Matthew 10:24-42

Part of my job as a professor at the Lutheran School of Theology at Chicago is to interview seniors in the ELCA process for approval of candidates for ordination. In addition to evaluating students’ internship experience and their understanding of Lutheranism, we ask them about their understanding of ordination and the pastoral office. Over the years I have found it helpful to give students a list of names for the pastoral office and ask them to expound on why this particular “take” is attractive to them. The list goes something like this: prophet (most take this in a social justice sense), priest (confession and absolution, presider at the font and table), pastor (usually understood in the pastoral care dimensions of ministry), or playing coach (a frequent favorite, especially with male candidates, perhaps because they suspect it will please me). Also included in the list, though never chosen by the students, are two understandings high on my own list: official spokesperson for the apostolic faith (after all, we’re always only a generation away from docetism, Gnosticism, pelagianism, and even Manichaeism), and rabbi (I wish more pastors coveted the role of expert in the church’s Scripture, tradition, and even dogma).

This conference of the Institute for Liturgical Studies is attending to ministry this year, with explicit connection to mass (last year) and mission (next year). Of course, I have not yet mentioned those many other ministries, richly represented in this audience, some rostered, others not. I speak especially of cantors and church musicians, who share their musical gifts in composing, arranging, performing, and getting the rest of us who don’t breath right to make acceptable, even wondrous music of praise and thanksgiving. I think too of youth ministers and of Christian educators, both so central to the church’s present relevance and future survivability. Other ministers perform their ministries in the church in the form of administration or serving as church secretaries. Still others perform word and service instead of word and sacrament. They may be community organizers, social workers, chaplains, or midwives. The titles of these ministries are varied: deacons and deaconesses, diaconal ministers, associates in ministry; some even lack titles or rostered status. All these ministers are essential to the church’s health and wholeness.

And when it comes to ministry, I have so far omitted the ninety-five percent of those faithful ministers whose ministry is ministry in daily life, those dear brothers and sisters who are neither rostered nor paid by the church, but who volunteer for the church’s programs and who live out the gospel as computer programmers, nurses, farmers, parents and other care-givers, university professors, truck drivers, children, retirees, citizens, and thousands in other roles and occupations.

These three categories of ministers—ordained, rostered lay ministers, and ministers in daily life—these three categories of ministers are what will occupy us in the three days of this conference of the Institute for Liturgical Studies, as they will continue to occupy us when we return home to the mass and mission in our home town and in the world. All of these ministries are fed and nurtured by mass, by font and table; all of them lead to mission to, in, and for the world.

As I began to work on this sermon I was shocked to see the gospel lesson that was picked for this occasion. The passage from Matt 10:24-42, of course, has a great deal to say about ministry and even mission since it reports the selection of the twelve apostles and their dispatch into ministry and mission. But it has nothing to do with Easter and it is divided up into two Sundays, Propers 7 and 8, of Year A in the three year cycle. Many of the presuppositions in this passage do not apply to the church of the twenty-first century. Consider the following eight disconnects:

