A Real Shepherd’s Good Shepherd (or De-Romanizing Catholic Leadership)

By Bill Moseley

Note: The following reflection was delivered before the start of mass at St. Frances Cabrini Catholic Church on Sunday, July 18, 2021.

My old shepherd friend Sadio relaxing at his home in 2014


First Reading – Jeremiah 23:1-6
Responsorial Psalm – Psalm 23
Second Reading – Ephesians 2:13-18
Gospel – Mark 6: 30-34


Good morning! My name is Bill Moseley and it is my pleasure to reflect with you on today’s readings which are all about shepherds and sheep. We learn about bad shepherds in the first reading, good shepherds in the psalm and the 2nd reading, and an exhausted shepherd in the gospel text. Shepherds and sheep are an oft used biblical metaphor employed to describe the relationship between the people of God and their religious leaders. This all seems pretty clear. But what if it is not? What if we have fundamentally misunderstood the shepherding metaphor.

Stories and metaphors, as any good teacher knows, are what people and students remember, so it makes sense that this is what was passed on through oral tradition, and eventually written down, in our religious texts. Many biblical metaphors are rooted in agricultural livelihoods, which is understandable as most people were farmers, herders and fisherfolk at the time the bible was composed. However, the challenge for contemporary people interpreting the bible is that many of us are not agriculturalists. As such, we may misunderstand the original intent of an agricultural metaphor, or be presented with a misguided interpretation.

Herewith a quick example of such misdirection or misinterpretation from my teaching There is a famous essay published in 1968 entitled “the Tragedy of the Commons” by an economist named Garrett Harden. This essay may or may not be familiar to you, but rest assured that anyone who works in the realm of environmental management knows it it and, luckily for my purposes today, it deals with sheep and pastures. Harden starts this essay with a parable of a common pasture in a small rural community. Here individual community members graze as many of their sheep as possible in order to maximize their own personal gain. In the process, however, the pasture degrades, and everyone losses as there is less and less pasture for the sheep. For Harden, the common pasture is the problem. If we want to solve the degradation issue, then we must subdivide and privatize different portions of the pasture. With your privately held plot, according to Harden, you will carefully manage your portion of the pasture, and only put on a few sheep so it does not degrade.

I find several aspects of this telling of the story problematic, but let me note just two here. First, Harden fundamentally misunderstands the idea of a commons, which have existed in rural communities all over the world for millenia, be they pastures, forests or fisheries. These commonly held natural resources are often tightly controlled and managed by a set of rules developed by the community for the community. It is not a free-for-all as Harden suggests, but carefully managed individual use so that everyone benefits. Second, Harden’s title for this story, the “Tragedy of the Commons,” is leading and frames the answer: the commons are the problem and therefore must be privatized. What if he had entitled the essay “The Tragedy of the Privately-Held Sheep?” This might lead us down an entirely different train of thought.

Now let us return to shepherds and sheep. How were you taught to interpret this metaphor? As a young person, I learned that the shepherd was to protect guileless sheep from danger and that their power may be used wisely or unwisely. In other words, the shepherd holds all of the ‘agency’ and the sheep, in this instance, blindly follow the directions of the shepherd.

But what would real shepherds, people who actually herd livestock for a living, think of the way we (a mostly urban people) interpret the good shepherd metaphor? I am not a farmer and I did not grow up in a rural area. What little understanding I have of shepherding comes from my time as a Peace Corps volunteer in the West African country of Mali in the 1980s. As a Peace Corps volunteer, I had a number of friends from the Fulani ethnic group, a group of farmer-herders that are spread all across the drylands of West Africa. I did go out shepherding cows with these friends on a number of occasions and I can share at least three insights from those experiences.

First, shepherding was not a high status occupation, but rather an arduous, often uncomfortable and low status job. Within Fulani families, it was not the male head of household who typically herded the cattle, but younger men in the family who would spend days in the bush with the cows, eating poor food and being devoured by mosquitoes in the evening. I spent one night in the bush with my male friends and their cattle, soaked by rain, strafed by insects, and kept awake all night by boisterous cattle. I was ready to go home to my village house the next day, which felt like the Ritz Carleton after my time at the cattle post.

Second, livestock (cattle, sheep, goats) are a form of wealth in many areas of the world and wealthy individuals have often hired herders to tend their livestock. This proletarianization of the herding workforce means that the status of this group is even more lowly. While this is not always the case, many peasant farmers at least control their own land, their means of production, whereas the majority of herders do not own the cattle they are tending. Herders are put there to ensure the wellbeing of the herd, but it is pretty clear that they do not own the herd.

Third, it is problematic to think that herders tell or direct their livestock what to do. The herd has a mind of its own and will often do what it wants. If there is good pasture, or water ahead, the herd will surge in that direction. Sometimes this is of no consequence, but sometimes the water might be contaminated or the tantalizing pasture ahead might actually be the field of a neighboring farmer, creating the possibility for conflict. It takes all the skills of a good herder to steer the herd clear of such hazards, something which is rarely recognized when done well and decried mightily when done poorly (as we hear in the first reading when God declares “Woe to the shepherds who let the flock of my pasture stray and scatter”). The herder is there to facilitate and keep the herd moving in the right direction. While it may not be cognizant of this, the herd, in this instance, really has more power than the herder.

I want to argue that these three observations shed a different light on, and give new meaning to, the shepherding metaphor. What might this say for those leaders seeking to derive meaning from this passage for today? While exhorting someone to govern wisely is always good advice, what is more clear here is that leadership informed by the good shepherd model means understanding at least three points.

First, leadership cum shepherding is hard, tiring work (the gospel reading was clear on this) and you take it on as a form of service to society, not for status. Second, people are the wealth of any society and our collective well-being may be facilitated by the work of good shepherds. Such shepherds understand that they do not own such wealth, but are there as stewards, stewards who may be removed if they are not performing their duties. And third, good shepherds facilitate, they do not dictate, They understand that the job is about encouraging the community to move in a smart direction but that, ultimately, this is a collective decision. Of course, the shepherd may also encourage the herd to move in the wrong direction or not stand in the way of a bad decision. This may be expedient in the short term, but ultimately it will create much bigger problems down the road, both for the errant shepherd and the herd.

So how do we apply this more grounded, good shepherd model to leadership today?

The scriptural authors recognized that herds can make bad decisions. Put yourself in a room with people voicing the same perspective and there is a tendency among many to want to go along. Sometimes that may be a wise decision, but sometimes that could be a poor decision. As such, in order to insure the common good, and longevity of society, we need two things to happen. First, we need thoughtful citizens who will raise different points of view. Second, we need leaders, cum good shepherds, who will facilitate a collective decision making process wherein all voices are heard so that the best decisions are made. The leader who feels self-important, entitled to the wealth of a society, and/or inclined to suppress critical thinking and dictate decisions, will fail in the long run.

Given the above, I suggest that we need an educated herd with critical thinking skills. We must have robust investments in public education for the good of society. We also need more shepherd-like leaders, real shepherds who are down-to-earth facilitators. The crozier, or the pastoral staff, symbolizes the role of a catholic bishop as a Good Shepherd. But many other trappings of a bishop’s garb, such as his ring, miter and fine robes suggest wealth and power. If we look at church history, the reality is that the lowly shepherd cum facilitator, along with the communal living preached by Jesus, was largely gobbled up by the Roman Empire whose norms live on in the Roman Catholic Church. It’s time we jettisoned the hierarchical and patriarchal model of leadership that Jesus found to be so problematic and returned to the idea of shepherds and shepherdesses toiling amidst the holy flock. Pope Francis has made encouraging nods in this direction by, for example, washing the feet of Muslim migrants or declining to be driven in chauffeured limousines. In contrast, recent pronouncements by the US Council of Catholic Bishops on President Biden and communion strike me as haughty, misguided and uncharitable. We need more of the former and less of the latter. Amen.


Acknowledgements: My thanks to the Word Team and my spouse for their thoughtful feedback on earlier iterations of this reflection. I may be contacted at moseley@macalester.edu.

New Beginnings

By Bill Moseley

Note: The following reflection was delivered during the virtual service of St Frances Cabrini Catholic Church, Minneapolis, MN, January 24, 2021.

First Reading: Jonah 3: 1-5, 10
Responsorial Psalm: Psalm 25
Second Reading: 1 Corinthians 7: 29-31
Gospel: Mark 1: 14-20


Good morning everyone. My name is Bill Moseley and it is my privilege to reflect with you on today’s readings, a reflection I have entitled ‘New Beginnings.’

