Tag: St Mark's Leamington

The thousands of deserted places: exploring the feeding of the 5000

David HerbertLeave a comment

The gospel for the 9th Sunday after Trinity is the Feeding of the 5000. It’s the only miracle that is in all four gospels. Today’s reading is from Matthew 14:13-21. I was taken by the references to the “deserted place” and the time and chose to explore the good news of these key features.

This deserted place is Hiroshima after the first atomic bomb was exploded on August 6th 1945. This deserted place stretched my imagination about deserted places God seeks out. This, and the writing of Belden Lane gave the energy for this sermon.

Reflection on the time and place

Today’s gospel follows a sequence of readings from Matthew’s gospel when so much is made with so little: the parable of the sower planting seed which crops an enormous yield, the parable of the good seed which withstands the weeds, the parable of the mustard seed which grows into a shelter for the birds, the parable of the leaven folded into the loaf – and here we have the feeding of thousands with just a couple of fish and a bag of loaves.

For our imagination I’m going to focus on the where and when of the story.

The place

It was a deserted place. It was a desert place. So many of the landscapes of the Bible are desert places, just as so much of Israel is desert and mountain, desolate, deserted. God seems to choose to make God-self known in such places. The landscapes of the Bible are barren, wild and fierce. 

This place is on the edge. Jesus got there by boat. It’s on the edge of water and on the edge of the town and villages. It’s on the edge of where people really want to go. Jesus sought this place out as a place he wanted to be. He wanted a retreat and somewhere to pray. This was where he wanted to recover and where he expected to be fed. 

Many of us search these places out and we make holiday of them, climbing mountains, challenging rivers, going “off grid”. There we often find out about ourselves, we feel invigorated and our souls get fed.

But we don’t live there. You might find a few eccentrics living in places like that. It’s OK going there if you have the right gear and have taken safety precautions.

David Douglas has this to say about desert places and barren landscapes where nothing seems to grow. He writes: “the crops of wilderness have always been its spiritual values – silence and solitude, a sense of awe and gratitude – able to be harvested by any traveller who visits.”

But there are many who are forced into such places. They haven’t chosen to be there. They’ve been driven there by the circumstances of their lives, driven to the edge. I’m thinking of refugees. Poet Warsan Shire points out in her poem called Home:

No-one leaves home unless
home is the mouth of a shark.
…
you only run for the border
when you see the whole city
running as well.
…
you have to understand,
no one puts their children in a boat
unless the water is safer than the land.

who would choose to spend days
and nights in the stomach of a truck
…….?

We may have come to such a desparate place as this in our own lives, or may know that we have been there in a place where no-one really wants to go. No one wants to go to the place of extreme pain, or the loss of a loved one. They are the dread-ful places we dread to go. It is because no-one wants to go there that makes the place deserted, and where the place is deserted there are no well-trodden paths to guide our way. There are no maps. We feel that we are on our own, deserted in desert places, helpless and hopeless.

It was in such a place that Jesus had compassion for the thousands, who like him, were living on the edge, those who had joined him in that deserted place, and those he had joined. It’s on the edge that we realise what little we have, what little we have in terms of hope or resources of resilience. We are hanging on.

Jesus had compassion on those thousands
– and the little that they had
became more than enough for all of them.
He took five loaves and two fish,
he looked up to heaven, blessed the bread,
broke the bread and shared the bread
and they ate and were satisfied. 

These are precisely the actions of the work of the church,
also known as “the liturgy”.
In our Communion we take bread,
bless it, break it and share it. 
Our very language is fed by the memory
of that miracle of multiplication in that deserted place.

It’s as if the bread we are given is meant for such a place,
a wedge in a thin place, raising the angle of hope.
It’s as if the desert place is the perfect place
for the work and liturgy of the church
for those on the edge, just hanging on,
for those deserted in love through loss or betrayal,
for those deserting homes through the cruelty of others,
refugees and all those seeking refuge (no one leaves home
for those straying paths of addiction, for those shamed
and those who are ashamed, for those who are bullied,
for whom the playground or workplace is a friendless desert,
for those who have little and those who think little of themselves.

