4th Sunday after Pentecost
(“And Abraham looked up and saw a ram, caught in a thicket by its horns. Abraham went and took the ram and offered it up as a burnt offering instead of his son. So Abraham called that place ‘The LORD will provide’; as it is said to this day, ‘On the mount of the LORD it shall be provided.’” Gen. 22:13-14)
(“For the wages of sin is death, but the free gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord.” Rom. 6:23)
(“‘Whoever welcomes you welcomes me, and whoever welcomes me welcomes the one who sent me.’” Matt. 10:40)
The reading from Genesis 22 for today is intentionally difficult for us to read. It is hard for us not to take it personally when we hear again the story of Abraham’s almost-sacrifice of his son Isaac. How can we not be appalled at the thought that our loving God would ever ask a parent to sacrifice their only child as a test of faith? But by empathizing with Abraham’s anguish, we get just a hint of what God went through to redeem us. As Paul reminds us in the Romans 6 passage, sin is very serious – in fact, it’s very deadly! – business, and God takes it very personally. In the person of Jesus Christ, God’s only Son, God himself takes on the burden of our sins and bears them on the cross, and in turn God expects us to take Jesus personally, and to personally take Jesus to the world through our every word and action.
We are the MESSAGE, as well as the MESSENGERS, of Christ.
But this level of personal involvement can be hard for us to wrap our heads and hearts around in our modern, 21st century society. After all, our society is one in which we’ve come to place a high value on objectivity and impersonal decision-making.
We put images of “blind Justice” in our courthouses, to remind us all that in the U.S.A., everybody is supposed to be equal under the law, with no partiality shown to one person over another. Only the facts, the laws, and the merits of the case being brought are supposed to be considered. Of course, there are far too many ways in which people are not all equal to begin with, so we try to even some of the scales by having public defenders for the indigent accused, or by setting age or I.Q. limits, below which persons may not be held equally responsible or punished with equal severity. And still, gender, ethnicity, poverty, education, where you live and who you know all play far too large a role in determining who among us get treated “more equal than others.” But the goal and the ideal seems to be to try take personal connections and personal biases out of the equation, as much as we can.
Similarly, in our political system, the ideal is that our elected representatives and officials should give equal access and consideration to the needs of all their constituents, regardless of personal friendships, political party, or the size of the campaign contribution. The reality is very different, as we all recognize, but the ideal remains: there’s a degree of consensus on the idea that money shouldn’t buy influence, or that people in power shouldn’t play favorites, even though they obviously and flagrantly do so.
This is in contrast with smaller, tribal societies, where there is usually an expectation that the leader, chief, or headman, should make distinction between persons – the leader should know who is who and what is what, and should dispense both justice and goods in a very subjective, personal way, like a parent who loves their children equally, but also recognizes that their children are very different from one another and have different strengths and needs. For those smaller-scale societies, the belief is that there can be no “one size fits all” set of laws, because people’s needs and gifts will not always be the same, and the chief is expected to be aware of that fact and ‘cut his cloth’ to fit the person(s) involved.
But large-scale societies, industrialized societies like ours cannot afford to operate like that, cannot afford to be that up close and personal with everyone in their society. No one merely human leader can truly know and understand what’s best for every unique individual and be trusted to act upon it, and so we put in systemic checks and balances to try to keep those in power from taking what should belong to everyone and giving it to only a favored few. We strive to ensure that “with liberty and justice for all” is as impartial as we can make it.
So, there’s a sense in which the Scriptures for today, and particularly the brief gospel reading from Matthew, fly in the face of some cherished ideals in our modern society. In Matthew, Jesus makes the gospel very personal, collapsing the space that separates the disciples from Jesus, and therefore from God. “If they receive you, they receive me,” he says, “and if they receive me, they receive the God who sent me.” It’s all VERY personal.
Today’s passage is the last of Matthew chapter 10, which has been entirely devoted to Jesus’ instructions to the disciples prior to sending them out on their mission, but in the very next chapter and verse, Matthew 11:1, we read “Now when Jesus had finished instructing his twelve disciples, he went on from there to teach and proclaim his message in their cities.” After all that instruction and preparation, the narrative goes on with Jesus’ own ministry, without any report of what happened during or as a result of the disciples’ mission (which Mark and Luke both cover)? It’s almost as though the disciples’ mission at that time is irrelevant to Matthew’s current concerns. And I think that’s true.
You see, for Matthew, it’s not about what the disciples did, back then; it’s about us, what we’re going to do here and now. It’s about our mission. That’s because it’s not just a message, a set of nice ideas or principles or beliefs, that we’re bringing to the world. Instead, it’s the person of Christ, in us, that we bring with us. And whoever gives even a cup of water in the name of being a disciple will not lose their reward.
As Christians, we know that names do matter. As Christians, it is not our own personal worth and achievements that we ultimately rely upon, but the power and the grace of Jesus Christ, whose name we bear. Whoever receives one of us, receives him, and whoever receives him, receives the God who sent him.
Paul perhaps takes this a little further in Romans 6. He emphasizes that we are never completely free agents, completely self-employed. We are either servants of sin or servants of God, depending on where our hearts lie.
If our hearts are with God, if we are seeking to act in the name of God, then even if we sometimes fail, we know that we have the reward, the gift of eternal life through Jesus Christ.
But if our hearts are given to the pursuit of selfish pleasure, then while we may feel that we are free from the demands of righteousness, we are actually enslaving ourselves to sin. Not only are we not free then, but what advantage do we get from being able to indulge our lowest instincts and desires? None, Paul says. All we get is the standard salary Sin pays to all its employees: namely, betrayal and death.
As Paul puts it in Romans 6:23, “For the wages of sin is death, but the free gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord.” Sin offers no health plan, and certainly no retirement benefits. Whereas, those who seek to do God’s will discover they have received the ultimate gift, eternal life.
It matters in whose name we act, not how effective or productive we seem to be. Christ does not demand that all those who bear his name be able to feed five thousand with a few loaves, or solve all the world’s problems immediately. If all you can do is give someone a cup of cold water when they are hot and thirsty, you will still not lose your reward. If all you can do is hold the hand of someone who is dying, or visit the lonely, or contribute a few coins to feed the hungry, and you do all of this in the name of Christ, then you receive Christ’s reward. You receive the payment Christ has already earned for himself and his followers — forgiveness of sin and life eternal.
Mystery writer and theologian Dorothy L. Sayers put it this way in her essay “The Dogma IS the Drama”: In Jesus, “God has himself gone through the whole of human experience, from the trivial irritations of family life and the cramping restrictions of hard work and lack of money to the worst horrors of pain and humiliation, defeat, despair, and death.” That’s personal! That’s a message that has to be lived, and demonstrated daily by our care for all who have been let down by the system and continue to suffer at the hands of human greed and prejudice.
In a very well-known passage from his book Mere Christianity, science fiction writer and theologian C.S. Lewis says that either Christ was and is the son of God, or else he’s a lunatic (or worse!) and you shouldn’t trust his message. Jesus deliberately didn’t leave us the option of accepting the message as simply the kindly SUGGESTIONS of a great human teacher.
We cannot separate the person of Christ from the Christian message, nor can we escape from the fact that Christ tells us that we personally represent his presence in the world, that we are his message, as well as the messengers.
So, in the words of the opening hymn today, let us “live tomorrow’s life today” through our actions of kindness and peace and justice for all God’s individual people, as we personally represent Jesus – and his coming Kingdom – to this suffering world.
Bethesda Presbyterian Church 
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