So I’m still in the same holding pattern healthwise… spending a lot of time on the couch. I wanted to post this story that we used in church this past week. We had a reflective worship service for the first Sunday of Lent which coincided with Luke 15 in our journey through the book of Luke. So we spent time reflecting on lost sheep, lost coins, and lost sons. I fully admit that this story is a rip-off. I had read this story over at Sarah Dylan Breuer’s lectionary blog. I loved it, but decided to tweak it for a more low church setting. So with my respects to Dylan – here’s my tweaked version of “The Story of the 99”
There once was a shepherd who had a hundred sheep. One day one of those sheep went astray. This of course caused a big stir in the flock. The other 99 immediately sprang into action – or at least discussion.
The first question of the day involved what exactly does “astray” mean. Did this poor sheep lose its way. Was it too stupid to follow the other sheep back into the fold. Did it get lost by accident? Or did it deliberately and maliciously wander off? One, sheep, long with the flock, asked if this sheep had ever really been a sheep at all. If he wandered off, perhaps in reality he was a goat. Others immediately agreed that he had never really seemed like one of them in the first place. The suggestion was given that a message should be sent to the sheep that if he could stop being a goat, or at least start acting like a sheep then he could rejoin the flock. This of course caused various groups to splinter off in discussion as to what it really meant to be a sheep at all.
One group argued that the sheep must follow the historic practices of being a sheep. None of this new-fangled nonsense of progressive shearing techniques and electric fences. No sir. This stray must be willing to be a sheep in the way they have always been sheep if he wanted to return to the fold. Others argued that those cultural trappings of sheepness might have been what caused the sheep to stray in the first place. If they could just redefine sheepness in a language the sheep could understand, the language of the wilderness, then there would never have been an issue. A committee was formed to explore what language was actually being spoken out there in the wilderness (with strict instructions to be out there in the wilderness, but to never be of the wilderness).
All this talk of course upset the faction that didn’t believe in different forms of sheepness. They asserted that that lost sheep should just know how to be a sheep. A sheep exactly like them. In fact all animals should just know how to be a sheep. They decided the best course of action was to start a petition to make it a law that all animals become, or at least act like, sheep. But since they didn’t know any animals that weren’t sheep, they failed to collect the required number of signatures.
Another group found all that talk really missed the point of what sheep were created to be to begin with. They asked if it really was all that bad to be astray. The sheep was out there in the wilderness – out where it belonged. It was in its natural, authentic environment. Perhaps instead of being confined to the flock, they should go join the stray. Get back to what it really means to be a sheep and all that.
The discussion continued late into the night. At some point a few of the sheep, tired of the whole debate, noticed that the shepherd was missing. One lone sheep who had watched the shepherd hurry out in search of the stray sheep asked unheard amidst the chaos of the bleating – if we are in here and the shepherd is out there – who really are the sheep without a shepherd?
On a different topic, my recent reading of 
Dora is a bit different. (As Kevin Smith pointed out, Dora only works for adults who are high…) I like the bilingual language skills it teaches, but I had an issue with how it labels its characters. One of the characters, a fox, is named Swiper, because he swipes stuff. I do not support enforcing negative behavior by causing a child to self-identify with that behavior. Label a kid “trouble-maker” and he will live up to that name. It is a self-fulfilling prophecy. So I’m not too comfortable with how that’s modeled on Dora. (BTW, Swiper is Emma’s favorite character). But then I just saw an episode where Swiper gets into a bad predicament (a genie tricks him into switching places in a bottle with him). Instead of being happy that Swiper was in trouble or saying he got what he deserved, Dora, Boots, and their friends immediately offered to help Swiper. They felt sorry for him and did whatever they could to help him out. That’s the type lesson in love and mercy that I want Emma to learn.
Example – chocolate. 40% of the world’s cocoa is grown on the Ivory Coast and is sold to chocolate makers like Nestle, Hershey’s, and Mars/M&M. The U.S. State Department Human Rights Report on the Ivory Coast for 2003 estimates that approximately 109,000 child laborers worked in hazardous conditions on cocoa farms in what has been described as the worst form of child labor. Many of those children were kidnapped from other countries and trafficked in as slaves. In 2001 US Congress. Representative Eliot Engel (D-NY) had introduced an amendment to the 2002 Agriculture Appropriations Bill to set aside $250,000 for the Food and Drug Administration to develop “slave free” labeling requirements on cocoa products. The bill was approved in the House of Representatives by a vote of 291-115 in June 2001. Given the multimillion-dollar trade in cocoa between the U.S. and The Ivory Coast, the bill would have had a tremendous impact on the chocolate industry. In response, the chocolate industry stopped the bill by agreeing to voluntarily adopt key portions of the bill as the Harkin-Engel Protocol. This (surprisingly?) didn’t work. The deadline slipped by without the companies complying. Legal action is being pursued, but nothing has yet to be enforced (including US customs law prohibiting the importing of products made by child labor). Read the whole report 
Interesting. Luckily chocolate is one of the few things that can easily be bought fairly traded. In buying chocolate (or coffee, tea, or sugar) with the Fair Trade label, one can be sure that you are not support slavery or other unethical practices towards workers. This doesn’t mean giving up chocolate, it just means having to stop being a brainless, callous consumer and instead use our buying power to let companies know what we do and don’t support.
In reading recently about discipline for home and school, I was struck by how our conception of sin influences how we approach discipline. Granted some sort of connection seems obvious, but I was intrigued by the difference it made in whether behavior and discipline became an individual or communal thing.