Losers Together

Matthew 9:35-10:23

June 18, 2017

I.

Jesus apparently finds himself a bit overwhelmed by the magnitude of his mission.  “The harvest is plentiful, but the laborers are few,” he notices.  He sees that people are “harassed and helpless, like sheep without a shepherd.”  Without a shepherd to guide and gather them, sheep tend to wander into trouble; they get lost and become victims of predators.  The poor people Jesus associates with were subject to oppression and exploitation by the Romans and by their own leaders.  Everyone in power was out to appropriate their labor, their property, and what little money they might have.  Jesus is moved with compassion for the people.  

By “the harvest,” Jesus means that there are plenty of people who need saving and deliverance, who need to be brought home into a safe community of love, equality, peace, and justice… but there are not enough “laborers” offering them help.  He can’t do it all himself. 

Therefore, he instructs his disciples to pray for “the Lord of the harvest to send out laborers into his harvest.”  And, the laborers they pray for turn out to be themselves.  So the Lord gathers his disciples together and sends them out to proclaim the good news that the Kingdom of Heaven has come near.  As an indication of the nearness of heaven, they are to “cure the sick, raise the dead, cleanse the lepers, [and] cast out demons.”  And they are to do all this without being paid and without bringing hardly any resources with them beyond the clothes on their backs.  In other words, he gives them the authority to do what he does in the same way he does it.  

Here we see what exactly the problems were:  people were afflicted with disease and death.  They were defiled with these horrible skin diseases that caused them to be excluded and ostracized.  And they were enslaved by demons.  And those who were supposed to care for them, their “shepherds,” were MIA, leaving the people exposed and helpless in the face of all this heartbreak, tragedy, and horror.

This is literally evangelism; it is bringing good news to people.  Not just verbally, but in terms of changing their actual circumstances.  Jesus does not send them out with instructions to bring people back with them to join their group.  He doesn’t tell them that they need to make people say some words about who he is.  They are to go to the villages of their own people — Israelites — and bring into their lives the reality of God’s Kingdom.  They are to heal, welcome, restore to life, and liberate people.

Then, after some more detailed instructions about what to do if folks don't welcome them, which is basically that they should move on, Jesus tells them that this ministry is not likely to make them very popular.  In fact, they should expect to be hated by everybody and become the cause of violent strife even within families.  Because, those “lost sheep of the house of Israel”?  It turns out that a lot of them would rather stay lost, sick, excluded, dead, and enslaved, than take the risk of embracing what Jesus is about, which is the Kingdom of Heaven.  

II.

Preaching the Kingdom of Heaven always involves risk because it means coming to see things from an infinitely broader perspective than the way we usually see.  That is the Lord’s point in calling it the Kingdom of Heaven.

In the New Testament, the word for heaven (ouranos) literally means “sky.”  It refers to the vast dome that stretches high above us across the whole Earth.  The thing about going higher into the sky is that the higher you go the more you can see, the more your vision includes and embraces.  The Bible talks about God who is “Most High,” meaning that God sees and knows everything.  So when Jesus mentions heaven he means coming more and more to perceive things from God’s lofty, elevated, inclusive, comprehensive, all-embracing viewpoint.

Seeing from the perspective of the Kingdom of Heaven means that these petty distinctions we hold, which often explode into hostility and violence, are just not real.  They are self-imposed on people due to our small-minded blindness.     

So when Jesus talks about heaven, he does not mean just a place you go when you die.  He intends for people’s lives to be changed now.  He does not tell the disciples to go out to these villages and talk about the kind of life the people will have after death.  He tells them to proclaim the good news that the Kingdom of Heaven has come near to people now, in their present existence, and then he instructs them to embody and enact this good news by curing the sick, raising the dead, cleansing lepers, and casting out demons.

Jesus thus at least implies that the root cause of much of the disease and death that dominates our mortal existence is our truncated, limited, shallow, small view of the world.  We don’t have a wide enough perspective.  We are overly focused on a tiny piece of real estate, or a narrowly defined category like my family, my nation, my philosophy, my tradition, my race, my religion, my language, and so on.  And everything else is out there is feared as a threatening, hostile “other” that we need to be protected from.  

