Amidst the Wolves

Scripture: The Seventh Sunday after Pentecost (Lectionary 14), A.D. 2016 C

Homily:

Grace, mercy and peace to you from God our Father and from our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. Amen.

“Behold,” says the Lord, “I send you out as sheep amidst the wolves!” But He does not send us out alone.

In today’s Gospel the Lord knows that His time is short, so He appoints 70 disciples to go on ahead of Him in pairs to every town and place where He Himself intends to go. This echoes Moses, who appointed 70 elders to receive the Holy Spirit and help him govern the Israelites justly; he couldn’t do it alone. But it also looks forward to Pentecost, to the day when all of Jesus’ disciples will be called upon to receive His Spirit and become His Body, working as one to continue the mission of Jesus in this world—teaching, healing, ministering, forgiving sins and proclaiming the Good News that Christ is Risen and we shall arise. Hallelujah!

This is the true miracle of the Incarnation: not just that God became Man in Jesus Christ, but that Jesus makes all men, all peoples, one with God in Him. When Jesus perishes, all of humanity is redeemed, and when Jesus rises, all of human nature is raised up to the right hand of God. It’s not just that Jesus signs a check to pay our debts, or that He exploits some legal loophole to get us off the hook for sin. It’s that Jesus redeems us, raises us, body and soul, freeing us from our bondage to sin, death, and the devil; freeing us to live lives of radical service and love and self-giving, that we might truly be His Body still at work, still acting as “little Christs” for a world in need of salvation.

Jesus gives us His Spirit, His Body, His Blood, so that together we can be Jesus. He sends us out as sheep amidst the wolves because He is Himself the Lamb of God, making us into the same. This is the freedom, the grace, the astonishing glory offered to us by God, not simply that He saves us but that He makes us Him. But we can only do it together. We can only be the Body of Christ as a body, as one. So, yes, Jesus sends us out as sheep amidst the wolves. But He does not send us out alone. Others travel with us, perhaps, as in this morning’s Gospel, only two or three at a time. But wherever two or three are gathered in His Name, Christ is with us, Christ is there.

We spoke of Elijah last week, and one of my favorite Elijah stories is when he is being hunted by the wicked king and queen of Israel—persecuted by the government, as it were. And he despairs that he is the only sane and faithful man left on earth. Everybody else is nuts, Lord, they’ve all lost their minds, he says. I alone am left, and they’re coming to kill me. Indeed, Elijah sounds rather like how I feel after watching too much election coverage: “They’re all nuts, Lord, I’m the only sane person left.” But God’s not buying it.

“I am with you,” sayeth the Lord. “You have nothing at all to fear. Moreover, there are no less than 7,000 souls just here in your immediate area who have not bent the knee to falsehood and wickedness: 7,000 souls of whom you are not aware, but who call upon My Name and I answer them. You are not alone, Elijah. You were never even close to alone.”

Christianity, like life, is not a single-player game. No man is an island, and all that. We are creatures built to be in relationship, built to be in community. We are designed for families and friends, for neighbors and townsfolk. From the beginning, God pronounced that it was not good for the man to be alone. It’s not easy to live in community, to bump elbows with other people, but nevertheless it is the deepest and most human part of us. Politics is as old as humanity, because living together is a necessity, a struggle, a science and an art.

It’s easier to shut people out. Easier to retreat into a safe space, to refuse participation in politics or family or neighborhood. It costs us to be good neighbors, active citizens, devoted mothers and fathers. But in this world we are given a choice: our lives can be easy, or they can be worthwhile. Rarely both. And so to do the work of Jesus we are sent out as sheep amidst the wolves.

There is an old Christian tradition—and indeed one found in other faiths as well—that there is only one creature, humanity. And that we are all persons within that one creature, aspects or expressions of the primal human being. Once there was only Adam, the Earth-Critter. He was one. But God said that it was not good for the Adam to be alone, so God removed his side—split him in half—into male and female. Now the two were one. And as they lived together, as two yet as one, they begot children, and thus became many: many persons, one humanity.

This is still the way that we describe a healthy family today, as many yet as one. Not coincidentally, this is also how we describe God: as Three yet as One. All of human existence, indeed all of Creation itself, is this paradox, this tension, between being many and being one, between the individual and the community. A healthy family, a healthy society, a healthy church uplifts both. When society is placed above the individual, tyranny and oppression result. When the individual is placed above society, cruelty and anarchy result. In order to be healthy, in order to be human, we must recognize that we, like the God in whose image we are made, are many yet are one.

If there is a constant throughout the Bible, it’s that we find God in the needs of our neighbor. We can only love God by loving one another. Those who cannot find Jesus in the beggar at our door will not find Jesus in the chalice at our altar. Even the great ascetics, the monks who ran off into caves or up high towers to escape the world, rejoiced that they, like Elijah, were ever surrounded by a great cloud of witnesses, by angels and saints, by the faithful of every time and place. And they found God not in their own heads but by spending their lives in service and prayer for others. They were never really alone.

We too have our monasteries, where we find God in the needs of our neighbors. Our monasteries are our families, which demand everything from us yet somehow make us so much more than we were. Our monasteries are our towns, our governments, in which we must dance together the art of politics so as best to serve both the individual and the community.

And of course our monastery is the Church, the believers of every tribe and tongue and time and place, united as one in Christ by the faith of our baptism. The Church teaches us to listen to the wisdom our brothers and sisters from other lands and other eras. The Church teaches us to love the person in the pew behind us who drives us crazy and with whom we otherwise would never interact. And the Church teaches us that Christ has died, Christ is Risen, and Christ will come again, making all of humanity one in Him, and all of humanity one with God.

On this Independence Day, we celebrate the hard work of trying to build a better society, a better world. As a country we have wrestled and argued and fought to discern how best to govern, how best to serve our neighbor, how best to preserve both truth and freedom. It has been a messy road of slavery and war and disenfranchisement. But we’ve come through it together. And we are learning, if ever so slowly, what it means to be an American, to be a citizen, to be a human being living justly in a community based upon the inalienable rights with which all men are endowed by their Creator.

In our politics, we must balance between the needs of the many and the rights of the one. We must not give into fear and division and ignorance, pandered with equal malice by both the Right and the Left. As Christians we are to be in the world but not of the world. We are called not simply to imitate Jesus in society, but actually to be His Body, His hands and feet and tongue, still at work in this world, still healing the sick, still proclaiming truth to power and forgiveness to the sinner and new life to the dead. “Behold, I send you out as sheep amidst the wolves!”

But He does not send us out alone. He will never send us out alone.

In the Name of the Father and of the +Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.