Sunday
June 18
The Gospel of the Kingdom
By Marsh Chapel
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The authority of Jesus’ ministry is today transferred to disciples, ancient and modern.
Change is afoot, as James Baldwin eloquently sang: ‘Nothing is fixed forever and forever, it is not fixed. The earth is always shifting and the light is always changing, the sea does not cease to grind down the rock. Generations do not cease to be born, and we are responsible to them, because they are the only witnesses we have. The sea rises, the light fails, lovers cling to one another, and children cling to us. The moment we cease to hold each other, the moment we break faith with each other, the sea engulfs us, and the light goes out’.
The authority of Jesus’ ministry is today transferred to disciples, ancient and modern.
Today we meet Jesus on the hinges of the first Gospel, as the flow of the Gospel swings from Lord to apostles. In the announcement of this good news is included a measure of empowerment for each one of us. This is the kind of day on which, for once, for the first time, or for once in a long time, we may be seized by a sense of divine nearness. The kingdom of heaven is at hand. The kingdom of heaven has come near to you. When that sentence makes a home in a heart, or in the heart of a community, a different kind of life ensues.
Capture in the mind’s eye for a moment the sweep of the gospel read earlier. First. Jesus has been about, teaching and preaching and healing. His compassion abounds. The endless range of needs about him he unblinkingly faces. Second. Jesus calls and sends the disciples, and empowers them, and by extension he empowers us. The gospel will have been read thus, as it is thus read by us. He instructs and directs them in their work, where to go, what to do, how to be. Learning, virtue, and piety
together. Start at home, heal the sick, travel light. Third. Jesus expects and forecasts for them a less than utter victory in their work. They are to know how to shake dust from their feet. Fourth. Jesus warns that there will be a price to pay. The discipline that is the hallmark of the disciple here is named. Shall we not remember Jesus ministry? Shall we ignore the call and power offered here? Shall we forget the directions given? Shall we turn a deaf ear to the caution about consequences? We pray not. The main sweep of the gospel today is clear as a bell. Jesus gives power to his disciples. To you, and to me.
And yes, there is devil in the details of the passage. The material in our reading sends us into foreign territory. We have other words, whether only modern or both modern and more accurate, to describe unclean spirits. We recognize that the list of apostles, or disciples differs from other lists. (A free for all!) We are uncomfortably aware that Jesus himself, in other Bible pages, goes both to the Gentiles and to the Samaritans, and regularly and infamously so. We do not regularly meet leprosy. We carry no gold in our belts, nor silver, nor even copper. We are not pilgrim peregrinators who arrive in town and camp on a doorstep. We sense that the hard distinctions we make between disciples and apostles were not made by Matthew. We do not readily conjure up the vision of Sodom and Gommorah. We sense that the time of Matthew and his community’s persecutions under Domitian, 90ce, may have colored all or a part of this passage.
Nor are we to think that we should buy tunics or money belts or sandals or travel through towns in Israel or prefer judgment fall on Gomorrah. A confusion here will allow us to avoid the clear call of Christ upon our consciences in the main flow of the gospel. For the main point is crystal clear. To follow Jesus means…to take up where he and his earliest companions left off.
Do you love Jesus? Then you must do something for him.
Jesus has taught, preached and healed. This ministry he has bequeathed to his disciples, his apostles. We have been seized by the confession of the Church; we are Christians. Now his ministry, this ministry, is ours. Which part of this ministry draws you?
Heal the sick, raise the dead, cleanse lepers, cast out demons. It may be that healing the sick has a medical degree of meaning, that raising the dead is about pastoral ministry in the Northeast where the church awaits
resurrection, that cleansing lepers is about including those on the outside of the social fence, that casting out demons is reminding people not to fear, not to fear. Good change can come. Real change is real hard but comes when real people really work at it. You could, rightly, challenge the interpretation. But the questions stands.
Where does your passion meet the world’s need?
What are you ready to risk doing, to plan for the worst, hope for the best, then do your most, and leave all the rest?
What are you going to give yourself to, to offer your ability, affability, and availability?
Who calls you, who called you, to your own real life, your ‘ownmost’ self?
Last spring, we honored our marvelous BU Chief Health Officer, Judy Platt, a physician who test by test got us through COVID. She mentioned that a book on her family table called to her, over the years, to enter medicine. A book about Albert Schweitzer.
A child organ prodigy, a youthful New Testament scholar, a young dean in his Alsatian theological seminary, a man whose New Testament books and articles I used with profit in my own dissertation a few years ago, a person whose own story has difficulties, Schweitzer’s life changed on the reading of a Paris Mission Society Magazine, and we went into medicine.
As a scholar, he wrote, of this passage, let us mark the words: He comes to us as one unknown, without a name, as of old, by the lakeside, He came to those (men) who knew Him not. He speaks to us the same word, ‘Follow me!’ and sets us to the tasks which He has to fulfill for our time. He commands. And to those who obey Him, whether they be wise or simple, He will reveal himself in the toils, the conflicts, the sufferings which they shall pass through in His fellowship, and, as an ineffable mystery, they shall learn in their own experience Who He is.’ (QHJ, 389).