• The Mission in this chapter is only to Israel. In the Jewish-Christian dialogues that I have been part of over the years, that is a definite no no. Targeting of Jews in mission work is seen as a sure sign of supersessionism and denial of the ongoing validity of the Old Testament covenant promises. While there might be disagreement among us about the appropriateness of an ongoing mission to Israel, we all would agree that such a mission is not the exclusive or even the primary mission of the church of the twenty-first century in North America. Rather, we have been trying to break out of the North European box, already exclusively gentile, and we have been making strenuous and appropriate efforts to include people of color and people whose primary language is other than English in our ministries and in our mission. But Matthew 10 requires that the mission be only to Israel.
• Secondly, the central pronouncement of Jesus is shocking and counter cultural: “Do not think that I have come to bring peace to the earth; I have not come to bring peace, but a sword.” Yet we hail Jesus as the Prince of Peace, and was it not yesterday’s Gospel that found Jesus in the locked room with the disciples saying “Peace be with you.” Christians have always worried about whether they could ever serve as soldiers, and many of us in the last two years have—in the name of Christ—opposed the ventures of the United States in Iraq and the ever-expanding “defense” budget. How out of touch this word of Jesus seems to be, when he says he comes not to bring peace, but a sword.
• Thirdly, Matthew 10 imagines that ministry, or even being a Christian, runs a high risk of martyrdom or persecution: “Whoever does not take up the cross and follow me is not worthy of me.” As one wag put it, if you are going to be a follower of Jesus, you had better look good on wood. Of course there have been Christian martyrs in my lifetime—missionaries who have been killed, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the people who risked social disadvantage or even imprisonment under the communist system, and many more—but for the vast majority of Christians in the west, and in attendance at this conference, martyrdom and persecution are at best remote possibilities.
• A good number of people at this conference depend for their livelihood, their income, on the church and their job with the church. In Matthew 10 Jesus says: Take no gold, or silver, or copper in your belts, no bag for your journey, or two tunics, or sandals. Laborers deserve only their food. Some of us complain about what the church pays us and what it pays us does not come close to matching what our skills would gain in compensation in the secular world. But we have hardly settled for “food for survival.” No, by the standards of the vast majority of people in the world we are recklessly rich.
• Fifthly, we are told to “shake off the dust of our feet” when our message is not received. Our witness is regularly ignored, occasionally even rejected. If we were to shake the dust off our shoes whenever our witness is rejected, we would have the cleanest shoes in the world! Shaking off the dust of our shoes as a sign of eschatological judgment might raise eyebrows in our community or even get an invitation from a bishop for a pastoral chat.
• We all know that a heart attack could come at any time, and even those who are young recognize that the biological clock is ticking. Those of us somewhat longer of tooth know that the American denial of death is futile and deceitful. But Matthew 10 supposes that Jesus will be coming back before the disciples go through all the towns of Israel. Two thousand years have flowed past since these words were penned, and while our personal end-point remains a moment of great imminence, few of us expect the return of Jesus either today or tomorrow.
• Seventhly, we often picture our congregations as families and we see a primary concern of ministry today to be about sustaining and supporting the severely-threatened estate of marriage in North America. We do not assume that the call to discipleship sets a person against his or her father or mother or his or her son or daughter, or even a man or a woman against his or her mother-in-law. We all have known families who have opposed the choice of ministry by one of the family members, and even rare cases where a person’s Christianity is mocked or opposed by the rest of their family. But we tend to dismiss these as dysfunctional families. Most families are happy if their kids stick with the church or even choose to minister.
• Eighthly, and perhaps the most unkindest cut of all, is that verse in Matthew 10 that says those who love father or mother, son or daughter, more than me are not worthy of me. The expectation in this verse seems to be that disciples ought to be worthy of Jesus, and all of us conclude, that is the last thing we would claim. Luther agreed when he said that anything we fear, love, and trust more than God is our God.

I mention these eight drastic points of departure from Matthew 10 to highlight and underscore the differences. If ministry has changed so much from New Testament times, can such a changed conception of ministry still be called Christian ministry? Well, of course, it can. But the gap between then and now shows that the topic of this conference is no idle question. The gap between the first and the twenty-first centuries is also matched by the chasm that separates your ministry from mine, your ministry and my ministry from the job descriptions that supposedly define our ministry, or your and my ministry now from what that ministry was twenty, thirty, or forty years ago.

Our ministries are not usually controversial in our communities. We are tolerated, patronized, sometimes even held in high esteem by the powers that be. Why are our ministries so easily tolerated by society? Is it because we are doing nothing objectionable, nothing to upset the empire, nothing to challenge consumerist society, nothing to interrupt the demonic status quo.

Do we offer a gospel without a cross, a discipleship with very little cost? Years ago I remember hearing a Jack Benny episode on radio, when he was held up by a mugger. “Your money or your life,” the mugger said. After a tension-filled pause, Jack Benny, a notorious miser and tightwad, said, “I’m thinking, I’m thinking.” What if someone said to us, “Your faith or your life?” Would we say, I’m thinking, I’m thinking?

