The Lost Sheep of Your Tribe
For the past two weeks, as our nation deals with a complexity of difficult social issues, I’ve preached sermons that have heralded the value of perspective taking — the act of intentionally stepping outside one’s own way of seeing the world and attempting to with deep empathy enter how someone else sees the world. I’ve done this because I believe as Einstein has said, “We can not solve our problems with the same level of thinking that created them.” We have some difficult problems confronting our nation at the moment. And we’re going to have to grow up a bit in order to solve them. Genuine perspective t aking is a critical tool to personal growth. Personal growth happens often when a child goes off to college and begins to see the world in different ways than in the environment in which they were raised. It happens when people take immersive trips in foreign cultures — perhaps a missions trip, a foreign exchange program, learning abroad. It happens when people begin to do work for social service agencies in the inner city or for the rural poor and they see the difficult conditions many people live with and realize that they had lived with assumptions about people that were short-sighted. It happens when we read a well-written book that wasn’t chosen to reinforce our own way of seeing the world, but rather to expand our perspectives and challenge ourselves.
This morning, however, I believe Jesus is pushing us beyond mere perspective taking as he gathers his disciples and sends them out to do the things that he has been doing. And in doing so Jesus says something that kind of bothers me. And when Jesus says and does things that bother us — rather than ignore or discount it — we ought to wrestle with it and not run at the first bit of spiritual pain it brings. Perhaps there is a problem that needs to be solved and we need to grow so that it can be. So what is it that Jesus says that personally bothers me? It’s this: Go nowhere among the Gentiles, and enter no town of the Samaritans, but go rather to the lost sheep of the house of Israel.” I like to think of myself as a nice, forward-thinking sort of person. I love how the Apostle Paul said, in Christ, “there is no Jew or Greek, male nor female, slave nor free.” It bothers me that the salvation that Jesus came to offer would be limited in some way — geographically, ethnically. It bothers me because it seems very un-Jesus like. [ABRUPT]
When I was in seminary, I took two classes that focused a great deal on racial injustice, a class on the Theology and Practice of Martin Luther King, Jr. and a class on the Theology of James Cone, a black liberationist theologian. I’m sure other classes I had too, dealt with racial injustice, but these two really focused on it. I certainly went to seminary as a person who was already bothered by what I saw as deep racial injustice in our culture. In fact, that sense of being bothered by racial injustice was part of why I had signed up for these elective classes. At my seminary, the class format was usually — two days a week we had a lecture from the professor and one day a week, we gathered for what was called precept and a doctoral candidate would facilitate discussion around the assigned reading. I learned much from the reading and lectures in those classes, but I was transformed by the difficult conversations that happened during those precepts. But that transformation only came with a certain amount of pain. In these difficult conversations, it often felt like I was on the receiving end of a considerable amount of black rage. As a white man from Alabama having difficult discussions about racial injustice and my own privileged background, I felt guilty. I felt like, even though I had never intentionally done anything that was blatantly racist, I was nevertheless, a part of a system that both benefited from and perpetuated racial injustice. And my fellow black students were not there to give me pastoral care for how I felt. When the band-aid was ripped off and we talked frankly about open wounds, including both material in the reading and personal stories, they were angry. And I felt their anger. One specific time, I even remember feeling personally singled out by an angry black woman, who I felt had wildly misunderstood a point I had been trying to make. I was on their side after all. I signed up for these classes. I don’t remember exactly when or how, but eventually I and many other white students in these classes got the — AH-HA. What our African-American collegues wanted from us was to have courageous conversations with other white people in our spheres of influence. They did not want to always have to be the ones raising the banner of racial injustice. And so we ended up staring a group on campus called, “Whites Against Racism.” Before going through theses conversations and classes, I don’t think I would have signed up for a “Whites Against” anything, even racism. I would have wanted other people of color to be involved. But sometimes, there is good reason to do work with the people you have influence over, rather than the general population at large. And so we gathered and had a place to both talk and work against racial injustice, but also process our feelings about it, including feelings of defensiveness, being misunderstood, and guilt.
For those of us who pay attention to social media, we know that it can be a vortex of opinions, articles posted, videos with strong takes coming at you from all directions. And this has only been dialed up even more so in recent weeks. It can be stressful and overwhelming. It can be a place where one is easily misunderstood. A place where assumptions are made about people that don’t reflect the full complexity of who they are and what they think. It is also part of the modern public square, the way we’ve come to connect with people we care about, platforms for businesses, churches, and other organizations, so it is not always easily ignored.
