By Jim Perkinson, a sermon for St. Peter’s Episcopal Church (pictured above) in Detroit, Michigan (July 21, 2024)

As he went ashore, he saw a great crowd; and he had compassion for them, because they were like sheep without a shepherd; and he began to teach them many things (Mk 6:34).

⁴ But that same night the word of the Lord came to Nathan, ⁵ “Go and tell my servant David, Thus says the Lord: “Would you build me a house to dwell in? ⁶ I have not dwelt in a house since the day I brought up the people of Israel from Egypt to this day, but I have been moving about in a tent for my dwelling (2 Sam 7:4-6).

Thus says the Lord of hosts: I took you from the sheepfold, from following the sheep, to be ruler over my people Israel (2 Sam 7:8b).

So, where are we today—in reality, in the text?  In our reality, it is simple, at one level. Apocalypse. An ending of the world as we have known it.  Not an absolute end, but a proximate and particular end.  “What” is ending?  Ah, the big question.  I would say: in a word, civilization.  Not the earth. Not the universe. But our species’ delusion about who we are on the planet.  And already I am deep in it, so let’s back up.

It is interesting in the texts today.  Jesus calls the disciples to go away to a desert-place (Mk 6:31).  Why? As we read in the lectionary offerings two weeks ago, he has gone home to Nazareth and been threatened with death (Mk 6:1-6; Lk 4:16-30). Sent the twelve out for a first foray into . . . . what? Actually, into gift-economy reciprocity and sabbath-sharing, with the very people—peasant small farmers—they are sent to (Mk 6:7-13). They don’t take a credit card and carry-on luggage with themselves.  They depend upon the people they are sent to.  Gift economy hospitality.  (Which, hint, hint, in this [biblical] tradition is characteristic of animal-herding lifestyle, not city-dwelling self-concern and opportunism. Pastoral nomad Abraham offering a meal inside his tent-flaps to three “wanderers” that show up at his “door” not urban Sodom’s exploitation and abuse of strangers as we read in the archetypal story in Genesis of the lifestyle difference between sheep-herders and city-dwellers.) (Gen 18:1-15 vs Gen 18:16-19:29).

And in the meantime, John has been beheaded (Mk 6:14-29).  They come back and he hustles them and himself over the waters, towards the border, outside “Galilee” and Herod’s jurisdiction, into the wild (Mk 6:32, 35, 45).  But crowds anticipate and amass there. And he sees them and instantly thinks: “sheep without a shepherd.” And we think, “Ah—the lost crowd!  Folk without a clue!”

But maybe something else was going on.

Let’s go slow.  Less than a year ago, my wife and I visited Ireland, to walk into a bit of my deep ancestry.  Halfway in—we found ourselves on trek in the Carrowkeel mountains south of Sligo, leaning into strong winds, mist swirling, now opening up green vistas, now closing in with a grey shroud. But all around, lounging content, chewing without concern, ambling slowly across the slopes, sheep.  Without a shepherd. Doing just fine. 

Sheep for us domesticated humans are a symbol of . . . ? What?  Not themselves. But “us,” in our most discombobulated moments. Sheep were here on earth—as is true with almost every other plant and animal on the planet—long before we were.  And they do just fine left alone in their habitat.  Yes, some have now been “domesticated” by us and thus rendered like us. Unable to survive on our own without all kinds of supports “shepherding” us through the day—like electricity, cars, pipped water, canned food, light bulbs, factory-made clothes., selfie-taking I-phones, etc.  Like sheep needing pens and guidance. 

But Jesus saw “sheep without a shepherd” and maybe, just maybe, that was not cause for concern, but for hope.  Village people, small farmer folk, peasants, corralled and captive to city-based regimes of domination and extraction, yes, but still close enough to the soil to remember.  And to be ripe for recruitment into a different movement and vision. But remember what? And move how?   (Sorry, I like to ask questions at least to pretend I am not just speaking with myself). 