If Matthew would address ministry today in all its forms, in North America, in the twenty first century, what might he have to say? Christian life and ministry is:

• Trust in God and God’s future. Surely such trust in God and in God’s promises is no easier and no more important today than it was in the 80s of the first century when Matthew wrote. God’s future is still rushing toward us, calling into question and transforming all of our compromises with mammon, jobism, and the possible. God’s promise is held out to us, for us to grasp.
• We are called by Matthew 10 and by the gospel in general to confess God’s act in Jesus in word and deed. Whether that word is spoken or sung, whether that word is written in a scholarly article or parsed in a way that a child or a person in the early stages of Alzheimer’s can understand, the centrality of that word—by grace, for Christ’s sake, through faith—needs to be said and sung again and again, as David Truemper so often reminded us. And that word needs to be lived. In visiting the sick and the imprisoned, in welcoming the stranger and the other, in beating swords into plowshares, in doling out cups of cold water, in reminding ourselves that our wealth does not consist in the abundance of things we possess, in caring for the very young and the very old, in finding alternatives to violence, in volunteering for the common good, in working for social and political change, in honoring, and learning from, people of other faiths, in conserving the environment and practicing stewardship with the earth, and in being generous to all, our deeds announce the one who did not think equality with God was something that had to be hoarded, but who emptied himself and took the form of a servant.
• Matthew 10 ministry is ministry living toward the eschaton, God’s future, with a concern for mission in, and transformation of, this world. We want and need to invite others to the faith, but we also need to see this world as our workshop, our arena, our challenge. Where poverty, racism, sexism, and violence are rife, exactly there is our place of mission, our ministries, our life.
• Matthew 10 ministry means letting go of material possessions. Everyone who finds their life will lose it, Jesus said. Finding one’s life in this context refers to affirming one’s own life on one’s own terms, within one’s self-centered framework, apart from allegiance and discipleship to Jesus. Finding one’s life is a synonym for obtaining life or finding life for oneself. It’s still true that in finding life one loses it.
• Ministry ala Matthew 10 means letting go of the fear of what others might think about us or do to us. Life in the United States after September 11, 2001, has been largely a life of fear, and revenge, of protecting ourselves, distrusting others, and wrapping ourselves in our duck-taped cocoons. Have no fear, be not afraid, Matthew urges us. Do not fear those who can only kill your body, but they cannot take your God-given life.
• We are all called by Matthew 10 and by the Easter gospel to place our loyalty to the God revealed in Christ above all loyalties, even the deepest loyalties of home and family. Sins against the first commandment—not the sixth commandment--are still our most frequent failure. Yes, we do love our self, our spouse, our son, our daughter, our ministry, and our achievements more than God. We are indeed by any standard unworthy of Christ. And yet, we remind ourselves, those persons are truly worthy and well prepared for the Lord’s Supper who have faith in these words: “Given and shed for you for the forgiveness of sins.”

Such Matthew 10 ministry, such Christian life, is in fact possible….

• Because of God’s abiding care for the least of God’s birds, the sparrow. In God’s eyes we are worth many many sparrows. Therefore, we are told, do not be afraid.
• Do not be afraid, the Easter gospel proclaims. Mary Magdalene was asked by the angels within the tomb and by her Rabboni, Why in the world are you weeping? We are all addressed by our baptismal names by the risen Lord and invited like Mary Magdalene into a relationship with God our Mother and Father, into a relationship with Christ’s God and our God. Mary Magdalene was the apostle to the apostles. She told them what she had seen and what her Rabboni had said. He may have come to bring a sword, but his word to us yesterday, today and forever is Peace be with you. His word is: As God has sent me, so I send you.

• Matthew 10 is not Matthew’s or Christ’s only word, let alone their final word. The final word in Matthew 28 is spoken by the one who claims “all authority” in heaven and earth. But we have come to know that the Son of Humanity has authority on earth to forgive sins, that God’s almighty power is know chiefly in showing mercy.
• This resurrected Lord says to all of us ministers, “Go.” We are the people called, the people sent, we—all of us are—the official spokespersons of the apostolic faith.
• We are sent to make disciples. We are reminded once again that the church exists primarily for those who are not yet part of it
• We are sent to the font to baptize in the name of the trinity and to the classroom to teach everything Christ have commanded.
• And the simple word that we speak is God’s “I am with you.” I am with you because I accept you. I am with you to empower you. I am with you in the splash of font and in the tastes of the holy supper, yes also, even, especially in the “work of the people,” in liturgy, this liturgy, every liturgy.

Is it Mass last year, ministry this year, and mission next year? But, of course it’s mass, ministry, and mission every year.

In the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.