Two and a half weeks ago an angry mob, egged on by a deranged president, stormed our nation’scapital, intent on disrupting 230 years of multiparty elections and peaceful transitions of power. As I watched the scene unfold from my office computer screen, I could not focus on my work. That article I had been writing, that class I had been preparing, just didn’t seem to matter as I witnessed this unimaginable – yet perhaps not entirely unexpected – scene. Indeed, as Paul writes in today’s reading from 1st Corinthians, “the world in its present form [was] passing away.” That day Americans experienced the end of something. Perhaps it was an end to a belief in so-called American exceptionalism, or the dawning recognition that our society could easily slip into chaos. While our supposedly strong institutions held that day, it was clear that they might not have held had our luck gone the other way. Attempted coups d’états, insurrections, police brutality, racial violence and tribalism are not the stuff of far off, distant places, but we arethe epicenter of such problems, we are the unruly edges of the world.

In the passages that precede today’s gospel reading from Mark, Jesus’s spiritual mentor John the Baptist has been arrested, and Jesus had spent 40 trying days in the wilderness. The area where Jesus retreats to after John’s arrest, to the western shores of the Sea of Galilee, had been hit hard by the extractive practices of the Roman Empire. Farmers were losing their lands and becoming sharecroppers who were barely able to survive. People living in communities on the shores of the Sea of Galilee were losing their rights to fishing. This was a somber and deeply unjust situation, and a very inauspicious time for a new beginning.

To paraphrase the late Fred Rogers, in all endings there are new beginnings. But Lord, how do we move forward and make a new beginning at this particular moment? We cannot put things back together as they were before. Former president Trump, for all his evil acts, has laid bare the racist underpinnings of our country and the vulnerability of our system to demagogues and ignorant mobs. But the problems seem so deep and so intractable. I can live with differences of opinion. But how do you engage with the other side if they have an entirely different set of facts?A distant cousin of mine insists that undocumented immigrants regularly benefit from the largessof the government when I know this not to be true. Old high school friends of the right leaning variety rage at me on Facebook about the fraudulent election when we know it was fair, inclusiveand the most secure in our history. The memories of the words of a racist relative continue to echo in my head, words my parents quietly told me to ignore and forget as a young child.

Part of me just wants to cut them all off. I am different I insist. I have never held these beliefs. I am not responsible. I am like Jonah, a timid, hapless and temperamental prophet. I just want to run away, but the whale spits me up and I must go to Nineveh to work for the common good. These are my people, the white tribe of America. I really hate such labels, such groupings, but I cannot deny that I have benefited from the privilege of the color of my skin, my gender, my sexual orientation and my nationality. And therefore I am part of the problem and I have a responsibility to make it right. And making it right, while so seemingly impossible, will only happen if lots of us engage in the long slow work of healing the rift and building a multiracial, socially just and democratic society.

Last August, in his speech at the Democratic National Convention, former President Obama said “[O]ur Constitution… wasn’t a perfect document. It allowed for the inhumanity of slavery and failed to guarantee women — and even men who didn’t own property — the right to participate in the political process. But embedded in this document was a North Star that would guide futuregenerations; a system of representative government — a democracy — through which we could better realize our highest ideals. Through civil war and bitter struggles, we improved this Constitution to include the voices of those who’d once been left out. And gradually, we made this country more just, more equal, and more free.”

That day, as Jesus walked along the shore of the Sea of Galilee, he set about recruiting his disciples. Against the backdrop of the demise of John the Baptist and the brutal exploitation of the Roman Empire, something new was beginning, a new way of thinking about the world, a new way of building community, a new way of interacting and caring for one another. And it started with one man, an illiterate Jewish carpenter, taking one step at a time along that beach, humbly calling people to join his nascent community. Against all odds, over the next 2000 years this new way of thinking would grow to become a major world religion. While a lot of harm has been perpetrated in the name of the church, the threads of social justice teaching that date back to Jesus have been forces for good in the world.

Despite my despair and consternation over our predicament and the deep divisions in this country, I am oddly optimistic. I do feel like we turned a page last Wednesday. Our new president, like us, is not perfect by any stretch of the imagination. He was not the preferred candidate for many on the political left. He has made mistakes in his life and he has experienced great personal tragedy. And while he does not wear his faith on his shirt sleeve, or march across the Washington Mall to pose with a bible in hand, I have been struck that he is a person steeped in the social justice teachings of the church. He’s an unlikely person to bring about reconciliationand help us more forward. He’s an old white man who really should be retired and at home with his grandchildren, but he might just be the right person. He’s someone who empathizes with others, had the wisdom to partner with a female vice president of color, and has the experience toknow how to make the machinery of government work for the common good.

And while leaders are important, and bad ones can do great damage, we the people are the ones who will make the difference in our own small, but myriad ways. That parallel universe, that fiction of a stolen election, alternate facts and racist ideology will not disappear if its believers are marginalized and cut off from mainstream society. We need to find a way to make our fractured society whole, approaching everyone with compassion. Of course those who committed crimes must be held accountable, but most did not in any direct way. So we must respectfully and lovingly engage across the divide.

As such, I will talk to that cousin the next time I see him, connecting with him as a human being and respectfully disagreeing when needed. I will not unfriend my right wing high school friends of yesteryear on social media, but do the hard work of sharing the facts I know to be true. I will confront racism and colonialism wherever I see it, be it from the mouths of relatives or in the scholarship in my discipline. And, in my own occupation as a college professor, I will continue to engage in the long, slow hard work of developing critical thinking skills among my students, skills that are the backbone of this democracy. Yes, I am but one person, but there are hundreds in this congregation, thousands in this community, millions in this country, and billions in this world. Together, slowly walking along the shores of the Sea of Galilee, calling people to join in the quest for a just world, we can make a difference.

In her poem to the country last Wednesday, National youth poet laureate Amanda Gorman beautifully said:

The new dawn blooms as we free it.
For there is always light.
If only we’re brave enough to see it.
If only we’re brave enough to be it.

Note: Thanks to the Cabrini Word Team for helping me think through the issues in this text. Any mistakes or errors are my own.


The author may be contacted at moseley@macalester.edu or may be found on twitter at https://twitter.com/WilliamGMoseley

The Road Not Taken: Rediscovering Jesus’ Humanity and the Communal Life as Church

By Bill Moseley

Note: The following reflection was delivered before the start of mass at St. Frances Cabrini Catholic Church on Sunday, August 23, 2020.

First Reading – Isaiah 22:19-23
Responsorial Psalm – Psalm 138
Second Reading – Romans 11:33-36
Gospel – Matthew 16:13-20


Good morning everyone. My name is Bill Moseley and it is my privilege to reflect with you on today’s readings.

One of my favorite poems is “The Road Not Taken” by Robert Frost. It starts as follows:

Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,
And sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveler, long I stood
And looked down one as far as I could
To where it bent in the undergrowth;

Many of us encounter different choices in life, and we may wonder about the road not taken. Sometimes these choices are clear, you have a decision to make, and at other times political forces and structures guide us in a way that make us less conscious of our decisions.

Dogma is an example of one such force that guides our thinking. According to Merriam Webster’s dictionary, dogma is defined as “a doctrine […] concerning faith formally stated and authoritatively proclaimed by a church.” I would suggest that today’s Gospel reading is one of the building blocks that has been used to establish church dogma. It purports to answer two important questions. First, what is the nature of Jesus, is he God or a human prophet? And second, how will the legacy of Jesus be carried on after his passing? I want to interrogate both of these two questions and ponder some other interpretations than the established ones. You might call this a heretic’s view. But maybe it’s just another view, a view of a fork in the road we did not take long ago.

In today’s Gospel reading from Matthew 16, Jesus asks his disciples, “Who do people say that the Son of Humanity is?” They answer, “Some say John the Baptist, others say Elijah, and others Jeremiah or another of the prophets.” Jesus asks: “But you, who do you that I am?” Simon answers, “You are the Messiah, the Son of the living God.” Jesus then replies, “Blessed are you Simon, son of John!”… “For flesh and blood has not revealed this to you, but God, my Father and Mother, in heaven. I tell you, you are the Rock, and upon this Rock I will build my church.”

Biblical scholars debate different aspects of this gospel text, but they largely agree that some parts were added at a later date, namely the question “who do people say that I am” as well as Jesus’ praise for Simon’s response and even the famous line “you are the Rock and upon this rock I will build my Church.” After you subtract the later additions, what remains are these different takes on the character of Jesus.

What does this text say about the nature of Jesus? Does it matter that a question was added at a later date? It might because the way you ask a question frames the information before us. There is a famous Peter Seller’s line in a Pink Panther film in which, upon seeing a man and a dog, he asks “does your dog bite?” The man answers no, so Peter Sellers reaches out to pet the dog and he is promptly bitten. Sellers then says “I thought you said your dog does not bite” and the man responds “that’s not my dog.” Many questions are loaded with assumptions.

