valuable thing.  Even more than the food in the next valley.

We can, and should, rely on the Shepherd.  He will protect us like David who became the King protected both his flock, and also the nation against the Philistines and Goliath.  He will feed us like He did the children of Israel in the desert.  He will guide us to our home, He will redeem us out of the slavery of Egypt.

We don’t have to worry about “are we good enough?”  We don’t have to worry about our righteousness.  We don’t have to worry about providing for ourselves.  We only need to do one thing – focus our being, the totality of all our effort, on Him, and on the family of the flock.

We will have to work – that is the result of the fall of humanity.  We can expect sweat and toil to fulfill our function.  But we don’t have to worry about our food.  We don’t have to worry about what our job is or what our career might be.

We have to learn how to be a sheep.  To accept the direction of the Shepherd, offered typically at the end of the staff, if we try to break away from the flock.  To not go off in search of a more fulfilling life or fulfilling pasture.

All we have to do is – keep eating.

In the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit, One God.  Glory to Jesus Christ.