A Swing and a Miss: Matthew 10:7-14
Ordinary Time
Sermon series: Genuinely Curious
7 As you go, make this
announcement: ‘The kingdom of heaven has come near.’ 8 Heal
the sick, raise the dead, cleanse those with skin diseases, and throw out
demons. You received without having to pay. Therefore, give without demanding
payment. 9 Workers deserve to be fed, so don’t
gather gold or silver or copper coins for your money belts to take on your
trips. 10 Don’t take a backpack for the road or two
shirts or sandals or a walking stick. 11 Whatever
city or village you go into, find somebody in it who is worthy and stay there
until you go on your way. 12 When you go into a
house, say, ‘Peace!’ 13 If the house is worthy,
give it your blessing of peace. But if the house isn’t worthy, take back your
blessing. 14 If anyone refuses to welcome you or
listen to your words, shake the dust off your feet as you leave that house or
city. (CEB)
I
had a colleague in graduate school named EJ who was an absolute shock to my
system in terms of how he saw the world.
He was brash, incredibly sure of himself, queer with a ferocity I’d
rarely seen before, and absolutely committed to tearing up the systems by which
our staid academic department was run.
We were friends in roughly the same way you’d befriend a feral cat:
cautiously, hopefully, and with a certain knowledge of the tenuousness of the
connection.
We
had a number of disagreements over the course of that connection because both
of us were very sure we were always right.
We clashed on teaching styles, the purpose of academics, the relationship
between politics and education—it was the 2010s, so the landscape of the
conversation was a bit different but still very charged. No matter how much we disagreed, though, wee
understood that we were friends of a sort and tried to live in the spirit of
what I’d now think of as John Wesley’s summation, “In essentials, unity; in
non-essentials, liberty; and in all things, charity.”[1] It mattered to us to keep the relationship
and to learn from each other, even when we outright thought the other was a
fool.
A
year or so after we’d graduated, we were having a discussion on social media—a
warning sign, I know. It doesn’t matter
what it was over; in point of fact, I still think I’m right. What matters, though, is that EJ stated very
clearly that he was done with the conversation, he didn’t want to hear from me
about how I viewed it, he found how I was framing things hurtful, and if I kept
going, he was going to shut me out.
I
kept going. He blocked me on that site
and from his phone. We haven’t spoken
since, more than ten years now.
“The
Kingdom of Heaven has come near,” Jesus instructs His disciples to proclaim in
today’s snippet of the Gospel of Matthew.
Contextually, this is Jesus’ first big mission push in His ministry;
He’s just finished gathering all the disciples in chapter nine and, after a
couple of healing miracles, sees that the ministry needed is so much more than
what He alone can provide. So he sends
out the twelve to see if they’re ready to be the fledgling Church He has in
mind, giving them authority over the spiritual and the physical, telling them
to go to the people of Israel and call them back to the dream of a Kingdom
they’d been promised for so many years.
“It has come near,” Jesus tells them to say, sending them without money
but with the power to back up the notion that a reality where equity, healing,
and life abundant is here. Larry Broding
writes that the list of things the disciples can do is “particular signs of
Messianic times: healing, raising the dead, cleansing lepers, and exorcisms.
Signs that only the great prophets performed would become common place, and
they would be freely given [10:8]. Like the forgiveness of sin, all other signs
of the Kingdom were grace. This placed the Kingdom itself outside the economic
and social systems of the day, yet, directly in the lives of the people.”[2]
What
an incredible thing for the disciples to be offering—the promise is coming
true, the dream is becoming reality, the long-awaited Messiah is here! To offer such a world-changing message, Jesus
tells the disciples that they have to go in vulnerability. Ancient Near Eastern culture rested on
hospitality not only as a virtue but as an expectation—you were shaming your
ancestors if you didn’t properly take care of someone passing through. But Jesus asks for so much more than a cup of
water or some shade; He tells the disciples to bring nothing, to hope for
everything, to arrive at every new space with nothing more than the message of the
Kingdom in their mouths. Garry Wills
writes that, “If Jesus demands from his followers in general that they give up
the pursuit of wealth, he demands this even more stringently from those who
will spread his message. When he sends
out his followers, he not only forbids them to take any money with them, they
are not even to take along a pack bag (pera) to store something in for
the next day. They are to live from day
to day entirely dependent on what others will give them.”[3]
As
someone who just recently moved and is sorting through all the items I’ve
accrued and justifying why I own every single one of them, I can’t imagine
traveling for days or weeks or even months relying entirely on the generosity
of strangers. And it makes it so much
more impactful, then, when Jesus tells the disciples that they go with the word
of the Kingdom and that sets a boundary; do not compromise yourself or the
message for food or shelter.
“When
you go into a house, say, ‘Peace!’ If the house is worthy, give it your
blessing of peace. But if the house isn’t worthy, take back your blessing. If
anyone refuses to welcome you or listen to your words, shake the dust off your
feet as you leave that house or city.” The
“take back” is ἐπιστραφήτω (epistraphētō), a passive verb that’s closer to “let
it return.”[4] The message matters because it is bound up in
the expectations of connection, of healing, of all the things Jesus has
empowered the disciples to do to say that the shalom of the Kingdom is
here, and if a household doesn’t want to hear that? Let your peace return to you, let it fill you
and the space left by those who want nothing to do with the Kingdom you
proclaim.