And as we’ll read next week in the lectionary texts, immediately after teaching the people many things, his disciples will fret—”the hour is late, man, send them back where they came from, so we can kick back with a hit of wine, a bite of bread, and a snooze. We’re feeling raggedy and wore out!” (I’m ad libbing a bit here, but the situation is clear) (Mk 6:35-44).  What they really want is to blot out the terror that is rolling in on them like a tsunami.  Like us, right here, right now, in the face of MAGA-violence and Project 2025 takeover of the state and a white Christian nationalist reinvention of America in the image of Margaret Atwood’s Handmaid’s Tale.

A quick detour, so we get “the feel.”  The disciples’ major hope has just been crushed.  The initiator of their movement—John the Baptizer, their Teacher, Visionary, Bombastic Debater throwing up word-bombs against every elite effort to take more of their land, more of their taxes, more of their esteem, even more of their very breath by stigmatizing any least protest they may venture in public as “renegade” and “outlaw” and turn them over to the Roman forces to be “disappeared” into an early grave—their Major Defender against those on-going incursions has just himself been arrested and “disappeared” in having his head chopped off to satisfy the voyeurism of the local politician-gangster, getting his pornography-toke, salivating over a teenage dancer.  They have risked everything for the movement—and now its Leader has been summarily executed.  Occupied Israel was already an imperial Roman police-state, in which any gathering of more than a 3-4 people was suspect and might result in arrest. And now, Apocalypse is closing in. Their world is coming to an end.  Yes, Jesus is successor, but offering . . . what?

If we read on just a couple of verses—two fish and five loaves (Mk 6:41).  In the face of a world end. “Have them sit in groups of 100 and 50 and we’ll pass out the ‘banquet.’”  One fish scale per person and one fingernail full of wheat bread!  Mmmmm! Just like eucharist, in church!  (No, just kidding! . . . or am I?) No, what apparently happens is ancient social relations—take the little you have and circulate it.  And provoke everyone else to do the same.  And see what happens.  Mutual sharing.  Gift-economy reciprocity.  Not hoarding for tomorrow. But celebrating what is here today.  But not simply as a one-time event.  As a movement practice pointing to a lifestyle choice. 

And here we get into the big question of the hour and the major hint of the readings this morning.  The entire range of texts today—2 Samuel regarding David, Jeremiah 23 and abusive leaders, Psalm 23’s comfort in the presence of enemies, the gospel’s characterization of the peasant crowds—invokes for us a puzzle.  We hear “sheep” and think Sunday school.  Presented with language regarding “shepherds” we instantly conjure an image of a young man with a gentle lamb draped around his shoulders.  Given a vision of pastures—“Jesus loves the little children” begins thrumming in our ears. 

But something much, much more significant is going on. 

The Samuel text has a divinity, YHWH, saying to king David through a prophet: “you want to build me a house of cedar? But I have been dwelling in a tent of hide all this while you have hung out with me!” And again, it is so hard for us, because we are so human-supremacist that we just can’t get all excited about the difference between a cedar-paneled structure and an animal-skin tent. But the one is a fixed abode housing a royal occupant of a throne exercising a human claim to sovereign reign over a particular plot of soil.  The other is a mobile tabernacle of shimmering (as in “glory” or kabod), a meeting place between this world and Other-World, only ever convened momentarily, for a brief encounter, not granting anything like human sovereignty, or architectural certainty (Ex 33:7; 40:34).  And that refusal of divinity to be incarcerated in a house under human control hints a profound and on-going struggle.

Israel began as a walk-out resistance movement from city-state settlements that were hell-bent on extracting surplus from an environment codified as “just there” for human plundering and use and abuse and discard as garbage or (today) toxified brownfield. Abram and Sarai leave Ur with herd animals reintegrating them back into uncultivated grasslands as pastoral nomad tent-dwellers (Gen 12:16, 19).  A few hundred years later, Moses and the slaves exit Egypt with their herd animals (Ex 10:9, 26; 12:32, 38) that will enable them to survive in Sinai sands and Negev desert for 40 years while they re-learn how to live on the land like their ancestors.

