The days are getting shorter, and when the whole city is covered with a grey blanket of clouds, it feels like it’s late afternoon from sunrise to sunset.
The days are getting shorter, the lights have started to go up around the neighborhood, and we find ourselves sitting in traffic, or looking out the airport windows, dreaming about being at home, cozy and warm, with a hot drink under our nose, listening to the music we have fallen in love with over the years, and we think about baking cookies, wrapping presents, and lighting candles.
The days are getting shorter, and many of us are already looking forward to the long night when shepherds hear the angels sing, “To you is born this day in the city of David a Savior, who is the Messiah, the Lord.” We look forward to finding the child lying in the manger, and to asking again, with hushed wonder in our voices, What child is this who, laid to rest, on Mary’s lap is sleeping? Whom angels greet with anthems sweet, while shepherds watch are keeping? “This, this is Christ the King…”we will respond with great joy.[1]
Toward the end of Second Samuel, we read an old man’s last words, written down so that generations to come would know and remember:
One who rules over people justly, ruling in the fear of God, is like the light of the morning, like the sun rising on a cloudless morning, gleaming from the rain on the grassy land.[2]
The hope for one who rules over people justly goes back as far as human memories can take us. It is a hope as old as the sad reality of rulers who abuse their position for their own ends. The prophet Jeremiah accused the king of Judah,
Woe to him who builds his house by unrighteousness, and his upper rooms by injustice; who makes his neighbors work for nothing, and does not give them their wages; who says, “I will build myself a spacious house with large upper rooms,” and who cuts out windows for it, paneling it with cedar, and painting it with vermilion. Are you a king because you compete in cedar? Did not your father eat and drink and do justice and righteousness?[3]
It wasn’t the king alone whom Jeremiah accused in the name of God:
Woe to the shepherds who destroy and scatter the sheep of my pasture![4]
The prophet held the entire city and temple leadership responsible for the destruction of Jerusalem and the exile of God’s people, but the scattering didn’t begin when the captives were taken to Babylon or the refugees fled to Egypt. The scattering had begun when families were driven off their land because they couldn’t make their debt payments, and when the workers who built the spacious houses and paneled them with cedar were not paid their wages. The scattering had begun when the king and the court officials attended to their own real estate interests instead of pursuing justice and righteousness. The scattering had begun when personal desires and ambitions pushed the needs of others to the margins of attention—and this is where the prophet’s indictment concerns us all: we can’t deflect its force to hit somebody else or pretend it will remain safely enclosed in a long-ago past, in a country far, far away. God’s people are scattered when our attention is absorbed by our own needs and desires until there is no time left, no energy, no love to attend to the needs of others, particularly those left to fend for themselves.
God’s commandments, again and again, draw our attention to widows and orphans and strangers, to those whose lives are vulnerable and fragile and whose position in the community carries little influence, but whose wellbeing is the measure by which the community as a whole is judged.
Jeremiah’s phrase, scattered captures well how fragmented our common life as well as our individual lives have become. And while this scatteredness is the result of past injustice, it is also the reason why injustice continues and spreads.