The psalmist has it. “You make us lie down in green pastures. You join us even as we walk through the valley of the shadow of death. You prepare a table to feed us in the sight of our enemies.” (Psalm 23)

So we have established where this miracle took place. We also know the time. Matthew tells us that the time is ‘when Jesus heard this’ – “this’ being the news brought to him by John the Baptist’s disciples that John, Jesus’s cousin had been killed by Herod – and that he had been killed in the most barbaric way, by being beheaded. Jesus’ grief is written into the landscape he deliberately searched for as his sense of desolation and desertion are reflected in the desolate deserted landscape. The when and where come together at this deserted place at the time of Jesus’ grief.

We are also told that it’s the end of the day. 

It’s going dark. 
Shadows are lengthening.
Time is running out.
It’s closing time.
It’s time for Jesus to send the crowds away
(according to the disciples).
But this is precisely the time
when Jesus makes time.
Just when it’s going dark,
when time is running out,
at the end of the day,
Jesus bids them stay with him.

We know this time at the end of the day.
It may have been a good day for us,
a  time for us to rest on our laurels,
for a job well done, the promises kept,
We may sleep well tonight.

But we know of other times, 
this time in the desert place deserted,
when promises are broken,
when we are exhausted and tired,
when time runs out
and the darkness spooks us.

And we know that for thousands,
(make that millions), 
time has lost all meaning,
there is only darkness.
At the end of the day,
when the shadows are
so threatening,
when promises lie broken,
when luck’s run out
leaving no chances
when both health and hope
have run out,
when the food’s run out
when friends have run out
leaving them there deserted
at wit’s end,
Jesus had compassion.
Worn out, grief-stricken, Jesus
at the end of the day,
looked to heaven
with the little he had,
the loaves, the fish, the love,
enough for another day.

And so we have the time and the place – and it is a miracle that thousands were fed, and that there was still enough to fill 12 baskets with what was left over. Those twelve baskets symbolise the twelve tribes of Israel, underlining the fact that God’s people have their fill of daily bread through Jesus and his compassion.

This feeding of thousands is a foretaste of our Communion service and a signal for the work of the church day in and day out. We know it’s not bread and fish for Communion. But it’s still the little Jesus had: his body broken for us, and his blood shed for us. His body seen in the bread and his compassion and passion seen in the drop of wine.

We have the time and the place. The place deserted, the time getting on. And so we come to Communion. Never think we come alone. We can never duck the fact that Communion is a political act. The timing and the placing of Communion place the broken and wronged at the scene of their greatest hope. We never come alone. We come together and we come in our thousands.

When you come for Communion don’t think you stand alone. Think of who you stand with and think of who you take a stand for. It might be the people you are literally standing by – in which case, pray for them and any grief, pain or challenge they or their loved ones may be going through and pray for their feeding for another day. Or they may be on the mountain, trying to achieve great things for others – in which case pray for their success.

And/or, you might cast your mind and your compassion further afield to others deserted and others lost in deserts. Maybe you will have already begun to name them in your prayers and intercession: those lost in addictions of various kinds, those in prison or detention centres, those in care homes, those whose work in dangerous, those who are bullied and abused, those who have been forced out of home, those caught up in conflict of one kind or another.

At the end of the day, when all is said and done, we stand together in our thousands. Thank God that he finds us when we are on the edge, in wilderness, in desert and desertion, when there’s no map to guide us or any other way to find us.

Matthew 14:13-21

Now when Jesus heard this, he withdrew from there in a boat to a deserted place by himself. But when the crowds heard it, they followed him on foot from the towns. When he went ashore, he saw a great crowd, and he had compassion for them and cured their sick.. When it was evening, the disciples came to him and said, ‘This is a deserted place, and the hour is now late, send the crowds away so that they may go into the villages and buy food for themselves.’ Jesus said to them, ‘They need not go away; you give them something to eat.’ They replied, ‘We have nothing here but five loaves and two fish.’ And he said, ‘Bring them here to me.’ Then he ordered the crowds to sit down on the grass. Taking the five loaves and the two fish, he looked up to heaven, and blessed and broke the loaves, and gave them to the disciples, and the disciples gave them to the crowds. And all ate and were filled, and they took up what was left over of the broken pieces, twelve baskets full. And those who ate were about five thousand men, besides women and children.

