2017/11/21

Watch out, shepherds!



Yesterday afternoon, as I was preparing worship for Christ The King Sunday, I received a surprising DM (Direct Message) from @ManhattanProphet forwarding to me 12 tweets.
The original tweets came from @RealLORD, here they are all:

@Ezekiel34, Prophesy against the shepherd-leaders in the #BrightHouse and on #TheHill. Damn to you, shepherds, I am watching you!...
...You only pretend to care for my sheep! Aren’t shepherds supposed to care for sheep? You don’t feed my sheep, you just feed my sheep...
...with your bigotry, prejudice and racism and then sell my sheep for cheap to your wealthy cronies. Not only you don’t care...
...for the wounded, you actively try to take away their affordable sheep-care, not once, not twice, for the third and fourth time...
...and I am not going to be silent, says the Lord! You pretend to care for sheep, but you threaten to divide them...
...by your ever taller walls as if my pasture was some kind of a prison! You aren’t building bridges upon which my sheep...
...could safely and peacefully walk. You are the ones who are actively misleading my sheep to dangerous swamps of your own making...
...And when you train sheepdogs, it is not to guard and protect my sheep, you train them to shoot-to-kill...
...And what have you done to the meadows of my pasture! Half of it you pricked and poked with your fracking rigs...
...so that the very ground is shaking like in fever. The other half you want to under-mine, pollute with bursting pipes...
...or turn to a waste-heap, taking away protection from soil, water and air. Therefore, listen to my message you pseudo-shepherds!...
...Watch out! I’m coming and will take my sheep back. I will rescue my sheep from your greed!
 
Of course this cannot be an authentic divine message. The Omniscient would certainly have known that the limit of characters had risen to 280! With all likelihood these prophetic tweets are another falsification from the workshop of the Manhattan Gospel of Henry Rutgers. Nevertheless this modern paraphrase of Ezekiel 34 clearly illuminates why so many biblical scholars think that many, if not all, otherwise bucolic biblical psalms and parables about sheep and shepherds contain a soothing personal message but also an explosive political rebuke to the powers that be.