Sermon for the Fifth Sunday After Pentecost

––

––

By The Rev. Kendra Joyner-Miller
Chaplain and Director of the Lilly Center for Vocation and Values
Catawba College

(The following is a transcript of the service audio, July 2, 2023)

It is such a joy to be with you all today in part because Reverend Sullivan and I attended divinity school together all those years ago, and many couches were slept on and many meals were shared and many theological debates occurred. And it is such a gift now for our little ones to come together and play and for us to share in the joy and fellowship of our callings with one another. And so I've heard many beautiful things about you all and the ways that you make her heart as a pastor sing, so I'm grateful to be here. And so friends let us center ourselves in prayer. Will you pray with me? Lord, may the words of my mouth and the meditations of all of our hearts be glorified in your sight for you, oh God, are our rock and you, oh God, are our redeemer. Amen.

So our scripture that was read for this morning comes from the end of Matthew 10. And in the course of the entire gospel, we have moved from a babe born in a manger, God who came down to earth to live and share in the mess of humanity, and we have heard Jesus's disciples cry out for Jesus to fix and heal and to figure it out for them. But in this passage, Jesus democratizes the gospel. We have seen Jesus teach and preach and heal. We have heard of the radical reversal of power from the wealthy to the worn out, from the politically connected to the political pariahs. As we celebrate independence this week, our gospel tells us time and time again of a different message, one in which we are dependent. We are dependent on God. We are dependent on one another. We are called to love even when and maybe especially when it gets hard. The passage read for us this morning is Jesus's second section of teaching after the Sermon on the Mount, the Sermon on the Mount where Jesus spells out who God's kingdom belongs to.

And in his life and in his ministry, Jesus shows us and tells us. From his very birth, Jesus shows us of a different way from that the ghettos of Galilee an infant is born who is the Messiah, Emmanuel, God with us. From that muck and mire of a stable comes a radical message of love unbound. And Jesus lives into that as he breaks bread with sex workers and tax collectors, the addicts and the alcoholics, with those who hear voices in their heads and those whose lives have been ruled by demons. As he speaks out about liberation for the prisoners, he lives into this message of love. Jesus tells us time and time again in the Sermon on the Mount that God's kingdom is for everyone. God's kingdom is for the meek, for that quiet person who doesn't look you in the eye when they talk, who maybe sits alone in their cubicle or at the lunch table, the person who rushes by anxious and unsure. God's kingdom is for them. God's kingdom is for the young man who struggles with the pain of his depression.

God's kingdom is for the mother who is trying to hold it all together, and God's kingdom is for the father who breaks down crying on the train. God's kingdom is for those who pretend they have it all together and are exhausted and depleted from the work of that illusion. God's kingdom is for those that need their daily bread. And from this Sermon on the Mount where we hear about God's kingdom, we see Jesus turn the powers of his world and ours on its head. From this sermon where we understand who the kingdom of God is for, Jesus then tells us what it means to live in right relationship with our world. He tells us to love our enemies. He tells us not to judge. He tells us to do unto others, and he doesn't only tell us. He shows us in his actions. And then we experience a shift in the Gospel of Matthew as it becomes less about what Jesus is saying and doing, and it becomes about the life and the ministry of the disciples, about the challenges that they will face.

Jesus talks about how they're to go forward with very little, relying on the goodness of those they will meet. Jesus talks about how they will be persecuted, how their message will not be welcome everywhere, and how they will not be welcome everywhere. Jesus tells them that they will have to trust on God's spirit. And here in our passage, we hear of the reward, the reward which is the assurance that you are doing the work of God. But what exactly is the work of God? Jesus spells it out just a few verses earlier. He says, "As you go, proclaim the good news that the kingdom of heaven has come near. Cure the sick, raise the dead, cleanse the lepers, cast out demons." And this is not easy work. It is smelly and messy. It is dangerous, and it demands that we are not independent but that we are deeply and intimately dependent on one another. And we fool ourselves if we think that this work is over, that it ended thousands of years ago, for it is only just begun. And we friends need more than a feel good faith.

We, each of us, need to look at our world to really look at it in the ways that it is beautiful and miraculous and in the ways that it is deeply broken. For if we want to be builders of God's kingdom, we have to take off our rose-tinted glasses to take that deep honest look, not just out there at the systems of this world, systems that call like sirens tempting us to live in ways that are not true or good, systems that make us into machines of productivity, of optimization and commodification, systems that value some people over others, systems that tell us tales of fear and scarcity. And we do not only have to be aware of how those systems exist out there but how they exist in here, in us. We have become dependent on the things that harm rather than the things that heal.

