It seems hard to believe that it was way back in 1978 when Bob Seeger’s song “Feel Like a Number” first appeared on the charts.  If you don’t know it, don’t worry, the title fairly well summarizes the content.  In the song, Seeger laments the fact that in most of his daily interactions, people know him only impersonally, instead of as a unique, living breathing human being.  And if that was the case back in ’78, what are things like now?  I mean, back then, you probably knew your grocer or your mailman by name.  When you called someone and they weren’t in, the phone was answered by a human and not a voicemail system.  Over the last 40 years, the content of the Seeger song has proven sadly more prophetic than even he probably imagined.  North American society has become less community centered and far more atomistic than ever.   As a result, North American culture has become far less nurturing than ever before.

  Now what do I mean when I say nurture?  Nurturing in some sense, it means to feed, as in you nourish.  On other occasions, it means to “bring up, or to rear” as you would a child.  But nurture also carries with it the idea of care, specifically a life-long, comprehensive care which stems from a sense of devotion and love.  Over the last 25 years, we’ve seen many societal methods of nurturing wiped away in the never-ceasing march “forward” wherever the heck that is.  Set up to care for long-term, devoted employees in their golden years, pensions have gone the way of the dodo.  Now you’re either doing something for the company or you’re out in the cold.  School care has gotten progressively less nurturing as we’ve focused more on test-scores than the overall development of children.  We’ve made leaps and bounds in prolonging life but we’ve done so only with skyrocketing costs.  And that profiteering has given birth to a system in which patients are too frequently treated like little more than dollar signs instead of ailing human beings.  The world around us has failed us utterly in the realm of nurture.  But it shouldn’t surprise us.  In this broken age where individualism reigns supreme, is it any wonder we’re less nurturing of others?  When our primary aims center around “me myself and mine” there just can’t be the kind of community-based nurture we all so desperately need. 

  Fortunately, this world isn’t the alpha and the omega of our lives, Jesus Christ is.  Thanks be to God we worship Him and He shows us a nurturing God – a Lord who cares for us so deeply He took on flesh and lived among us.  Through the Holy Spirit, the nurturing power of God Almighty is with us every single day, every single hour.  In the Bible we encounter a God who heals.  Who nourishes.  Who teaches.  God leads a people away from dearth and into the land of milk and honey.  When God’s own people stray, He corrects their behavior instead of abandoning them.  God’s nature, as revealed to us in the Old Testament is one of amazing nurture of His people. 

  This morning we read Psalm 23, a scripture many of us know by heart.  It’s so frequently read at funerals we might overlook the fact that it speaks poignantly of a God who actively cares for us.  This isn’t some hidden God.  This is an engaged deity.  He sits us down in green pastures.  He leads us beside still waters.  He gives us food and drink.  He restoreth our souls.  God even watches over us even in the shadow of death.  God nurtures us.  Jesus Christ being fully God is the incarnate reflection of the Father.  In fact, Jesus’ incarnation speaks powerfully to the extraordinary lengths to which God will go to care for us.  God gets involved.  He isn’t content to just foster us for us from afar, Jesus Christ arrives on earth to nurture us in the flesh.  Throughout the New Testament Jesus is personally engaged with humanity.  He feeds people.  He educates all about the coming Kingdom, offering hope and joy.  He heals men and women, laying his hands upon them, taking away their sorrow and their pain and their ostracism from their community.  Our Scripture reading from the Gospel of John highlights that nurturing desire.  There’s likely no act which shows more clearly the intimate nurture Jesus Christ has for humanity than when He washes His disciples’ feet.

  Consider this, many of us shudder at the idea of even touching somebody else’s feet today and we certainly don’t think they’re ritually unclean as the Jews of the time did.  Now we might cite the potential unsanitary elements but our refusals likely stem from something else.  For the most part, we don’t want that kind of involvement in other people’s lives nor do we ultimately want them that involved in ours.  We don’t want to be too close to anyone.  It’s the same reason that too often we come even to church with smiles on our faces answering the question “how are you doing” with a cool “I’m fine” even when our lives feel as though they’re careening out of control.  We want distance from other people.  To be too involved in another person’s life or they in ours runs a risk, or so we think.  Accepting nurture from another person may leave us too obligated for our liking.