And once Israel betrays its founding in sudden capitulation to become like the people around it—embracing a king hankering after a “house of cedar” (a human-built palace and shrine, constructed from timber destructively clearcut from the Lebanese Mountains by Hiram king of Tyre), coercing labor into producing surplus product, re-engineering alluvial lands into monocrop “fields” serving elite agendas to accumulate power and elaborate luxury and ostentation on the back of other stolen creatures (gold, silver, marble, copper, oak, rock, water, etc.)—once that betrayal is routinized in state bureaucracy, the prophetic movement that erupts in reaction thereto becomes the carrier of this memory of having lived otherwise (2 Sam 5:11; 1 Kg 5:1; 9:10-28; Is 14: 7-8; 29:17; 32:19).

And remarkably, late in the history, a Jeremiah face-to-face with Babylonian cataclysm ending Israel as a “kingdom” will briefly reference a rogue band of Jewish folk known as the Rechabites who for more than a thousand years afterwards become the emblematic archetype of what Israel was supposed to be: a pastoral nomad crew of horse and camel and sheep and cattle herders who never settle into houses or cultivate soil, but continue with their four-footed consorts to live lightly and respectfully “on the land,” Bedouin-fashion (Jer 33). And John the Baptist may well have learned his lifestyle orientation (camel-wearing, locust-eating, honey-drinking) from their pastoral nomad descendants.

The prophetically communicated rebuff that YHWH offers David codified in today’s texts invokes a historical struggle more than 5,000 years old.  Even today it continues: a headline as recent as March 3, 2024 read, “We are under attack,” delineating the on-going efforts of governments in Tanzania and Kenya to push Maasai nomad herders off their traditional homelands and into a settled and ultimately annihilatory lifestyle, answering to urban priorities and nation-state policies of conformity and plundering. And part of who is being annihilated today by Israel in Palestine are Arab Bedouin who continue to live with their herds. This kind of beleaguered pastoral nomadism is actually the centerfold of the biblical witness—from Abraham through Moses to Jesus and the Baptist. Not individualized salvation by a lone-ranger Messiah, popping lip-synching bodies into some imagined “heaven” out of the mess of modern life no matter the destruction we cause, so long as we mutter the magic formula of supposedly “Christian” confession! 

Herder life, dwelling in tents, as one very tried-and-tested means of exiting the mistakes of settled “civilizational” life and returning to more sustainable and just modalities of indigenous “land-taught” human dwelling (most clearly and successfully embodied in our ancient hunting and gathering history but also found in subsistence horticultural lifestyles alongside nomadic herder life)—pastoral nomadism for the moment remains alive on the planet as a witness otherwise.  And even though we don’t know it because of the way we cherry-pick scripture to fit in with our modern addiction to high-tech removal from and enslavement of the more-than-human world, this thing we call Christianity is not rooted in urbanized imperial aggression on an entire biosphere of fellow creatures, whose historical “face” we are taught to celebrate as “civilization” and whose latest incarnation we now call the globalized economy.  It is rather rooted in lifestyle resistance thereto at every turn of the tradition. Sheep without a shepherd indeed! 

And it is interesting then to see how often in the ancient world, kings and other elite dominators tried to style themselves as “shepherds”—seemingly affirming that lifestyle—precisely in order to re-colonize the renegade resisters with their autonomous herds and force them back into urbanized extraction and ultimately (today) industrial agriculture commodification inside big beef warehouses. But we need to be clear.  The issue—way back then and all the way up to today—is not a matter of pulling sheepherding lifestyle and creatures up into urban priorities and civilized technologies but just the opposite. How do urban dwellers once again learn to live differently precisely by becoming members of a herd and speaking sheep-talk?

