Transcription
Today’s Old Testament reading is from Jeremiah, chapter 20, verses 7 to 13, Bible page 623.
O Lord, you have enticed me, and I was enticed. You have empowered me, and you have prevailed. I have become a laughingstock all day long. Everyone mocks me. For whenever I speak, I must cry out, I must shout, violence and destruction. For the word of the Lord has become for me a reproach and derision all day long. If I say I will not mention him or speak any more in his name, then within me there is something like a burning fire shut up in my bones. I am weary with holding it in, and I cannot. For I hear many whispering, terrors all around. Denounce him. Let us denounce him. All my close friends are watching for me to stumble. Perhaps he can be enticed, and we can prevail against him, and take our revenge on him. But the Lord is with me like a dread warrior. Therefore, my persecutors will stumble, and they will not prevail. They will be greatly shamed, for they will not succeed. Their eternal dishonor will never be forgotten. Our Lord of hosts, you test the righteous, and you see the heart and the mind. Let me see your retribution upon them. For to you, I have committed my cause. Sing to the Lord. Praise the Lord, for he has delivered the life of the needy from the hands of evildoers.
And our New Testament lesson from the Gospel of Matthew, Matthew chapter 10 verses 24 through 39.
Hear God’s word this morning.
A disciple is not above the teacher, nor a slave above the master. It is enough for the disciple to be like the teacher, and the slave like the master. If they have called the master of the house Beelzebub, how much more will they malign those of his household? So have no fear of them, for nothing is covered up that will not be uncovered, and nothing secret that will not become known. What I say to you in the dark, tell in the light, and what you hear whispered, proclaim from the housetops. Do not fear those who kill the body, but cannot kill the soul. Rather, fear him who can destroy both soul and body in hell. Are not two sparrows sold for a penny? Yet not one of them will fall to the ground apart from your father. And even the hairs of your head are all counted. Should you not be afraid? You are of more value than many sparrows. Everyone therefore, who acknowledges me before others, I will acknowledge before my father in heaven. But whoever denies me before others, I will deny before my father in heaven. Do not think that I have come to bring peace to the earth. I have not come to bring peace, but a sword. For I have come to set a man against his father, and a daughter against her mother, and a daughter-in-law against her mother-in-law, and one’s foes will be members of his own household. Whoever loves father and mother more than me is not worthy of me. And whoever loves son or daughter more than me is not worthy of me. And whoever does not take up the cross and follow me is not worthy of me. Those who find their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake will find it.
Let us pray.
Gracious God, we thank you for your word. We thank you for its light for our path, for how it shows us the way to be your servants. Guide us as we seek to live out your call in our lives. Help us, O Lord, to be your servants. Hear our prayer and be with us. Be with our listening and the movement of your scripture through us. Gracious God, hear our prayer. Amen.
When we listen to Jesus in our scripture today, Jesus is fulfilling a particular role within the faith. He’s on a teaching, preaching, and healing tour. He’s traveling all throughout the land, telling of the good news, teaching about what it means to be a follower of God, calling on the people to return to God with their whole heart. Now when we think of this, we think we see it all the time. It’s nothing new to us that Jesus is teaching, preaching, and healing. These are offices that he fulfills all the time. But the other side is, he is heralding the kingdom to come. A herald used to be a messenger that would go out ahead of the king or on behalf of the king and announce to the world that the king had said thus. You know, this is the days before Instagram and Twitter and Facebook where you couldn’t type in, this is my command, send. No, the king had to send out. Usually, they would have a banner of some sort, the king’s banner, to show their office, their authority, and they would proclaim to the land. Not terribly unlike when we would have town criers and others who would announce the good news. But here in verse 36, there starts to be an issue. Wait, wrong sermon.
All right. There we are. Jesus makes an opening statement that no one is above anyone. Slaves are not above the master. Students are not above the teachers. Now, in our context, it might seem as if Jesus is just kind of going and flowing, focused on the here and now. But all throughout, Jesus is pointing further down the road. Every step along, he is preparing the disciples. He’s telling them what is to come, what is going to be, what is going to happen. And he’s not a very great salesman, if you pay attention. Because when you go to buy a car, when you go to a salesman, what do they do? They tell you all the good stuff, right? They’re not going to tell you, yeah, this engine is going to die about 20,000 miles down the road, and it’s going to be a spectacular flame, you know. They don’t show you on the Ford commercials what’s going to happen down the road. Tesla is not going to say, oh, by the way, the batteries in your car, if they go bad in an accident, they’re going to go really bad. They don’t tell you that. They don’t tell you the negatives involved with these things. They don’t tell you the full preparation for what’s ahead. And that’s a challenge. Because Jesus is here telling us the good, the bad, and the ugly that will happen with the disciples.
I remember back many, many years ago when I was supervising a congregation, and someone was interested in applying to that church. And they reached out to me and said, Bill, I read their profile. I know what they say they are, but I want you to tell me the stuff they didn’t write down. What are the bad stuff? Where are the the mines laying in the field ahead? What is the golden cow that they worship? What are the ugly and the bad with that congregation? Truth be told, there wasn’t a lot to share. It’s one of the easiest congregations to supervise, but they wanted every thing up front. We don’t do that. We kind of hide what’s going to happen. How many people have looked at me in the last week and said, well, you know, that’s teenagers. And at the same time I said, nobody said that when when he was this little. They waited until he got big. Nobody does that. But Jesus is not us. Jesus is not going to hide what’s going to happen. He’s not going to glaze it and sugarcoat it for us. He is going to give us the truth. The good, the bad, the ugly, the human. He’s not going to send the disciples out and say, it’s going to be a great time you’re going to have going to all of these towns and working and serving and telling them about what I’m doing and who I am. It’s all going to happen and it’s all going to be great. He doesn’t do that. He tells everyone. So it’s going to be hard. There are going to be people persecuting you for my sake, harming you physically, harming you mentally and emotionally. There are going to be people putting pressure and pressure and pressure on you. Not exactly stuff you read right before you go to sleep. But Jesus is above all else honest about what the challenges his disciples are going to face. He’s going to be honest about the difficult roads that lie ahead. When we hit points like this, and Russ will understand this, you come to a black diamond ski hill. I’m not going down that hill. It’s my warning sign. Never been downhill skiing in my life. It’s not where I’m going to start out, right? But for others who are more advanced skiers, that’s a sign that this is going to be a fun time. There are curves and bumps all along the road for us.