I was on a three-day pilgrimage to Washington last week with a group of Rabbis and Jewish lay leaders and fellow pastors from various backgrounds. We visited the United States Holocaust Memorial and Museum and the Museum of African American History and Culture, and we began processing the overwhelming experiences together—in light of our respective faiths and in the shadow of our daily experiences of division and scatteredness. I brought back with me the words of a Holocaust survivor, and the disturbing questions his words raise for me and for us. He wrote,
I try to repress much, but one thing lodges especially in my memory, very deep in memory. These were the marches, the daily marches upon which we shifted from the camp to work in the tunnels, and, especially later in the afternoon, tired, utterly exhausted, dehumanized, on the way from work in the tunnels into the camp. On the left side, on the right side these white houses. I was so frightfully cold. I tried to dream of all that lay behind these walls. And I tried to think, perhaps a mother and children live in this house, but always I was awakened by the shouts of the SS: “Move on! Move on!” But again and again, every day when I left the camp, I tried to have these momentary dreams. That has remained so alive in my memory.[5]
There were people living in those white houses. Surely they looked out the window occasionally? Surely they witnessed the daily march of horror? The camp prisoner thought of the people living in those houses almost longingly, as icons of happy home life, as a link to the normal life that had been brutally denied him. But outside of his dream, the silent spectators in those white houses epitomized one of the most horrifying realities about the Holocaust: it was not just carried out by other human beings, but tolerated by countless others. Historian Victoria Barnett writes,
To those suffering in the camps, these anonymous witnesses were invisible, almost unimaginable. Who were they? the victims asked themselves. More importantly: Where were they? Why did they do nothing?[6]
Could it be that they, like most of us, were far more preoccupied with maintaining the normal rhythms of their lives than with the wish to become involved—perhaps at some risk—to alleviate the suffering of others? Could it be that to them, the “normal rhythms of their lives” simply included this daily march of tired, utterly exhausted, and dehumanized human beings stumbling past the living room window, one way early in the morning, and back the other way at night? Could it be that they saw and knew and simply had other things to worry about? The narrator of Elie Wiesel’s 1964 novel, The Town beyond the Wall, says,
This, this was the thing I had wanted to understand ever since the war. Nothing else. How a human being can remain indifferent. The executioners I understood; also the victims, though with more difficulty. For the others, all the others, those who were neither for nor against, those who sprawled in passive patience, those who told themselves, “The storm will blow over and everything will be normal again,” those who thought themselves above the battle, those who were permanently and merely spectators—all those were closed to me, incomprehensible.[7]
Incomprehensible. Comprehensible, perhaps, only as a symptom of the terrifying reach of our scatteredness.
Therefore thus says the Lord, the God of Israel, concerning the shepherds who shepherd my people: It is you who have scattered my flock, and have driven them away, and you have not attended to them. So I will attend to you for your evil doings, says the Lord.
Jeremiah accused the Jerusalem leadership—the king, the priests, the court prophets—for the scattering that found its fullest expression in exile, and we gladly, and perhaps with a little relief, follow his lead by placing the blame for the world’s ills on political and corporate leaders and their PR meisters.
But we are the ones living in the white houses. Our choices matter. Our voices, as people, count. We are each other’s shepherds. The Lord promised,
I myself will gather the remnant of my flock out of all the lands where I have driven them, and … I will raise up shepherds over them who will shepherd them, and they shall not fear any longer, or be dismayed, nor shall any be missing, says the Lord.
For us, these words, and the promise of a righteous branch who shall reign as king and execute justice and righteousness, point to Jesus. They point to the curious king who builds his spacious house not on slavery or stolen labor, but with living stones: a house to gather in all of us scattered ones. On the night of his birth, the angels sang and we were glad to join their heavenly anthems. Then the air was filled with song and possibility; the small cradle was big enough to hold all our hopes and expectations. But on the day of his crucifixion there were no anthems, only a cacophony of scorn: “Let him save himself if he is the Messiah of God!” the leaders stated with a smirk. “If you are the King of the Jews, save yourself!” the soldiers mocked. Even one of the two men crucified with him joined them in taunting Jesus, “Are you not the Messiah? Save yourself and us!” The scene Luke has painted for us looks like an obscene joke, with the punchline written on a sign and nailed over Jesus’ head, “This is the king of the Jews.” Amid the abuse and the clamor Jesus remained silent. “Father, forgive them,” he prayed, “for they do not know what they are doing.”
Forgive whom—the soldiers who, as always, were only following orders? Forgive the leaders who, as always, assure us they only act with the best interest of the state or the temple or the church or the nation in mind? Forgive those who stood by and watched? Forgive all of us scattered ones acting in our scattering ways?
This kingdom, the reign of the crucified Christ, is not a new and improved version of the kingdoms of the world, it is their end. It is the end of our royal ideologies and the dreams of domination that feed them. It is the gathering of the scattered in the shepherd’s reign of justice and righteousness. It is the life of Jesus alive in us. We are the sheep of his flock and, because we are his, we are each other’s shepherds.
[1] What Child Is This, Chalice Hymnal #162, words by William C. Dix.
[2] 2 Samuel 23:3-4
[3] Jeremiah 22:13-15
[4] Jeremiah 23:1
[5] A survivor of Mauthausen quoted in Victoria J. Barnett, Bystanders: Conscience and complicity during the Holocaust (Westport, CT and London: Praeger, 1999), xiv.
[6] Barnett, Bystanders, xiv.
[7] Barnett, Bystanders, xv; quote from Elie Wiesel, The Town beyond the Wall (New York: Avon, 1969), 159.