I think it is significant that the question, “who do you say that I am,” was added later. This question sets up a dichotomy or a binary, Jesus is either human or divine, full stop. Furthermore, we are led to believe from Jesus’ appraisal of Simon’s response (also added later to the text), that divine is the right answer. But maybe this was never the question asked? Maybe this was a decidedly 4th century question reflecting a 4th century way of thinking about the world (the 4th century being the time when the Council of Nicaea codified the nature of Jesus). We know from contemporary queer theorists, and LGBTQ activists, that much of the world doesn’t fit into neat binaries. Sometimes things manifest on a continuum, simultaneously co-exist, or even just defy categorization.

Perhaps it’s my Vatican II sensibilities, but it makes sense to me that Jesus was simultaneously human and divine, as I believe the divine runs through all living things. Jesus’ task, as I understand it, was to show us how to let that divine more fully emerge in our daily lives, by being kind to others and ourselves, and by recognizing the common humanity and divinity in all of us, be they friend or foe. This was the path he charted for us to build heaven on earth, or the ‘way’ to contentment. Perhaps we are tempted to label Jesus as only divine, but I think that actually minimizes the true miracle of the transcendence he achieved. Rather than demonize or shun our humanity, we must embrace it.

As some of you may know, I recently lost my father to cancer just a month ago. He wasn’t a young man, but he was a very youthful 81, and I was taken aback by how quickly he declined at the end. While I have buried grandparents, aunts and uncles, the death of someone very close to you, be it sibling, spouse or parent, is equally devastating and deeply grounding. To help him bath one week, and then to touch his dead body in another was one of the realest things I have ever experienced. To see his ashes literally poured into the soil made vividly visceral the Ash Wednesday refrain, from dust you come and to dust we shall refrain. His death, perhaps the most human of human actions, made me feel oddly more connected to the world. I think the challenge of modern society is that we are so removed from aspects of our humanness (birth, illness, death) that we rarely connect to deeper energies.

The other common interpretation of this gospel reading is that it is a rationale for the institution known as the church and for papal succession. “You are the Rock and upon this Rock I will build my Church.” As noted previously, this phrasing was also a later addition. Interestingly, Matthew is the only Gospel that uses the term church or ekklesia in Greek.

The way one lived was clearly very central to Jesus’ message. His was not a cerebral, abstract message as a different approach to living was part of his project. We were to care for one another, to love our neighbors as ourselves, to share our wealth. Living in community was not uncommon for early Christian collectives and it worked, as I have heard fellow parishioner Harrison Nelson argue, because it enabled poor and marginalized communities to live a better life. The Christian message is a guide to better living more than anything else, a roadmap for building heaven on earth.

But Christians were also persecuted within the Roman Empire and they suffered greatly during the first centuries following Jesus’ death. This changed when Christianity became the official religion of the Roman Empire. This shift was important because it not only ended the persecution, but because it fundamentally changed the lived, communal aspect of Christianity. Instead of small communes led by elders who acted more as facilitators than rulers, we see the emergence of a Church organization patterned on the hierarchical and patriarchal structure of the Roman Empire with a male leader at the top.

I cannot blame our forbearers for the decisions they made. Persecution and death were no fun and I am sure they were thrilled when Christianity became the official religion of the Roman Empire. Debates about the nature of Jesus ended after Emperor Constantine called the Council of Nicaea and the Roman Catholic Church became the strongest political force in Europe, outlasting the Roman Empire. That original way of Christian living, in a commune patterned on the life of Jesus with his disciples, would also become a distant, strange and alien form of social organization, marginalized to convents, monasteries, and kibbutzs. Just like the debate about Jesus’ humanity, this debate about how to live together and how to organize the faithful was seemingly shut down in the 4th century. As such, today’s gospel reading, with all its additions, shows us how they tried to close the door on future debate.

We currently live in a very unsettled time when institutions and authority are being questioned, and when sexism, racism and homophobia are increasingly recognized as systemic problems. The contemporary Catholic Church, an institution built by humans, is not immune from these important social debates.

But it is discouraging. I have been waiting since Vatican II for major church reform and it just never seems to come. I remember having a college professor in the 1980s, in a course on Catholicism, tell me that change was just around the corner. But the Church remains as hierarchical as ever, single men are in charge, and the younger ranks of the priesthood appear to be stacked with unimaginative, ecclesiastical conservatives. Part of me just wants to move on, to give up, to leave the church.

But, as much as some may have wanted to have buried it, the door was never completely closed on alternative ways of organizing the church. Jesus was a rabble-rouser who had his own issues with abuses of power within the Jewish community, turning over tables at the temple and showing his very human anger. Today’s Old Testament Reading from Isiah also speaks to the need for institutional change. As President Obama shared in a speech a few nights ago: they win if we stay home, “those who benefit from keeping things the way they are -- they are counting on your cynicism.” “We can't let that happen. Do not let them take away your power.”

Jesus, fully human and divine, had sound ideas for better living. We need to rediscover that road not taken and keep working to make it a reality, no matter the obstacles in our path. We are the Church, we have the power to make change. Thank you.

Note: Thanks to the Cabrini Word Team for helping me think through the issues in this text. Any mistakes or errors are my own.


The author may be contacted at moseley@macalester.edu or may be found on twitter at https://twitter.com/WilliamGMoseley

Rethinking Shepherds and Sheep

By Bill Moseley

Note: The following reflection was delivered before the start of mass at St. Frances Cabrini Catholic Church on the weekend of July 21-22, 2018.

People of God, my name is Bill Moseley and it’s my privilege to reflect with you on today’s readings.

Today’s lessons from Jeremiah and Mark, as well as Psalm 23, are on the Good Shepherd with some passing inferences to sheep. When I met with the Word Team last week to discuss these texts, I learned that the faith formation students in our 5th to 8th grades were critical of this image as a metaphor for our relationship with God. I don’t blame them. Who wants to be compared to dumb sheep that get bossed around by a know-it-all shepherd that supposedly has our best interests in mind? More importantly, hats off to our young people for being critical thinkers and not passively accepting these ideas. That said, what I would like to do today is offer an alternative perspective on sheep and shepherds which might allow us to approach these readings differently.

So, first off, what about these dumb sheep? Are they really so dim witted? When I was younger, I enjoyed a comic strip by Gary Larson entitled the “Far Side.” One of the recurring themes in this strip was the inversion of humans and animals in the intellectual hierarchy, with the idea that animals might actually be much smarter than people thought them to be. Most farmers would concur that sheep really do need to be herded. But, as per Gary Larson, what if the sheep are just channeling their mental energy somewhere else than the everyday practicalities of life? They may look like mindless fluffy eating machines in a pasture, but what if they are really spending their time solving physics equations and can’t be bothered to think about where they are going?

As a quintessential absent-minded professor, I must confess that I have some sympathy for sheep. You may or may not know that I can be pretty spacey. I can get lost in thought and literally become oblivious to where I am and what I am doing. My wife claims that I fortunately found the one and only profession where such a talent is prized: academia. But such a tendency can put a strain on one’s marriage. While there are literally hundreds of family stories in our household about me doing spacey things, I will just share one particularly egregious vignette to illustrate the problem. In the mid-1990s, my wife, Julia, and I were living in Harare, Zimbabwe where we both worked for the international NGO Save the Children (UK) on a large hunger mapping project. We lived in a small, rented cottage behind the main house on a larger piece of property. The property was fenced and gated, which meant that you always had to open a gate before going up a very long drive to our cottage. One day, we were coming home from work and I happened to be driving. As we approached the entrance to our place, Julia got out to unlock and open the gate so that I could drive through. Now, on that particular day, I must have been thinking about something – trying to solve some sort of problem in my head. As such, and very unfortunately, after driving through the entrance I didn’t stop for Julia to get back in the car, but just kept on driving to the back of the property where our cottage was located. I pulled up to the cottage and I looked over to the passenger seat and I was thinking where did Jules go? I literally had absolutely no idea where she went. I got out of the car and started walking back down the driveway when I saw Jules trudging up the hill. I said, very honestly, where were you, where did you go?

Julia, fortunately, has stuck with me. And that’s a good thing. Not just because she keeps me on track with the practical aspects of life, but because she also nudges me in the right direction on so many other fronts. To wit, we recently met a young Ugandan man at Cabrini named James. James had introduced himself to the congregation at the end of the service. After mass we said hello, chatted during coffee hour, and then offered to drive him home. As we got in the car, Julia discretely said to me: why don’t we invite James home for lunch, isn’t that what someone in Africa would do? And to this, I am ashamed to say, I hesitated. I was probably thinking that I had some “really important” thing to do that afternoon. But we did invite James over for lunch and we had a wonderful conversation, learning that James was here for a month as a medical student at the U and that he had come to Minnesota via connections with an orphanage we serendipitously already knew about in Uganda called the Blue House. My point here is that Julia nudged me in the right direction in this particular moment as she has at many other times in our relationship.

