Third Sunday after Pentecost A; 06.14.26; G. Miles Smith+
Genesis 18:1-15, (21:1-7); Romans 5:1-8; Matthew 9:35-10:8 (9-23)
3rd Sunday after Pentecost A; 06.14.26; G. Miles Smith+
So, now that the Vestry has announced their appointment of the Discernment Committee…that will begin working later this summer on the search for your next Rector…I’m thinking that frees up the Vestry…to undertake a new and even more daunting task: the formation of a team of parishioners…to go out into Keswick…“to cure the sick, raise the dead, cleanse the lepers, and cast out demons” (Mt. 10:1).
That is of course what Jesus did…summoning and sending out his disciples…to do just as Jesus had been doing…in the Galilean countryside and towns. This can be easy to overlook in the gospel story. It can be hard enough to know what to do with Jesus himself…curing…raising…cleansing…and casting out. But then what do we do with Jesus sending others to do the same extraordinary things?!
A popular way of explaining it has been to say that, well, God made possible those kinds of extraordinary things through ordinary human beings…back then…because that was the apostolic age…a special time. And then after that age…such things were no longer possible. Which I guess means that now…we have doctors to do a lot of that…psychiatrists…law enforcement…and church committees to do other things…and that we live in a different era of professionals, corporate healthcare bureaucracies, and, well, generally speaking, lots of meetings. And of course that is true. But only up to a point.
Yes, we do have those kinds of specialties that exist quite independently…of the disciples and apostles of Jesus. But, as I’ve mentioned before, the sheer existence of hospitals and hospices in western civilization…actually emerged out of the early Christian Church…and ordinary people…hearing Jesus’ call through the Holy Spirit…and going out into their communities to care for the sick, the dying, and the tormented. Such caring…was so unusual in the midst of the common cruelties and neglect of the ancient world…that it was one of the key testimonies to non-Christian people of the compelling truth and beauty of the gospel…and was a large reason for the rapid growth of the early Church. Even some Roman emperors took note of how the early Christians, even despite killing them, so very much cared for others.
So, what we have in modern medical care two thousand years later, actually has its origins in Jesus…and him summoning and sending…ordinary people to be extraordinarily caring beyond anything that people then could imagine. Those early Christians…in following Jesus in that way…opened up new possibilities…that gradually changed our world. It is very important to note this… because the modern secular world can give the impression…that it just created everything of value …all on its own.
It is also important to note this…because what easily happens when we listen to this particular gospel story about such extraordinary things…many of which would definitely fall into the category of mysterious miracles…is to just turn it off…because we may not know what to make of such things. Well, I can’t fix that for you this morning. I can’t quite fix it for myself either. Who knows quite what to make of such things. Except that I can say…that there are still…plenty of such things still happening…just not so much publicly known. So it is important that we don’t just write off the mysterious and miraculous…because when we do…then we also end up missing the observable historical fact…that in terms of hospitals and hospices alone…the fact that early Christians obeyed Jesus…despite whatever doubts they had…and they went out…and cared for people who were in the direst of straights…their obedience…actually changed things… and something new…entered into the world through them.
We don’t need to worry that we don’t know how to raise the dead or cast out demons…or what that even means today. We just need to believe Jesus enough…that if we dare…to show any kind of true caring for somebody else…especially for those who are really suffering…that it won’t be just our little efforts alone…but we may just become a pathway…for the Holy Spirit to flow into the most devastated places in peoples’ lives…and for something new to become possible…yet again.
As much as I don’t understand many mysteries of God, what I do understand is that that is what God is all about.
Make what you will of the story of blessed old Sarah…Abraham’s wife…laughing her head off…at the message that she would have a child…even after “it had ceased to be with Sarah after the manner of women” as the Bible puts it. Make what you will of that story…but notice that it is a story of God creating new possibilities, not only for them, but for generations to follow.
The former Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, makes this point well, when he writes about how we so often get the idea of God’s “almightiness” a bit wrong. God does not wield power like human emperors do…forcing their will upon their subjects…or as we might imagine ourselves being almighty by just doing whatever we wanted. Instead…after the event of Jesus Christ…the Church was able to recognize that what is truly almighty about God…is that “God always has the capacity to do something fresh and different, to bring something new out of a situation” (Tokens of Trust, p. 44).
Williams also went on to say: “God has—mysteriously—made a world in which what human beings do can [either] help or hinder what God achieves at any point in the world’s history…when we give God space, through our prayerful consent to and identification with what God wants, things may happen that were otherwise unpredictable” (p. 48). Because, “at the heart of the desperate suffering there is in the world, suffering we can do nothing to resolve or remove for good [my emphasis], there is an indestructible energy making for love. If we have grasped what Jesus is about, we can trust that this is what lies at the [very] foundation of everything” (p. 10).
And that is how, as Jesus said, the kingdom of heaven comes near. The summoning and sending by Jesus in the love of the Father is going to look different in different times and places. But you can be a part of creating new unforeseen possibilities…for a renewal of life…within the world’s pain…that is coming in the new era of Grace Church.
