Sent: The Prayer You Have to Live

Matthew 9:35–10:8 (NRSVUE)

I’m convinced Jesus is tired. You can feel it in the text. He has been going town to town, village to village… teaching, preaching, healing. Matthew gives us this sweeping summary in 9:35 that sounds almost like a travelogue: “Jesus went about all the cities and villages, teaching in their synagogues, and proclaiming the good news of the kingdom, and curing every disease and every sickness.” That’s a full sentence and an even fuller life. Behind every word in that verse is a person with a name and a wound. A man whose legs don’t work. A woman who has been bleeding for twelve years and is too ashamed to ask for help out loud. A father who grieved his daughter’s death this morning.

Jesus keeps moving. He doesn’t stop because the need doesn’t stop. And when he finally pauses long enough to look out at the crowd pressing in around him, something happens inside him. Matthew uses a Greek word, splanchnizomai, to describe it. It means his gut wrenched. His insides moved. This isn’t polite concern or professional compassion. This is visceral. This is the kind of feeling that bends you over a little. He looked at the people “harassed and helpless, like sheep without a shepherd,” and it hit him somewhere deep.

The word Matthew uses for “harassed” in the original Greek is graphic too. It means beaten down, torn apart, thrown to the ground. Some translations try to soften it. I’m not sure that they should. These are people who have been broken down by the systems and powers around them; religious, economic, political… and then left on the side of the road. Rome is standing on their necks. The religious establishment has handed them a list of rules they can’t keep, and offered them very little mercy when they fail. They are exhausted. They are lost. They have nobody looking out for them.

Jesus sees that. Really sees it. The compassion he feels is not passive. It doesn’t let him stand at a comfortable distance and feel sorry. It moves him forward.

“The harvest is plentiful,” he tells his disciples, “but the laborers are few.”

That image lands hard. A harvest that isn’t gathered is a harvest that rots. There is urgency here. Not the panicked urgency of someone who has lost control, but the focused urgency of someone who knows what time it is and what needs to happen. The fields are full. The need is right in front of them. But there’s nobody there to do the work.

And here is where Jesus does something rather amazing. He says, “Therefore ask the Lord of the harvest to send out laborers into his harvest.” Pray. Ask God to send workers. And before the disciples have finished the sentence, before the amen has left their lips, Jesus calls them together and sends them out.

They are the answer to the prayer he just told them to pray.

Let that marinate for a second. Jesus doesn’t tell them to pray and then wait for someone else to show up. He tells them to pray and then looks them in the eye and says, “You. Go.” The prayer and the sending are almost simultaneous. There is no gap between petition and commission. The disciples discover, maybe for the first time, that sometimes when you ask God to do something, God’s answer is to hand it back to you.

Then Matthew does something interesting. He slows way down and lists the soon-to-be-sent-out by name.

Simon, called Peter. Andrew his brother. James and John. Philip and Bartholomew. Thomas and Matthew the tax collector. James son of Alphaeus, and Thaddaeus. Simon the Cananaean. Judas Iscariot.

There’s a reason Matthew lingers here. These names are not incidental. They are the twelve most ordinary men you could possibly assemble. They represent virtually every social and political tension of their day held in one small group. Matthew collected taxes for Rome, which made him a traitor in the eyes of most of his neighbors. Simon the Cananaean was almost certainly a Zealot, part of a movement that wanted to violently overthrow Rome. These two men probably despised each other before Jesus called them. And Jesus puts them in the same room and sends them out together.

Peter is here (The man who will deny Jesus three times before sunrise on the worst night of the story). Judas is here… the man who will hand Jesus over for thirty pieces of silver. Jesus knows who they are. He knows what they’re capable of and what they’re not. He calls them anyway. He sends them anyway. He gives them authority anyway.

One of the scholars I read this week working with this passage makes a strong case: in Matthew’s Gospel, the list of names doesn’t appear in isolation. It appears as a charter, an introduction to an apostleship that is born in the movement from the Father to the Son and now out into the world. These aren’t just names on a roster. These are people whose very identity is being reshaped by the mission they’re being sent into. They are becoming who they are by going where they’re sent.

And notice what they are sent with! Authority. Real authority. Authority over unclean spirits, over disease, over the forces that diminish and destroy human life. Jesus doesn’t send them empty-handed or on their own strength. He gives them something to work with.

“Cure the sick, raise the dead, cleanse the lepers, cast out demons.”

That is a remarkable list. Every item on it represents a category of person who has been pushed to the margins. The sick were often blamed for their own illness, seen as evidence of sin or divine disfavor. The dead, well, contact with death made you ritually unclean. Lepers were legally required to announce their own presence so others could get away from them. Those with demons were feared and avoided. Jesus is not sending his disciples to the powerful and the comfortable. He is sending them directly toward the people everyone else has written off.

And he tells them: “You received without payment; give without payment.”

The grace that has been given to them, freely, without condition, without earning, is the same grace they are to extend. They are not brokers of God’s favor. They are conduits. What has flowed into them is meant to flow through them and out into the world.

Here’s where we should be honest with ourselves, because this text won’t let us be anything else.