Most people don’t like to be compared to sheep because the implication is that we are simple minded followers. But what if the sheep metaphor is just a way of acknowledging our human potential for waywardness? Whether we are pensive, distracted, or worried, we can wander off course and we need good shepherds in our lives to nudge us back in the right direction.

Just as we are re-imagining the meaning of the sheep metaphor, I would also like to examine our conception of the good shepherd. What I want to argue is that we come to our understanding of the good shepherd via our own cultural understandings of this idea.

What is the stereotypical American understanding of the qualities of a good shepherd or herder? The US, as we know, is a majority urban/suburban nation. Increasingly there are very few Americans who have first-hand experience with animal husbandry and farming. As a kid who grew up in the suburbs of Chicago, I probably was first introduced to the idea of the good shepherd in faith formation. I also encountered shepherds and herders in children’s story books. My take-away was that shepherds were above all protectors, they guard the flock from bad things like wolves. In American folklore we also have the iconic cowboy whom, by the way, we often forget is a herder. In fact, cowboys have been so abstracted from their herding context that we tend to focus on their protector role above all us. They almost always carry guns. They are rugged individuals who know best, are only accountable to God, and they protect us from danger. These are the American ideas we often bring to the good shepherd metaphor in today’s readings. We need a good shepherd to protect us from bad things out there, the good shepherd is only accountable to God, and we are lost without such a protector.

My experiences in West Africa with herders shed a different light and interpretation on this metaphor. As you may now, my wife Julia and I met in the Peace Corps in the 1980s in Mali. I served in a small, rural farming community of 200 people in southern Mali. This farming village of Bambara people also had, at its outskirts, 3-4 hamlets of herders composed of another ethnic group called the Fulani. My social life outside of work largely consisted of hanging out in the evenings with young male village friends drinking tea and chatting. There was a Fulani herder man name Sadio who used to come and join us some evenings. Despite the fact that some of the farmers teased Sadio for always smelling like milk and cows, I gradually developed a friendship with him.

As I began to learn the Fulani language, I spent more time with Sadio and his family. I learned to milk cows by hand and even spent a couple of nights in the bush with the herders and the cows. Herding was not an easy life. During the rainy season, the young men would take the cows far away from the village so the animals wouldn’t get into people’s farm fields. The herders didn’t eat very well, consuming mostly milk and some grains. The mosquitos were rapacious in the evening and the social isolation was challenging for these young men in a society where human relations meant everything. These herders tended to the cows like their children, carefully removing ticks from them in the evenings so they would not catch diseases. Above all, however, I learned that the herders’ main job was not to protect the cows from predators because there are almost no big predators left in this part of West Africa. No, their main job was to keep the cows out of farm fields. This task could become very challenging in the fall when the rains stopped, grass cover declined, and the crops were still in the field before the harvest. Hungry cows that see green in a distant field can be extremely determined to get there and eat as much greenery as possible. Allowing cows to wander astray could lead to serious altercations with the farmers in the area - and a potential for conflict that could sometimes escalate to violence.

In sum, the West African view of a herder or shepherd is quite different than the American one. Here the cultural reading of the metaphor is not that of the great protector. Rather, it’s a humble, hardworking person who tends to the health of his or her animals and adroitly steers them away from trouble, even if the instincts of the herd are to satisfy their hunger by feasting on a farm field – an event which would undoubtedly lead to conflict.

I want to conclude by suggesting that we can potentially use these different understandings of shepherds and sheep to sift through today’s readings. After reading and re-readings today’s passage from Mark, I was struck by how Jesus led by example. He mostly taught/led/shepherded by the way he lived his life rather than didactically telling people what to do. In Mark, we see how his active compassion for the masses and the marginalized was a lesson to others. Jesus’ ideas about how to live differently were revolutionary for his time. His thoughts on living in community, loving thy neighbor as thyself, & welcoming the outcast constituted a new “way.” Jesus, to the chagrin of some of his followers, was no gun toting, ruggedly individualistic cowboy with righteousness on his side, riding in to save the day. Rather he, like the lowly West African herder, was trying to lovingly shepherd people along this path to longer term peace and happiness.

Lastly, what to make of the penultimate sentence where Mark writes that the people who came to see Jesus “were like sheep without a shepherd”? Yes, we can read this as simple-minded people who were lost. But we can also read this as people who were mature enough to recognize that they needed a little help getting back on track or staying on track. Furthermore, these people didn’t just flock to anyone. They had choices. There were plenty of other prophets around at the time exuding strength, who were quick to lay the blame at the feet of others, or who promised material wealth. No, they came to see Jesus and I am guessing they did so because they recognized in him a different kind of wisdom. Indeed, these lessons about thoughtful sheep and the good shepherd are helpful guidance for the long but important task of making heaven on earth.


The author may be contacted at moseley@macalester.edu or may be found on twitter at https://twitter.com/WilliamGMoseley

Lessons in Power, Humility & Collective Learning

By Bill Moseley

Note: The following reflection was delivered before the start of mass at St. Frances Cabrini Catholic Church on the weekend of January 20-21, 2018.

People of God, my name is Bill Moseley and it’s my privilege to reflect with you on today’s readings.

I would like to start with a brief story that was shared by the New York Times columnist David Brooks when he gave a talk at the Aspen Ideas Festival this summer. In that talk, Brooks tells a story about President Abraham Lincoln. When Lincoln was fighting the Civil War, one of his early general-in-chiefs was General George McClellan. President Lincoln sought to see McClellan because he wanted him to fight a little harder, so Lincoln invited McClellan to the White House. But McClellan wouldn’t come, so Lincoln went to McClellan’s house. Lincoln arrives at McClellan’s house and the butler indicated that McClellan was out. Lincoln said that this was okay, he would wait. I little while later, McClellan came in the back door and went up the stairs. Lincoln waited for another 45 mins and the butler came down and said I’m sorry but General McClellan’s is too tired to see you. So this is the president of the United States sitting in the living room. He is with his assistant John Hay who says this is an outrage, he is insulting you. And Lincoln says it’s okay, I will sit here all day if I can get him to fight harder. Now Brooks’ point in telling this story is that it illustrates a man who is at peace, patient and persistent. Lincoln, the president and arguably most powerful man in his country, had no problem putting aside his ego for a higher cause, in this case unifying his country and putting an end to the horrendous practice of slavery.

What I am going to suggest today is that our readings have a lot to say about power, and more specifically, the insights and knowledge that is generated when power is inverted and humility is practiced. For that matter, I would argue that a significant portion of the gospel readings are actually radical and unconventional lessons for those who hold power and privilege. This seems more important than ever given the current #metoo movement, aimed at exposing abuses of power, and the temperament of some of our current leaders who lack sufficient peace to practice a Lincolnesque or gospel story approach to power.

In today’s Gospel reading from Mark, we learn about Jesus’ early ministry, a time when Jesus is assembling his disciples. More specifically, Jesus is walking along the sea of Galilea and he encounters several fishermen. In each case, he calls to them, midstream in their work, to stop what they are doing and follow him. And, remarkably, they do. They stop casting or mending their nets and follow him.

My initial instinct when reflecting on this Gospel reading was to focus on the disciples. How did they process this call and respond so quickly? But this is not where I am going with my reflection today, because I was drawn back to Jesus and his simple act of walking along the shore and recruiting followers. There is a certain humility involved in having to recruit one’s own followers. In my mind at least, great teachers don’t have to actively recruit because their reputations precede them - and followers or students just go to them. In fact, this is what happened in last week’s Gospel reading from John. In this instance, two disciples of John the Baptist approach Jesus and ask where he is staying. These disciples took the initiative and wanted to be with Jesus.

But while last week’s story featured a regal and wise Jesus – to whom followers flocked, the Jesus in today’s readings is much more humble, a guy who chooses to pound the pavement in order to attract followers and develop a community. This version of Jesus is also fairly consistent with many of the other stories passed down to us in the gospels.

From day one, Jesus’ very existence seems to be an exercise in humility. For starters, the gospel stories are about an almighty and all powerful God who decides to lurk among us in human form. If you were impressed by Lincoln’s ability to patiently wait in General McClellan’s living room, then what about God stepping down from her heavenly thrown to be among us, and with us, in our often crazy world. From there forward, Jesus’ life and comments - as shared in the gospel stories - are often unconventional lessons in how to practice leadership. In fact, Jesus often frustrates his followers by not exercising authority in the traditional way or fawning before conventional power.

While we traditionally think of Jesus as transcendent, all knowing and wise, I want you to imagine for a moment that perhaps Jesus, the teacher or rabbi, was a co-learner with his disciples. In other words, maybe his disciples were less followers or students in the traditional sense, and more members of an active learning community facilitated by Jesus. As such, perhaps divine insight or the divine itself is co-produced and among us – rather than an external force.