I have over 1500 friends on Facebook. I say that not to brag. But rather to point out — that they are not all on the same level when it comes to addressing the problems facing our society, no where close. I think that is what makes online, social media spaces an especially difficult place to talk about social problems. These are sensitive issues and they bring up lots of emotion in all of us. I suspect in this church we’re at different levels on how we might solve the complex and interweaving social realities we face today. I tend to be somewhat restrained in what I post and how I talk about social issues online because I don’t want church folks to tune me out when I speak from the pulpit if they happen to disagree with my perspective. And that’s what I think tends to happen so often on social media — and probably other places too — we talk and share from the level at which we see the problem. And others who are in a different place, who see the problem in a different way do the same. And it becomes very easy to discount those people and see things only through our narrower lens.
I believe something similar to all of this is actually happening in our Scripture this morning. Jesus was trying to solve some problems at a level that was very different from the religious consciousness that was common in the Jewish mind of his day. He would, of course, by the end of Matthew’s gospel send his disciples out to all nations to spread the gospel. But first, he needed to do some work with those he had influence over. The dominant Jewish consciousness of the time understood God to be on their side. They were God’s chosen people. God had delivered them from slavery, returned them from exile and been present in many ways, the way a father or mother is with a child. He was proclaiming a kingdom — good news — news about the way God wanted the world to look. Yet, the Jewish crowds were rudderless. Without leadership. And so they saw their own problems at the levels they inherited them at. Perhaps they understood God’s deliverance and salvation as having been for them and their people long ago. But Jesus comes and gives them a taste of God’s salvation in a personal way. Salvation is not theoretical or merely in a past long ago, but the real problems people have, Jesus offered salvation from. He was curing disease and sickness, casting out unclean spirits. Really offering deliverance to people with their very real, everyday problems.
And Jesus gained a following doing this. His support grew with the people. So much so that later in the story the religious leaders that were heavily invested in the way things were working — for they were rewarded by the system — they were afraid of the crowds we learn. In Matthew 21:46, we learn, “They wanted to arrest him, but they feared the crowds, because they regarded him as a prophet.” Jesus’ work first among the lost sheep of the house of Israel worked. And in a strikingly parallel way, at the end of Matthew’s gospel, he would send out his disciples into all the world to spread the good news of the kingdom of God — the way GOd wants the world to look.
Friends, my conviction is this. Even while there are important discussions happening in the public sphere — we ought to be doing so ourselves face to face, as a church family. This is not to say that I want to indoctrinate you to see our nation’s social problems exactly as I do. But it is to say that we, as a church family, should be talking to each other frankly about the difficult things that break God’s heart. Including all that is going around us in the conversations about racial justice and reconciliation and the role of policing in society.
There’s a wonderful program that I have been a part of in the past that I want to invite you to be a part of here at Epworth. It is called JustFaith. It is just the medicine we need to talk about these issues directly, prayerfully, and faithfully — neither avoiding the hard conversations, nor settling for the back and forth posting of articles, videos and memes on social media. The program also helps equip you to move beyond conversation and into Christian action. I’ve had the opportunity to be a part of it twice, once as a participant at Latham United Methodist Church and once as a facilitator at my previous church. It is more than a class — it is a shared journey over a 24-week period that involves some one day retreats, immersive experiences, a significant amount of reading, and weekly gatherings of prayer and discussion. I have seen it produce lasting change and be a vehicle for meaningful conversations grounded in Scripture and prayer. It carries the intensity of something like an Emmaus walk or a Disciple Bible Study with it. It is not for the faint of heart. It is hard work, but it is worth it. It is not partisan in a political sense with focus on Democrats or Republicans. But it does focus on the many things that break gods heart, including poverty, injustice, racism, care for the earth and many other things. I’ll be continuing to share with you more about JustFaith, but I hope you’ll consider joining me on this journey. Because of the uncertainty of the Coronavirus, I don’t yet have an exact start date. I anticipate sometime around when school starts offering the program. I hope that we have enough interest to offer a daytime gathering during the week and an evening gathering to accommodate different people and schedules and then combine for some of the immersive experiences.a
Whether or not you choose to participate in JustFaith, we, as a church must not avoid talking about difficult things to one another and to those we have influence over. I believe that we each have influence over a relatively small group of people. Jesus had an inner 3 — those he took up the mountain with for the Transifguration, the twelve, still a larger group of women and others who followed him, and finally the crowds in the Judean country side. Friends, there is a time for sending out a message to the ends of the earth, but there is also a time when it is appropriate to “Go rather to the lost sheep of the house where you have influence.” Some people won’t or can’t hear messages designed spoken from different levels from where they find themselves at. But in the deep relationships of people we trust and who trust you, this is where we must have the courage to attempt the transformative work that Jesus did and sent his disciples out to do. Real life salvation — casting out disease and unclean spirits. If people are angry — my advice is to remember that anger is a covering emotion. Underneath it is usually some form of sadness or brokenness. Stay with the conversation long enough to see the genuine pain. This is place where the disease and unclean spirits are healed. This is what helps us grow and see the world’s problems from whole different levels. And only then we will be equipped to solve the problem, that is, be a part of salvation, show people the genuine, real, good news of the kingdom.
In the name of that Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Amen.