What he wrote of Jesus became his life. He left organ and seminary, studied medicine, and practiced in Africa for 35 years, calling his philosophy, ‘a reverence for life’.
Vocation leads to God. A decision about vocation leads to nearness to the divine.
Or perhaps you remember young woman from Rockford Illinois, Jane Addams. She grew up 140 years ago, in a time and place unfriendly, even hostile, to the leadership that women might provide. But somehow she discovered her mission in life. And with determination she traveled to the windy city and set up Hull House, the most far reaching experiment in social reform that American cities had ever seen. Hull House was born out of a social vision, and nurtured through the generosity of one determined woman. Addams believed fervently that we are responsible for what happens in the world. So Hull House, a place of feminine community and exciting spiritual energy, was born. Addams organized female labor unions. She lobbied for a state office to inspect factories for safety. She built public playgrounds and staged concerts and cared for immigrants. She became politically active and gained a national following on the lecture circuit. She is perhaps the most passionate and most effective advocate for the poor that our country has ever seen.
Of her work Addams wrote, let us mark the words: “The blessings which we associate with a life of refinement and cultivation must be made universal if they are to be permanent…The good we secure for ourselves is precarious and uncertain, is floating in midair, until it is secured for all of us and incorporated into our common life.”
Christopher Lasch explained once the puzzle of Jane Addams’ fruitful generosity, let us mark the words: “Like so many reformers before her, she had discovered some part of herself which, released, freed the rest.”
Is there a part of your soul ready today to be released, that then will free the rest of you? Is there a backwoods, a quiet trail, a hidden meadow of meaning in your spirit, ready today to be the scene and site of such a release?
You may reminisce this morning, Father’s day, about one or more who raised you. And not all parents are the natural sort. Some are relational dads and moms. Our dad died on this date, June 18, 13 years ago, and his generation.
He and his companions in the ministry lived in the openness, the magnanimous freedom of grace, the freedom for which Christ sets us free, on which we are to stand fast, and not to be enslaved again. Faith is not a prize be won, but a gift to be received.
He lived convinced of the lasting worth, the ultimate value of persons and personality.
He lived and taught that love means taking responsibility.
He placed the highest premiums on marriage, family, children, and friends.
He had a rare, great capacity for friendship.
He could be restless with and critical of those perspectives which narrow the wideness of God’s mercy. And he could be restless with and critical of those practices in personal and institutional life which did not become the gospel, were not becoming to the gospel.
When we said, ‘that’s not fair’, he replied, ‘whoever told you life was fair’?
He trusted that wherever there is a way, there is Christ, wherever there is truth, there is Christ, wherever there is life, there is Christ.
He honored his own conscience and heart, and expected others to do the same. The conscience of the believer, he trusted, is inviolable.
Many of you remember today those who helped you become a person, a real human being, and even a disciple, with toughness in love and love in toughness.
And as I heard him say, circa 1990, during a ministers’ meeting in the Oneida church sanctuary, ‘because I am loved, I can love’.
Or, you may muse today, alert to costs in discipleship, about Juneteenth. Andrea Taylor Senior Diversity Officer at our beloved BU has taught us so much about the holiday, and about her generation’s marches toward freedom, encouraging us to read and learn. Say, Arthur Ashe’s brilliant memoir, Days of Grace. Say, Howard Thurman’s With Head and Heart. Say Cornellian Edward Baptist’s towering monograph, the single best available work in the area: The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism. (He reminds us that we dwell in the tenth floor of a building whose first three stories were constructed with stolen land and enslaved labor, free land and free labor, for the benefit of anyone who had or used money, then or now.) Say Charlayne Hunter-Gault, My People.
One day nine years ago, here at Marsh Chapel after a winter funeral, later at the collation following the service, Charlayne Hunter Gault introduced herself. You may remember her, as we did, from her many and fine contributions to the PBS News Hour, with Jim Lehrer. She said, ‘I need to talk to you later about the 23 Psalm’, which I had used in the service. I was so pleased to meet her, and then so worried that I had somehow offended her, or that I had misrecited the pslam, or other, that the collation time passed anxiously. It needn’t have done. She wanted to recall a memory. A memory of her younger self. A self that heard a voice saying, ‘Follow Me’. At 18. The first African American to integrate the University of Georgia, 1961. The daughter of a Baptist minister. Alone in a big place, a strange place, a new place. Walking home the third night, there were taunts and threats. The University that day had even suggested she might want to go home, at least for a while. She went into her room, alone. She closed the door. She turned out the lights. And she waited, until quiet came. And then—it was the only thing that came to her mind—the prayer of David in Psalm 23 came to her. And she spoke the psalm, alone, afraid, uncertain, at night. ‘Surely goodness and mercy shall follow me all the days of my life, and I shall dwell in the house of the Lord, forever.’ Surely goodness and mercy shall follow me all the days of my life, and I shall dwell in the house of the Lord, forever.’
Do you love Jesus? Then you must do something for him. Do you love Jesus? Then you will want to do something for him.
-The Rev. Dr. Robert Allan Hill, Dean of Marsh Chapel