This idea is a hard thing to wrap one’s head around, the notion we are part and parcel of the divine. In today’s Old Testament reading from Jonah, we learn how Jonah wrestles with this in his own comical way. Jonah, after spending three days in a whale or giant fish, gets burped up on a beach after he agrees with God to go to the city of Ninevah. Jonah, the reluctant prophet, is to tell the people of Nineveh to repent or they and their city will be destroyed. Amazingly, the people listen to Jonah, change their ways and God does not destroy the city. But, ironically, Jonah is disappointed that God does not destroy the city because he thinks it makes him look bad because he foretold the end of the city and then it did not happen. Jonah can’t get his head around the fact that he was part of the divine process – people listened to him and they changed. Jonah can’t get beyond this me-centric idea that he is an autonomous actor that exists outside of the divine, rather than an active participant in the process.

So how does inverting power, practicing humility and co-producing the divine potentially play out in our own lives? Let me share a brief story with a couple of caveats. First, this is not to suggest that I have it figured out, but to imply that even very flawed people like myself can engage in such a process. Second, I realize that I am blessed with extreme privilege given my race, gender, economic status and education. As such, I likely can pursue ways of inverting power differently than those with less privilege.

My story dates from the time when I was a Peace Corps volunteer in Mali, West Africa in the mid-1980s. I was stationed as an agricultural volunteer for two years in a small community of 200 people. I was the first volunteer to live in the community and they welcomed me with open arms. I suspect, however, that they also had a lot of ideas about me and how I would pursue development. I was white, from the United States, the richest country on the planet at that time, and presumed to possess a lot of relevant technical knowledge. Some aspects of my life were perplexing to my village, including my desire to live with a local family, eat local food , wear local clothing, and learn the local language (all of which were part of the Peace Corps approach and philosophy at that time). But other aspects of my life were completely consistent with their expectations for an American, including some of my possessions, such as a short wave radio and a motorcycle given to us for work. Early in my Peace Corps tenure I used the motorcycle a fair bit to get around. The young men in my village really liked the fact that I had this motorcycle. It was relatively small by American standards, but actually quite large, flashy (painted red) and substantial compared to the local mopeds. I believe they liked the bike because it conformed to set of expectations for young males or machismo.

Early on in my tenure as a volunteer, an unfortunate incident occurred which even further endeared me to my young, male, village friends. One lazy Saturday afternoon, I was in my courtyard doing periodic maintenance on my motorcycle (I think I was cleaning the carburetor). After completing this task, I wanted to merely start the engine to see how it sounded – not to drive anywhere. Well, for reasons that I have never been quite able to figure out, the motorcycle immediately began to rev at full speed, and engaged, with me on top of it. I then proceeded to literally race, at a terrifyingly high speed, in the wheelie position, straight through the middle of town. The miracle is that I didn’t injure myself or anyone else, somehow managed to hit the kill switch, and the motorcycle decelerated, and turned off three quarters of the way though my small village. I then got off the bike and walked back to my house, trembling after what had just happened. Back at my house all of my young male friends were clapping and cheering. I was one cool cucumber for that fleeting moment. In their minds, I was like the Sylvester Stallone’s character Rambo and I had come to live in their village.

The problem was that the motorcycle represented power and wealth – and it put distance between myself and members of the community, especially older people and women of all ages. So after a few months, I made the decision to park the motorcycle. I would use it once every few months to go to the capital city some three hours away, but the rest of the time I would walk or ride a bicycle. Of course, this was deeply disappointing to my young male friends. If I had this symbol of power and wealth, why not flaunt it? However, over time, this decision yielded tremendous results, especially when combined with my insistence that I was a facilitator rather than a development expert who had all of the answers. I just became Mambi (which was my local name). I was the American guy who lived in the community, spoke the local language, hung out in the evenings drinking tea with his village friends, and who liked to talk to old people and work on gardening projects. I proactively decided to let go of the trappings of power and it enabled me to do better work by learning from my village friends. This led to tremendous personal growth and to shared development efforts rather than imposed ones.

Let me end with a couple of thoughts. First, while there is a lot in the Christian tradition about justice for the poor, marginalized and disenfranchised, Jesus had just as much to say about the exercise of power. In fact, Jesus’ life is a lesson in how to lead differently by building a community of learners and leaders, rather than exercising top down control.

Second, places like Cabrini can and do model different approaches to power when they engage in learning and spiritual growth as a shared exercise. When we hear someone on this podium share a reflection, this person often imparts the thoughts of an army of people behind them. Our liturgist feeds us relevant background information, we hash out our ideas with the Word Team, we talk it over with our spouses, and they critique our rough drafts. While I am the messenger when I share reflections, and take full responsibility for any poor word choice or potentially offensive comments, anything of value that I have to offer almost always comes from this community that helps me shape a reflection.

Lastly, let us just imagine that Jesus operated in a similar fashion. Perhaps his pearls of wisdom, handed down to us as his parables and stories, were the result of a collective and shared process of co-learning with his disciples. This makes his stories our stories. These are stories which offer insights born of unconventional leadership, the inversion of power, humility, and the embrace of the wisdom of everyone. Indeed, we are all people of God. Thank you.

The author may be contacted at moseley@macalester.edu or may be found on twitter at https://twitter.com/WilliamGMoseley

Who Are We In This Charlottesville Moment?

By Bill Moseley

Note: The following reflection was delivered before the start of mass at St. Frances Cabrini Catholic Church on the weekend of August 26-27, 2017.

People of God, my name is Bill Moseley and it’s my privilege to reflect with you on today’s readings. I have always been enamored with the human side of Jesus. I know theologians have long debated the exact nature of his divinity, and some scholars and church officials over the centuries have sought to minimize or erase his human side. I prefer to think of him as someone fully human that achieved great insights.

In today’s Gospel reading from Mathew, Jesus asks his disciples, “who do people say that I am?”and then more directly “who do you say that I am?” What is going on here? To be clear, most Jesus seminar scholars believe these are not the words of Jesus, but the construction of Matthew, written some 80-90 years after Christ’s death. As such, what these words likely reflect are the conditions of a budding institution in this period and the struggles of a community to portray Jesus. They may also, I would argue, give us some insight into the human side of Christ, a person whose very human questions may be particularly relevant to us today.

I can imagine at least three possibilities for ways to think about Jesus’ questions. First, is this a moment of self-doubt for Jesus? Is he wondering what have I gotten myself into, where is this going, who am I, and what am I to do? Or, second, is he concerned about what others think about him? That is, is he essentially asking what are the popular kids saying about me? Or, lastly, does he already know the answer to these questions and is he simply querying his disciples’ understanding?

I’m skeptical of the second and third possibilities. I believe that Jesus was sufficiently grounded that he would not have been too concerned about what others were saying about him. The third option, that Jesus knew the answer and was simply probing the disciples, seems to be the favored explanation by several scholars I read in preparation for today’s reflection. But this explanation annoys me. In large part because what follows is Peter’s response: “You are the Messiah, the Son of the living God.” Here Peter purportedly gets it right with his mentor, effectively becoming the class brown noser (and can’t you just imagine the other disciples rolling their eyes while this happened). Jesus then goes on to say that Peter “is the Rock, and upon this rock I will build my church.” He is promised the keys to the reign of heaven, and furthermore, considerable power: “Whatever you bind on earth shall be bound in heaven, and whatever you loose on earth shall be loosed in heaven.” It’s this text that often has been used to justify the church hierarchy, as well as the authority to determine who is welcomed and not welcomed into the divine. This foundation for institutional power makes me uneasy and I also question whether Jesus, a fierce critic of the religious authorities of his day, would have ever spelled out so clearly a vision for institution building.

I like the first explanation, that Jesus is asking these questions in a moment of self-doubt. For me, this is a particularly human moment. Here we have the most grounded of people, a man with powerful spiritual insights, essentially asking his friends, who am I? Where is this all going?

Who am I, who are we? What are we to do in this particular moment? I have been thinking a lot about these questions recently, especially in the wake of the events two weeks ago in Charlottesville, VA. At that time, neo-Nazis and white supremacists marched. They carried guns, burning torches and shouted slurs of hate. Then one in this group got in his car and drove into a crowd of counter-protesters, wounding dozens and killing a young woman. Our president then vacillated, alternating condemning and excusing what happened.

The first part of what happened is not that unusual. As a kid in Chicago in 1977, I remember neo-Nazis marching in the suburb of Skokie, Illinois, a predominantly Jewish community. While the community sought to bar the march, the Supreme Court upheld the neo-Nazis right to free speech and allowed the march to go forward. No, the expression of hate is not new. But the unabashed violence which ensued in such a public space in Charlottesville, and the way our president reacted, is different. Our president equivocated in condemning those who perpetuated the violence that day, violence committed in the name of hate.

Who am I? Who are we? What are we to do in this particular moment? Part of me wants to focus on the failings of the president and, like the Matthew community, focus on institution building. We need strong institutions that endure over time so that less than perfect individual leaders do not drive our collective train off the rails. I get why the Matthew community wanted to build a church. I understand why we need government institutions that transcend individual propensities.

