The Labor is Ours
Last week, I framed up the wider sweep of Matthew’s gospel, and today’s reading continues from where we left off. So, by way of review and summary, in the Jesus-biography that is Matthew’s gospel, Jesus was born, baptized, and tempted in the wilderness before launching ministry travels throughout Galilee to heal, preach and teach. In his sermon on a hillside, he laid out a sweeping vision of God’s Kin-dom in which the poor in spirit are blessed.
By the time we get to today’s reading, Jesus has continued his healing and teaching and along the way crossed paths on more than one occasion with religious authorities, challenging them to see beyond the letter of the law to the intention of loving God through obedience, service, justice and right relationship.
Last week we pondered how different the world looks through the lens of Jesus’s teaching, and as a result, how differently we need to be willing to see through Jesus’ upside down worldview.
In the text you heard today, Jesus had gathering larger and larger crowds of those hungry for his teaching and hopeful vision, “like sheep without a shepherd.” Because of the great need, the great hunger these people had, Jesus instructs his disciples, preparing them to go out from one place and expand his work of healing and teaching.
Only in Matthew’s gospel does the word “apostle” appear. Let’s unpack that: disciples were students and learners, but apostles were sent out to share what they were learning and experiencing from their teacher. We are intended to see the disciples being sent as an extension and expansion of Jesus’ teaching and reaching in the world.
And that sounds a lot like the church’s mission!
I also want to offer a little reminder about how scripture was written and collected into the thing we know as the bible today. The gospels were written AFTER Paul’s epistles. That matters because in remembering that, we might see the gospels as refined instruction, shaped and crafted for a broader purpose, in light of the kind of things that we see happening in Paul’s letters to the earliest churches.
The epistle text for today to accompany our reading from Matthew is from Paul’s letter to the Roman’s, chapter 5: 1 - 8:
Therefore, since we are justified by faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ, through whom we have obtained access to this grace in which we stand, and we boast in our hope of sharing the glory of God. And not only that, but we also boast in our afflictions, knowing that affliction produces endurance, and endurance produces character, and character produces hope, and hope does not put us to shame, because God’s love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit that has been given to us.
For while we were still weak, at the right time Christ died for the ungodly. Indeed, rarely will anyone die for a righteous person—though perhaps for a good person someone might actually dare to die. But God proves his love for us in that while we still were sinners Christ died for us.
The church in Rome was facing some hard things, and Paul was addressing them specifically – because they were figuring out by experience what it meant to follow a man who had gone to the cross as punishment for resisting empire and establishment. They were figuring out by experience what it meant to follow a man who was crucified, died and was buried but rose on the third day. They were figuring out what it meant to receive the power of the Holy Spirit to carry the work that Jesus started forward into the world.
So Matthew’s gospel is providing context and specific instruction about why the apostles were to be sent out along with some insight about how they might expect to be received in the world. While not responded directly to the experience of Paul’s churches per se, the gospel writer was aware of the difficulty that many emerging communities/early churches were facing as they resisted the powers of the Empire in which they found themselves. In Matthew’s gospel, Jesus makes it clear: I am sending you out like sheep into the midst of wolves.
…so be wise as serpents and innocent as doves.
There was work to be done in the region of Galilee, far more than Jesus alone could do. And so, Jesus sends out the twelve giving them authority to do this work.
These 12 were well-prepared. They sat with Jesus to learn and to understand, they watched him teach and heal.
This is the early model for why gatherings of Christ-followers would happen – first to learn and then to share Jesus’ teaching, to be healed and offer healing. This is what it meant to be a disciple. Over time, certain folks among the disciples would be given greater responsibility for going out from the community to teach and to heal.
What does all of that reveal to us for our work here and now?
I offer this from Colin Yuckman’s commentary on this passage:
… If we were to represent “kingdom” and “world” in a Venn diagram (so picture two overlapping circles, one is God’s preferred future and one is the real world, so to speak), the apostles—and we by extension—have been selected and instructed to occupy the overlap. Something of the intensity of this overlap is depicted in Jesus’ extended instructions in 10:9-23. Like “sheep into the midst of wolves” (10:16) Jesus is sending them. Where the work of God meets the trajectory of the world, resistance is greatest—they will be handed over to councils, flogged in synagogues (10:17), dragged before governors and kings (10:18), families will be divided (10:21), and stigmas borne because of Jesus’ name (10:22). (WP, Colin Yuckman, June 14, 2020)
I wonder, are there moments when we feel the world’s resistance as we try to bring just little bits of the Kin-dom into being right here and now?
Here’s what comes to mind for me:
I think about being accused of bringing politics into the church when teaching about anti-racism or about taking care of the widow and the resident alien.
I think about standing in front of St. John’s Episcopal Church on Lafayette Square in 2020, toe to toe with National Guard troops, naming that black lives matter in the wake of George Floyd’s murder in Minneapolis.
I think about our chairs getting stolen after we displayed 18 tiny empty chairs as a witness to the horror of the school shooting in Uvalde.
Just Friday night, our rainbow flag was vandalized…following on the heels of an angry phone call from a neighbor a week earlier, yelling at me on the phone, asking why we would celebrate “that,” meaning LGBTQIA+ folx.
And really, while those situations were uncomfortable and created a sense of violation or a sense of outrage in my spirit, and all of them created a deep sense of the world’s resistance to the places I see and understand my work in the Kin-dom of God, none of them were particularly unsafe.
Make no mistake, there are places that the work like this is unsafe.
And we’re not all called to the depths of that work.
But we are called to some of the work.
This weekend, we pause as a nation to celebrate Juneteenth. Some of our leaders and members are currently attending an interfaith service to stand in solidarity with the Scotland community nearby. They are showing up to listen and to learn. Because for the most part, we folks here at Faith cannot understand the experiences of oppression felt by Black communities like Scotland or Emory Grove or Pleasant View right here in Montgomery County. And so some leaders are there…because their attention to this matters.
This is part of the work to which these folks feel called in this season – the work of being in the overlap between God’s vision of the Kin-dom and the world in which we find ourselves.
I wonder where you feel called?
Here’s the good news – the work is not ours alone, and in fact, anything we feel called to and do is by God’s grace and power. There is grace for the places we fall short and there is the Holy Spirit’s breath to sustain us. There is a model in Jesus’ teaching and in his actions.
God's love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit that has been given to us.
May it be so.
Amen.
Invite a time of mediation over this:
"The harvest is plentiful, but the laborers are few; therefore ask the Lord of the harvest to send out laborers into his harvest."
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