June 14, 2026

This morning, before we begin, I want to offer just a further bit of scripture, as sometimes the pericope — the verses that are chosen for the lectionary — need to be expanded just slightly to give us a little bit more context. You all may remember that last week we were also in Matthew chapter 9, but this week we pick up in verse 35, missing about nine verses from where we ended last week and begin this week. And in those nine verses we have two healing narratives, with verse 33, right before we pick up today, with this statement: "And the crowds were amazed and said, never has anything like this been seen in Israel. But the Pharisees said, by the ruler of demons, he casts out demons."

In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen. Please be seated.

Well, here I am, 1,055 miles later. And again, thank you so much for all of your prayers, though I will admit to you that I may have a bit of a thousand-yard stare for the next few days as I continue to recover from the journey. But I went to Arkansas and helped my parents pack up and begin that journey of movement from Conway, Arkansas, where they have lived for the last 22 years.

Conway is amongst a number of cities in the United States that advertises or identifies itself as the "city of colleges." And to be sure, there are a number of institutions of higher learning — a rather unique feature for the state of Arkansas and for the region in general. So it's a befitting name. But I think also, equally, Conway might be said to be the city of churches. Now, anecdotally, I couldn't pin this down precisely, but I was told at one point in the past — back maybe in the 80s or early 90s — Conway had more Christian churches per capita than any other city in the country. And I don't know if that's exactly true or not, but it certainly could be the case. One of the main drags through town has this section of about a quarter of a mile, if that, where literally side by side by side by side are five different churches, all of different denominations.

Also, it is a truism that when you get to Conway, one of the first questions you get asked is, "What church do you go to?" Not, "Do you go to church?" But, "What church do you go to?"

And these two realities might seem in some ways in tension with one another — the city of higher education and the city of faith. But those two things are not so entirely separate at this time of year. I suspect that this is one of the very few times in the calendar year where our societal ethos is almost paired precisely with the ethos that we encounter in our lectionary readings and this season of who we are in our church life.

This is a season of commencement and commission. When we look around, high schools and colleges and universities are wrapping up their academic years, students are preparing to graduate, and in that season of commencement — that sense of beginning — there is very often also a season of commissioning, a pairedness with that beginning of a new era, a beginning of a new journey. Because when you listen to commencement speakers, they almost always present a commission: with this new era of your life, with this new beginning that you are moving into, here's how you should live into that most fully.

And this is a season of commission for us in the church. If you remember just a few weeks ago, the Sunday before Pentecost, we celebrated the Ascension. And we celebrate it this year with that great passage from Matthew 28: "Go, therefore, and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, and teaching them to obey everything I have commanded you." That language of the Great Commission — the singular commission that we often think about when we think about that term in our Christian life.

But the reality is that is not the only commission in the Bible. Over and over again, God commissions his people and Jesus commissions his followers. This is not exclusive to Matthew chapter 28. And so I want to invite us today to think about the commissionings, the commissions, that we encounter in our readings.

First, we have this passage from Exodus 19. And in verse 6, we hear, "You shall be for me a priestly kingdom and a holy nation." That is very much a way of commissioning — it is an identification of the Israelites with a mission. That's where "commission" comes from: with a missio, with a focus for their life and their work. Martin Luther took this language, especially in Exodus 19, as one of his primary bases for articulating the theology of a priesthood of all believers — that the call to be priestly, the call to be holy, is not exclusive to a certain group of people, a subset of Christians, but it is to apply to all the chosen people, to all who are of the fold. That we all have a call and responsibility to these priestly vocations of gospel proclamation, of holiness in life, of communicating the power of transformation that God is on about.

And then we have the commission that we encounter here in chapter 10. Quite honestly, this is maybe a little bit more awkward of a commissioning. And to be fair, in light of the Ascension, in light of Pentecost, the descent of the Holy Spirit, these two-plus millennia later, we take everything in Scripture all together and sort of see it as an integrated whole. But we have a commissioning here in Matthew chapter 10 that is one I think we often fail to think about. It is a commissioning that is much more localized, much more focused on the realities of relationships in our very context, in our very communities.

David Schmidt, a professor at Concordia Seminary in St. Louis, puts it this way: "It is not that mission is in foreign, exotic places — or that mission in foreign and exotic places is wrong — but there is mission in the middle of our ordinary life. And I think that is what our Lord is doing. He is opening our eyes to see that mission begins in compassion, and he's opening our eyes to see that he has surrounded us with people ripe for the harvest."

So often, when we think about commission, we can kind of exclusively focus on this universalizing sense of Matthew 28. But we are simultaneously called to this mission of the local, to this mission of the people for whom we are engaged. And very often, at least in our context in the United States, this is a mission and a commissioning to people who are already Christian — people who are sort of similar to the context of Matthew chapter 10: people of the book, of the fold, of the faith.

And it can be very easy for us, in our kind of progressive, comfortable, not very confrontational lives, to not want to get into the messiness of theological debate and discourse, to avoid dealing with the complexities of differences that we might often encounter when we are in relationship with those who are already Christian but of a different persuasion — or to deal with the awkwardness of the differences that we might have denominationally, doctrinally.

