6/28/20
(Genesis 22:1-14; Ps. 13; Romans 6:12-23; Matthew 10:40-42)
Some of you may know of the legendary basketball coach John Wooden. His teams at UCLA won 10 NCAA championships, including seven consecutively (from 1967 to 1973), a record never even approached before or since. He had the pick of the best high school players from all over the country, and many of his players went on to star in the NBA.
Every year, on the first day of practice in the fall, the first thing Wooden did was ask his players to take off their shoes and socks; and then he’d say, Now I’m going to show you how to put them back on. (It didn’t matter if you were a senior and had already been through this three times; you had to do it.) He would say, Hold up the sock, and pull it on slowly; work it around the little toe, and the heel area, so that there are no wrinkles. Then pull it up the ankle firmly and smooth everything out well. Then hold the sock up while you put the shoe on. And the shoe must be spread fully apart, when you put it on. And don’t simply pull on the top laces: tighten them from the bottom, snugly, eyelet by eyelet. Then tie it. Then double tie it. If you don’t do it this way, he’d say, you’ll get blisters. If you get blisters you can’t play. If you can’t play we can’t win. That’s why this is important.
So the operative principle was, Start at the foundation (in this case, literally.) And pay attention to the little things: the big picture starts there. And make this a habit: do it regularly.
Of course the same applies to the life of faith. We need regularly to refresh our awareness of the basics; and remember the primary importance of the little things.
We have been on our present fast from in-person worship in church for 17 weeks now; and we don’t know when we’re going to be able to resume (that’s an open question that your Wardens and Vestry and I are continually revisiting.) But our present status is also a learning opportunity: as is the disruption of anything we do habitually. Church on Sunday has been such a given, such a fixture in our lives for so long – even those who come infrequently know we’re here, know we’re going to be here, know it’s available – that its absence is a chance for us to reexamine the question of what it means to be a church. If we’re not meeting together to worship God, who are we?
By the grace of God, the gospel we heard today bears directly on that issue. Today’s reading is the conclusion of chapter10 in the gospel of Matthew. This is the chapter in which Jesus commissions his disciples: tells them what to do, and sends them out to do it. He co-missions them: in this chapter we hear Jesus enlisting his disciples in his ministry. Matthew 10 is a picture of that ministry, and over the last three weeks we’ve heard that chapter in its entirety. The story begins with verse 1: “Then Jesus summoned his twelve disciples and gave them authority over unclean spirits,, to cast them out, and to cure every disease and sickness.” Then Matthew tells us their names: simply recites them, all twelve; and there’s a teaching in that. We know them as saints ( St. Peter, St. John, St. Andrew), but they weren’t called saints when Matthew was writing this near the end of the first century, and certainly not when Jesus called them to be disciples: they were just people like you and me. And when Jesus is speaking to them, he is speaking to you and me.
Jesus sends these twelve disciples out to the people they live among, and in this chapter we hear him tell them what to do: “…proclaim the good news, ‘The kingdom of heaven has come near.’ “ That is: God’s reign – life the way God intends it to be, is at hand, is possible, is available to us: if we open ourselves to God’s presence in our lives. And God needs us to make it happen.
And then Jesus goes on to give specific examples of how to make it happen: “Cure the sick, raise the dead, cleanse the lepers, cast out demons.” He’s talking to the people who are to be his church. He’s talking to us.
To us, these tasks are from another age, another mindset; and all very well for a miracle worker like Jesus. But not things we can realistically think about doing, yes?
Well…let’s think again. Cure the sick? None of us is going to cure someone’s cancer; but are there not many kinds of sickness, which we can address, by beng living witnesses of God’s love? Are there not many kinds of cure? Little and big?
None of us is going to bring a dead body back to life. But are there not many forms of death? Death through anger? Death through despair? The paralysis they create is a kind of death. In Christ we are free from anger, we are free from despair. And Christ calls us to live a different way: to be a living witness to that different way, and so bring hope.
I doubt whether any of us have ever known someone suffering from leprosy, but we certainly do know people who are shunned, ostracized, treated as less than human, the way lepers were back then. Don’t tell me there’s nothing we can do about that.
Casting out demons? We all know people whose lives are dominated to some degree or other by obsessions, addictions, illusions. We can be part of healing those wounds, by what we say, and much more importantly by what we do; how we live.
As Jesus commissions his disciples, he commissions – co-missions – us to join in his ministry of healing by being living witnesses of the presence of God’s love among us. That ministry – the ministry which is described in Matthew chapter 10 – t is happening around us all the time, in little and big ways (and little things can have big reverberations.) That ministry is who we are, as a church. One of my fellow clergy, years ago, always said the same words every Sunday at the conclusion of the liturgy: he would say blessing on the congregation, and then dismiss them with these words: “The worship ends. The service begins.” Amen. Thanks be to God.