Congratulations—You’re Hired

Proper 6A: Matthew 9:35-10:8

“We’ve got what you want—come get it.” That was the message emblazoned on a billboard I saw while driving not long ago. Though it pains me to admit it, my first reaction was to figure out what it was advertising, to make sure it wasn’t a church. Because sometimes the church, in attempting to “reach people,” comes across this way, sounding suspiciously like the sales staff at a big-box store, touting all the benefits of being a member of the congregation:

Are you concerned about your children learning good morals? We’ve got a great children’s program.

Are you anxious about the state of the world, worried and confused? Just wait until you hear my inspiring sermons.

Lonely? We have a dozen small groups to choose from.

Clueless about the Bible and confused about Christian beliefs? Sign up for one of our Bible studies and we’ll get you fixed up.

And so the church gets marketed as if it were a product. Worship becomes the showroom, and the congregation becomes the customer base. God becomes the provider of spiritual goods and services. And Jesus becomes the brand name we put on whatever people are already shopping for.

Trouble is, there’s very little in Scripture that supports this supermarket image of the church. I mean, just look at the passage I just read from Matthew’s Gospel. Jesus shows himself to be a terrible salesman. Jesus doesn’t stand at the door asking newcomers, “What can we do for you today?” He doesn’t say, “Tell me where it hurts. Let’s see if we can meet your needs.” No, Jesus looks out at the desperate, needy mass of humanity and says: “What a grand opportunity to show what God can do!”

It's not that Jesus is oblivious to people’s pain. In fact, he calls attention to it. He just refuses to let trouble have the final word. He won’t let people’s needs define him, nor let people be defined by their problems. Instead, what he does is “reframe” the situation, he looks at it differently, in light of God’s transforming grace. And so, in Jesus’ view, the needy crowd is not primarily a problem to be solved; but a harvest to be gathered.

Just changing how the situation is framed has powerful consequences. For when Jesus sees the needs of the people, it means he resists jumping in again to help, as we might expect. Nor does he take a managerial approach, directing the people to form a line, orderly-like, to triage their needs. No, what he does is he tells his followers to pray. “The harvest is plentiful, but the laborers are few. So ask the Lord of the harvest to send out workers into the harvest” (9:38).

But then just as the disciples kneel down to pray, Jesus turns to them and tells them that God has answered their prayer—they are the ones they were praying for. They asked for more workers, and Jesus tells them, “You’re hired!” They’ve been drafted to join in Jesus’ work, to do the very things he’s been doing—teaching, healing, preaching, casting out demons.

It’s an amazing turn of events. It’d be like if you’ve been invited to a wedding of a friend and at the reception, the host shows you to your table and the waiter brings you a glass of wine and an appetizer, but then just as you are expecting the main course, you’re handed an apron and a tray and told you’re now part of the waitstaff and so will now be serving the other guests. It’d be rather jarring recruitment.

But that’s about what Jesus does in today’s gospel lesson. Jesus looks at the throngs of people and has “compassion for them because they were harassed and helpless, like sheep without a shepherd” (9:36). So, he ropes the disciples into his work, delegating his authority to them to carry out his saving work in the world.

Reflecting on this passage, the disciples’ abrupt conscription, we might draw a number of conclusions. We might see it as a warning, a word of caution—that we should be careful what we pray for. Not just because we might just get it, but because we might be implicated in the answer! Praying about a need can lead to us getting personally involved in its solution.

But there’s more than that going on. Jesus isn’t just trying to teach the disciples a lesson about prayer. More profoundly, he is showing them that, whatever good God wants to do among them, he chooses not to do it alone. Jesus refuses to let his followers think they can sit on the sidelines and let Jesus do all the work. They have a part to play, too, an important part, an indispensable part in the redemption of the world.

Seeing that, we might begin to wonder, What if we’ve got this whole “Christian thing” wrong? What if the church is not where we get what we want from God, but where God gets what God wants from us? What if being a Christian isn’t the way God meets our needs, but rather we are the way that God meets the world’s needs? It’s not uncommon for people to show up here as “customers,” only to leave having been deputized as God’s agents in the world. for, whatever work Jesus wants to do in the world, he apparently doesn’t want to do it alone. He delegates. He sends us.

Now, that might strike many people as offensive, contrary as it is to our consumer spirituality. I mean, we’ve been trained to believe that the good life is achieved by acquiring the right goods. And we bring that habit into worship: “I need inspiration. I need peace. I need answers. I need…fill in the blank.”

And sometimes, by grace, we do receive those things—strength, mercy, guidance, and all kinds of blessings. But Jesus will not let us stop there. Because, as this passage suggests, the usual way Jesus gives us what we need is not by dropping it in our lap, but by giving us someone to serve, some gift to share, some word to speak, some neighbor to love, some task that pulls us out of ourselves and into his mission in the world. God has created us not for ease and comfort and pleasure, but for a purpose, for a mission, for adventure.

