Gospel: Matthew 9:35-10:23
1st
Reading: Exodus 19:2-8a
2nd
Reading: Romans 5:1-8
I remember standing there at my
ordination and Bishop Swanson asking me all the questions: Would I faithfully
preach and teach in accordance with the Holy Scriptures and the creeds and
confessions, would I be diligent in my study of the Holy Scriptures and my use
of the means of grace, would I pray for God’s people, nourish them with the
word and Holy Sacraments, and lead them by my own example in faithful service
and holy living, would I give faithful witness in the world, that God’s love
may be made known in all I do? I knew
what all they were going to ask me, of course, and I was aware of those big
expectations and that I was unlikely to be able to fulfill them, but I was also
aware of God’s grace which gave me enough hope to answer, “Yes, with the help
of God.” In our baptisms, too, we state our intention
to live among God’s faithful people, to read the scriptures and pray, to
receive the Lord’s Supper, to proclaim Christ, to care for this world God has
made, and to work for justice and peace in all the world. It is a lot to take on for anyone, but over
and over we say, “yes, with the help of God.”
It reminded me of the Israelites
this morning in the reading from Exodus, when they all say so naively,
“Everything that the Lord has spoken we will do.” How could they possibly know what they were
agreeing to? They are just beginning a
40 year journey in the wilderness school of hardships and complaining and
rebellion and fear and turning to false gods and new rules for living as a
community and becoming the people of God and God becoming angry and Moses
making a case for the people and God cooling off. What a journey it would be, difficult and
trying! It is a lot to take on for
anyone, but they all say, “Yes, with the help of God.”
In the Gospel of Matthew, Jesus
says, “The harvest is plentiful, but the laborers are few.” In other words, there is plenty of work to be
done, but few people are stepping up to do it.
I always feel guilty when I read this.
Is Jesus saying I’m slacking off?
Let me put it this way, how many of you would like to be more
faithful? Ok, so what is holding us
back? Why don’t we want to go into the fields with Jesus?
Whenever I sing “I love to tell
the story” I want to confess, I feel uneasy. It is a beautiful song, but it expresses an
ideal that is often far away from the reality we are living in. When I was a
kid, I would stand in church and listen to all the adults around me singing it
and feel the disconnect between the words and the reality. Besides my Sunday School teachers, in the
classroom, and my pastor in church, I didn’t hear anyone telling the story of
Jesus and his love, and I certainly didn’t know anyone who “loved” to tell the
story. When I pictured what this would look like, I pictured the kid who always
brought his Bible to school and everyone made fun of him. I didn’t want to be that kid. I didn’t want to be foolish. It was an aspirational hymn we sang, and to
my mind we didn’t mean it one bit. It
was like we were asking God to make us love to tell the story, or that maybe we
loved to tell the story to other people who loved it as much as we did, but
that was it. When I think of the
affirmation, the “Yes” in that song to follow where Jesus leads, I think of how
far we are away from that ideal, and it makes me squirm.
It is true that many of us are
doing God’s work every single day, in small and large ways. And it is true that Jesus’ story isn’t
necessarily one we tell by going door to door or yelling it through a megaphone
at a street corner, that we can tell the story sometimes a lot better by living
it, by loving people who no one loves.
And it is also true that we could be more responsive to God’s invitation
to go work in the field side by side with our Savior. So what is it that hold us back?
I think a lot of it is that we
don’t want to be unprepared and look foolish. The Disciples were instructed to go out
without money or extra clothes or much training. They are going to have to ask for help. If we are Jesus’ disciples, we are going to
have to ask for help. We are going to
look like we don’t know what we are doing.
We are going to make mistakes. We
want to get this right. But God is
trying to keep us humble, so we will fail.
And God is trying to keep us creative, so we will fail and have think
creatively. Sometimes we think it is our
job to save others, and we forget that only God can do that. We often bring supplies and gifts, we bring
the know-how and the labor, and we try to do for others. In that case, we put people in a situation
where we are the haves and they are the have-nots and we are better than they
are. However, if we go in with nothing,
having nothing and knowing nothing, we leave room for them to be the experts
about their own lives. We open ourselves
to receiving from others, needing them as much as they need us, so we will be
more likely to form community of equal partners with balanced power.