How
terrifying to simply leave, though. Leaving
a house would have meant no washing up, no food, no shelter for the night, and
quite possibly a need to leave the town itself, which would open them up to the
unmercies of the bandits in the wilderness.
Leaving a house wasn’t safe, but Jesus’ command to His disciples is
rooted in the awareness that staying in one that did not welcome them was
unsafe in a much different way.
Our
sermon series for the month of August is “Genuinely Curious,” a series about
deliberately building bridges of conversation.
It’s a topic so many have been asking about as our society fractures and
faction-builds over everything with a ferocity unmatched in recent
history. Everything comes with a side to
choose and defend, a battleground of allegiances over everything from our
favorite television shows to our understanding of global geopolitics. You have asked how do we build bridges, which
is a great question and one so intricate that we’re taking a full month to
unpack it.
Perhaps
odd, then, that we start with how not to build bridges. This isn’t accidental; before we learn to
build bridges, we must be able to set with ourselves the hard limits of when
the building destroys us and whatever relationship we hoped to have. There are some times—hard, grief-inducing
times—when the best and most genuine thing to do for a conversation is to walk
away from it because who we are and how we navigate the world cannot be
comprised for the sake of connection. This
is in the realm of bedrock principles like the quote from author Robert Jones,
Jr: “We can disagree and still love each other unless your disagreement is
rooted in my oppression and denial of my humanity and right to exist.”[5] Jesus is teaching His disciples before they
set foot on the path that staying where the core of what matters to them is not
welcome isn’t going to help their ministry but will drain them; my colleague EJ
was trying to tell me that it didn’t matter what we were fighting about so much
as it mattered that I wasn’t hearing his limits and boundaries or respecting
his right to set them. To be genuinely
curious, we must first be genuine with ourselves about what we’re willing to
tolerate from ourselves and the other person or people in order to preserve the
connection.
For
your conversations, that boundary is yours to set. Your staying in a house and not shaking off
the dust, your allowing your peace to remain with others, will look entirely
different than mine, or EJ’s, or anyone else’s.
Others may tell you it’s too much or too little, but only you can name
where the line of compromise is for you.
But you must name one, even if only tentatively in the privacy of your
own soul. Staying in a place that
devalues you, remaining in conversation that dismisses you, continuing to
extend yourself when no one is meeting you anywhere near the middle—this is quite
literally wasting your time but also your peace. God’s love of you is not contingent on how
many friends or relatives or coworkers you remain in contact with; God’s grace
for you is not rescinded if you have to step back from a relationship, even if
the other person feels put out. Lord
knows I wish I could handle that last conversation with EJ better if only so
there was some form of goodbye to the years we spent pushing each other, but I
did not listen to his limits and he took back his peace because I made it clear
the entirety of him was not welcome.
That is my sin to acknowledge, and maybe you have your own of where you
were the one who did not welcome the one bearing a message of something new,
something different. Perhaps you are the
one who has had to leave, shaking the dust off your feet, the grief and anger
of loss following behind you like a borrowed cloak.
The Kingdom
of God is grace, grace abundant, grace unending, and there is no grace where
there is no accountability. To build a
bridge, you must build a foundation; no conversation will survive if the grounding
aspect of it is perseverance alone. Grace for yourself, grace for your peace,
grace for your worthiness of being a person beloved by God: this must be part
of the foundation, or the bridge will crush you beneath its weight.
It is
Communion Sunday, the time of returning to this bedrock ritual that connects us
all along the chain of ancestors and descendants in this vast faith. In The United Methodist Church, the table of
communion is open to all—we don’t believe that you must adhere to a certain
doctrine or have certain membership or even have ever been in a church before
to receive this grace of God. But we do
understand that the table is a holy connection rooted in an event followed
immediately by betrayal; we understand that relationship built on half-truths
will not survive, that bread broken together with secret hearts will taste sour
on our tongues. One of the services of
our communion liturgy has the invitation, “Christ our Lord invites to his table
all who love him, who earnestly repent of their sin and seek to live in peace
with one another.”[6]
“The
Kingdom of Heaven has come near,” Jesus tells the disciples, the disciples tell
the people, the gospel writers tell us.
Grace has come near; hope has come near; healing has come near; mercy has
come near; peace has come near. Do you
bring peace with you, in you? Do you
receive peace, the peace that encircles the message that the Kingdom is here
and we are also still building it, that Christ’s miracles are less about
illness of the body and more about reparation of the soul? Do you seek to build bridges to places that
will uplift and redeem you and to let crumble the bridges to places that demean
and dismiss you? Do you recognize that
every person with whom you speak has this right as well?
It’s not
easy; important things never are. It’s
vulnerable work, this kind of bridge-building.
Thank God we do not do it alone, for the peace of Christ is with us, now
and always. Amen.
[3]
Wills, What Jesus Meant (Penguin Group: New York, 2006), 43.
[5]
Often mistakenly attributed to James Baldwin; see the Snopes unpacking: https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/james-baldwin-disagree-love/
[6] “A Service of Word and Table I,” The United Methodist Hymnal (Nashville: The United Methodist Publishing House, 1989), 7.
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