Your Part
A Homily on Matthew 9:35-10:23
by Griff Martin
For the Second Sunday of Ordinary Time (and the Fourteenth Sunday of Online Worship)
June 14, 2020
*This document comes from an oral manuscript.
Welcome to the Second Sunday of Ordinary Time. It’s important that we know where we are in the liturgical calendar, in particular these days when we are not always sure where we are on the daily calendar.
For the last few months we have been in the more proper high season of church, where we celebrate the birth, life, ministry, death and resurrection of Christ and then the gift of the spirit and the birth of the church. These are the events which we orient the rest of the year around. Now we enter into what is known as Ordinary Time…. I always think of it like this: starting in Advent we study the life of Jesus and then we get to ordinary time and the story becomes ours. What are you going to do with that?
Which means Ordinary Time is about figuring out what do our lives look like now? It’s a question that if we are honest we have been pondering for the last 14 weeks, so this season is a very fitting time to ask the question: what does life look like now?
It’s a question that today’s text helps us to answer.
But I want to start somewhere very different -- a space that is about a nine-hour drive from us, the City Club in Baton Rouge. In many ways this space is not any different than any other type of club, members pay a fee and there is dining, parties, meeting rooms, etc. It is located in downtown Baton Rouge and because of that it’s a very popular place for business lunches and happy hours after work. Many of my community were members there and it was a place that I went often. It had a great seafood salad and it was the prime spot to watch one of the big Mardi Gras parades, the Spanish Town Parade. It meant nothing more beyond that to me, at first.
Until one day I was having lunch with one of my favorite church people there, a woman who had a very successful professional career, very high up in the banking world. But I loved her because I did not know that at first, what I knew at first was she was the most comfortable, laid-back person who made the best white chocolate bread pudding and who you could sit with and talk to for hours on her back porch. She was always at church but she took very few leadership roles, even though I knew she was a valuable resource who we had so much to learn from and who could lead us so well.
So one day we were at lunch, at the City Club, and I was once again trying to persuade her that when she was again nominated for leadership (as she was every year), she would be so good and needed. She looked at me and said, “Griff, do you want to know why I say no to church all the time?” And then she explained to me why she was willing to serve on the leadership board for the City Club (along with a few other groups in town)…. “Griff, I serve in places that will let me bring what I learned here in the City Club along with me… the Rule of 5….”
She then went on to explain that the rule was simple: if someone found a problem or a cause or wanted to do something -- create something -- change something, they would bring it to leadership and they already knew what the reply would be, “great…. go find 5 other people who want to join you here, create a plan and bring it back so we can bless it.”
She explained that she did not want to waste any time in any group that did not 1) allow its membership to do that actual work and more importantly 2) was a membership that was actually willing to do the work.
And then she politely said, “Griff, pastor our church into a community that is willing to do the Rule of 5, create our community into that and I am on board… until then I want to use my spiritual energy actually doing the work of Jesus instead of just talking about it, so I am better to be in the pews doing the work and not at a committee meeting.”
Amen. Sermon could end there, couldn’t it?
Today we have this odd text and I will tell you that at first glance, I was not sure why it was chosen for today’s lectionary and what it had to teach us. It’s from Matthew 9 and it’s the first time Jesus has sent the disciples out.
There is a lot of this text that I don’t like because it goes against the inclusive All People nature that is the heart of who we are and I don’t know what to do with that to be honest, but looking at it I saw this… in trying to figure that part out, in arguing with Jesus and trying to frankly make Jesus more theologically accurate… I was missing a really important part of the text.
Sometimes we do that, we focus all our attention on something minor, something we don’t like and we do that to avoid dealing with what is really calling out and speaking to us…. We do this with the Bible but we do it with politics, friendship, emotions… we are masters in majoring on the minors.
Because when we focus on trying to make Jesus easier to hear, we miss a line that is incredibly telling about the character of Jesus…It’s the second sentence of the text: “When Jesus saw the crowds, he had compassion on them, because they were harassed and helpless, like sheep without a shepherd.”
Jesus is going about doing his ministry, he has called the twelve, there have been miracles and casting out of demons and there have been parables… people are starting to see what all this Jesus stuff is truly about and people are drawn to the work of Jesus, it’s deep and meaningful and it connects and it tells a truth that their hearts have been wanting to hear for a long time, they are drawn to Jesus hopefully for the same reasons we are still drawn to Jesus.
And Jesus pays attention…. This is one of the most important things we can learn from Jesus, how important it is to pay attention. How to see people and to really see the souls of people. It’s a longing we have rediscovered today and perhaps that longing will make us never again take that gift for granted.
What Jesus sees is a people who are tired, exhausted, harassed, worn out, at the end of their rope, helpless and pay attention to what the text tells us about Jesus, “Jesus had compassion on them.”