Several people have mentioned to
me that they keep meaning to visit homebound members, but it never seems to
happen. I understand. It is complicated. Should you call first and then go or just show
up? How many days ahead should you
call? What if you have to cancel the day
of? How difficult will it be to find the
location? Will you have enough to talk
about? What if the person expresses
dismay that you haven’t come until now?
What if uncomfortable topics arise?
What if the person just talks and talks and you have trouble getting out
of there? Should you pray with the
person? And then there are feelings of
powerlessness to help a person who isn’t going to get any better. There are so many unknowns in a visit like
this. None of us is an expert. We go in feeling guilty and afraid, even I
do! Sometimes our fears keep us from
going out to the harvest. But in that moment of connection, we find healing and
forgiveness and acceptance and joy and that person finds the same and we are
equals, partners in this chaotic wilderness journey. And in those visits, we find Jesus is with
us.
God brought the Israelite people
through the wilderness so they would practice being God’s people, and being
community together with each other. It
was a learning experience in which they often looked and felt foolish. It took all these years of walking together
to learn how to rely on God and how to treat each other. We are in a wilderness school too. God is bringing us new experiences that
disorient us and make us feel foolish, not to make fun of us, but to remind us
who we rely on and belong to, who is with us always gathering the harvest with
us, and that it isn’t about us but about the body of Christ, the whole
community finding healing and wholeness and connection.
And it is about what brings us
hope and keeps us going, what motivates us to respond to God’s call to join in
the work. Do we hope in our own
powers? If so we are disappointed. I got curious about the reading from Romans
so I looked up the original language. I specifically wanted to know what it
meant by “character.” But it got me
looking at the whole passage. First of
all, the reading from Romans says we are justified by faith, and the question
is whether it is our faith that justifies us and makes us right with God, or
whether it is Jesus’ faith. Secondly,
the word “boast” is actually the word meaning to rejoice. So we rejoice in our sufferings, we rejoice
in our hope of sharing the good news.
And the comes the part, “suffering produces endurance, and endurance
produces character and character produces hope and hope does not disappoint
us.” It is actually more like this,
“suffering produces patience, and patience produces experience, and experience
produces expectation.” In other words it
is only through life experience that we learn who to trust and where to put our
hope, because we keep practicing in the wilderness school of life, that stuff
doesn’t fulfill us, that we need to take care of each other, and that God comes
through for us, the only reliable one, the only one who fulfills the
expectations—again, whose expectations?
Ours or Gods? Expectation is more
than hope, more than a dream, but a promised reality, assured, expected.
This world is full of
suffering. We have the means to keep
ourselves from suffering. We have the
means to be comfortable, or at least keep up the illusion of comfort. But God invites us to join the harvest. We are invited to go where there is
suffering, to experience suffering ourselves, in order to find abundant
life. The harvest is plentiful. There is a lot of work to do. Mothers need comforting whose sons have been
shot by the police. Drug babies need
rocked at the hospital. Veterans who
have lost limbs need a friend. Teens who
have cut themselves need support networks.
The homebound need visitors. Will
we go where we are uncomfortable? If we
do, we will be enrolling in wilderness school. We will find that we are
powerless to fix them, but they will minister to us. We will have the chance to work side by side
and learn from the best, our Savior Jesus.
We will look foolish. We won’t
know what we’re doing or be prepared.
Jesus calls us to serve where we aren’t the experts. Jesus doesn’t want experts who already know
everything, know-it-alls that aren’t trainable.
Jesus wants people who are open to learning and receiving help. What we’re going to get out of this is going
to be good for us and others. We’re
going to get a healthy dose of humility.
We’re going to become part of something greater than ourselves. Jesus is going to use us to bring in the
Kingdom.
It’s all
hands on deck! Let’s get moving. Jesus is calling us to day one of the
harvest. By the time the day is through
we’re going to be pretty worn out and by the time 40 years is through we’re
going to wonder if it will all be worthwhile, but we’ve got the best teacher
there is, and we’ve got the expectation, the promise of what will be. None of us will be greater than another, but
all will have what they need and all will be included, and all will know they
are loved, all will stand in God’s presence and all will see God’s presence in
each other, and all will feast and be filled, and all will find fulfillment. The promised land awaits if we will embark on
this journey and be taught in the 
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