That's where my work as the chaplain at Catawba College and the director of the Lilly Center for Vocation and Values feels so important, work that you all also do here at Harvard, because there is immense pressure on all those things that claw and cling, claiming the attention for all of us and especially for young adults entering into higher education, young adults who are daring to ask for and demand a different way of being in this world and are trying to figure it out amidst the cacophony. They ask these essential questions of existence, questions the disciples must have been asking themselves, questions I pray that we all continue to ask in our lives, the questions of who am I and what am I being called to do with what, as Mary Oliver puts it, my one wild and precious life. This work, this living of an examined life, is essential and it is important and it is deeply faithful. The unexamined life, after all, is not worth living.

I don't know if any of you have experienced this, but for many I've heard and I've experienced these full cycle moments in our lives, this almost deja vu esque nature of existence, moments seemingly replay from a previous time. And I find myself entering that space more and more often since I have become a mother. Now, see, as a little girl, my family would travel every Memorial Day to the Great Sand Dunes National Park in southern Colorado, where immense mountains of sand are nestled beneath the base of the Sangre de Cristo Mountains. It is breathtaking, and it is beautiful. And it is almost otherworldly. We would pack our enormous heavy green Coleman tent, my dad's giant cast iron skillet, and our swimsuits. There was a river that wove its way down from the snow melt of the mountains and acted as a natural barrier between the campsite and the dunes themselves. I have a distant memory, or maybe it is only family legend, of crossing the river one year after an immense snow.

My little three-year self holding tightly onto my dad's hand, my mother and brother waiting on the dunes across for us to join them. And as we started to cross that river, my rugged independence took over. And I ripped my hand away from my father, and I declared, "I will go myself." And I rushed forward into the water, water which quickly swept me away and all there was was water and sand as I somersaulted downstream, my dad running after reaching out and never quite catching me. My mom and my brother later shared that they thought we were playing some sort of game of chase until the panic set in that we weren't. I tumbled along, my dad frightened as this little stream neared an even greater stream. But then he caught me and he held me and he comforted me. And now, as a mother myself with a fiercely independent three-year-old who too declares, "I do it myself," I find myself torn trying to give her space, knowing that this is age appropriate, and also telling her, "Honey, it's okay. We all need a little help sometimes."

This self-examination is important as we ask ourselves what is at work within us? Both maybe what we inherited from the world and what is foundationally us, and then what is it that grounds us? What is it that provides a rootedness to our being? But it never stops at that point, that point of self-examination, because we are made for relationship. We have built these false narratives of bootstrap pulling, our self-sufficiency and rugged independence. But it is just that. It is false. I know he's a beloved New England poet, but I take up a little argument with Mr. Frost because maybe it was true for a farmer, but good fences don't always make good neighbors. I've instead seen the ways in which fences can act to build up bigotry and hatred, an us and a them that does not recognize us as well, an us as common humanity, beautifully diverse. And we are better when we do not think that we have to do it all ourselves but when we experience the transformation that happens when we live life together. The gospel is not just to be talked about.

It is to be lived. And it is not just about the righteous or those prophets. No. Again, Jesus takes our expectation and subverts it. He adds at the end of our scripture today, "The vulnerable, the little ones who need water." Jesus has a tendency to point out these often forgotten little ones, who in the ancient world did not really count and did not really yet belong, and claim that they are the holders of the kingdom. That those who care for the little ones in even the most basic way of providing water, God's reward, God's blessing will be upon them. And in many ways, we are called to provide water. And in many ways, we are also the little ones. We all thirst and we have walked through deserts of our own, deserts of depression and anxiety, deserts of addiction and grief. We have walked through deserts of burnout and we're exhausted.

And yet we do not have to. We do not have to walk alone. We can hold that hand and cross the stream together. We are called to walk together just as the disciples were. As we celebrate a nation's independence, our national striving in the face of oppression and tyranny, how do we reclaim the importance of our human dependency? That we cannot live this life alone, that our lives are richer when they are shared, but our lives are not only to be shared with the righteous or with those who think and act and believe like us, not just trusted friends who affirm us so that we can congratulate one another in our shared belief, some echo chamber of self aggrandizement. We have to also go to the little ones of our world. And when our time comes, also receive the faithful help of those around us because we need each other, because our lives are enriched and made whole. We are made more whole when we experience the holy in the other.

And each of us is called in our own way to do this work, imperfectly always. And so as we celebrate this Independence Day, as we look around at the barbecues and the pops and the fireworks over the Charles, let us look at who is there. Let us celebrate the dependency we have, giving thanks for all of those who have come before us, those who have nurtured us and supported us, those who have challenged us and stretched us, because we cannot walk through this life alone. But thanks be we can walk through this life together. As we celebrate this Independence Day, as we look around, maybe we can also think about who could be there. And may we feel the encouragement not to shut down but to build up. Let us open our doors and our hearts wide as God does for each of us. God's beautiful, messy, dependent people. Hallelujah. Amen.