The Gospel - Matthew 9:35-10:8(9-15)
Homily by the Rev. Dr. David Smith
The Kingdom at Hand
Be
careful what you pray for—you might just get it! You can see a little of
the dynamic of this bit of proverbial wisdom in today’s Gospel. Jesus tells the disciples to pray that more
workers would be sent out into the ripe harvest fields he saw all around
him.
If we
assume that the disciples took their master’s urging seriously and did indeed
pray for more workers, they soon discovered that God answered their prayers by
sending out the disciples themselves!
Why
and how Jesus authorizes such an important job to disciples who were clearly—at
least as of that moment—completely clueless is a puzzle. It’s like authorizing
some high school students to go out and start doing some brain surgery even
though they don’t have a clue about human anatomy, the nerve system, or
electrical impulses in synapse construction.
And yet Jesus tells these people to go declare, “The kingdom of heaven is near.” Even though they don’t have a clue, or understand the kingdom.
The
reason is pretty simple - urgency. As Jesus looked
around at his people, he saw a lot of what we observed last week….despair,
disease and death. He could see the
tombstones in their eyes, the absence of hope.
He could see their dislocation from everything that was supposed to give
them hope and identity.
They
no longer found great comfort and promise in their faith. It had become rote, legalistic and
dull. The glory days were over and they
could no longer summon any sense of God’s providence and direction.
So the
urgency of the situation propels the disciples into the boondocks saying, “The
kingdom of God is at hand” even before they are as fully informed as they might
otherwise have been.
And today we face
something very similar. In an age of
tolerance when overt missions, proselytizing, and evangelism is frowned upon by
the culture and sometimes even many in the church, it is a challenge to recover
something of the fire in Jesus’ belly and realize this is work that simply
needs to be done.
Jesus
is going around announcing the kingdom of God and authorizing his disciples to
do the same. He casts out demons left and right, heals all sorts of
disease and again tells the disciples to start doing the same. Yet this
sounds foreign even to us in the church. It’s not what we do. It feels presumptuous and a bit
fundamentalist. But it is that way only
if we look at this literally and try to imagine ourselves laying on hand and
making sick people well again.
However,
there are demons and diseases of all different types. Illiteracy is a demon, starvation is a disease, prejudice is a
demon, overt waste and silly consumerism is a disease.
And Jesus is telling all of us disciples to proclaim (which means live in and talk about) the kingdom of God being at hand.
It is difficult for us to imagine a kingdom that is not a country on the map-- with borders and visible signs that this particular place is different from all other places.
Most of us know what those markers are like. Cross the border into Canada and immediately lots of things look different: highway signs, street signs, and traffic lights. Everything is in kilometers and the lines painted on the roads may be a different color. In England the entire flow of traffic is reversed.
Therefore we think kingdoms are defined like that: by their different customs, signage, currency, and culture. So it is perhaps no surprise that when Christians pray for the coming of God's kingdom, we quietly assume that this is something that will happen only, or at least mostly, in the future; a far off place in a far off time. When God's kingdom comes, we will all know it because living inside the borders of that kingdom will be just as obvious as being in a different country.
But
although we do believe in the day of a New Creation that is yet to come, it is
wrong to relegate God's kingdom to any other place, dimension, or time other
than this place, this time.
Here’s
how a kingdom works. It is that realm where
the will of the monarch determines what happens. We all have our own little
kingdoms: those places where what we want happens. If we say it, it goes. Maybe
this is in our households, maybe it happens at work, but wherever we can say,
“That's the way I want it and so that's the way it is going to be," then
that is in a kingdom, a place where your influence rules and makes stuff
happen.
Do you
and I have the power to exorcise the demon of illiteracy? Yes.
Do we have the where with all to heal environmental demise? Yes.
Do we have the power to eradicate hunger? Yes. Do we know how a
person’s life can go from despair to destiny? Yes.
The
kingdom is present wherever a believer refuses to go along with some scheme
because she believes it is untruthful and that going along with it would make
her less faithful to Christ. The
kingdom of God is present wherever people choose the hard right against the
easy wrong.
Wherever
such things are done because people believe there is a cosmic Lord named Jesus, then right there and right
here and right now--the kingdom of God is at hand because the effective will of
God is calling the shots.
The
message we have to speak and live is the same now as it has always been: the
kingdom of God is at hand. People need to know
that this kingdom is real and available. They need to see the possibilities of
that kingdom in us. Because often people are too easily satisfied just to make
do with what is quick and easy and cheap to help them move forward in a grim
world.
But,
as C.S. Lewis once wrote, we are far too easily satisfied. We're like a child
who turns down an invitation for a day at the beach and chooses instead to stay
sitting in a dank slum alley making mud pies just because he can't imagine how
much better a day at the beach can be. "What could be better than making
these slimy mud pies?”
In the
name of the father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit,
Amen.