Quick Thought

Way too much to do this week, but just a quick thought from today's reading.

Jeremiah 23: 1-6 has the Lord saying, "then I myself will gather the remnant of my flock out of all the lands where I have driven them, and I will bring them back to their fold, and they shall be fruitful and multiply. 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 (emphasis added)." We know that not every one who is driven out into foreign lands comes back -- history is such a long recitation of all those who were widow and orphans and strangers and dispossessed, who perish far from home and seemingly without the attention of the God who we believe makes covenant with us. So, what does it mean that not any shall be missing?

As I was preparing for class this week, I was confronted in the textbook with one of the famous photos from Abu Ghraib; the one where a US soldier stands holding a leash over a naked and fallen prisoner with a dog collar around his neck. Both are figures who, as scripture reminds us, are made in the image of God -- infinitely precious -- in front of whom angels would bow down and call out "make way for the image of God." Both are tragically alone and lost, with eyes that haunt; the torturer and the tortured locked in an intimate interaction that profanes everything we profess to believe about being human. I dearly hope that is a God somewhere, of some type, who is in the business of insuring that not any shall be missing-- that there is some hope for finding one's way back for any of us, for all of us -- to wholeness, to reclaiming one's humanity and dignity, even to recognizing the image of God in each other.

Does God collect all the lost and lone --regardless of how far they have strayed or been driven out -- who would otherwise disappear from the face of history? Does God preserve their essence, the part that is "in God's image," for some greater cosmic truth that we can't quite grasp? Is no one ever actually beyond the watch and protection of the shepherd, no matter how much it may seem like it? And it DOES seem like it! The statement in Jeremiah reminds me of my favorite line from one of the Prayers of the People in our Book of Common Prayer, in which we pray "for all who have died in the communion of your Church, and those whose faith (and we could add, whose pain, whose motivation, whose confusion, whose fear) is known to you alone, that, with all the saints, they may have rest in that place where there is no pain or grief, but life eternal."


--AnnBarbie