Post script:
Belden C Lane makes much of the desert and mountain landscape of the Bible in his book The Solace of Fierce Landscapes: exploring desert and mountain spirituality.
There are so much good work to help us understand the dreadfulness of the experience of refugees. Here’s four books I’ve found helpful:
My Fourth Time, We Drowned by Sally Hayden (2022), winner of the 2022 Orwell Prize for Political Writing, looking at efforts by the rich world to keep refugees from seeking safety
The Lightless Sky by Gulwali Passarlay (2015) – an Afghan refugee boy’s journey of escape
The Beekeeper of Aleppo by Christy Lefteri (2019)
American Dirt by Jeanine Cummins (2020)

Dealing with weeds and digging the seeds of Jesus’s teaching

David Herbert1 Comment

This is a sermon for the 7th Sunday after Trinity, inspired by Jesus’s so-called parable of the weeds, which is also his second parable of the sower. The text, Matthew 13:24-30, 36-43, is at the foot of this post.

The Sower at Sunset by Van Gogh. He painted over 30 pictures of The Sower. As a missionary he perhaps saw himself as a sower. He loved the land, its people and their commitment to their toil in soil. These parables meant a lot to him.

There isn’t a word of today’s gospel which is impossible for us to understand, is there? Jesus is talking to Jewish peasants as a Jewish peasant of things they knew well. This is the second parable of a sower and one of several parables about seeds. 

Last Sunday’s gospel was the parable of the sower who sowed seed – even as we heard the gospel, some of it will have fallen on stony ground, some among thorns, and some in good soil where it might have rooted through the week. Come next week and we will be celebrating the gospel where the kingdom of heaven is likened to a mustard seed, the smallest of all the seeds in the mind of Jesus. 

The language is simple, and the meaning is simple. Jesus explains: the sower is the Son of Man, the field is the world, the good seed are the people of the kingdom, the weeds are the people of the evil one and the evil one is the devil. That is how Jesus explained it then. 

Van Gogh’s Sower in the background. He painted over 30 pictures of The Sower. As a missionary he perhaps saw himself as a sower. He loved the land, its people and their commitment and love of the daily toil. These parables meant a lot to him.

These parables are simple – and small. They’re for us to dig into.

The sower might be anyone who sows the seeds of faith, hope and love. The field could be more specifically our field of work, or our field of study. The field could be anything, anything we are folded into, society, family etc (fold and field are the same word). 

The enemy could be anyone – even our very selves. Sometimes our biggest enemy is ourselves. We get the word enemy from a Latin root – the en of enemy means not, and the –emy ending is where we get the name Amy, meaning friend. So the enemy is anyone who is not friendly, the unfriendly

The weeds may be the enemies’ effect. Those weeds may be injustices, insults, prejudice, condemnation, curse – anything that nips hope in the bud. They may be temptations and cravings, or the unfriendly voices we replay in our minds, or the way of thinking we return to when we are tired or have worn ourselves out. It could be pain we suffer. It could be personal assault or it could be something more systemic and societal like the phobias such as xenophobia which affect our attitudes to the extent we become the un-friendly ones. The weeds may be so many things. They grow around us and they grow within us.

It is so hard living like this, particularly when we are hard pressed on every side, and particularly when so many weeds grow within us. There is never a time when we are not vulnerable. 

It is hard being, as it were, the seed planted by the sower in a field where the weeds threaten to overwhelm and throttle us. And it’s hard for any sower to see weeds growing where they have planted so carefully. So much so, that the perennial question is “what shall we do about the weeds?”.