We are those disciples. Not in a metaphorical, inspirational-poster kind of way. I mean structurally, literally… Matthew writes this passage with his own community in mind, and by extension, every community of faith that has gathered around Jesus since.

The language Matthew uses to describe what the disciples are sent to do mirrors almost exactly the language used to describe what Jesus himself does in verse 35. Teach. Proclaim. Heal every disease and every sickness. The work Jesus does becomes the work they do. The work they do becomes the work we do.

To be a disciple of Jesus is, eventually, to become an apostle of Jesus. The word “apostle” simply means “one who is sent.” You don’t get to be a disciple indefinitely without getting sent. At some point, the prayer you pray becomes the assignment you carry.

Think about the prayers you bring here. We do this every Sunday. We name the places where it hurts. We pray for the sick and the grieving. We pray for a world that seems to be coming apart. We ask God to show up in the hard places. Those are real prayers. They matter. But every now and then, God’s answer to that prayer is to look back at us and say, “I’m sending you.”

That is uncomfortable. I know it. You know it. There is a reason Jesus says the laborers are few. It’s not that the need is hard to see. It’s that showing up costs something. It asks you to bring your time, your energy, your emotional weight to someone else’s pain. And pain is something most of us, when given the option, will walk around.

But here’s what the text won’t let us escape: Jesus did not walk around it. He walked into every city, every village. He looked at the crowd and let their suffering land on him, in his gut, in his chest, in whatever it is that makes us human. And then he moved.

“As you go, proclaim the good news: ‘The kingdom of heaven has come near.’”

The kingdom of heaven does not arrive by announcement alone. It arrives in the arrival of people who are willing to carry it into the places where it is needed most. The kingdom shows up when someone sits with a person who is dying and doesn’t look at their watch. It shows up when a congregation fights for affordable housing in its neighborhood instead of protecting its parking lot. It shows up when someone recovering from addiction is welcomed at the table instead of whispered about in the lobby. It shows up when the sick are cared for, when the isolated are found, when the person carrying a weight too heavy to bear alone discovers they don’t have to carry it alone anymore.

This important work has been showing up in a quiet but remarkable way across the country over the last few years, in churches that have started paying off their neighbors’ medical debt. Not symbolically. Literally. By partnering with a nonprofit called Undue Medical Debt, congregations purchase bundled debt from collection agencies for pennies on the dollar and then simply forgive it. A United Methodist congregation in Michigan raised $15,000 and retired more than $2.2 million in debt for families in their community. Letters arrived at people’s homes, people who had been losing sleep over bills they couldn’t pay, and the letters said: this is gone. You don’t owe it anymore.

Think about what that is. That is a church deciding that the prayer “thy kingdom come” means something on a Tuesday, in someone’s mailbox, in the form of a debt that no longer exists. That is disciples who prayed and then became the answer to their own prayer.

And sometimes the kingdom shows up in ways nobody planned. A church in Tennessee paid off $8 million in medical debt for nearly 4,000 households across seven counties. One of the letters went to a man who was not a Christian, but an atheist whose son happened to attend the church. When the letter arrived telling him his medical debt was gone, he called his son, genuinely confused. “Your church just paid off all my medical bills,” he said. “Why did they do this?” And his son got to answer that question.

That is what “the kingdom of heaven has come near” sounds like when it lands on someone’s doorstep. Not a pamphlet. Not an argument. A debt, cancelled. A burden, lifted. A question the gospel could finally walk through.

Hear me on this, Jesus is not describing a program here. He is describing a way of being in the world. A posture. An orientation toward the person in front of you and the need they carry.

The twelve sent out in this text are a wildly imperfect collection of people. There is a traitor among them and a man who will fold under pressure at the worst possible moment, and several others whose names we barely remember. Jesus sends them anyway. He gives them authority. And the kingdom moves forward through their obedience.

We are not so different from them. We are an imperfect collection of people who have gathered around Jesus and are trying to figure out what it means to follow him. Some of us are carrying wounds we haven’t shown anyone. Some of us are further along in faith than we let on. Some of us are holding on by our fingernails and hoping no one notices. Jesus sees all of that. And he still calls us by name. He still looks us in the eye and says, “Go.”

The harvest is plentiful. The laborers are still few. But you are here. And you were not called by accident.

Let us pray.

Lord of the harvest,

We see the need. We feel the weight of it, if we’re honest. The people around us who are harassed and helpless. The burdens too heavy to carry alone. The places in this city where the light hasn’t reached yet.

We have prayed these prayers before, asking you to send someone, to fix something, to show up somewhere. And we mean them. But we know what you do with prayers like that. You often hand them back to us. You look at us and say, “Go.”

So we’re asking you, again, for the courage to mean what we pray. Give us eyes that see what you see when you look at the crowd. Give us the gut-level compassion that doesn’t let us stay comfortable at a distance. Give us the willingness to be the answer, imperfect, ordinary, insufficient on our own, but sent, and therefore enough.

The kingdom is yours. The harvest is yours. We are yours. Send us.

Amen.

Sermon by: Rev. Dave Wasson