July 7, 2025
/There's a rather old joke that's been around for some number of decades: you call someone who speaks two languages bilingual, and someone who speaks three languages trilingual, and someone who speaks one language an American. I was acutely aware of this fact landing in Madrid a week ago Thursday, and especially making my way down to Granada, a little outpost on the southern coast of Spain. The plane actually only had one row of seats on one side, two rows of seats on the other. We had to climb up the folded-down stairs on the plane to get to Granada. It was an interesting little experience. I was very, very disappointed in myself for how little Spanish I actually knew considering how much I've been exposed to it for so much of my life. As a quick aside though, I was amazed at how much kind of was in the recesses of my mind once the cobwebs got knocked off and things got cleaned up a little bit up there.
But even in the midst of my limited Spanish, I was shocked, amazed at how hospitable the folks in Spain were. There was this incredible depth of hospitality everywhere we went. We were well received in pretty much every quarter that we were in. And it was such a noticeable reality for me because of the history of the place. In the 20th century especially, there's been this shift, this attempt to frame Spain, and especially the south of Spain, Andalusia, where we were, as this kind of center of a clash of civilizations, that competing ideologies cannot coexist with one another. And so, in fact, what we have throughout history is this fraughtness, this competition, this conflict between these competing ideologies. But the more nuanced, more complete truth is that these competing ideologies, to the degree that they are competing, actually in the long arc of history, coexist more than they conflict. And yes, there are tensions. There are times of unease. There are periods of outright suppression and oppression, like the expulsion of the Jews during the Reconquista. But more often than not, it's a process of living together in the midst of diversity.
You might hear in that a continuing theme that I'm building: that this experience of being the church in our place, our ministry of presence in this community and in the world around us, is one in which we are always pointing towards the possibility of being together in our diversities, being unified in the multiplicity of experiences we bring into this space and time and this community. And I've been continuing to think about all of these things, but especially in light of our gospel passage today. This is a passage about embrace, hospitality, transformation. And there are some unique characters and features to this particular passage. This ascending is in all three of the Synoptic Gospels. Now, sometimes it's ascending of the 12, sometimes it's ascending of the 70, sometimes it's a little bit ambiguous as to whether it's 12 or 70, but it's ascending. And it's ascending into communities desperately in need of good news, ascending into fraught and difficult spaces, lambs in the midst of wolves, as we hear about in our passage today. But it was ascending into spaces and places and to people who all needed to hear the good news.
One of the interesting notes, and I believe I referenced this last year when this passage came around too, is that if we go and look at the Greek, and this is true in the Lucan passage and in the Martin passage, the Greek is duo, duo, that the 70 or the 12 were sent out two by two. We don't actually hear that in the rendering from this translation, but that's what the Greek says. And in the whole of Scripture, if we take the Greek Old Testament, the Septuagint, the Hebrew Scriptures translated into Greek, there's only one other place in the whole of Scripture where that framing is used. Duo, duo is how the animals came into the ark: two by two. And womanist scholars, those who focus on the narrative of women in Holy Scripture, have suggested, I think rather compellingly, that this is a hearkening back to the Ark, and that it is a pairing of men and women disciples going out into the community. Because when it is fundamentally about reaching everyone, it would have been nigh impossible for a man to speak to the whole community. Men, male disciples, would have been the proselytizers to the men in the community, and women, female disciples, would have been the proselytizers to the women in the community. It would have culturally made sense to have a pairing of men and women together to reach everyone with this transforming news of a new way.
But there's also an interesting editorial redaction in our passage as well. If you look closely, we're missing some verses. Verses 11 through 15 are cut out of what we have in our reading from Luke's gospel today. And those verses, beginning in Verse 12, say, "I tell you," and this is Jesus speaking, "on that day it will be more tolerable for Sodom than for that town. Woe to unrepentant cities. Woe to you, Chorazin. Woe to you, Bethsaida. For if the deeds of power done in you had been done in Tyre and Sidon, they would have repented long ago, sitting in sackcloth and ashes. But at the judgment it will be more tolerable for Tyre and Sidon than for you. And you, Capernaum, will you be exalted in heaven? No, you will be brought down to Hades."
Now, scholars don't actually know exactly why these particular communities were highlighted, where these communities were, who they were. There's some ambiguity here. But I think it is reasonable at least to consider the possibility, if you remember several weeks ago, that these might have been the communities where things were kind of isolated, kept to themselves, as I talked about three weeks ago, four weeks ago. The whole of Galilee, while it was this kind of transnational crossroads in which a lot of commerce and multiple identities and communities and cultures blended together, also had these pockets of isolation, these communities that were very tight-knit, that wanted to keep a certain way of being, a certain way of living to themselves. And it might be the case that these communities being condemned were precisely those that were this kind of isolationist, standoffish, holding everything else at arm's length type of groups. And so, yes, it does make sense to think about the pairs of the disciples going out, duo, duo, men to men, women to women. But it also seems that Jesus is kind of playing with, upending, challenging the cultural milieu in which you have these very tight, delineated lines. And we see that throughout his gospel narratives. He talks to women, sometimes by himself, which would have been incredibly radical in that day and time.
And so we don't actually know exactly what's going on with all of these dynamics. A lot of it is up to speculation. But if we come back to the fundamental heart of the passage, what we see is a command to communicate good news, transforming news, life-giving news, a new way of being in the world around us. And I actually like, for once, that the passage of condemnation is redacted out of our reading. Because when we take the pericope, when we take the reading that we have today as it is presented to us, the focus remains from beginning to end on us, on our actions, who we are to be in the world around us, how we are to be the communicators of good news. The condemnation and the judgment are left to God alone.