Jesus sees a need.
Now I want to give you a bit of grace here…. Jesus saw a need. I think it’s always important to remember that when Jesus ascended, when Jesus gave us the Spirit, there were still a lot of needs, Jesus did not heal and fix everyone… there was a lot of brokenness still left… so know that you can’t heal and handle every need.
I think this is important because we see too much suffering today… with the invention of technology and 24-hour live access to anywhere on the planet, we are overwhelmed with need and not one of us can deal with all that. I realized this a few years ago when there was an image that went viral of a young refugee child who had drowned and their lifeless body on the shore. That image wrecked me but not in a compassionate way, in a paralyzing I did not know what to do or even why life had any value way.
Today we have a name for this, compassion fatigue. It’s the condition of having seen so much suffering that it has overwhelmed and paralyzed us to inaction, a numbing of sorts.
This is part of paying attention -- it’s knowing what is yours to do. It’s one of the key lines we learn from our beloved addiction movement theology, “God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can and the wisdom to know the difference.” All of our addictions (and we all have addiction) -- the ones we wear outside our skin with alcohol and drugs and the ones we wear inside with food, power, image, sex, popularity… I think so much of our addictions are about compassion fatigue and our numbing.
In the last few weeks I think a lot of us have become more aware of these and aware of our numbing strategies and are starting to finally deal with them.Which is good work. Needed work. And it will help us to better pay attention.
Because part of paying attention is knowing what is yours to do…. You can’t do it all, so what is yours to do? I think a good question is always what moves you to tears, genuine tears? Start there.
Jesus pays attention and notices the people following Jesus are worn out, helpless. Jesus has compassion for them.
Jesus turns to the disciples, a little side bar conversation here: “The harvest is plentiful but the workers are few. Ask the Lord of the harvest, therefore, to send out workers into his harvest field.”
Jesus sees a need, he brings the need to God in prayer, in mindfulness in his heart and soul, and then he gathers his 12 and says “Go out…. This work is too much for one person, it has to be shared.”
And then Jesus offers some actually rather amazing psychology, “go out and do this work, but know your boundaries.” Go and do the work but do so protecting your heart because if you go get hurt doing this work, well, there is the old truth… hurt people hurt people and doing this work takes strong boundaries.
And then he sends the 12 off to do the work that no one person can do alone. That is our Jesus.
So why are we given this text right now? Maybe it’s because as we start Ordinary Time and we learn to do the work of Jesus, we need to be reminded of how he sent his disciples out. And maybe this text is really important this particular year because not only are we struggling with how we are going to do the work of Jesus, we are struggling with what the work of Jesus looks like as we create a new normal.
So my suggestion is that maybe this time the new normal could actually be faithfulness to the words and way of Jesus, to the authentic and true Kingdom of God with justice, grace, equality, forgiveness, compassion, sharing, vulnerability and love. Above all these things, love.
And perhaps to get there, we listen to Jesus.
If you will allow, a new translation of this text, The Gospel of Matthew paraphrased by Griff in the time of Coronavirus, the Gospel for today, the Gospel for creating a new way that is really an old way…. Close your eyes and hear this anew:
“Jesus looking over the world, a world paralyzed by a newly discovered virus which had devastated the world in terms of economics, a world that was already unstable and so vulnerable and seemingly so close to collapse, a world that looked lost and alone, in need.
Jesus looked at that world and it once again broke his heart, as our world is apt to do. Muttering aloud Jesus said to everyone and to no one, ‘Still like a sheep without a shepherd, and what are my followers -- my people -- doing?”
So once again, never giving up his hope in people, Jesus called out and calls us…
"Because I have never left you, you have all the power in the world, because you have love your power in unlimited… so go and create a new world, create a new world by paying attention, pay attention to what breaks your heart and find the one thing that is yours to do and do it, commit fully there, don’t just make a call to try to get someone else to do the work, don’t just contribute to a cause… find the one thing that breaks your heart, that calls out to you, that one place that you were created to give all and then give all. Find the others who are called to join you, who share your passion and do the work.
Don’t fool yourself into thinking you can do it all. Don’t bounce from issue to issue and neglect your calling. Don’t try to offload your work to someone else. Do what is yours to do, no more but certainly no less.
And protect your heart. Don’t get overwhelmed. Put up boundaries. Find a community that will fill your heart and soul as quickly as you are giving them away.
You can do all this because you have the power of Christ, which enables you to do far more than you could ever do on your own.
So go and do it, create the church, the city, the state and the world that has been longing to be created for so long now.”
Amen and amen.
*artwork: "Call of the Disciples" from the St. John's Bible
*artwork: "Call of the Disciples" from the St. John's Bible
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