11th Sunday in Ordinary Time
Matthew 9:35-10:8
Click here to view our live-stream worship service for JUNE 14th 2020.
Sermon Title: Near
In this age of social distancing, when concerns about the highly transmissible COVID-19 virus are still very real, we’ve all had to come to a new understanding of what it means to be near, and what it means to be far. If you’ve had to stand in line to go to the grocery store, or Target, or any number of stores with reduced capacity, you may have noticed that different people have different ideas about appropriate distancing. There are those who stand way too close, and others who like to keep far away. Truth be told there are people we probably wish would keep a little more distance. There are also people we wish we could be nearer to, and cannot. Certainly, we would like to be closer to our church friends, to see them, share a cup of coffee and some conversation and maybe some donut holes; give them a hug. Instead, we’ve had to resort to using the tools of technology to be as close as we can without putting anybody who might be vulnerable in danger of becoming infected by this virus. We’re making due with things like Zoom for meetings and evening prayer; this livestream for Sunday worship. We’ve been trying to make phone calls to stay in touch, anything we can think of, really, to close the distance as best and as safely as we can. It hasn’t been easy. And to make matters worse, even as the number of reported cases and hospitalizations are starting to tick up again, there is a collective sense that people are ready to be done with this pandemic and move on. The face masks make them feel claustrophobic and they want to see their friends. As someone put it this week, “we’re going to have to retire the expression ‘avoid it like the plague,’ because it turns out humans don’t do that.” Maybe it’s just that we have a hard time taking seriously something that we’re told is near, but cannot see.
The publication The Christian Century from time to time invites notable Christian thinkers to try articulating just what Jesus’ good news is with only seven words. I don’t know why only seven. Although it might have something to do with what Jesus says to his disciples here in this reading. “As you go, proclaim the good news, ‘the kingdom of heaven has come near.’” He’s sending them out, sending out the twelve with these seven words. But what do they mean? Honestly. First, just what is this kingdom of heaven? And second, what could it possible mean that it has come near? Clearly the answer to that first question isn’t terribly obvious. After all, Jesus spends a good bit of his time telling these stories, parables, in an attempt to give people an idea of what this kingdom of heaven is like. Given that it has come near, there’s a good chance that we can confidently say what it is not. When Jesus talks about the kingdom of heaven, it’s unlikely that he has in mind anything resembling the popular understanding of heaven as, “the place one goes when they die.” None of the parables Jesus tells has much to do with afterlife images of clouds, or cherubs strumming harps. How would something like that come near? And anyway, that kind of idea of an afterlife destination sounds more like the Roman image of Elysian Fields than anything you will find in scripture. Perhaps it’s due to the fact that we’ve focused more on the ‘heaven’ part of this equation, to the neglect of the ‘kingdom’ part. It cannot be overemphasized that Jesus uses this phrase in the shadow of one of history’s mightiest empires- Rome. Rome, and Roman power dominated the daily life of the people in those cities and villages where Jesus spoke. It was common practice in the Roman world, when a military garrison arrived to occupy a region, to announce it as “good news.” Essentially, “Good news! The might of Rome and its divine Emperor have arrived. You are saved.” So, to announce the nearness of a kingdom that wasn’t Rome was to announce an existential re-ordering of the world as they knew it. To announce as good news that a Kingdom of Heaven had come near was to announce someone, or something else in charge other than Rome and its emperor. Rome has long since be relegated to the dust bin of history, but the good news remains. That’s because it never really was about Rome, per se. Or rather, it was never specifically about Rome. Instead this good news that Jesus gives to his apostles to announce is a reminder that every power this world ever has or will produce is provisional at best. Something else, something bigger, something having to do with the presence of God has come near to reorder our reality and put things right.
Which is easy to say, but what does it look like? Saying something doesn’t necessarily make it so. We might like to say that we’ve moved past the pandemic, but the numbers suggest otherwise. Jesus doesn’t just send the apostles, or us, out into the world with an empty slogan. He gives them some specific things to do, to demonstrate the nearness of this heavenly kingdom, this realm of God’s active presence to put things right in the world. At first glance some of them might sound a little farfetched.