But I am not sure if this is where Jesus would have focused his energies. To be clear, Jesus was not shy about calling out the failings of those in power. This is also a theme that runs through the Old Testament. In fact, in today’s reading from Isiah, we hear about Shebna, the manager of the palace, who is prone to excess, and is therefore removed in favor of Eliakim. But, as we learn time and time again in the New Testament, Jesus’ focus was more often on the community, on teaching people how to live together, how to love, how to forgive one another, and always welcoming the outcasts into the fold.

Like the human Jesus, it is natural to ask at a difficult juncture who we are and what we are to do. I believe Jesus would have held the perpetrators of violence accountable for their actions, and then encouraged us to love, forgive and welcome the alienated and those troubled by hate. Of course, loving and forgiving those afflicted by hate is no easy task, especially when they commit acts of violence. But love and forgiveness can come from unexpected places. The father of Heather Heyer, the woman killed in Charlottesville, VA, said that “people on all sides need to learn to forgive each other.” He then said, “I include myself in forgiving the guy who did this . . . I just think about what the Lord said on the cross, ‘Forgive them. They don’t know what they’re doing.' I hope that there comes a positive change in people’s hearts, in their thinking, in their understanding of their neighbor.”

I don’t know, if put in a similar situation, I could be as forgiving as Heather’s Dad. I am, frankly, challenged to understand and forgive white supremacists and racists. It helps me to start with empathy, to imagine myself in the shoes of such a person. This is not to condone their thoughts and actions, but simply to try to understand how one could get to this place.

If I’m honest, I must admit that my maternal grandmother was a racist. She was a hard scrabble woman who grew up in western Pennsylvania and was the first person in her family to get a college degree when she became a registered nurse. Unfortunately, my grandmother also would occasionally make racist comments, which thankfully, my parents would challenge. My parents would also take me aside after the fact and explain that her comments were wrong and inappropriate. I loved my grandmother unconditionally, yet I also knew that she had this inappropriate, racist side. But what if my parents had not challenged her, what it they reinforced what my grandmother had said? This helps me begin to imagine that I could just have easily been raised a racist. As the character Mrs. Pell in the film Mississippi Burning said: “Hatred isn’t something you’re born with, it’s taught. At seven years of age, you get told it enough times, you begin to believe it. You believe the hatred, you live it, you marry it.” This allows me to begin to understand & empathize with those afflicted by hate. This is not to excuse any violent actions, but I can imagine myself being in their shoes, full of rage. Seething with hate and resentment is not healthy for oneself or the community. In this case, I would need help. I would eventually be grateful for those who reached out to me from other side.

President Obama has said that “while we are taught to hate, we can learn to love.” For example, “Life after Hate” is a non-profit in Chicago, founded by a former skinhead, which works with former neo-Nazis to help them shed their hateful ideology. This group shows people love and compassion, exposes them to the people they once hated in productive and constructive ways, and helps them build self-confidence. Groups like this are showing us a different way forward.

In conclusion, we are a Christian community. We are all human. We are all imperfect. While we need to hold each other accountable for our actions, we also need to empathize, forgive, and help people to learn to love, even in trying times like these. While we should expect appropriate behavior from our leaders, we must also acknowledge that they may be a symptom of deeper problems in our community. Jesus calls on us to welcome and forgive the estranged and the lost. It is in this healing of uniquely human problems that lurks the divine – the essence of Christ.

Thank you.

I may be contacted at moseley@macalester.edu or may be found on twitter at https://twitter.com/WilliamGMoseley. I am grateful for the input I received from the Cabrini Word Team, and the valuable feedback from my spouse, on my thinking in this reflection.

Building Bridges as an Exercise of Hope

By Bill Moseley

Note: The following reflection was delivered before the start of mass at St. Frances Cabrini Catholic Church on the weekend of January 21-22, 2017.

People of God, my name is Bill Moseley and it’s my privilege to reflect with you on today’s readings.

Most Americans pride themselves on a constitution and set of laws that facilitate the peaceful transition of power from one administration to the next every four to eight years. That said, these changes are never easy, and some would argue that this particular shift, given the political divisions in our country, has been more challenging than others. These past few hours, days, weeks and months have been an emotionally fraught time for many of us. In monitoring my own feelings, talking with family and friends, interacting with colleagues and students at the college where I teach, and watching the reactions of others on the news, I have witnessed the entire panoply of human emotions: from depression and despair, to anger and protest, to joy and jubilation.

My family and I happened to be visiting my parents in Milwaukee the week after the election this past November. My father had poured his heart into the campaign. For someone approaching 80, I marveled at the hours and miles he logged walking the streets of his city to canvas and knock on doors. He was now deeply depressed, more depressed, frankly, than I had ever seen him before. When he and I stayed up late that first night chatting, he shared with me that he had a plan to move to Canada. While many of us have said we might move to Canada in jest, my father had actually worked out the details of such a move. He had identified a small town over the border from Niagara Falls, explored the real estate market, and calmly explained that they would only be a few hours from where my brother lives in Northeastern Ohio. Now, thank God for my mother, who had the fortitude to tell him that he’s nuts and they’re not moving anywhere. To be clear, I think my Dad had a right to be depressed. He had worked far harder than I to get out the vote, only to see his efforts come to naught.

Many of my students and co-workers were also deeply depressed after the election. I recall taking a photo of my female colleagues in their pant suits the day of election. There was a sense of anticipation and optimism in the air. The next day could not have been more different. Some students were crying and others were genuinely scared. In some cases this depression and fear would eventually turn to anger and then calls for political organizing. On Thursday and Friday of this week I found myself in the heart of a teach-in on my campus, and yesterday I marveled at the tens of thousands of people who gathered for women’s marches in DC and Saint Paul, including my wife and many of you.

I have also read in the papers, and heard on the news, the joy and jubilation of those who supported this election result. While there is a dark element to our new president’s constituency (a group motivated by racism, misogyny and xenophobia), let us not forget that there are also folks who have been left out of the new knowledge economy, who have seen their livelihoods unravel as manufacturing jobs have left the country, and who have felt looked down upon by urban elites. For them, they are elated because they feel like their voices have finally been heard.

Not unlike our contemporary political climate, today’s readings are also filled with darkness, division and hope.

In our first reading from Isiah, we hear about areas near the Sea of Galilee (Zebulun and Naphtali), a land that was “humbled and in gloom, darkness and anguish,” yet a land that will also experience a light that will bring them joy and rejoicing.

In our second reading from Corinthians, we learn about divisions and quarreling in the early Christian community. These tensions are clearly troubling to Paul. The source of these divisions has to do with people lining up behind different leaders in an emerging Christian tradition. Paul confronts these divisions with two arguments. First, he suggests that his role, and those of other preachers, is both minor and in service to the same, larger Christian message. As such, their work and message must not become a source of division. Second, he argues that we are all one. We might imagine critical and consequential differences among ourselves that are worth fighting and dying for, but these divisions are illusory and we must recognize that we are all connected. We are all one in our common humanity.

Lastly, in our gospel reading from Matthew, we learn about the beginning of Jesus’ ministry which, frankly, is not a very happy story. Jesus’ spiritual mentor, John the Baptist, has been arrested and, we know, murdered. God did not intervene to save Jesus’ beloved John. This had to have been a very difficult moment. How do we have faith, how do we believe that there is good in the world, when bad seemingly triumphs over good? It is at this point, I imagine, that Jesus could have made the decision to move – metaphorically - to Canada. He might have been deeply depressed and it would have been quite normal to just want to escape.

Alternatively, Jesus could have fomented violence. These were, after all, challenging economic times for everyday working people. The area where Jesus retreats to after John’s arrest, to the western shores of the Sea of Galilee (the same lands mentioned in today’s old testament reading) were hit hard by the extractive practices of the Roman Empire. Farmers were losing their lands and becoming sharecroppers who were barely able to survive. People living in communities on the shores of the Sea of Galilee were losing their rights to fishing. It is here that Jesus started his ministry and recruited his early followers. These lands were ripe for an insurrection and Jesus could have chosen to channel peoples’ economic anxieties with a message of hate and violence.2

What ensues, instead, is something remarkable. Rather than retreating from the world, or being fueled by anger over the murder of John the Baptist, Jesus appears to have had an epiphany that God does not intervene from on high, but that he works through us. And so he begins his ministry as an itinerant preacher, spreading the good news and curing people of diseases. Furthermore, his philosophy and message is completely counter-intuitive for his time. As we willlearn next week in the Sermon on the Mount, and in Sundays thereafter, he has a message of hope for the poor and the downtrodden. His message is also not solely reserved for those in good standing with his group. He understands that he needs to cross social boundaries, to cross party lines, in order to build his vision for the future.