The weeds are the big question at the heart of the parable. What are the weeds? Where did they come from? What should we do about them? This simple parable goes to the heart of what we find most difficult. How can we live with our enemies? How can we live with such unfriendliness? How can we live with these weeds?

This parable may be simple, but the challenge Jesus makes is so difficult and demanding and so countercultural.

What shall we do about the weeds? In our world, where nothing is perfect, where there is so much wrong, where we have so little control, where we are exhausted – how shall we live like this? What shall we do with the weeds to ensure a crop yield of hope, dignity and righteousness?

What is the gardener’s answer? It is interesting that our scriptures begin in a garden, and here we are in a garden with Jesus hearing the question, what shall we do with the weeds?

The gardener’s answer is surely, “get rid of them”, “pull them up”,  “poison them”, “cut them down”, “kill them”. Our default position is to cut the enemy out of our lives, to hate them and have nothing to do with them.

But Jesus’s answer is to leave them, because killing them may uproot the good seed. His concern is to protect the roots of the good seed, the people of the kingdom of heaven. If you listen carefully to the language of the gardener it is all violent – poison, cut, kill, eliminate.  It is actually the language and practice of the terrorist, and all those who want to make a short cut to their final solution. 

Jesus is teaching us to live with trouble, at a time we have little control, when we are surrounded by the effects of so much that is un-friendly. This has always been the way. God’s people, God’s seed, have always been in the world where there is so much wrong, cohabiting with weeds of unfriendliness. Sheep amongst wolves, Jesus described us. Jesus’s teaching was only ever for the poor and the poor in spirit – for the good seed planted in a field of unfriendliness and the effects of enmity.

And he wants to protect us, his seed, so that we develop strong roots of righteousness and grow a harvest of blessing. He is teaching us to live with enemies including the many times when the enemy turns out to be ourselves.

The violence of “poison, cut and kill” not only makes victims of our enemies, but also undermines the roots of righteousness. Jesus is teaching another way. That way he stated plainly in the Sermon on the Mount: “You have heard that it was said, ‘Love your neighbour and hate your enemy. But I tell you, love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, that you may be children of your Father in heaven.” (Matthew 5:42-45). He exemplified it on the cross when he prayed for those who were killing him.

Jesus is teaching us a new way to live with our enemies.

Another teacher, and another example of the good seed planted in a field: 

Howard Thurman was a black American preacher born in Florida a year after Van Gogh painted The Sower – in the heyday of white supremacist rule. He had a profound effect in the civil rights movement. In that sense he was “good seed” – a person of the kingdom. He was brought up by his grandmother, Nancy Ambrose. She had been a slave on a plantation in Madison County, Florida. She was a woman of great faith and a member of Mount Bethel Baptist Church. Good seed again. But listen to how the seed was planted in her and how she planted the seed in her grandson – and listen to the language of farming in what Thurman wrote:

Thurman’s whole life was dedicated to those “whose backs were against the wall”, as one whose back was against the wall. He says that the question of all those whose backs are against the wall, whose life and identity has been stolen, is “Who am I? What am I?” His awareness of being a child of God was drilled into him (notice the language of seed drilling) by his grandmother. 

“The idea was given to her [planted] by a slave minister who held secret religious meetings with his fellow slaves. How everything quivered in me with the pulsing tremor of raw energy when, in her recital, she would come to the triumphant climax of the minister: “You – you are not niggers. You – you are not slaves. You are God’s children.”

That’s how that man found out who he truly was in the eyes of God. It was drilled into him by his grandmother who had the idea planted in her by other good seed in that slave plantation of hostile racial bigotry. And roots of righteousness grew, and spread through the words and teaching of Thurman, through the seeds he transplanted to the book I have just quoted – a book which Martin Luther King always carried with him because of the good seed it contained.

Who can measure whether the seed of the slave minister, Nancy Ambrose, Howard Thurman, Martin Luther King and all their seeding yielded a crop hundred times, sixty times or thirty times what was sown?