First Jesus tells them to cure the sick. Okay. That sounds pretty reasonable. We’ve got plenty of folks who work at the hospital, or in the medical field. Although, they might point out that they aim a little lower than curing the sick. Usually, they’re just happy to treat the sick in the hope that their treatment has a positive outcome. But then, none of the twelve so far as we know had a background in medicine. The truth is that there are many diagnoses that cannot be cured. Duke professor Kate Bowler was diagnosed with stage 4 colon cancer at the age of 35. In that moment she began to come to terms with all the ways a person is reduced to their diagnosis, and the inadequacy of magical thinking for someone with a chronic, or terminal illness. Maybe for those of us sent to proclaim the nearness of God’s kingdom, to cure the sick simply means to see them as more than the disease they are living with. Certainly not to minimize the severity of what anyone may be battling, but also not to minimize who they are and what they have to offer, regardless.
Similarly, we don’t see a whole lot of leprosy these days. I know that it still exists. But the directive Jesus gives is to “cleanse the leper.” Lepers were cast out because the unsightliness of their skin condition branded them as unclean. I think about the people who have been isolated due to this pandemic. It wasn’t too long ago that the AIDS crisis was ravaging the gay community. Men and women who were already treated as outcast were stigmatized even more by that disease and the skin lesions sometimes associated with it. But what if cleansing the lepers has less to do with whatever may be used to mark someone as unclean, and more to do with their being cast out? If that’s the case, then whenever we extend a hand to the outcast and welcome them back into the community, we are caught up in what God would set right. When we celebrate something like Pride with the gay community and stop holding people at arm’s length because of who they love, that is a manifestation of Jesus’ good news.
But what about raising the dead, or casting out demons? That sounds like something out of a zombie movie, or the Exorcist. Surely, that isn’t something that we do anymore, is it? What about the man who loses his spouse? He lived more of his life with her than without her. And when she dies, a part of him dies too. In fact, it feels like he is dead, or might as well be. Until someone sees him and asks, “would you be a part of this? Would you help to make this happen?” Raising the dead might be as simple, and as difficult, as noticing when someone has died inside and helping them come alive again.
And when it comes to demons? Well, take a look at some of the pictures from the era of the civil rights movement, or the footage from something as recent as the gathering of young men with torches in Charlottesville, Virginia echoing the German Nationalist slogans from the 1930’s, “Blood and soil,” and, “Jews will not replace us.” In that footage and those old photos of schools being de-segregated and lunch counter sit-ins, you see the faces of white people contorted by hatred and rage; the same kind of hatred and rage that turned the lynching of people of color into public spectacle. Demonic. There is no other word for it. Of course, the demonic power of white supremacy in this country is so much bigger than those ugly and overt displays of racist violence. The greatest lie the devil every told, the saying goes, is convincing people he doesn’t exist. I don’t know about the devil, but the most demonic lie that continues to circulate, the one that has been so dramatically unmasked in these past two weeks, is the one that contends that the racism of white supremacy is a thing of the past. It isn’t, and if we are to be people of the good news about the kingdom that has come near, then we must actively work to cast that demon out. We can no longer sit idly by and in the comfort of our own virtue, thinking ourselves as “not racist.” The call of Jesus is the call to be anti-racist, to confront and cast that demon out every single time it shows its ugly face.
Too often we are led to think that the mission of Christ is something that happens somewhere else, that it’s for other people, people who need to hear the gospel. And while that may be true, in this moment of his ministry, Jesus directs his apostles to the fact that mission often begins in our own backyard, that we don’t have to go far far away to do what is essential to the work of God to make things right: curing the sick, raising the dead, cleansing the leper, and casting out demons. When we do those things, we are announcing God’s radical re-ordering of the world. When we do that, we are announcing the reign of the one who outlasts all earthly empires and regimes. When we do that, we are about gospel work that is truly good news. Alleluia, amen.