From Life @ St. David's

This month we are exploring the legacy of the 1970’s.  We are looking for how God blesses us today, by recognizing where he has blessed us in the past.

A parishioner recently mentioned that the she did not remember the 70’s as a happy time.

The decade opened with the war in Vietnam raging.  By the time it was over 1.5 million people were dead on both sides.  It was a terrible, terrible experience.  In 1971 the “Pentagon Papers,” a study commissioned by the Defense Department that detailed a long series of public deceptions were leaked to the New York Times. 

It was the first step in a long, demoralizing decade in which the American public lost faith in the military, the federal government in general and the Presidency in particular.  Things went from bad to worse.

It began with the resignation of Nixon’s Vice President Spiro Agnew who pleaded no contest to charges of tax evasion and money laundering.  And then came the Watergate Scandal and the resignation of the President of the United States to avoid a trial in the Senate after having been impeached. 

After all of this, the United States withdrew its troops from Vietnam in 1975, finally recognizing that the American military could not provide the one necessary thing South Vietnam needed to survive:  Internal Political Legitimacy.  Saigon fell.  Many remember the haunting photograph of a lone helicopter evacuating people from the roof of the American embassy. It was first war America ever lost. 

And it went downhill from there.  Through the OPEC oil embargo, gas lines, and recession, the decade ended with the storming of the American embassy in Iran where 52 Americans here held hostage for 444 days.

In a very real sense, the 1970s decade was a time when America seemed to have lost is way in the wilderness.  We were desperate for a shepherd who could lead us home, someone with confidence and vision who could inspire hope for a nation.

For many, Ronald Reagan was that man.  He was controversial – anyone with a clear vision will generate opposition.  Many challenged his social policy and feared his challenge to the old Soviet Union.  But despite detractors and sometimes intense opposition, Ronald Reagan helped change the mood of a lost nation.  

Nations journey through lost moments.  Today may feel to many people like such a time.  Like the lost sheep in today’s gospel reading, when a nation is lost, it needs a shepherd to guide it home.

So it is with an individual who looses his way in the wilderness.   Lions, and wolves and bears there are in abundance.  The lost do not need condemnation or judgment.  They need a shepherd willing to come looking for them, to guide them home.