Sermon for the Fourth Sunday after Pentecost 6.28.2020
Church of the Good Shepherd, Acton, Massachusetts
Rev. Melissa Buono, Interim Priest
Readings: Jer. 28:5-9; Ps 89:1-4,15-18; Romans 6:12-23; Matthew 10:40-42
Welcome back to the final installment of Jesus’ “Missionary Discourse” “How to Follow Jesus,” brought to you by Matthew Chapter 10.
The first installment was a lesson in Jesus showing his disciples how it’s done - moving from town to town and sharing the message of God’s love and mercy, and having compassion on God’s people by feeding and healing them and tending to their needs.
Having shown them, Jesus then sent out his followers, called Apostles meaning “those sent out” to go out and follow his example. They were to take no payment for their service, bring no bag of coins, no extra clothes, sandals or staff. They were sent out as sheep in the midst of wolves.
The second installment brought understanding that they would be rejected by some people, mocked and criticized by others, but through it all they need not fear. God would be their rod and their staff along the way. But they should be forewarned that the message of salvation that they bring to the weak and the marginalized will cause your closest relationships to be challenged, father and son, mother and daughter, as those who challenge you will likely be members of your own household.
And finally in this last bit, the last couple of verses of Matt. chapter 10, we learn a little something about hospitality.
At first read, this week’s Gospel lesson might sound like a directive to simply be hospitable to others by serving them with a cup of cold water on a hot muggy day or with a cup of hot coffee with steamed milk on a beautiful Sat. morning, for doing so will bring great reward. However, that’s not where Matthew has Jesus go with this teaching.
A closer reading of the text says, “whoever welcomes you welcomes me, and whoever welcomes me welcomes the one who sent me.”
Did you catch that subtle difference? It’s not asking you or me to welcome others, but it’s charging us to be the ones welcomed by those willing to accept the message of God’s love for the building up of God’s kingdom on earth.
If you think about it, the whole text has been about what Jesus’ disciples should expect when they are sent out as sheep among wolves. So far, Jesus has been teaching the warnings of what to expect the reaction of some people to be. But in this lesson, Jesus speaks of the promise that is to come for one who is faithful in bringing the message of God’s kingdom.
And the promise is connected to the ancient understanding of hospitality. Throughout the Bible, the gift of showing hospitality especially to the stranger in your village was very important. No one was ever to be left outside to sleep in the town square. Doing so, would leave one vulnerable to the bandits and thieves who were most active at night.
The thing is, in the ancient world, there’s no such thing as the “rugged individual” that we know today. Instead one’s identity was connected to one’s family and the community in which one lived. Therefore, it was understood that in showing hospitality, one welcomed not just an individual, but wholeheartedly accepted the community who sent the person and all that they represent. The connection being that those who welcomed a disciple of Jesus, welcomed the very presence of Jesus as well as God, the Father who sent him to earth in the first place.
This passage therefore is speaking about the people that do the welcoming to you and to me and to all Jesus’ followers. We are not the ones welcoming anyone, instead it is about the disciples being welcomed by others. They and we, are to go out and preach like the prophets of old, bringing a word of God’s love, and in turn they will receive a prophet’s reward.
Here we must ask ourselves, what is a prophet’s reward?
Think about John the Baptist. He was sent as a prophet to prepare the way for Jesus’ coming. What happened to him when he took on the King and pointed out his adulterous behavior? His head was cut off.
Think about the prophets of the Old Testament? How was Moses received by Pharaoh when he came with a message from God to let God’s people go? Let the slave labor that was enriching Egypt’s economy go free? He was told no, and no, and no again - that was until God made it clear who Pharaoh was really dealing with.
What of Ezekiel, Isaiah, Jeremiah, Amos? Each one faced very difficult challenges because they brought a message that was not all peaches and cream. Their calling, their mission was to speak to God’s people to remind them of their sin and call them back to relationship with God. How popular do you think the prophets were in their time?
The reward of the prophet is not welcome parades and be pampered with hospitality. The reward of the prophet is less tangible in that one is seen as righteous in the eyes of God. In other words, being seen as doing the right thing according to God is more important that being liked by members of one’s community.
The reading from the book of Jeremiah is a classic example of this. The true prophets usually came with a message of war, famine, and persecution of some kind. But they weren’t the only players in town. There were also false prophets - fair weather friends - who said that they spoke a message from God, but in fact, they were just telling the people what they wanted to hear in that moment to make them feel better.
Hmmm, by this understanding, and in our own 21st c, might this be one of the reasons that immunologist Dr. Fauci is being vilified in social media by those who don’t want to hear that the Coronavirus pandemic is real and that everyone needs to take precautions to prevent its spread?
Idk, that’s something you need to decide for yourself.
See even in the time BCE (before the Common Era), people had to decide for themselves what prophets to believe.
In the Jeremiah lesson, the ancient people of Judah were taken captive by their enemy, the Babylonians. They were ripped from their land, no longer able to worship in the Temple and some of the sacred vessels used in worship were stolen by the Babylonians as well. The people’s live were so uprooted and they were living much like we are today with coronavirus not knowing what was next and what to do.
And there were these two prophets: Hananiah and Jeremiah each proclaiming different messages. And they had to choose.
Would they accept the message of Hananiah that their time of exile at the hands of the Babylonians would be over soon and their lives would be restored? Or would they listen to the weeping prophet Jeremiah, who showed up wearing a literal yoke around his neck, as a sign that they were going to live under Babylonian rule for quite some time and they might as well begin to build houses and plant gardens and live out their lives in this new reality because it wasn’t about to change back anytime soon?
Who do you think the people listened to?
The prophet with the rosy message? or the just hang in for this rough ride?
Jeremiah said to all those gathered, yes indeed, I hope all ends as Hananiah prophesies, wouldn’t it be great. But that’s not the word that I received from God. But the only way to find out who was telling the truth was to wait and see how things played out.
In the meantime, which prophet’s word will you live by?
In the case of Jeremiah, he was telling the truth even though many people thought his prophecy felt like they were giving in to the oppressors. But Jeremiah also announced a prophecy of judgment against Hananiah, that came to pass two months later. The last sentence of Jeremiah chapter 28 reads, “In that same year, in the 7th month, the prophet Hananiah died.” That was 2 months after the two prophets clashed.
So what does all this mean for us as church in the 21st century?
Who are the ones sent out to proclaim the Kingdom of God today?
Who are the prophets of our day calling people back to the Lord?
We are.
We are a people who are sent out to bring good news to the poor, the sick, and those living in the margins of life.
And we can no longer expect or wait for people to come to the church for spiritual nourishment.
Instead we need to find ways to be the church beyond our walls. We need to be out in our communities, whether it’s standing with Black Lives Matter - like the folks at ACC, or with Mothers Out Front, or reaching out to the police departments in each of our communities to ask how can we help? Finding ways to support immigrant communities through volunteering with groups like Progente to teach English.
This is the reality of the world - there are powers and principalities at work seeking to snuff out the Gospel. We can’t sit back and wait for someone else to make things better. We need to continue doing our part to share the message of God’s love and salvation through Jesus Christ in our words and our deeds. But we can’t do it having an eye focused on some immediate glory.
Our call given in baptism, is to be a people of justice and mercy, even when it’s not popular to do so, but to know at the end of the day, that it’s the next right thing to be done.
AMEN.