CAMINANDO WITH JESUS:

We are checking on each other by phone. We’re going without haircuts, and shopping for groceries as infrequently as possible. All this, and more, to keep our neighbors and ourselves as safe and healthy as possible under these challenging circumstances.

And many of us, many of our siblings in Christ, are particularly vulnerable in this moment. Workers in essential sectors like agriculture, food processing, and retail grocery; trucking and deliveries; medicine and pharmacy; cleaning. Tens of millions who have lost jobs, and now must try to get by on unemployment payments that are really too small to support life. Neighbors—many of them children—who didn’t have everything they needed to live well even before this crisis; who have been made vulnerable by years, even generations, of being denied what others take for granted.

In the midst of so much suffering, our own and our neighbors’, Christians like you and me can help each other listen for the loving voice of our Good Shepherd. In a moment when so many voices are competing for our attention, we can remind each other to focus on the One whose voice we can always trust; who calls each of us by name; who walks ahead of us wherever we’re called to go, no matter how stony the road may be; and who promises that new life will rise out of death.

And we can remind each other that there’s no such thing as a lone sheep. Through our baptism into Jesus Christ’s life, death, and resurrection, you and I are members of his Body; together, we’re members of his herd. We’re creatures who acknowledge human vulnerability in a world that’s always full of dangers, more so at some times than at others, and for some more than for others. We’re people who know we need to stick together, not to increase or enrich our herd at the expense of another, but to provide protection and sustenance to each member, and especially to those who need it most.

That’s what the first Christians in today’s reading from the Book of Acts were doing. They “spent much time together” in prayer, which you and I are currently having to do from our own homes. Like us, when they broke bread at home, they thanked God for what they had. And as so many of us are doing now, they shared their belongings with neighbors in need, as signs of their trust in God who had, more than once, fed God’s people in a time of famine.

That’s where their strength came from then; that’s where our strength comes from now: listening for the Good Shepherd, trusting that he is with us as we walk a path shadowed by death, and that he will lead us, together, into greener pastures.