Have you noticed how small everything is that Jesus uses to teach his disciples? He keeps using seeds, which even by his own admission can be choked and lost, probably thinking all the time of his own life and the lives of his disciples which could at any time be choked and lost. He is simply teaching us the hardest lesson of all, about how to live with enemies.

And he uses seeds to do that. In a world ripping itself apart in an arms race, where we are dominated by size, Jesus is pointing us to a new way of being – small. That’s the way. It’s not by acting big. The people of God don’t kill their way out of trouble. They don’t do away with the enemy. They live vulnerably with the enemy, all the time growing roots of righteousness and discernment.

This parable is like a seed planted in a field. It has so much energy to grow. It’s not about weakness. It’s about strengthening disciples for their life in the field. It’s not about submission, but is preparation for mission of those, like good seed planted in a field.

Matthew 13:24-30, 36-43
Jesus told them another parable: “The kingdom of heaven is like a man who sowed good seed in his field. But while everyone was sleeping, his enemy came and sowed weeds among the wheat, and went away. When the wheat sprouted and formed heads, then the weeds also appeared.
“The owner’s servants came to him and said, ‘Sir, didn’t you sow good seed in your field? Where then did the weeds come from?’
“‘An enemy did this,’ he replied.
“The servants asked him, ‘Do you want us to go and pull them up?’
“‘No,’ he answered, ‘because while you are pulling the weeds, you may uproot the wheat with them. Let both grow together until the harvest. At that time I will tell the harvesters: First collect the weeds and tie them in bundles to be burned; then gather the wheat and bring it into my barn.’”
Then he left the crowd and went into the house. His disciples came to him and said, “Explain to us the parable of the weeds in the field.”
He answered, “The one who sowed the good seed is the Son of Man. The field is the world, and the good seed stands for the people of the kingdom. The weeds are the people of the evil one, and the enemy who sows them is the devil. The harvest is the end of the age, and the harvesters are angels. “As the weeds are pulled up and burned in the fire, so it will be at the end of the age. The Son of Man will send out his angels, and they will weed out of his kingdom everything that causes sin and all who do evil. They will throw them into the blazing furnace, where there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth. Then the righteous will shine like the sun in the kingdom of their Father. Whoever has ears, let them hear.

Taking up the cross. What on earth does that mean?

David HerbertLeave a comment

This is what I emerged with by way of a sermon for Trinity 3A. The gospel from Matthew 10:24-39 was a tricky one. The sparrows caught my eye when I was preparing. So often in his teaching Jesus picks up on what is seemingly worthless and what usually goes unnoticed by others. I wanted us to explore this in relation to Jesus’s mission and the way disciples join his mission by taking up the cross. My exploration took me to the heart of brokenness and all that is wrong in the world. The text of the gospel is at the foot of this page.

The Sermon:

Has anyone got a penny? Long gone is the penny bazaar. You can’t even spend a penny when you’re desperate, when you’ve got everything crossed. A penny for your thoughts. You wouldn’t even give me the time of day for a penny. What’s the point of a penny?

The point of a penny is that it is the price of worthlessness. Way back in the day, before even the pound in your pocket was something, Jesus took up worthlessness when he took up the cross.

Are not two sparrows sold for a penny?

I imagine Jesus at the market, casting his eyes around the stalls and finding someone so poor that all they had to sell was pairs of sparrows. Two-a-penny. You could get them anywhere – and who wants them anyway? 

Jesus here is talking poverty. His own family was poor. Tradition had it that after the birth of a first born the mother would offer a lamb to the priest as a burnt offering. This was the law, and it applied to both boys and girls. The exception was for those who couldn’t afford a sheep – then it was to be two turtle doves or two pigeons. That is what Mary offered when Jesus was born according to Luke’s gospel (Luke 2:24). They couldn’t afford a sheep.

Are not two sparrows sold for a penny? They’re ridiculously cheep! Put it another way. The cost of sparrows on the open market is nothing, zilch, nada. 

Jesus has an eye for the worthless, for what the world doesn’t even bother counting or noticing, and he uses that in his teaching, like in the parable of the mustard seed and the parable of the leaven. He also picks strands of hair. Nobody counts strands of hair unless they’re folically challenged. Even the hairs of your head are counted.