Now, I’ll tell you a little story about warning signs. Years ago, we were visiting my great-uncle in Winchester, Virginia. Mom was driving. I was in the very backseat of the full-sized van. Sitting there enjoying. Then I see a sign. Railroad crossing ahead. Okay. Mom’s not slowing down. Mom’s not slowing down. If you would picture, the top of the railroad crossing was about where the pulpit is. And there was a hump in the road that went about this high. Did mom slow down? Nope. Did she take that thing at full speed? She sure did. When it crashed, when the van hit the down, was everything okay with the car? Mostly. Except my behind went through the backseat. There was this huge divot and if you imagine, I’m down in the middle of the divot like this. Now, she tried to say she never saw the warning sign. And I will never forget my uncle Jack looking her in the eye and saying, Barbara dear, with his Virginia accent. Barbara dear, there’s a sign there. There’s quite a few signs. I just know you and you wasn’t looking.
The fact of the matter is we can’t complain when we see Jesus. We can’t ever say that Jesus didn’t warn us about the road ahead. We can’t always say God said God was going to be there in the good times. Except there are a few dots that say and the bad. The bad times will happen. The dead times will come. And yet God will be with us in all of those times. As Jesus sends out the disciples, as he prepares them, he tells them about the persecutions they are going to face. All the rounding up of Christians, the tossing into jails, the tossing to animals. All of that is warned. Jesus tells them that it will happen. The suffering, the pain, the grief, the loss, the divisions that come. But also the isolation of that division that will bring a part of their lives to a halt. A part of their social network will be halted. Now we look at this and we think, okay, he talks about divisions. Jesus talks about setting father against son, mother-in-law against daughter-in-law. What does that mean? Does that just mean these are the relationships that exist and they’re going to be broken? No. When you think about the communities that Jesus is going to, these are close-knit communities. They would live almost all together right on top of each other. Your family would be your family. You wouldn’t go from one end of the country to the other for a job. Your job would be in the town you grew up in.
Now imagine, you’ve heard Jesus speak. You’ve come to follow and believe in him. What effect does that have on that close-knit community you were a part of? Where honor, shame, and family obligation all play a part. What does that mean for us? For you in that situation? It means the family pressures will come. The family divides. It means sitting down to dinner or maybe not even getting an invite to dinner because you’re following that Jesus guy. It means your family would ostracize you. It means also that if your full family were to come to believe there might be someone in the family who wouldn’t.
Division is going to be a part of the early church. Sacrifice is going to be a part of being followers of God. Sacrifice. Think about all that Peter gave up when he followed Jesus. He’s a fisherman. He had a business. He walked away from fishing. Sure, for the promise of following God, but he gives up what he had. We don’t know too much about his greater family. But we know he leaves it all to follow Jesus. His financial, status, his family business, his friends, and everyone to follow Jesus. And on that tally of his sacrifice also comes in how Peter dies. He is tortured. He suffers at the end. Christ wants the disciples as they go and follow him to count and understand that it is costly for us to follow. Costly in terms of how we serve, how we live, but also the divisions we have to be willing to place. We must place one thing above everything and that is God. And that is a profoundly difficult and hard thing to do.
To be honest right now, I’m having a hard time and struggle with this. Because I love the World Cup. I love it. I want to talk about this game. I want to watch every single game I can. But I’m having a hard time as a Christian watching it. I’m having a hard time because I’ve talked with missionaries whose ministries focus on human trafficking during this time. And would you believe certain events that we celebrate, the Super Bowl, the World Cup, are some of the highest points of human trafficking in our world and in our country. So I’m struggling. How do I as a sports fan celebrate this moment and watch this and enjoy it while at the same time the harm that is being done? The harm to young women or young men. The harm to human beings. It’s hard to be a Christian. It’s not easy for us to follow God because it means we look at the world with a different set of priorities. We look at a world and we think about things a different way. When we see this great gathering, we also count the cost to our world. We count the cost of the young women who are in sexual slavery. We count the cost across our world. As things like this happen and it’s hard to enjoy because we are children of God.
This isn’t the only time it happens though. There are other moments. As we look across our world, we as Christians must see the world differently. We have to see the human cost that is involved in our world. The human priorities from God. We must see things as God sees them. We must experience them as God experiences and that is going to cost us something here. But as we see Jesus tell us, what is the great end of all of this? We pay the cost here as his servants because we are willing to be with him in eternity. That’s why we do what we do because we love our God, we serve our God, and we work for him.
So as we measure the cost in our world and in our lives of what it means to be a Christian, what it means to prioritize the sacrifices in our lives and in our world, to prioritize what God wants and desires in our world over what we want and desire. May we hear Christ challenge us to give and give up and way we willingly, fully embrace what it means to be a Christian. Amen.
Brothers and sisters, let us return to God.