Proclaim the Good News: the Kingdom of Heaven is near!
The Second Sunday after Pentecost
Genesis 18:1-15 • Matthew 9:35-10:8
Video of Sunday, June 14 service
I think we can all agree: these times are trying… It started off with the emerging pandemic, and has only got worse with additional layers of national and global distress being piled on. At the beginning, we were dealing with an external threat, but now, those of us who identify as white are additionally recognizing the role that we and our forebears have played in the cruel racial inequities in this country. So many of us are grappling with how to have that conversation with even ourselves, let alone others.
When I read the sentence in this week’s gospel about Jesus seeing the people being harassed and helpless, I couldn’t help making a connection with where we are today. Where I certainly am at least. These days are exhausting. There is so much in play all the time. Nothing is particularly normal. The news cycle is hard to bear. The world is so full of pain and grief. Everything keeps changing. Who knows where we’ll be next week?
Sheep who have it all together, and, I admit that is hard to imagine, would have no need of a shepherd. But our Collect for today spells it out clearly: we have a tender shepherd who is utterly present to the helpless and the lost. We have a tender shepherd who surrounded himself with a ‘motley band of stumbling friends’, with whom he shared his power.
Our Gospel passage from Matthew begins with Jesus going about, teaching in the synagogues, proclaiming the good news of the kingdom, and curing every disease and sickness. He cannot help but be moved with compassion by the people’s harassment and helplessness. In response, he summons his twelve disciples, names each of them, and commissions them to go to the lost sheep of the house of Israel to proclaim that the Kingdom of God has come near. And to cure the sick, raise the dead, cleanse the lepers, and cast out demons. Quite the list of instructions!
Tender shepherd, to the helpless and lost; we praise you for sharing your power with a motley band of stumbling friends.
We hear those words of our collect in the past tense. And, yes, it happened. And yes, it is still happening, if we will let it.
I was listening this week to Krista Tippet’s conversation with writer Eula Biss in the ‘On Being’ podcast entitled ‘Talking about Whiteness’. Eula breaks off at one point to express how ‘inadequate, uncomfortable, even mortifying it feels like to talk about this unexamined white privilege. Eula goes on to say, “I’m allowing this embarrassment to just wash over me, because I really deeply believe in bumbling your way through a conversation about this subject…We just cannot be silent.”
She is so right. We just cannot be silent. We need to keep bumbling our way through these hard conversations in these challenging days. And, despite being in, as my mother would say, a parlous state, a precarious state, full of danger and uncertainty, I actually think that we have more reason to hope than we have ever had. I do believe that the Kingdom of Heaven is close!
We are now engaged in life-giving conversation: conversations about what it means to be human, and the value of all human life. And most of us are indeed ‘bumbling’, and given the enormity of the topics, that is just where we need to be. Of course, it would have been vastly preferable if we hadn’t got it so badly wrong in the first place. Genocide, land theft and slavery was a truly tragic beginning to America’s history, and yet, if we recognize and own that, we can now no longer be silent, and there can at last be hope that we can ‘love mercy, do justice, and walk humbly with our God’.
Now is the time to have conversations where we all are welcome at the table, where voices that have previously been silenced can speak their truth. And where those of us, accustomed to speaking, now learn how to listen with open ears, hearts, and imaginations.
In the shade of the Oaks of Mamre, God has made a covenant with Abraham and Sarah that God would be their God for ever. And as they recover from the enormity of that, they are visited by the three strangers, to whom they offer hospitality, strangers who turn out to be none other than angels.
Desert hospitality is radical hospitality: a response to a life and death need in the arid wastes of the wilderness. God showed up in person, or three persons, to be more accurate, at Abraham’s table. And God will show up at our tables as we together grapple with our new understanding that opportunities are not to be limited or hoarded, but available for every single person. This is the work of the Kingdom of God. And this is our work.
As our collect concludes:
May we who have received without payment give without charge and so bring your kingdom near; through Jesus Christ, the Lord of the harvest. Amen.