Ex. 19:2-8a Ps.100
Rom.5:6-11 Matt.
Lectionary Link
We are at the season of graduations, and of course graduations this year have been interupted by the pandemic, but they still happen. Why? Because learning cannot stop and people cannot cease to have transitions from being students to being graduates.
In today's Gospel we have something akin to graduation from the rabbinical school of Jesus of Nazareth. The Gospel sets it up almost like a graduation ceremony with even a list of the graduates. "Peter, would you come forward and get your diploma...Andrew, James, John, Matthew, Thomas, Thaddeus, Judas,James son of Alphaeus, Simon, Bartholomew and Philip. You can imagine Jesus giving a commencement address, saying, "I have called you disciples, my pupils and my students, but now you have the degree of apostleship conferred upon you. You don't cease to be a disciple now that you will be apostles, but the whole purpose of learning from me is to go forth and practice what I have taught and shown you. Yes, you are apostles now, but you will still have some very hard lessons to learn, and some of you won't make it, (wink, wink, Judas). and some of you will experience failure, (wink, wink, Peter) but being an apostle does not mean being perfect, it simply means that I am sending you."
Jesus, as someone who knew he had something very special to share with the people of his country, also knew that in his time he was limited by only being able to be in one place at at time; he was limited by the location of wherever his body was. So, he needed to deputize and send out apostles from his school. He needed his graduates to go forth and put into practice what they had seen and learned from him.
And what did getting the message out need? It needed strategies and so Jesus gave his newly graduated apostles an evangelical strategy for a specific mission at the specific time. He tried to help them understand that not everyone would agree with them. Some would ignore them, some would even try to hurt them. Not everyone would be receptive to their message. So, "Don't get bogged down with rejection; move on. Let God take care of those who do not receive your message."
You and I are in the school of Jesus by virtue of our baptisms. And just like the apostles of old, we need to be graduates and continuing students at the same time. Everyone gets baptized into the school of Jesus. We matriculate in the school of Jesus through baptism. But the church has often made a mistake; we have often made the clergy the official apostles who do the ministry and we have treated lay people like perpetual students who belong to the churches where we pay clergy to be the special graduated apostles to do the work. No, everyone is to be an apostle and graduate in the school of Jesus. We are not called to be perfect graduates, only sent graduates. And we need to remember that if we have been baptized, then we are also sent. The so call official apostles of the church do not exhaust what it means to be sent by Christ; we are all sent by Christ.
Just as there were evangelical strategies in the early Jesus Movement and Christian communities based upon the "harvest" of people ready to hear. We too need to be sent with strategies to the people in our lives. The message has to be articulated to the conditions on the ground; what does it mean for the kingdom or realm of God to come near to the lives of people today?
Right now, the Gospel evangelical strategy for us has to include the message of God's love and justice for all people, particularly the people who have had to deal with those who have preached the love of God but not been recipient of the love of God from people who have called themselves followers of Jesus.
We live with the results of some very painful irony. When the message of Jesus became so white and Euro-centric, it became associated with the air of cultural superiority. And Euro-centric Christians conquered much of the non-white world and what happened? In direct and indirect ways, we introduced the peoples of the world to this Jesus. And many black people and people of color came to like this Jesus. And in the middle of the subjugation of black people, the obvious question was, "Why can't these white people treat us like Jesus would. We've found Jesus and he treats us much better than you do."
This discrepancy between the Christ we proclaimed to people we conquered and the total malpractice in the love of Christ is the big racial plague and aftermath of the era of the subjugation of the black people in our world.
If we are going to return to be students of Jesus and become "re-certified disciples and apostles," we are going to have to make conscious the deliberate practice of social justice for all people in our lives central to our Gospel strategy of evangelism.
Evangelism for us today, means that we need to become re-certified in the Holy Spirit who is honest to what the love of Jesus Christ means in the actual practice of justice. And we as Christian missionaries should never have taught this song, if we didn't practice it. "Jesus loves the little children, all the children of the world. Red and yellow, black and white, all are precious in his sight. Jesus loves the little children of the world." Let us sing this song again but let us really mean it in our evangelism and Christian living today. Amen.
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