Our job, our calling, in every part of this fractured world we live in is to bring healing, reconciliation and peace, to care for each other as a shepherd cares for the sheep. In the new beloved community, we are all the sheep and we are all the shepherds, too.

I believe that the earth and the human heart can both be healed, even as we live in a world that more and more ignores the facts of history, current realities, and science, that more and more abandons the obligations we have to one another. I believe in goodness and truth, and I believe in God’s power to instill goodness and truth into the human mind and the human heart in ways that we can neither ask for or imagine.

The God who feeds our spiritual lives, the God embodied in the life and teaching of Jesus Christ, is a God who cares passionately about justice.

Through being fed by Jesus’ life as well as Jesus’ death, we are nourished to live the life that the church calls us to live: a life of kindness, gentleness, generosity, truth-telling, forgiveness, forgiving one another as God in Christ as forgiven us.

Increasingly, as we come to know more and more about the world we have lived in and the world we live in now, we have to come to an understanding that God’s gift, God’s promise, of freedom, security, material sufficiency, salvation, and life are intended for all of God’s children, and especially for those of us who are in fact children.

I hope we are all trying to live our Christian faith by seeking to understand the relationship between faith and action, between faith and justice, between spirituality and compassion.

The texts for this sermon from the fifth Sunday after Pentecost (6/24/28) are Psalm 107:1-3,23-32, ...