And now I know I have left probably all of you behind, hoping I will just shup up and get out of the pulpit, so we can get on with prayers and get into after-service snacks and Sunday-afternoon comforts and sports. But I will wrap up this way.  We are indeed facing apocalypse today.  Certainly—of this country as a supposed “democracy.” But actually—all over the world, as climate change brings eco-catastrophe, displaces ever-growing numbers of people, who then become desperate immigrants elsewhere, crossing borders, raising hackles of citizen-residents, whose fears are rounded up by right-wing demagogues into scapegoating policies, providing a collective channel for angry “release” and vindictive satisfaction for otherwise “shepherd-less” people seeking comfort in mindless reaction and bloodletting ritual, even though their own circumstance remains itself bleak and hopeless.  

But biblically, apocalypse is not only about endings, but even more about “seeing” underneath and beyond the fear.  The word itself, apocaluptein in Greek means “unveiling” and the biblical counsel in its anticipation is a mandate to “watch”!  But what we are counselled to watch for—in the quintessential text of apocalyptic visioning known as the Book of Revelation—is horsemen.  Very interesting when we bother to pay attention!  What brings the empire—“Babylon,” which is actually a cipher for the presiding empire of that time, Rome—to its knees is horsemen. Which is to say, pastoral nomad resisters. Human communities, refusing urban domination, integrated into their grassland ecologies by their animals, riding horses and herding sheep and cattle and goats. Yes, horse-riders, cattle-herders, sheep-tenders. Four of them to be exact, in John’s Revelation (Rev 6:1-8).  The four horsemen of the Apocalypse!  See that.  And then see also in that account, Jesus coming, at the far end of those events (in chapter 19), on a horse.  And actually, in history, it was the pressure of wave after wave of pastoral nomad resisters to Roman imperial aggression, coming in off the Asian steppe over centuries, that gradually eroded Roman might and brought that empire to its end. Big topic; no time for it here (for further reading, Perkinson, 2023; 2024).

Suffice it to say.  When we are facing collapse, and terrified in the mix, in the biblical accounts of such, the big actors bringing real change are not human, but wild and natural. Storms. Earthquakes. Floods. Volcanic eruptions. Fig-tree lessons. Fish-salvations for Jonah characters. Bush-voices for enslaved labor in Egypt. River-baptized prophets in Palestine, dove-hassled and stone-taught.  Donkey-seated messiahs talking about falling temples, and horse-riding deliverers.  Hardly seems “adequate to” the emergency.  In fact, seems ludicrous! There is nothing we can do but turn to what is “outside” of us, the “natural” world!?  Hmmm. Actually—it is not outside of us.  And crucially, turning away from responsible partnership with our more-than-human kin was the beginning of the problem in the first place, starting some 10,000 years ago.  Do we really think there is remedy not entailing recovery of reciprocity with such fellow creatures? 

So yes, start—however small the uptake, however halting the hearing of these other voices.  We learn by listening.  And then honoring.  Yes, do what we can to solve the dilemma by our own efforts. Demonstrate!  Resist!  Vote! Try to turn an election in a direction that will stave off the calamity (here, at least) for another few minutes. But also recognize it is way beyond us. Especially when civilization is at the end of its delusional “boom” cycle, cresting over into the downward “bust” curve that inevitably follows. That has been the destiny of every single civilization we’ve ever fabricated, more than 100 in number over 5,000 years.  How live justly and with integrity in a time of collapse, when even our best efforts will likely be caught in the widening breakup?  A rough, rough question.

In his own apocalyptic situation, Jesus gave thanks for two fish and five loaves. But he didn’t just eat otherkind; he emulated them. Fashioned himself in their image.  Became vine (Jn 15:1, 5). Offered himself as bread (Mk 14:22). Took counsel from a dove (Lk 3:22). Embraced thunder as “angel speech”—and dared interpret! (Jn 12:28-33) Channeled ancestry—not just Moses and Elijah, but the “I AM” voice of the Bush that accosted Moses (Ex 3:1-14; Dt 33:16; Jn 6:20, 35, 41, 48, 51; 8:12; 10:7, 9; 11:25; 10:11, 14; 14:6; 15:1, 5). Joined with a donkey to broadcast his final public message in the face of imperial repression and elite betrayal (Mk 11:1-10). Tellingly, it did not stop the apocalypse his people faced.  Most immediately he was arrested and executed.  More broadly and distantly, Rome eventually rolled through and destroyed everything in sight.  But the Roman empire is gone.  The Jesus movement isn’t.   Of course, it has been coopted again and again by empire.  But the witness otherwise remains.  And when we bother to listen closely, it is a testament to more than just human resilience. 

