The Fifth Sunday after Pentecost Genesis 18: 1 – 15, (21: 1 – 7)
The Rev. Bambi Willis Matthew
“See, I am sending you out like
sheep into the midst of wolves;”
Matthew
In November of 2003, the young people in a small parish just outside of Washington, D.C., were invited to church one Friday evening to consider what being a disciple of Christ means. The evening was designed to encourage the youth of the parish to live into their faith in the midst of a world that would challenge their beliefs over and over again. The program for the evening included three adult parishioners who shared their personal journeys of living out their baptismal promises.
One woman that evening shared an
especially dramatic story. Her name was
Juanita Moore and Juanita was in college, she told those listening in the
sanctuary that night, preparing to go home for Christmas when she got a phonecall telling her both her parents had been
killed. A bomb planted under their bed
had exploded and neither had survived the blast. Juanita was the daughter of civil rights
activist, Harry T. Moore. Moore, who
with his wife was a teacher in the
Juanita had put the kids on notice: Beware. Discipleship comes with a risk.
In our gospel reading from Matthew this morning we hear Jesus giving the disciples a brief tutorial on discipleship. “Then Jesus summoned his twelve disciples and gave them authority over unclean spirits, to cast them out, and to cure every disease and sickness,” Matthew writes. And then Jesus sends them out to “cure the sick, raise the dead, cleanse the lepers” and “cast out demons,” proclaiming the good news, “The kingdom of heaven has come near.” And then Jesus tells the disciples, “See, I am sending you out like sheep into the midst of wolves” adding, “You will be dragged before governors and kings because of me, as a testimony to them and the gentiles.” Out of compassion for the “harassed and helpless” crowds, Jesus sends out the disciples to bear witness to God’s love for God’s beloved creation and puts the disciples on notice: “you will be hated by all because of my name.” Beware, Jesus warns the disciples, not everyone is going to like what you are doing. In fact, you may die because of me.
Harry Moore’s battle against racial injustice is dramatic and sobering. Most of us I pray will not encounter a call to act in ways that might threaten our very lives. But all of us I would suggest will be called to take risks in faith. We take a risk in faith whenever we perceive a nudge from God and act on it. The risk factor comes when we ascribe the nudge to God.
Every Sunday we affirm our belief in God, Father, Son and Holy Spirit. We confess that God brought the world and all of us into existence. We confess that God loves the world, indeed died for the world. And we affirm that God calls us to share in God’s work of loving this world, of bringing life not death into the world by the power of the Holy Spirit. And all of that is fine and good until God calls us to do something. And God calls to us in any number of ways – through the reading of scripture, through trusted confidants and mostly by the churning of our own guts. And then the rubber hits the road. Are we sensing the movement of the Holy Spirit or simply the “devices and desires of our own hearts”?
You and I can never be certain we are doing God’s will. We will always live with the haunting possibility that we may be wrong. On the other hand, if we dismiss those nudges, we risk forfeiting the peace God longs for us – peace in the Hebrew sense of “shalom” – of completeness, of feeling right in the world. Harry Moore could not have been at peace in the world had he not challenged the injustice he saw around him.
Now any time we say: God made me do it! (and in the Episcopal church we usually do not say that. Rather we say we have been “called.” Same thing.), we bear witness to a will other than our own, an active and unseen presence moving within us and among us, the Holy Spirit, the Spirit of God. Trusting that Spirit exposes all of our fears, all of our doubts and all of our desires to be masters of our own fate.
Every encounter with the Holy Spirit calls us into question, reveals our wills, our egos, our desires for security and comfort and the esteem of others. An encounter with the Holy Spirit is an encounter with all the “good” reasons we have for dismissing God’s claim on our lives. When God calls us toward new possibilities, God is at the same time asking us to leave something behind - maybe our fear of failure or the expectations of our family and friends or the comfort we all take in the familiar and predictable. When we follow in faith, we will be leaving something behind, just as Abraham and Sarah left the land of their birth when God said: “Go to the land I will show you.” To get to a new land we must leave some other land behind.
The risk of faith will be different for each of us. But something will be left behind, something will have to go. Something we think is important to us. Something we think we cannot live without. Something God, though, believes we can well do without.
Risk taking is not an especially prized virtue in our culture. We are encouraged in our culture not to take risks, to keep ourselves – our lives, our limbs and our bank accounts - protected against all possible threats. We live at a time and in a place where safety is an ever present concern and new threats to our safety appear every day. We would be hideously naïve were we not to appreciate the evils of the world.
But I do have to wonder if safety cannot become an idol. Are we at risk of being deaf to God’s call in a vain attempt to secure our safety in the world? True, we are well advised not to throw caution to the winds; on the other hand, evil is real and we simply do not have the power to overcome it. Only God has the power to “deliver us from evil,” in the words of the Lord’s Prayer. And until God comes again, until God brings to a close this age, our safety in this world will always be threatened. Do we really want to live lives of quiet desperation or do we want to live trusting in the will of a gracious and loving God?
That night in that small Episcopal parish, Juanita Moore was not the only speaker. Another parishioner spoke, a middle aged man who was active in the parish. That man spoke of his journey with the Wiccans, a group some have labeled as adherents of witchcraft. The speaker shared his experience, subsequent disillusionment and return to the church. Afterwards, a woman in attendance shared her dismay that the young people of the parish were being exposed to such pagan practices. She thought the youth would have been better served had he not shared his story.
How odd I thought that we want to protect our youth from stories about witchcraft but feel no tension in telling our youth they could be killed for their beliefs. Of course we do not believe that our children or anyone else’s will be killed for their faith. We do not believe we will be killed or meet rejection or be dismissed or suffer any kind of loss because of our faith. In light of the gospel this morning, I wonder what all that says about how well or ill we are daring to live out our faith.