Two Communities, One Mission
Two Communities, One Mission
Now, as then, we can go about our city, meeting the harassed and the helpless without a shepherd. Perhaps now, as then, we can see a potential harvest that just needs a few more laborers. So, what do we do now? Appoint twelve people for twelve tribes and send them back to Israel … Or we might renew our understanding of ourselves as adopted children of the God of Abraham. We might renew our faith that our struggles for justice and freedom are not futile because they are part of the story of Israel’s wrestling for those same things. Then we might hear Israel’s Chosen King calling us to be mediators of infinite love and eternal life to the harassed and the helpless.
To recap: Jacob, later named Israel meaning, “one who wrestles with God,” had twelve sons, who became twelve tribes, whom God liberated from Egyptian enslavement through Moses, and led them to Mt Sinai: where today we hear their one unseen God say to them, “For me you shall be a kingdom of priests, a holy nation.” Those are two separate things in divine tension. God doesn’t say that Israel will be kingdom with priests, but a kingdom of priests. The whole nation will be a priest, mediating between God and who? The priests set apart within Israel will mediate between God and the people of Israel.
But with whom will the nation of Israel mediate with God? Other nations. This is the next step of the promise God made to Jacob’s grandfather, Abraham — In you all the nations of Earth shall be blessed. Israel’s call has always been to bring all the peoples who God created in God’s image to the knowledge and love of the one God in whom all are one.
But, to also be a “holy” nation means to be a nation set apart from the nations, who at this point still assume that there are lots of gods and goddesses, all with their own territories: stars, seas, lands, seasons. So, in order to bring the nations into unity with Israel and Israel’s God, Israel must stand apart from the nations. Far too often, the nations have so resented their standing apart that they have dehumanized the people of Israel. At other times, the leaders of Israel have so insisted on standing apart that they have forgotten their God-given mission of restoring all nations to unity with themselves and God. But, they remain God’s first chosen people, and Jesus’s people.
Which is why, at this early point in Matthew’s Gospel, Jesus focuses his mission on the “lost sheep of the house of Israel.” He picks twelve apostles as a sign of a renewed nation of twelve tribes, even with ten of those tribes having been “lost” in the Assyrian conquest centuries earlier. And for now his mission is focused on their people, still called to be a kingdom of priests and a holy nation. Later, at the very end of Matthew’s Gospel, Jesus will command his Jewish disciples to “make disciples of all nations.” In time, what resulted from the disagreements and conflicts of the first century were two communities, both called by the same God to restore all people to unity with God and each other. Two communities, one mission and covenant.
So, what is this community to make of Jesus’s instructions? First, we are to be moved for the harassed and helpless around us, as Jesus was moved, in his bowels. Jesus’s compassion was literally “gut wrenching.” And what seems to have most wrenched his gut was their harassment and helplessness, due to their leader-lessness, their lack of direction, meaning, purpose.
So, we are called to intercede with God for those we know who are suffering. And those whom we name in the Ave! are included in our Prayers of the People, “those for whom we have interceded.” We can also ask Jesus’s Mother to intercede for them, as well as Monica and James. I am always ready to lay a priestly hand on your head or shoulder and anoint you with holy oil, as did the Twelve. And we can also cure those who are sick, or even dead in spirit, because they lack direction, meaning, purpose. Just listening to them creates a relationship of two. And where two or three are gathered in Jesus’s name, he is there in Spirit, breathing peace and wisdom between your souls. Where you see the lepers who have been ostracized, and include them within the boundary of your gut wrenching, you are doing what Jesus empowered the Twelve to do. And when you respond to the demons of accusation and bitterness with understanding, truth, and love, you defuse them as did Jesus and the Twelve.
None of this is easy, and as Jesus warns us, it may not always be safe. So, he also advises us as sheep among wolves to be “as cunning as snakes, yet innocent as doves.” “Wise” is a milquetoast translation here. Jesus knows that sometimes we need something more concreate and immediate than wisdom. Naivete is not a Christian virtue. I’m reminded of one of my political mentor’s “Laws of the Public Policy Process … Don’t stop to kick every barking dog.” Not every disagreeable online opinion is worth commenting on. Not every disagreeable person is able at that moment to repent, to change their heart and mind. Sometimes the most we can do for a person or situation is to pray, with our guts wrenching.
When it seems like the moral arc of the universe hasn’t just detoured but broken 180 degrees, remember our adoption. We have been adopted as children of Abraham. We have inherited the story of an enslaved people on whose behalf God intervened and himself bent the arc. The story of that arc is longer than any of us can see ahead. But it is the truest story of our Creator and creation that has ever been told. And our mission is to tell that story as best we can to those who need to hear it, and are ready to hear it.
June 14th, 2026
The 3rd Sunday after Pentecost
Proper 6, Year A
The Rev. David Kendrick