And I have to admit, I find myself many times avoiding these same confrontations. Just this past week, the denomination I was raised in proclaimed a rather heavy-handed and conservative take on women's roles in society and in the church — a rejection of any kind of role of leadership that women can have in the church. And more often than not, my response has been one of saying, "That's not who I am anymore. That's not my community. It is not for me to speak into that situation. I am no longer a part of them." And I think Jesus is challenging me today — maybe challenging us — to not so rigidly hold those dichotomies, but to recognize that in our ministry and vocation, in this place, as this community of faith, with this particular charism and gift of faith that we have been bestowed, we do have a ministry, a proclamation, even to those who are like us, even to those who we may often avoid confronting.

And so I want to spend a few minutes today thinking about the nuancing of that, and the complexity of what it means to have this kind of localized call — this commissioning that may sometimes be to those who look most like us, instead of just to those who are different.

We are in the Gospel of Matthew for this liturgical year. And there is this profound passage in Matthew chapter 18 that we often equally avoid or sometimes just ignore outright — Matthew chapter 18, verses 15 through 17. Jesus is offering guidance for how we deal with discord, with those who have violated some kind of precept or covenant, those who have in some way sinned. And the beginning of that prescription is a private, one-on-one encounter. It is only as the one to whom we are addressing this admonition rejects that counsel that we escalate the issue to more and more public spheres.

So often today, in our kind of social media, frenetic, soundbite culture, we jump to the public condemnation first. We fail to do this deep work of relationality, this deep work of encounter in these one-on-one spaces. And so the first thing to think about when we think about this commission we have from Jesus today is to think about what that means relationally for us, one to another — how we are to cultivate these relationships as a part of our proclamation of the good news that we have been entrusted with.

And then, two, we have the reality of what it means to be these people of proclamation, and how it is that we move into this form of ministry — to live most fully into this sense of commissioning. This goes beyond the structures of what we hear in Matthew chapter 10, but is certainly connected to and informed by it.

In John chapter 4, we have another passage in which Jesus uses this language of harvest, where he sees those to whom the disciples are going as the people ready and prepared for transformation. In John chapter 4, verse 35, Jesus says, "I tell you, look around you and see how the fields are ripe for harvesting. The reaper is already receiving the wages." And who is it in that example but the Samaritans?

Now, this seems to violate precisely what Jesus prescribes in Matthew chapter 10: "Go nowhere among the Gentiles and enter no town of the Samaritans." And yet that is precisely what he is doing here. And I want to suggest that even in the kind of confining parameters that Jesus sets up in chapter 10, when we begin to go to our community — to those who are more like us than not — even in following through that commission, our eyes are opened more fully to the expansiveness of who the people of God are.

To pull from St. Paul elsewhere in his epistle writings, even as we hear this admonition of restriction in chapter 10, what we know in the end result — taking the fullness of Scripture together — is that there is no such thing as a Gentile or a Jew. There is no division at the end of the day. And so for us to go to each other, for us to go to our brother and sister, is in a fulsome sense to go to all the world.

But as we hear in that beautiful passage from Acts chapter 1, to do that is to go to everyone — to Judea and Samaria. And sometimes today I think it is easier for us to think about the Samaritan, easier for us in our context to think about going to the one who is radically other, radically different. And the most difficult — the most difficult call — is to go to the one who is most like us, the one for whom it is very convenient to agree to disagree, to not get into the challenging weeds of these doctrinal divisions that we have.

And yet, in the fullness of our faith tradition, we have a powerful witness to the equality of all in the call to ministry — through the role and power that women can play in being proclaimers of the gospel, in being leaders and guiders of the faith; the role and witness that we have to play in raising up the dignity of every human being; the diversity of created order; the experience of those who have a variety of differences, whether they be on matters of human sexuality or disability or anything else — that we proclaim the goodness, the beauty, the holiness of all of life's expressions.

And we have a powerful witness in being able to offer that to those who are most different from us, and to those who are most like us. And when we go back to that passage that I began with — those last two verses preceding our reading today — we are reminded that this is not going to be an easy road. There are those we will encounter, those who are very much like us, who will be amazed, who will say that never have they heard anything like this, that it will be a fresh and new way for them to encounter the loving, compassionate God that they desperately seek. But we will also find church leaders, we will also find those in authority, who say, "Clearly this is demonic. What you are on about is demonic." And both of those realities occurring should not obscure or diminish the call we have to proclaim the gospel that we have been entrusted with.

And so, friends, today I invite us, as we move forward from this place, to embrace this commissioning that we have — to embrace this call to be a people of good news, a people of transformed life, in the ways that God has given us that ministry. To be those who minister to ones most like us and to ones most different from us, but to be open to all the spaces and places that God has given us as our fields, as our places of harvesting.

May we be nourished and renewed today in that commitment, and embrace that call now and in the time to come. In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.