The sour consequence of our limited perspective and our smallness of mind is our fear, our anxiety, our anger, our paranoia, which in turn cause us to live in violence, exploitation, and domination of each other.  Our limited perception leads to a sick society which produces sick individuals.

The more tightly we grasp on to and cherish and stoke our own resentment, anger, fear, nostalgia, and sense of scarcity, the more prone we are to diseases and even death, not just of ourselves, but of others from whom we withhold benefits.  My fear of going hungry causes me to hoard and waste food, while my neighbor starves.  My self-centeredness in making sure that I get what I need causes me to refuse healthcare to someone else.  My anxiety about losing my power makes me grab away power from others.  Society devolves into a selfish war of each against all, which spawns disease, death, defilement, and disenfranchisement.       

III.

Into this society dominated by toxic and oppressive practices that spawn disease and death, Jesus sends his disciples.  And he gives them authority to heal the sick, cleanse lepers, raise the dead, and cast out demons.  Then he tells them exactly how to do this.  

He instructs them to “Give without payment.  Take no gold, or silver, or copper in your belts.”  In other words, avoid money; money poisons every relationship and community.  Then he says to take “no bag for your journey, or two tunics, or sandals, or a staff,” meaning that they are to exemplify a voluntary poverty and live in mutual dependence with others.  He says that “laborers deserve their food,” implying that they are to work and make a contribution to the common life of the village by their labor.  They are to live in community and cooperation.  They are to embody generosity and share in hospitality.  They are to identify with the people Jesus sends them to serve.

This sharing and identification is the Kingdom of Heaven, just as Jesus himself takes on our flesh, our life, our mortality, and even our death, and thereby saves us.  The broader and wider and more inclusive our view of things, the more lightly we am able to hold onto our own life.  This enables us to connect better with others, which in turn gives us a better and fuller  perspective on everything.

How much of healing is about community and relationship?  Some of you know I had a heart attack a mere six weeks ago.  I had a stent put in and I am now fine.  But would I have come through it so well if I did not live in a community of mutual service?  If I did not have first of all my wife to drop everything and take me to the ER, and then let people know?  If I did not have so many people praying for me?  If I did not have the Board of Pensions of the PCUSA to pay the many thousands of dollars to the hospital?  Let alone the whole community of the Somerset Medical Center?

Seeing ourselves as participating in broader and wider communities is part of this higher perspective we get from being aware of the Kingdom of Heaven.  Under God’s ultimate and all-inclusive Kingdom we are also integrated into the community of creation, of life, of the Earth, and of all humanity; and then smaller communities of nation and family.  It turns out that even as individuals we are not only communities of cells and microbes, but we are sharing matter and energy with others all the time, and that without others we simply cannot live.

Jesus sends his disciples out to heal by living with and serving others in mutual community.  Part of that healing is taking away the anxiety, stress, and terror that comes from holding a smaller vision.  Part of it is working against the enmities and competitions built into an oppressive system.  This is what heals and raises the dead.  This is what ends exclusion and liberates people from bondage. 

IV.

Unfortunately, this kind of knowledge, awareness, and perception — the Kingdom of Heaven in which we are all united and equal — is deeply threatening to those who gain and maintain their wealth and power by keeping people sick and poor, defiled and enslaved.  If our status and influence as  winners depends on making sure some are always losers, then we will fight to keep an unjust and unequal regime churning along.  And we will persecute anyone who imagines a better, more equal and beneficial world.

Hence Pontius Pilate had to execute Jesus, and many of Jesus’ followers have died, and will continue to die, for their trust in him and his larger more inclusive vision.

For the truth is that Jesus comes into the world as a loser, and he sends his disciples into the world as losers, so that by losing all pretense, power, status, wealth, superiority, greed, and fear, we may gain access for ourselves and others to God’s heavenly Kingdom where everyone has enough, no one is in need, and conflict, exclusion, slavery, and even disease are banished in the unifying ocean of God’s love.

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