Thoughts going in, Sunday June 26th

Matthew 10:5 These twelve Jesus sent out with the following instructions: "Do not go among the Gentiles or enter any town of the Samaritans. 6 Go rather to the lost sheep of Israel. 7 As you go, proclaim this message: 'The kingdom of heaven has come near.' 40 "Anyone who welcomes you welcomes me, and anyone who welcomes me welcomes the one who sent me. 41 Whoever welcomes someone known to be a prophet will receive a prophet's reward, and whoever welcomes someone known to be righteous will receive a righteous person's reward. 42 And if anyone gives even a cup of cold water to one of these little ones who is known to be my disciple, truly I tell you, that person will certainly be rewarded."

Strictly speaking, the text for this Sunday is really just vss 40-42. Going with just those couple of verses, however, seemed so decontextualized. Properly speaking they belong in the entire context of THE SENDING OUT that Jesus does earlier in chapter 10 of Matthew's gospel. That being the case, I've empowered myself to grab vss 5-7 to help give context to the reading.

The main thrust of my focus from this text is going to be talking about being the SENT CHURCH. People my age & older have this concept that mission work is something that an extremely dedicated *few people do in far flung areas of the globe, while the rest of us live a "normal" life here & occasionally give some money to help support those brave missionaries overseas. At its worst, this thinking has artificially divided the Christian life into "specialties"....whereby some function in certain specialty vocations and others do not. Even at its best, we could say that this line of thought was hatched in an era when we here functioned in a culture that was "broadly Christian[ized]" already, hence *the mission-field per se was something that only existed in far flung lands--not here next door.

The problem is that even if we grant truth to the myth that we ever lived in a broadly Christianized land, the fact of the matter is that this is no longer true. It is also not true that God only calls a select few specially-trained individuals to be "sent." The Church, as a whole, as part of its identity is to see itself as SENT. Our era has coined a term for this truth. It's called "being missional"...or thinking "missionally-minded." Along with this new realization has come the further realization that the "mission field" is HERE. It's where God has already placed us.
It should look something like this:



What we learn from this text and this image combined is really quite basic. As they went along, the disciples were to proclaim the message (vs 7). NOTHING HAS CHANGED. As **we go, we too are to be message proclaimers. Exactly how this works and what it looks like will be the focus of my message this week!

Cheers,

TM