Exodus 19:2-8a
Romans 5:6-11
Matthew 9:35-10:8(9-15)
Psalm 100
On September 11, Rowan Williams, the Archbishop of Wales, was at Trinity Church in Wall Street. He has written a little book of reflections on that experience. In it he tells of meeting an airline pilot who asked him: "Where is God in all this?" The archbishop muttered something about how God doesn’t intervene, but is always with us as we struggle to cope, but he felt his answer was lame and inadequate.
We can, after all, say something about deliberate destruction, malicious evil, as things that God condemns and resists. But what about this: during the last month, in the peaceful little office where I work, a young mother who has been struggling with cancer for three years had to return to the hospital with new and probably fatal metastases, and in the very same week her father died. And on a Friday morning one of our young co-workers got out of bed and went to fetch her 15-month-old daughter from her crib, only to find that the child had climbed out of the crib, fallen between the crib and the bureau, and died. Nobody is responsible; no one wanted these things to happen; no matter how much self-blame the people involved impose on themselves (and they will, always), it is impossible to foresee everything or to prevent it. In the following weeks I heard of the deaths of two old and dear friends: one of them a man well into his 80s, but the other a woman just turned 50. I am sure if we go around the room here, you can tell me of the same kinds of things that have happened in your own lives just this month.
And the gospel today talks about ministry, about Jesus’ compassion on the people and his sending his disciples to heal them and care for them. And like the archbishop, we, disciples for today, embrace these suffering people, and we wonder what to say that could even begin to be adequate.
It all sounds so simple in the gospel: Jesus sends the disciples out and gives them power to heal and comfort and even to raise the dead. Off they go, and it all works so well! In the short run, it sounds great. But in the long run—well, there was that one who betrayed him, and in fact they all lost their nerve at the end. They didn’t believe, after Jesus was crucified, that they really had that power he gave them. And even when he was raised from the dead, even when he showed himself to them, they weren’t so sure. When he was taken away from their sight they ran pell-mell back to Jerusalem and locked themselves in a room, afraid of what would happen to them now.
We are no different than they were—no worse and no better. In the face of all the things that come at us, day by day and week by week, we stand like Peter and Mary and the rest of them, gazing up to heaven, bewildered and dazed and doubting. We huddle with Peter and Mary and the rest of them in our houses and our churches, hoping somehow to keep the world at bay. And then the Holy Spirit comes, that tornado of mystery, and, as Barbara Brown Taylor says, "sets our heads on fire" and drives us out—out into the streets, babbling and shaking and still blinded by sorrow and joy and awe and total incomprehension, speaking words that are strange even in our own ears—words of hope in the face of despair, words of triumph in the face of disaster.
For God does intervene in our catastrophic world, just not in the way we wish for, not in the way we hope. God intervenes by joining us in the chaos. God intervenes by living our very life and dying our very death—knowing by experience what it means to lose a child, what it is like to look into the face of hatred—and so inviting us to join our lives to God’s, to enter into the agony of transforming human life into glory. God puts words into our mouths, words we don’t even begin to understand: Easter. Pentecost. Jesus.
We talk about our mission, about the work God has given us to do. But we would do better to think of it this way: the church doesn’t have a mission; the mission has a church. We are not the doers, the movers, the shakers, the folks who make it all happen. It doesn’t matter that we are inadequate. God is adequate. As the Black church’s hymn has it, "Our God is able." Our only responsibility is to listen, to let our heads catch fire—to take care that what we are doing is truly God’s doing, that the words we speak are God’s words, even if we don’t begin to understand them. In the end, when we are exhausted from our work, and when our eloquence falls to silence before the incomprehensible sorrow of the world, this is all we have left to say—and this is everything: Easter. Pentecost. Jesus. Amen.