I think that's helpful to remember. Because last Sunday, last Sunday, you might recall that when the Samaritan village did not receive Jesus, James and John wanted to call fire down upon them, wanted to take that place of judgment. And Jesus rebuked them for that aggression. As my colleague, Father Chris Corbin notes, we Christians are particularly in this outraged, addicted internet culture of ours called to calmly and coolly walk away from rejection, hostility, etc., etc., rather than getting revenge, one-upping, dunking, escalating. And in this way, we are called to proclaim God's peace. So our responsiveness is to dust off our feet, to not let these places of rejection weigh us down, these times of rejection, but simply to carry on with the proclamation of the good news to the places and spaces to which we are called and to the people for whom it is received.
So where does this bring us today then? I want to invite us to consider this as an opportunity for liberation. Deacon Janice noted that last week. She had this powerful observation that liberation always comes at a cost. This ministry of good news that we offer to the world around us is a ministry of liberation from our provincialisms, from our closed-off ways of being. But in being that, it is also a call into often, very often, times and spaces of discomfort, of being new or being in a new way to a new people, of transforming ourselves as much as we are transforming the people to whom we go.
I said that I liked the redaction because it highlights for us the ultimate judgment and condemnation being God's purview alone. But it's also true that we live not just in this moment of outrage, but in a moment of isolationism and inhospitality. Like the more complicated and nuanced picture of Spain that I painted at the beginning of my homily, we too have a complicated and nuanced legacy of openness in our own country. And it's not always clearly wholly good or wholly bad. This present moment, though, really brings into acute focus what our ministry of good news should be in this present moment.
This past Thursday, July 3rd, right before the July 4th holiday, our presiding bishop, Sean Rowe, published an article in RNS, Religious News Service. And I want to commend the whole of the article to you. But I want to highlight just a couple of pieces that I think are very prescient for us today. He reflected on our long legacy as a church, beginning by observing, "It is shaping up to be a complicated Independence Day for the Episcopal Church. We were once the church of the founding fathers and presidents. 34 of the 56 signers of the Declaration of Independence were members of what became our church after the Revolution. And 11 presidents, including George Washington, have professed our faith. Today, however, we are known less for the powerful people in our pews than for our resistance to the rising tide of authoritarianism and Christian nationalism. When religious institutions like ours enjoy easy coexistence with earthly power, our traditions and inherited systems tend to become useless for interpreting what is happening around us. But our recent reckoning with the federal government has allowed us to see clearly the ease with which the Protestant tradition of patriotism can lead Christians to regard our faith more as a tool of dominion than a promise of liberation."
And we are in a particularly challenging place because one of our primary ministries in the last decades of the church, the last half century or more, has been a ministry to migrants and refugees the world over. Our migration ministries department, our resettlement office in the Episcopal Church has been one of the major resettlement agencies, along with Catholic Charities and Lutheran World Services, working to help displaced and vulnerable people the world over. And those ministries, that work, has now had to be shuttered in light of current policy decisions. Additionally, our denomination, specifically the Episcopal Church within the larger Anglican community, is not just here in the United States. We actually represent 11 countries, including within those, Colombia, Venezuela, Cuba, Haiti. And it's become nigh impossible for members of our church, our own brothers and sisters, to travel from here to there or from there to here. Our very being, our very construction, our very presence as a church is being compromised by these difficulties.
And yet, and yet what we are called to is not partisanship, is not some kind of delineated good and bad other, but instead to more forcefully and fully proclaim the gospel in this moment, to preach the promise of liberation. Further on down the article, after reflecting on the history of the prophetic church in certain places and throughout history, specifically highlighting the confessing church during Nazi Germany, Presiding Bishop Rowe goes on to say, "These historical lessons from these prophetic churches are urgent. Churches like ours, protected by the First Amendment and practiced in galvanizing people of goodwill, may be some of the last institutions capable of resisting this overreach and recklessness. To do so faithfully, we must see beyond the limitations of our tradition and respond not in partisan terms, but as Christians who seek to practice our faith fully in a free and fair democracy. We do not seek this predicament, but God calls us to place the most vulnerable and marginalized at the center of our common life, and we must follow the command regardless of the dictates of any political party or earthly power. We are now being faced with a series of choices between the demands of the federal government and the teachings of Jesus. And that is no choice at all."
And so what do we do with all of that? That's so very complicated. It feels in this present moment that we too are the sheep among wolves in the midst of all of these competing forces and tensions and conflicts in the world around us. And I think here, here is where St. Paul's epistle reading from Galatians is so very helpful: "What do we do? We don't grow weary in doing what is right because we know that we will reap at harvest time if we do not give up. Wherever we have an opportunity, let us work for the good of all."
Now granted, there's this little caveat there: "especially for those of the family of faith." But if we go down further, what does he say at the very end? "For neither circumcision nor uncircumcision is anything, but a new creation is everything. As for those who will follow this rule, peace be upon them and mercy and upon the Israel of God." The people of the family of faith are all, are all who follow the way of peace and love and compassion. Maybe. Maybe the people of faith are all of us. The whole world. Such that when we work for the good of all, we literally mean all. And that's challenging. That's hard. That's going to put us in places of tension and difficulty. That's going to send us into spaces that are inhospitable. But may we never grow weary in doing what is right. May we never grow weary in doing what is right. In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.