The root of discipleship is in sacrifice–a concept which, much like acknowledging white supremacy and racism, is a truth we’d rather avoid.
Discipleship and the need to dismantle racism
Proper 6A | Matthew 9:35-10:8(9-23)
We catch up with Jesus who is healing, feeling compassion for the leaderless people, and saying to his followers,
“The harvest is plentiful, but the laborers are few; therefore ask the Lord of the harvest to send out laborers into his harvest.”
Like Jesus is saying to his disciples, These people need people. Pray that God will send them what they need.
I like putting a pause there—like the end of an episode—put the words “To be continued…” on the screen. An announcer: Next week, we’ll see if God shows up for them!
But part 2, chapter 10, begins with “Then”. A strangely-placed connecting word. He’s telling the disciples to pray. Then…he calls the disciples close. For the plot twist.
You go.
Jesus is sending the disciples out to be God’s grace. Like the ancient predecessor to Margaret Meade: You be the change you want to see in the world.
The Real Twist
We know the drill by now; we’ve seen it many times with Jesus. We’ve heard Paul call us the hands and feet of Christ. We know that we are how God is to be known here. So this revelation may not be so surprising to hear this morning.
What Jesus says next may be the bigger twist for us.
“Go nowhere among the Gentiles, and enter no town of the Samaritans, but go rather to the lost sheep of the house of Israel.”
This command is abrupt. It goes against our instincts. We’re used to Jesus sending us to the Samaritans and outsiders. But here, it’s a mandate to work at home. Now, it doesn’t so much read like a command to avoid the rest nearly as much as saying the sickness in the world is here. In our house.
Even this is not a shocking idea.
Many want us to focus our attention on our neighborhood rather than our world. On the poverty in our closest streets rather than those many miles away. But let us not mistake systemic problems for permanent ones. Jesus isn’t saying we should look close to home because that is always the best posture.
He says to them
“See, I am sending you out like sheep into the midst of wolves”
because their own people in their own house are wolves. Their leaders, those chosen to protect the sheep are in fact killing them. These sheep are being wolves.
Racism close to home
Many of our siblings in faith are following Jesus’s mandate into the streets, to find their sheep struggling in the midst of wolves.
Let us look at our own house for wolf behavior.
In 1901, the 27 year-old George Ward was accused of killing a white woman right here in Terre Haute. This fits the most common excuse for singling out young black men for punishment—threatening white women. Ward was taken from police custody, lynched, and his body was burned. Nobody was held responsible for this extrajudicial murder.
My friend Matt Larimer, recently shared Terre Haute’s redlining maps; those maps of the city used to not only prevent minorities from buying property, but
“…these maps influenced zoning ordinances so that bars, liquor stores, and night clubs could be built in racially integrated communities but not in white communities.”
Not just “a few bad apples”
We must refuse to argue that it is just “a few bad apples” when the old saying reveals the danger rot poses to the whole. Racism is rooted in the economic systems, public health systems, and certainly the criminal incarceration system.
We too often frame our racism as a problem in the hearts and minds of individuals rather than the unjust systems themselves. That a mob could lynch a man, any man, for any reason, and feel justified is horrifying. None of them were punished!
Or that some benefit from having corruption or pollution in someone else’s neighborhood—a kind of unseen benefit that they didn’t ask for personally. But someone else engineered. And other people are paying the price.
And yet all of this is a past informing the cries of pain in the present. We choose how we respond.
Costly Grace
Dietrich Bonhoeffer reminds us that the parable of the Good Samaritan is a direct response to a question. Who is the neighbor? A question asked by someone trying to avoid responsibility for justice. So Jesus responds with a parable about avoidance.
A parable that invites each of us to answer Me, I am the neighbor.
When someone is beaten, who helps them? Each of us answers Me, I am the neighbor.
When someone can’t breathe? Me, I am the neighbor.
When someone is left to die by the side of the road? Me, I am the neighbor.
The gang that lynched and then burned George Ward in Terre Haute 119 years ago was full of people who claimed to follow Jesus. Supposedly good citizens. The kind of people few in town would ever call “bad apples”. But they joined in killing the man.
Like the four men who together killed George Floyd in Minneapolis.
Who is the neighbor? Me.
Feeling Lost
Wrestling with systemic racism; injustice; all of these wheels of oppression are confusing. We worry about offending each other. About “getting political.” We don’t know what to say. And even if we did know what to say, we don’t know what to do about it.
It’s funny that we always end up here. As if confusion about where to go next is some kind of natural endpoint or a legitimate option. Like wrestling with the sin of racism and the evils of systemic oppression is just so…ugh. Like deciding what we’re going to have for dinner tonight…I mean, it’s so hard, sometimes we just can’t even.
Is there any wonder that Jesus’s instructions are to go out there anyway? Like sheep in the midst of wolves. Carrying nothing. No food or weapons. Nothing to get to the second level of Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs.
Just go. And not even with prepared words. No finely-tuned mission statement. No expertly-crafted list of demands. Nothing poll-tested as not to offend the people you hope to convince.
Just go. And when it’s time to speak, you’ll find the words are there.
Grace, Finally
The Equal Justice Initiative held a remembrance for George Ward on March 1st of this year. That was just three months ago. Members of his family came to Terre Haute, to the banks of the Wabash, to the place of his murder, for reconciliation as part of the national Community Remembrance Project.
At a time when some are eager to protect certain symbols of our history, they would rather lynching, redlining, and other manifestations of racism go unremembered.
But a grace given without regard to our substance, to the weight of our commitment to one another is indeed the cheapest of grace. The grace we are invited into—of being the neighbor, to sacrifice our own welfare for those who are suffering is far more costly. But it is quite literally the substance of the gospel.
Jesus has given a mandate to those who would be his disciples: shepherd the shepherdless when all around are wolves.
This mandate is, at its root political. And yet, even if we wish to avoid it, it remains. Calling out to us. To be with. The words will come. Trust that the words will come. Just be with these sheep, as he is with us. An unconditional love for unconditional loving.
This is what it means to be his disciples. Committed to loving the evil out of this world. Not papering over it. Or ignoring it, hoping it will go away. Or saying nothing to avoid angering the protectors of injustice. Saying the names of victims, revealing their stories, seeking better justice than what we’re doing now. In this house.
And we can transform this community, this city, once the site of a most heinous evil, an evil protected for decades by banks, civic leaders, and even the church, into a place of true conciliation. God’s kin-dom. With our healing presence; our love for unconditional loving.