I’ve been sweating this assignment since Stephen announced it last January. I teach youth ministry and Christian education at Princeton Seminary; I’m an ordained United Methodist pastor. In other words, I’m supposed to feed sheep for a living – so why is the “Feed More Sheep” moment in worship so intimidating?
I’ve decided it must be because I have a “sheep disorder.” I show the symptoms from time to time. The first symptom is guilt: What if I’m not feeding enough sheep, or the wrong sheep, or if I’m feeding the right sheep the wrong food? The second symptom is a direct result of the first: exhaustion. Truth be told, I’m exhausted from feeding sheep. What if I’m trying to feed too many sheep? What if I don’t have enough food to go around—for them, or for me?
I had breakfast yesterday with a pastor—and boy, the sheep that get fed from her ministry! She feeds sheep nobody else will touch. Prostitutes. Homeless people. Addicts. She opens her home to teenagers who have nowhere else to go, and ten or twelve of them live with her at any given time. Somehow, she brings them back to life.
I don’t open my home to ten or twelve teenagers at a time; I’m having enough trouble saying goodbye to the one I’ve got. The sheep in my pasture, my students, are healthy, smart, capable sheep; the sheep in her pasture are broken and struggling. So the guilt starts creeping in: should I be feeding more sheep, or different sheep, or needier sheep?
But then I look at my life, and my moral pendulum swings the other direction. When I look at it, I do feed a lot of sheep—and it’s exhausting! If I’m honest, I’m feeding way more sheep than I can handle. . . and I know it’s a trap. I know that whenever we try to feed sheep out of our own pantries instead of out of Christ’s, we’re going to run out of food. And steam. And hope. Only Christ’s food is enough—only Christ is enough to go around: “I am the bread of life,” Jesus said. “Whoever comes to me will never be hungry, and whoever believes in me will never be thirsty” (John6:35).
So where does that lead me this morning?
Well, I suppose it leads me back to another conversation, with a retired Methodist minister who loved teenagers back in the 1970s in the middle of nowhereOhio. Rev. John was my youth pastor. He supervised the Conference Council on Youth Ministry there when I was a teenager. When I became a youth minister myself, I joked with Rev. John that he taught me everything I know about youth ministry –which is mostly true.
A couple summers ago, Rev. John called me out of the blue. He had just returned from his granddaughter Rachel’s graduation in Seattle—they drove all the way from Ohio to Seattle in their RV—and when they went to church that Sunday, Rachel had been excited to introduce her granddad to her youth pastor DJ, who had been important in Rachel’s life. When Rev. John learned that DJ graduated from Princeton Seminary, he asked if he knew me. DJ laughed and jokingly said, “Sure! She taught me everything I know about youth ministry!”
That’s when Rev. John’s knees almost went out from under him…because in that moment, he realized that his own ministry—35 years ago, 2000 miles away, with teenagers he thought he would never see again—had come back to him, and was now standing before him in the form of his beaming granddaughter.
The great “bucket brigade of faith”: you are part of it, and I am part of it. Because Rev. John let God use him to feed a flock of teenagers inOhioback in the 1970s, his own granddaughter, 2000 miles away, left for college with a bucket full of faith.
On Monday, Rev. John and his wife came to visit me in Ocean Grove. We walked on the boardwalk, on the beach, remembering each other 35 years ago. And you know what? My “sheep disorder” went away. I don’t know how many teenage sheep Rev. John fed in his ministry. All that mattered to me was that I was one of them.
It’s like that story they tell about the man throwing starfish, stranded on the beach, back into the ocean. “Why do you bother?” somebody asks him. “You can’t possibly save them all! Does throwing one back really matter?” The man bent over, scooped up another starfish, and flung it into the sea. “Well,” he said. “It mattered to that one.”
God may provide the food for the sheep, but somehow God is still looking for distributors. I think that’s what feeding more sheep boils down to for me. You take the bucket of faith someone has handed to you—a teacher, a pastor, a parent- and you pass it to the next person in line. Maybe to a stranger. Maybe to a student. Maybe to a spouse or a daughter or a son.
I need to say this before I go. Of all the sheep I feed for a living, Kingston United Methodist Church has helped me feed the ones most precious to me. Two years ago we didn’t know whether we would have a church that would helpShannonbe part of the bucket brigade of faith or not. When we moved toPrincetonseven years ago, we struggled to find a church that gave more life than it took. Despite the fact that Kevin and I both see our jobs as feeding sheep, we came to this church two years ago pretty hungry spiritually.
You didn’t think a thing about it. You passed around the Bread of Life that you happened to have on hand, and you fed us. And you fed our daughter. And then you invited us all to pass the Bread to others….to feed more sheep. I am more grateful than I can say thatShannonwill leave for college on Wednesday with her bucket of faith very full. Thank you. Amen.
August 14, 2026