I’ve been thinking a lot about these readings and how Jesus started his ministry this past week. I’ve also been asking myself what a person of faith should do in this particular moment of our nation’s history. Clearly, after taking some time to reflect, we need to move forward. Working peacefully for what we believe in is important. For me, this means fighting for political change and not accepting the normalization of racism, misogyny, homophobia and xenophobia.

But if Jesus could acknowledge the common humanity of tax collectors, prostitutes and lepers (the untouchables within his community at that time), then we can also engage outside of our own political and cultural comfort zones. Jesus was roundly condemned for consorting with the outcasts of his era, and many today may scoff at efforts to reach across deeply entrenched political divides. But as the Apostle Paul suggests, we likely imagine our differences to be greater than they really are. Despite the invocations of some political leaders, I believe there is much common ground and shared concern over issues like inequality, under-employment and trade. While there may be disagreement about the best way to address these issues, we can’t have a thoughtful, provocative and transformative dialogue about them if we don’t recognize our common humanity and engage.

My favorite example of this approach is the marriage equality movement in Minnesota. This movement started with the basic premise that change is not just about partisan politics, but about getting to know the other side. Once you acknowledge family members, neighbors and friends in same sex relationships, once you recognize their common humanity, hopes, aspirations and concerns, then it is much more difficult to see them as an abstract ‘other’ and to demonize their perspective.

Like a shroud torn asunder, the current political rifts in our social fabric may seem insurmountable. And while clearly there are some who stand to profit from such cleavages in the short term, and they will do everything in their power to deepen them, we all stand to lose if these differences are left to fester. While Jesus was not afraid to speak truth to power, and to hold those in power to account, he was also a social bridge builder. He was willing to sit down with anyone regardless of their past. It is never easy to build bridges, to understand the hopes and fears of our enemies, to see the divine in all of us, but it’s the only way forward. As Paul Wellstone said, “we all do better when we all do better.”

The author may be contacted at moseley@macalester.edu or may be found on twitter at https://twitter.com/WilliamGMoseley

Jeremiah and the Messy World of Compromise

By Bill Moseley

Note: The following reflection was delivered before the start of mass at St. Frances Cabrini Catholic Church on the weekend of August 13-14, 2016.

People of God, my name is Bill Moseley and it’s my privilege to reflect with you on today’s readings.

In today’s gospel reading from Luke we hear Jesus’ passionate, even frustrated, side when he declares to his companions “I have come to cast fire upon the earth. How I wish it were already blazing.” He then goes on to say that “From now on a household of five will be divided, three against two and two against three.”

I have mixed feelings about this passage. On the one hand, my younger self would have appreciated the strident tone and the anger imbued in this reading. Oh how I loved to rage against the machine, to rail against the injustice. Some 30 plus years ago I remember coming home from college, Karl Marx and Andre Gunder Frank in hand, and deliberately picking a dinner time fight with my parents. They, in their cozy middle class home, in their cozy middle class suburb, and their cozy middle class jobs, were capitalists I declared. They were a part of the problem. Their roles in US corporate society, their wasteful suburban consumption habits, their bourgeois thinking, their tacit acceptance of US imperialism, were anathema to me, a young, budding socialist. I roared, my father roared back about my disrespectful attitude, and my mother tried to keep the peace. (By the way, if you’re sensing self-righteous hypocrisy here, that would be accurate as my parents were bankrolling my college education]).

My fervor and strident anti-imperialism would stay with me well into the Peace Corps. I was decidedly anti big development and pro self-reliance. My sacred texts on this subject were Paulo Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed and EF Schumacher’s Small is Beautiful. In Mali where I was stationed, we were cautioned about the “cadeau mentality.” Cadeau meant gift or present in French, and the cadeau mentality referred to a handout culture that could develop in places with year upon year of foreign assistance. I was determined to avoid fostering such a handout culture, to make sure that my actions as a development worker did not breed dependency, or a taste for Western thinking and consumption habits. I was so zealous in my pursuit of this goal that, as a board member of a small fund for volunteer projects, I voted against all proposals providing funds for items I thought the community could cover. Furthermore, in my everyday life, I refused to give money to strangers who routinely asked me for help – believing that my small act of charity might lead to a life of dependency. In sum, in my zealous pursuit of ideological purity I had become a complete jerk. I was, in retrospect, embarrassingly sanctimonious and astoundingly unaware of my own privilege. Worse yet, in my reach for ideological purity, in my fervor to combat imperialism and dependency, I had strayed into the territory of right wing narratives regarding welfare dependency.

Now don’t get me wrong, there is a place for enthusiasm, passion, frustration and even anger in social change movements, I see it every day amongst my college students and their fervor for causes like Black Lives Matter, divestment of college endowments from the fossil fuel industry, or justice in Palestine. It is this energy, passion and sense of injustice that fueled our former pastor, Mike Tegeder, to fight the archdiocese of Saint Paul and Minneapolis, and it likely propels many in the Catholic Coalition for Church Reform and the Council of the Baptized to battle the hierarchy for a more open church and desperately needed reforms. I continue to see it in myself as my passion, frustration and even anger sometimes propel me to do some of my best writing late into the night.

But these passionate quests for justice and truth can also morph into something darker and more dangerous. The stories of ideological movements gone wrong are too numerous to tell: the Spanish inquisition, the ‘reign of terror’ in the midst the French Revolution, the supporters of Haiti’s Jean-Bertrand Aristide necklacing opposition activists, or Islamic fundamentalists destroying ancient religious texts which do not meet their strict standards of ideological purity or killing innocent civilians in the name of advancing a religious state. This is why I have mixed feelings about today’s gospel reading, because I know from my own life, and from my knowledge of others’, that we need that energy to persevere and fight the good fight, but sometimes we also go off the rails in our certainty and passion.

I used to think of Jeremiah, the protagonist in our first reading today, as a purist and an ideologue, someone who suffered because of his unflinching and uncompromising commitment to his beliefs. In today’s reading we learn that Jeremiah has been cast into a muddy cistern or pit, and a likely long, slow, and painful death, for refusing to stop talking in a way that is “demoralizing the soldiers and the rest of the people left in the city.” Jeremiah is the kind of person we seem to increasingly celebrate in some American political circles where compromise is a dirty word. He is, for some Modern day Christians who are persecuted for their faith, looked to as an inspiration because he did not relinquish his beliefs and persevered.

It is not that the standard presentation of Jeremiah is wrong, but the reality is more nuanced. In this instance, the back story is important. Zedekiah, the King of Judea has been persuaded by the Palestinian nobility to revolt against his master, the King of Babylonia. The King of Babylonia responds by laying siege to Jerusalem. From the start, Jeremiah has advised against this move because he sees it as a suicidal rebellion and continues throughout the siege to urge surrender. Not surprisingly, the Palestinian nobility see Jeremiah as a traitor and hence successfully convince Zedekiah to throw him into a muddy cistern to die. The illuminating detail for me is that Jeremiah is a pragmatic realist in this instance, not an idealist. He is against the rebellion because the Babylonians will crush them and it is a suicidal mission for his people.

While we celebrate the tenacity and idealism of our heroes, we sometimes ignore the compromises they have made. There is a scene in the 2014 movie Selma on the life of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr that highlights such a compromise. In this scene, Dr. King is leading a second of three marches for voting rights from Selma, Alabama. As the marchers cross the Edmund Pettus Bridge, the protesters meet state police officers. Instead of confronting them, the marchers kneel, pray, and retreat. That day would become known as Turnaround Tuesday and King was deeply criticized by his supporters for this compromise. King, it turns out, had agreed in last-minute negotiations with President Lyndon Johnson to retreat. But I also think he understood that the potential loss of human life in this instance was too great. He was patient and they would return another day to march

Similarly, in the 2012 George Lucas film entitled Lincoln, we learn about the compromises President Abraham Lincoln made in the closing days of the Civil War to pass the 13th amendment banning slavery before the readmission of the southern States. This was critical because Lincoln knew the wartime measure known as the Emancipation Proclamation could easily be undone if it was not reflected in the text of the Constitution. In order to pass the amendment, Lincoln embarked on a vote-gathering effort that stopped just short of bribery. When moral appeals failed, patronage positions were offered to garner the requisite votes in Congress. In contrast to previous narrations of a heroically steadfast Lincoln, this film revealed the nitty gritty politics involved in legal reform and improving the human condition.

Now don’t get me wrong, I am not suggesting that the ends justify the means. This, after all, is the trap that has sometimes led pure idealism down the dark path, to terrible situations like the McCarthy era witch hunts use of torture by the US military after 9/11. So how do we know when to step back and compromise or when to stick to our ideals?