The point of this passage is not about how precious the sparrow is but about the importance to God of every part of creation, particularly those people overlooked by the powers that be. It’s about those who don’t fit in ……. It’s about those who become “lost” in the system, or the gas chamber, or at sea, those who get lost through the carelessness of others. Most particularly, in this passage, it is about “the lost sheep of Israel” – all those lost by the religious leaders who were supposed to be good shepherds loving everyone dear to God, but didn’t. It’s about those who count for nothing in the world.

And it’s about the disciples themselves. Jesus is aware of the cost of discipleship – that the disciples will be humiliated, flogged, imprisoned, betrayed (even by members of their families), even killed. This is what Jesus’ talk about the sparrows and the hair is leading up to – the encouragement to the disciples not to be afraid of the opposition which will want to discredit and reduce them to nothing.

Jesus stands at the heart of poverty and there gives his life. This becomes his mission and the consequences are the same for him as for those who live at the heart of poverty and brokenness: rejection, betrayal, humiliation and even death. This is the mission, (and the consequences), he is preparing the 12 for in this morning’s gospel, and this is the mission he would love us to join.

We can summarise the mission of Jesus (and the mission of God) as taking up the cross.

One of the questions that has bugged me while I was preparing this sermon is what this means for us. What does it mean for us to take up the cross? It sounds like it is a lot easier for us to be part of Jesus’ mission than it was for those first disciples, or for Christians who continue to live with the threat of persecution, humiliation and hatred. By and large, we live in a society where Christianity has been a dominating culture. I suspect that none of us imagine being persecuted, imprisoned or killed for joining Jesus’ mission taking up the cross.

So what does it mean for us to be taking up the cross in Jesus’ mission?

I played with the word “cross”. I discovered that it is “the cross” in our gospel this morning. It is not “your cross”. Reading “your cross” gives rise to the expression “everyone has their cross to bear”, which might not be true, and which might lead some to think that they’ve got enough to bear carrying their own cross that they’re not going to help carry anyone else’s. If it’s “your cross” it becomes your own bubble of trouble – individualised, almost self-centred. 

No, Jesus’ mission is to “take up the cross”, and anyone taking up the cross is worthy of him. Ever since God became the God of the Hebrew slaves in Egypt God has been “taking up the cross” – as it were.

So I played with the word cross. I did a word search of my imagination, and I remembered all the crosses marking my homework and the failure they denoted.

I thought about the crossings out we do and was reminded of those who are crossed out for being who they are, for being wrong – the wrong ethnicity, the wrong race, the wrong gender, the wrong sexuality. 

Probably because it was the 75th anniversary of the Windrush landing on Thursday, and probably because it was World Refugee Day on Tuesday, and probably because of the sinking of the boat carrying hundreds of refugees and migrants off the west coast of Greece, I thought of crossings – and the bravery, and the desperation and the exploitation of those who make dangerous crossings.

Already I see the wrong (and who says anyone is wrong?), the wronged, the displaced and the misplaced in the cross. And I see that there is not one cross, with one victim (the object of our worship), but that there are so many crosses and so many for whom Jesus dies to live for in this mission to “take up the cross”.

Black theologians are helping us to understand the folly of not using our imaginations when joining Jesus’ mission of taking up the cross. One of them, James Cone, an American, wonders how ever we managed to divorce the cross from the “lynching tree”. James Cone was a black American theologian. He died in 2018. 

It didn’t take much imagination for him to link the cross to the lynching tree. In the lynching era, between 1880 and 1940, white Christians lynched nearly 5000 black men and women in a manner with echoes of the Roman crucifixion of Jesus. Cone’s comment on this is that these white Christians didn’t see any irony or contradiction in what they were doing. 

Cone writes: “during the course of 2000 years of Christian history, this symbol of salvation [the cross] has been detached from any reference to the ongoing suffering and oppression of human beings – those whom Ignacio Ellacuria, the Salvadoran martyr, called “the crucified peoples of history””.

