Matthew 10:24-39
“Taking a Stand”
June 21, 2020
Jesus, the whole fear not, be not afraid kick you were on may have been all fine and good throughout Biblical history and you certainly knew your audience with your disciples and their fears, but let’s get real.
We are living in a time and place where fear is a daily part of our existence. As wonderful as it is to be able to worship together now outside with each of you after 3 long months of isolation and Zoom church, the fear of the spread of this Coronavirus continues to take up valuable room in our hearts and heads every day. Look around – all of your beloved faces are half-covered in an effort to protect each other from spreading an invisible virus that none of us at this moment knows whether we have. Masks and social distancing are intended to protect us and keep our fear at a manageable level because it means we are doing something.
The economic downturn that we are experiencing is making many fearful, especially the record numbers of those whose hours have been cut or whose jobs are gone altogether. Fear of food insecurity is at the heart of the thousands whose cars have lined up hours ahead of time throughout Vermont in order to be there to receive much needed dairy products, meat, produce and MREs through the Farmers to Families program, including many right here in our county who have lined up at Bromley and the Bennington Airport in the last couple of months.
The racism that we as a nation are facing down with hopefully an intention to change its course is predicated on fear, fear that has festered in this land since the 1619 arrival of the first enslaved Africans on this continent. The reckoning we are having at this moment in our history has the potential to beat back that fear.
The United Methodist Council of Bishops just laid out its response on this past Friday, Juneteenth. They have called it “Dismantling Racism: Pressing on to Freedom” and it’s an ambitious wide-ranging denominational effort intended to confront this fear from a variety of perspectives over the next 15 months. May we pray that, in the words of one bishop in the video rollout, “It must be different this time. As people of faith, we must lead.”
Jesus here in this passage is pushing a huge “Get Out the Volunteers Campaign,” as one theologian called it. Jesus is prepping these disciples for the conflict that they will inevitably encounter, just like him. What Jesus offers them is the power to heal, to drive demons away, to cleanse lepers and even bring the dead back to life. He knows and wants them to know that there will be sacrifices – in the form of financial security, extra clothes, maybe shoes, and their families to lean into. Jesus is a realist. He knows the high price of discipleship. These ones who would follow him risk arrests, beatings, family who will turn on them, hatred and persecution.
Wouldn’t it just have been easier to return to the life they lived before Jesus? Wouldn’t it be easier for us to live blissfully ignorant? Here’s the thing, though. We can’t unsee what we’ve seen or unlearn what we now know. Facing down fear, choosing the loving path may mean we forfeit comfort for courage. The disciples made a choice to follow Jesus who stood up to the status quo, the known, because of his all-encompassing loving path. He was embodying the God who included all of creation, leaving no one behind.
In the coming days and weeks and months, we may each face a time of determining where we stand on issues of justice and mercy. Taking the loving, inclusive way runs the risk of alienating us from people we care about and love. Jesus so often says fear not and what he’s pointing to is how truly human it is to fear. And then he offers an alternative. But it’s not always an easy alternative. As Brennan Manning in The Ragamuffin Gospel put it, “[Jesus] had no romantic notion of the cost of discipleship. He knows that following Him was as unsentimental as duty, as demanding as love.”
The Gospel is not intended to make nice and make us feel better. It is written to make us be better and to do better. In the words of Barbara Brown Taylor, “The peace of God is worth anything it takes to get there, and anyone knows that the absence of conflict is not peace. The good news is that in Christ God has given us someone worth fighting about, and someone with clout enough to end all our fighting.”
The cost of discipleship is the hard thing we can do. May we be blessed and a blessing to others in our words and deeds. Amen.