I think the answer lies in our recognition and respect for human dignity and in the notion that God dwells in all of us. While we may cling to certain ideals in our faith or other moral codes, do we sometimes come to hold these principles in such high regard that we are blinded to the dignity of our fellow human beings? As I illustrated at the start of this reflection, I certainly have been guilty of this. In Amoris Laetitia, Pope Francis argues that the role of the church is “less to judge than to accompany and discern God’s grace with people in their complex and complicated lives.”

Today’s gospel reading shows us one facet of Jesus, a passionate side which wishes to set the world on fire. We need that passion and energy as a spark for social change. We ought to be angry when a young black man is pulled over and needlessly shot while complying with an officer’s orders. But we also need to harness that energy, to respect the basic dignity in all of us, and to recognize that the betterment of the human condition sometimes involves compromise because the real world is messy and complicated. Another facet of Jesus is that he constantly coached his disciples to love their enemies. In his hour of deepest humiliation, Jesus tells Simon Peter not to strike back at the servant of the high priest. While Jesus could have set the world ablaze, he did not because he loved humanity too much. Making heaven on earth is a slow and messy process. We are a part of that process and we are moving in the right direction, it’s not always linear, and we sometimes go backward, but that’s okay. Yes, Jeremiah was prophetic bullfrog, but he also loved the world.

The author may be contacted at moseley@macalester.edu or may be found on twitter at https://twitter.com/WilliamGMoseley

Our Common Humanity Will Save Us from Fear and Economic Injustice

By Bill Moseley

Note: The following reflection was delivered before the start of mass at St. Frances Cabrini Catholic Church on the weekend of January 23-24, 2016.

People of God, my name is Bill Moseley and it is my privilege to reflect with you on today’s readings.

The second reading for today comes from Paul’s first letter to the Corinthians. I found the historical situation of the city of Corinth highly relevant to the challenges we face today. Corinth was a large Greek city which was totally destroyed by the Romans about 150 years before Christ in order to put down a rebellion, but then it was slowly repopulated. People from all over the Roman Empire, including many former slaves, began to flock there. The pull of Corinth had much to do with its advantageous physical geography. It is located on an isthmus, or strip of land, connecting southern and northern Greece. It became a hugely important place for trade and commerce. Travelers going from one part of Greece to another had to pass through here. Ships regularly stopped off at its ports.

Corinth grew by leaps and bounds, becoming the third largest city in the Roman Empire. Former slaves and immigrants who had moved to this area became fabulously wealthy and rose to positions of power. Rags to riches stories became a common part of the city’s collective narrative. Newly wealthy people gave money for public structures, almost always accompanied by large plaques acknowledging their generosity and hard work. But not everyone in Corinth benefitted from these boom times. Huge divisions of wealth began to appear. Not surprisingly, the Christian community here began to experience divisions similar to those in the broader society.

The situation in Corinth struck me as hauntingly familiar. A place depopulated by conquest, repopulated by immigrants, that becomes fabulously wealthy, yet deeply divided along economiclines. Change that produces economic divisions understandably generates a lot of uncertainty andfear – and faith communities are often called upon to try to make sense of this. How should religious and spiritual communities operate in places with deep and growing economic divisions?Do we moralize such differences, do we scapegoat others for our problems, do we assist the poor, or do we work for a more equal and fair world? Interestingly, religious communities have played a role in all of these approaches.

For example, some Protestant Christian denominations have a long history of holding up those who are economically successful, praising their efforts, and suggesting that their economic success is a sign of God’s favor. This “Protestant Work Ethic” has been championed as the reason for America’s economic success. We celebrate our entrepreneurs as people who toil alone to build businesses and generate wealth, and we deride those who suggest that there is a societal or collective element to any individual’s success. Increasingly, we elect the wealthy to public office so that we may double down on the economic system that produced them, so that we too may become wealthy.

But if we celebrate the wealthy as God’s chosen, if we glorify the economic system that produced them, then we still need to locate the source of our problems, to scapegoat the “other.” For this, we need to reify difference: to determine who is in and who is out. Sadly, many faith communities have excelled at constructing social difference.

In our first reading today from Nehemiah we hear the story of Ezra preaching to his people. Heretoo the context is vital. Ezra, along with the other elite of Jewish society, have slowly returned to Judea after a long exile in Babylon. Those who had stayed behind had intermarried with other groups, no longer speaking Hebrew, but the local language Aramaic. The Jewish elite see this as a problem and Ezra, interpreting Hebrew text that his people no longer understand, is commanding his people to leave their non-Jewish relatives. These non-Jewish relatives are different, they must be excluded. This is an immensely sad time, but, as you will hear today, Ezrais exhorting his people to celebrate this moment.

Some Christian communities are also accomplished at the art of exclusion. As a high school student I worked at our Episcopal Church as janitor, cleaning toilets, mopping floors and mowing the grass. My boss was an evangelical Christian seminarian who lived in an apartment in the upstairs of the church. We spent a lot of time together working and chatting. I distinctly remember him telling me that non-Christians would go to hell. I had many friends of other faiths and yet he insisted, no matter how good they might be, they would go to hell. They were different.

Sadly, we have also seen a certain brand of fundamentalist Islam gaining ground in economically marginalized West Africa – an area of the Islamic world historically known for its tolerance and moderation. Using tactics similar to the Crusades and the Inquisition, we have seen armed Jihadists increasingly wage terror in the name of religion. Just last week armed Islamists attackeda hotel and café frequented by Westerners in the capital city of Burkina Faso, Ouagadougou, killing and wounding nearly 100 people. I had a friend in that hotel. I sat stunned last Saturday as I read her interview with a local newspaper. She only survived by pretending to be dead.

Yes, such horrible atrocities are done in the name of religion, to separate the chosen from the unchosen. We celebrate the powerful, we blame the poor, we exclude the immigrant, we condemn people to hell, we ostracize folks, and we even kill people of other faiths: all to preserve or create some insane sense of order.

This is not, however, Paul’s advice to the Corinthians – the community racked by economic difference that I described at the start of this reflection. Paul neither justifies economic differencewith scripture, nor does he blame challenging circumstances on others. His overarching message is that we are all members of one body. “In this way all members may have the same care for oneanother. If one member suffers, all suffer together. If one member is honored, all rejoice together.” We are one, we are connected, we must care for one another – this is the message.

So what do we do in our troubled economic times that are rife with division, inequality and fear? Paul is suggesting that recognition of our common humanity will save us. Human contact, exchange and understanding are powerful antidotes to abstract ideologies and divisive narratives.

Every time my family and I volunteer at the Dorothy Day center I am reminded how I could so easily be down and out, freezing in the cold, and struggling to feed my family. I am reminded how deeply misplaced and flawed is our societal narrative of poverty linked to a poor work ethic and wanton substance abuse. Instead, I often see hard working people who can’t make ends meet, or folks struggling with mental illness with treatment far from accessible. I am reminded ofPaul’s message. Recognition of our common humanity will save us.

Minnesota is rightly proud of the fact that it was the first state to successfully beat back a regressive amendment, supported by a Catholic hierarchy divorced from its people, narrowly defining marriage as a heterosexual union. The tactics employed to defeat this inhumane amendment are relevant. It was a novel person to person campaign designed to reveal our common humanity. It was the simple idea that it’s a lot harder to disenfranchise same sex coupleswhen you actually know and respect them: they are our loved ones, neighbors and friends. Recognition of our common humanity will save us.

It’s a lot harder to categorize Muslims as terrorists to be excluded and ostracized when we have Muslim friends, or when thousands of Americans have served abroad in Muslim countries as Peace Corps volunteers developing a deep respect for these cultures and forming enduring friendships.

Recognition of our common humanity will save us. Recognizing our common humanity is a critical first step because it moves us beyond abstract ideologies that allow us to vilify, exclude and inflict violence on others. If others are not the problem, if we are all connected by our common humanity, then we are pushed to consider the structures that produce inequality.

Today’s Gospel reading from Luke is a policy manifesto of sorts, hinting at a better way to approach inequality. Here we see Jesus, the itinerant sage, the would-be radical, the most unlikely of prophets, beginning to speak truth to power in his home town. By referencing scripture, he is essentially arguing that the powerful need to relinquish privilege. He calls for a jubilee. “God has sent me to proclaim liberty to the captives, sight to the blind, freedom for the oppressed: to proclaim a year of favor from our God.” I’m not sure if I can relinquish my privilege on my own. I am quite comfortable and I enjoy my status as a white middle class American. But recognizing our common humanity helps me understand the destructive nature of this privilege and gives me the courage to work with others for change.

I would like to end with a quote from Martin Luther King Jr. that nicely summarizes the messageI take away from today’s readings. "Power without love is reckless and abusive, and love withoutpower is sentimental and anemic. Power at its best is love implementing the demands of justice, and justice at its best is power correcting everything that stands against love.”

The author may be contacted at moseley@macalester.edu or may be found on twitter at https://twitter.com/WilliamGMoseley