Frederick Buechner famously said, “The place God calls you to is the place where your deep gladness and the world’s deep hunger meet.” That’s what it means to have calling, a vocation. Jesus takes your life—your ordinary, everyday life—and turns it towards the world’s greatest needs.

That outward orientation is in fact central to what it means to be church. William Temple, the late Archbishop of Canterbury, once observed, “The church is the only society that exists for the sake of those who are not its members.” The church exists not for its own sake, but for the sake of the world. And anytime we make the church into an entity that exists for our sake, we mess up Jesus’ mission. Jesus is not angling to establish a fan club. He is forming a people who will go where he sends them, do what he commands, and love those whom he places before them.

We should note, though, that the first ones to accept this charge, to embark on this adventure, the first “missionaries,” Jesus tells them not to go to the distant Gentiles or Samaritans, but to “the lost sheep of the house of Israel” (10:6). Whatever else we make of that, it means that Jesus’ mission begins with the people who are nearest to us, most familiar, most entangled with us. Later in Matthew, we will see the gospel move beyond the Jews, to those other groups. For now, though, their mission is to go on at home, among those closest to them.

What this suggests is that, contrary to common assumptions, mission is not first of all about going “somewhere else.” Mission is across the street, down the hallway, next door, in the office, in the waiting room—among our neighbors, our friends, coworkers and family, the ones we know only too well.

Perhaps long ago some of you dreamed of participating in some great mission—“someday I’ll do something significant for God.” But Jesus says, “Start with the person you’re tempted to ignore. Start with the discontent you’ve gotten used to. Start with the neighbor you’ve decided is none of your concern.” That may not seem very remarkable or romantic or revolutionary. But that is where our work should begin.

Tish Harrison Warren, in a posting I read, describes a sign she saw at a prominent monastic community house she visited. It read: “Everyone wants a revolution. No one wants to do the dishes.” As this sign suggests, we often long to be a part of some grand mission, some great movement, to change the world. But too often we ignore our calling to serve those right where we are.

We have no need to go abroad, to a distant land, when today there are so many people around us here who are shepherd-less, who are lost and wandering, who’ve fallen prey to abusers and pushers and exploiters who don’t care about them, who are only out for themselves. We have no need to “go” anywhere to serve God; there are plenty of people who need healing, who need Jesus, right around us here in Richmond, just down the street, a few blocks away, just next door. Jesus charges us to serve and witness to them, to start with them.

Now, I can imagine that, hearing this, some of you may be getting a little tired of me talking so much about mission, about how we are called to go out and spread the Good News. And to be fair, I have talked a lot about that in the past few months. Likely, you think it’s about time I preached something more “pastoral” and provided you with some comforting thoughts to help you get through your week, to sooth your aches and anxieties, answer your questions. If that is where you are, I understand. But I’m sorry, God wants more for you than that.

I mean it’s not that comfort and encouragement and peace are bad things to desire. And sometimes Jesus provides them. But the typical way Jesus has of doing good for us is by sending us to do good for someone else. That is to say, you may have come here hoping to receive some grace from God, but that grace, Jesus insists, comes in the form of an assignment.

Like, say, maybe you think you need less stress in your life, but Jesus believes that what you need most is something good to do with your life! That seems a strange answer to a stressful life, giving you more work to do. Except that maybe the stress you feel isn’t because you have too much on your plate, but because there’s no focus to your efforts, nothing to give your life direction, to order your days. And now Jesus gives you that focus, by focusing you on serving someone else.

Or let's say you're reckoning with your mortality, what will happen when you die. Jesus’ answer, surprising enough, is for you to tell others of the new life we have in him. The reason being, in telling others the good news of eternal life, we’ll likely find our own trust in Jesus’ promises renewed and strengthened. Not unlike how John Wesley instructed his doubting lay preachers to preach about faith until they had it, and then preach the faith they have.

Please understand, I do hope our time this morning before God is edifying for you, comforting and encouraging, a source of strength and hope. But even more than any of that, I hope you’ve gotten a new sense of the good work that God is doing and the good that God has called you to do as part of it. There are people near you, sitting beside you on the pew, living at your home, or working beside you at the office, who need the truth-telling, life-giving, kingdom-witnessing that Jesus has commissioned you to do.

There’s a reason why, at the end of every service, while the notes of the last hymn are still ringing in the air, worship concludes with a charge, “Go forth in the name of Christ! Go in peace to love and serve the Lord! Let us go forth into the world, rejoicing in the power of the Spirit!” Those are not words for “consumers” of God’s love. Those are words for those called to give it. These words, this charge, is an important reminder, one last time, before we head out, that we are not merely the beneficiary of God’s love; we are its instruments. We are not only receivers of grace; we are bearers of it.

So let us go forth today as the twelve did, not as hawkers of spiritual goods, but as a people empowered with Jesus’ authority, eager to show the world what God can do, what he is doing, for us and for others. Thanks be to God!