It insists rather: take courage from elders! Learn from forerunner plants and animals. Become seed.  Or sheep.  But beware of shepherds wanting to live in cedar houses!  Real shepherds don’t live in fixed abodes of royal ostentation; they live sheltering in hide-tents and skin-yurts, out in the wild, with their herds.  The Samuel text is very curious.  Describing the choice of David to become a replacement leader, YHWH states, “I took you from following the sheep . . .”  So strange!

I thought sheep were supposed to follow the shepherd?  Yes, but only after the shepherd follows the sheep. Not metaphorically, but really becoming a member of the herd—accepted on their own terms (Corbett, 249, 253, 275-276, 316, 318).  Learning sheep-talk and -song. Among some pastoral nomad groups—even learning to sing in herd-sonority so compellingly, the human herder can initiate a lactating-nursing response among females of the herd merely by vocalization (Hutchins, 2019).  That’s pretty dammed intimate sheep-talk!  But necessary if you are going to rely on the herd for your primary protein in milk-drinks (Corbett, 316). 

And here a final recognition—subtle but seismic if we bother to pay attention—in reading through the gospels. Jesus is only ever interested in David as sheepherding-lyricist-singer, never as city-dwelling, power-wielding king committing murder.  He invokes nothing from the life of David after he becomes king; only from his lyre-playing, been-trained-by-the-sheep, renegade-pastoralist days (Mk 2:23-28;12:36-37).  

So what to do with all of this?  Dammed if I know!  I don’t think we’re called to try to become pastoral nomads—not enough of the Earth’s surface left for that. But I do think we are called to “see” in an “apocalyptic unveiling” sense, what is going on.  And what is going on is collapse.  I don’t think it will be avoided ultimately.  And I don’t think there is a technological solution. 

What is needed is recovery of what works—what has worked across more than 200,000 years of homo sapiens history, what those deeply studying the dilemma are saying is the only workable possibility for the planet.  And that is respect for, intimacy with, and collaboration alongside, the more-than-human world.  Not as a prophylactic, not to avoid death or extinction, but as part of the incredibly wondrous—and yes, also, at times, monstrously terrifying—mystery of this thing called Life.

Our ancestors—Indo-European, African, Latin, Middle Eastern, Asian, Native Turtle Islander—were all savvy about the prospect, understanding themselves as hybrid creatures, inseparably partnered with a plant or animal “relative,” in a healthy local ecology.  And quite content to rest in the interdependence.  And somewhere back there, in the family lines of many of us, our forerunners were indeed, “sheep-humans.”  Without a shepherd. Dare we begin to re-learn in some small way how to be, not only consoled, but actually counselled, by such? 

Bibliography

Corbett, Jim. 2005. A Sanctuary for All Life: the Cowbalah of Jim Corbett. Englewood, CO: Howling Dog Press.

Hutchins, K. G. 2019. “Like a Lullaby: Song as Herding Tool in Rural Mongolia,” Journal of Ethnobiology 39:3 (Sept., 2019), https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.2993/0278-0771-39.3.445

Perkinson, James W. (2024). Political Spirituality in the Face of Climate Collapse: Of Monsters, Megaliths, Mules, and Muck. New York: Palgrave Macmillan Press, 291-296

Perkinson, J. W. (2023). “Dies Irae, Dies Illa: Hip-Hop, and the Apocalypse of Whiteness,” in Dies Irae, Dies Illa: Music in the Apocalyptic Mode, ed. C. McAllister and L. DiTommaso, Brill Publishers, Boston, 303-322.