He continues: “The cross and the lynching tree interpret each other. Both were public spectacles, shameful events, instruments of punishment reserved for the most despised people in society. Any genuine theology and any genuine preaching of the Christian gospel must be measured against the test of the scandal of the cross and the lynching tree.”

I carried on with my wordsearch – my play with the word cross and I remembered that that is how we vote. We put a cross by what we are voting for. And I park that idea – the cross being election and choice. We are free to choose to take up the cross, or we can vote another way.

Then I got my sourdough out of the fridge and got it ready for baking in the oven. Those who have the sourdough baking bug know that you have to score the dough before putting it in the oven. If you don’t score the dough the steam will find the weakest point in the loaf to make its escape. The scoring provides a controlled escape for letting off steam. I score with the cross – and the cross-score becomes the way out, the release, the exodus, as well as the lines along which I would break the bread for sharing with those who are hungry.

And I remember the sign we use for kisses, the cross we choose to show our love for others, and how far we are prepared to go to honour the pledge of our commitment – even to the extent of taking up the cross in our love for them

So, what does it mean to “take up the cross”?  Is it something like this?

To choose (elect) to be at the heart of the age-old brokenness of the world with those bearing the burden of that brokenness? Is it to be there with long-suffering love? Is it to be at the broken heart of creation as typified by all Jesus predicted for the 12 (and suffered in his own person) – flogging, imprisonment, humiliation, betrayal?

This is where we’re at, in the midst of brokenness, grief, pain – at the heart of a poverty where life can be so cheap, and when not enough are held dear, where so many are undervalued and so much taken for granted. There is so much wrong. This is where God wants us to be – at the heart of this brokenness and the forefront of his mission.

But just being there is not enough, because those who follow Jesus in taking up the cross are taking up the cross of Jesus which becomes the gateway to resurrection and the new heart of life. Taking up the cross of Jesus is taking up the promise of deliverance – it is trusting that God is at the heart of brokenness, that he is always with us as light and love in the darkness, and that God gives God’s life in the mission he invites us to join. Taking up the cross means taking up the cross in faith, trusting God who sees his people through terrible times of trauma.

So, here we are, as “sheep among wolves”, just like Jesus called those first disciples. He refers to sheep again when he talks about a judgement (Matthew 25:31-46). He divides people into sheep and goats. The sheep are the righteous. They have fed the hungry, given water to the thirsty, welcomed the stranger, clothed the naked, taken care of the sick and visited the prisoner. 

The difference between sheep and goats is that goats go their own way, leading the goatherd. The sheep, on the other hand follow the shepherd, just as Jesus encourages his disciples to join him in giving their lives in the brokenness and wrong of the world.

Matthew 10:24-39
“A disciple is not above the teacher, nor a slave above the master. It is enough for the disciple to be like the teacher and the slave like the master. If they have called the master of the house Beelzebul, how much more will they malign those of his household! So have no fear of them, for nothing is covered up that will not be uncovered, and nothing secret that will not become known. What I say to you in the dark, tell in the light, and what you hear whispered, proclaim from the housetops. Do not fear those who kill the body but cannot kill the soul, rather fear him who can destroy both soul and body in hell.
Are not two sparrows sold for a penny? Yet not one of them will fall to the ground unperceived by your Father. And even the hairs of your head are all counted. So do not be afraid, you are of more value than many sparrows.
Everyone therefore who acknowledges me before others, I also will acknowledge before my Father in heaven, but whoever denies me before others, I also will deny before my Father in heaven.
Do not think that I have come to bring peace to the earth, I have not come to bring peace, but a sword.
For I have come to set a man against his father, and a daughter against her mother, and a daughter-in-law against her mother-in-law and one’s foes will be members of one’s own household.
Whoever loves father or mother more than me is not worthy of me, and whoever loves son or daughter more than me is not worthy of me, and whoever does not take up the cross and follow me is not worthy of me. Those who find their life will lose it and those who lose their life for my sake will find it.