Shepherd-ruling

My church home group are currently working our way through the prophet Micah - quite challenging stuff! This week we found ourselves in chapter 5 which was quite appropriate really in that we had spent the weekend playing at being royalists. It's amazing how so many British people (and I was one of them) can either ignore or deride our royal family most of the year and then spend four whole days waving the Union flag, singing "God save the Queen", and having lunch out in the street in pouring rain with neighbours we never spoke to before - just because someone called Elizabeth Windsor has been "long to reign (or was it rain?) over us".

Well, Micah, was certainly not a royalist, but he does have some interesting things to say about reigning.

Quite independently two of us in the home group decided that we should use "The Message" version of the Bible this week for our study. I admit I rarely read "The Message" - some sort of intellectual snobbery about it not being a proper translation, just an interpretation, as if the hermaneutical process is somehow secondary to linguistic translation!  Anyway, having been led to "The Message" one phrase really stood out for me. In a passage which I know almost by heart, because we use it every Christmas, (Micah 5:2) Micah speaks prophetically of Israel's king - the Messiah, Jesus - as "the leader who will shepherd-rule Israel". Instantly pictures of Homs jumped into my mind and my ears rang to the tune of Bashar al-Assad, Hosni Mubarak, Muammar Gaddafi, Slobodan Milošević, Idi Amin ...  What a contrast!  And then a quiet sense of gratitude for the young lady who fifty nine years ago was announted with oil in a Christian Cathedral and prayed for God's strength as she dedicated herself to serve her people.

But, I was reminded in our home group, the prophet's words are for me (not just Obama, Kibaki or Pratibha Patil). Shepher-ruling is for me, in my workplace, in my family, amongst my community. Verse 4 of that chapter in Micah goes on " He will stand tall in his shepherd-rule by God's strength, centered in the majesty of God-Revealed."  After the washing up, everyone had gone home, I had put away the Bibles and swept up the crumbs, I rewrote that verse as a prayer:

"May I stand tall as I shepherd-rule by God's strength, centred in the majesty of God-Revealed"