Exodus 19:2-8a
Romans 5:1-8
Matthew 9:35-10:23
Our scriptures today describe our job and what to expect as we perform it: our job is to bring people and God together, and we are to expect trouble while we try to do that. In our Old testament reading, God tells Moses to remind the Israelites of the dangerous path God has carried them through out of slavery in order that they might be a “priestly kingdom and a holy nation.” They were God’s chosen people, but not chosen because they were superior or to be superior; they were simply chosen to fulfill the task of transmitting the truth of God’s love to the world around them.
The gospel story this morning is about Jesus commissioning twelve people to travel around, bringing the loving, healing mercy of God to the people around them. Jesus warns the twelve that their message will be unpopular with some powerful people who will harm them, but to do their best to keep their message of hope alive. Like the twelve, we are still disciples of Jesus, and we still have the task of bringing God’s grace to our own world. Like the Israelites, God chooses us, not because we are superior or to be superior, but to humbly serve others as God’s priests: being channels of God’s love, joy, and peace to the world around us.
And so, just like the Israelites escaping from slavery and walking through the wilderness, and just like the twelve disciples upsetting harmful social and religious structures, we will encounter trouble as we live out our vocations as God’s ambassadors. One source of trouble is the fact that being associated with God in any way brings with it high expectations of moral behavior. We will all fail to meet those standards and so will be rightly branded as hypocrites, but it does not mean that we should not expect ourselves and others to strive for them. One thing we do need to work on is to have a better understanding of morality than the often encountered childish view of morality only meaning prudishness, but that is fodder for another sermon. But even the most pure and respectable disciples of Jesus will be offensive to many of the power-holders of our greed-driven culture, because by pointing to Jesus, the disciple points away from greed.
We in this building are not in much danger of physical abuse for following Jesus, unlike the people of Myanmar or Zimbabwe or North Korea. We are much more likely to be slowly numbed and seduced by the consumer culture around us, and to slowly substitute merchandise and military strength for God. We are prone to buy disposable, polluting items to try to fill our emptiness, rather than realize that God already fills us infinitely. We won’t have horrible persecutions that we can use to help us grow, as described by Paul in our second reading today. But we do have the choice of letting our daily minor trials and our occasional major catastrophes making us either bitter or sweeter. Choosing the sweeter option is not easy, but it does make our job as disciple of Jesus easier. We won’t always choose the sweeter option, at least not at first, but hopefully we will come around to it, and help each other choose it so that we may be better channels of God’s grace to our world, living out our vocations as a “priestly kingdom and a holy nation” as we travel the difficult road from slavery to our promised land, bringing as many others along as we can. AMEN