SPEAKER_00: One of my favorite definitions of discipleship is from the late Dallas Willard.
SPEAKER_00: He says, discipleship is the life, living the life that Christ would live if he were you.
SPEAKER_00: Discipleship is living the life Christ would live if he were you.
SPEAKER_00: The reason I love this definition is it's so lucid, it cuts to the heart of really what's at the center of Christian living, a Christian life, what church is all about.
SPEAKER_00: That is, why are we gathering together?
SPEAKER_00: Why are we praying?
SPEAKER_00: Why do we sing songs of praise, worship?
SPEAKER_00: Why do we confess our sins?
SPEAKER_00: Why do we gather at the table?
SPEAKER_00: Why do we befriend each other?
SPEAKER_00: We do this to be formed into Christ.
SPEAKER_00: That is, that we inhabit Christ in our life.
SPEAKER_00: Now, we are familiar with the phrase, you are what you eat, but there's a deeper logic, an ancient logic that the ancient mind knew, the biblical authors knew, that is, you are what you worship.
SPEAKER_00: That there's something about what we direct our gaze, our worshipful gaze to, whatever we esteem as that having ultimate, unsurpassable value and worth, that that, the object of our worship, shapes and transforms us in the act of attributing such worth.
SPEAKER_00: This is to say that humans are malleable.
SPEAKER_00: This is like the logic behind why we can talk about things like repentance and you know, change here.
SPEAKER_00: You know, let's do this.
SPEAKER_00: Humans are malleable.
SPEAKER_00: We're moldable, we can be shaped and formed to a particular kind of end.
SPEAKER_00: We saw Paul speaks about suffering in this way.
SPEAKER_00: This is one of the joys of suffering, is that it can actually give shape to something that would otherwise not happen, according to Paul.
SPEAKER_00: But this image of being molded, I was actually today just happened to be playing with Plato with my three kids, and just this image of being shaped, like truly we are the clay and God the potter.
SPEAKER_00: That as we worship, as we attribute ultimate and unsurpassable worth to Christ, that this is meant to shape and form us.
SPEAKER_00: It's as though all these words that we're singing, these phrases about redemption and mercy and the cross, that these phrases seem to like ricochet off somewhere and hit us and thereby transform us.
SPEAKER_00: That we, according to Willard, discipleship is living the life that Christ would live if he were us.
SPEAKER_00: And principally what this gets, kind of the anchor point for what this means in the New Testament, has to do a lot with love.
SPEAKER_00: Christ is the revelation of the love of God.
SPEAKER_00: That Christ is loving us and is showing us the definition, in fact, of love.
SPEAKER_00: Right?
SPEAKER_00: Love is not a feeling, it's not some vague intuition, it's not desire, desiring somebody.
SPEAKER_00: Love, in fact, has been on full display.
SPEAKER_00: This is part of the gospel, the love that's been revealed.
SPEAKER_00: And love gets revealed as this self-giving and emptying out of oneself for another.
SPEAKER_00: This is Christ pouring out his life in self-sacrificial love for others, for the world, for us.
SPEAKER_00: It is to say that love, true love, has been revealed as pouring out our lives for people, including those who don't give a rip about you, but pouring out your life nonetheless.
SPEAKER_00: This is the display of love, right, that we see in Christ.
SPEAKER_00: That while at the right time, right, while we were weak, Christ died for the ungodly, while we were sinners, while we were enemies of God, Paul says, Christ died for you.
SPEAKER_00: This is love.
SPEAKER_00: This is the life that we are beckoned by Christ to embody, to inhabit through the very power and presence of God in our life.
SPEAKER_00: You see, in our reading in Romans, Paul says, right, the love of God has been poured out into you by the Spirit.
SPEAKER_00: That is the Spirit.
SPEAKER_00: That this love that Jesus embodies, Paul says has been poured into us.
SPEAKER_00: The love of God, the love that comes from God, the love with which God loves, that love, Paul says here in our hearts.
SPEAKER_00: And so Christ is the one, the object of our worship, the object that determines the quality and the shape of our heart and our soul.
SPEAKER_00: This is what it means to love Jesus.
SPEAKER_00: This is what it means to worship Jesus.
SPEAKER_00: It is to have this deep resolve in faith to be like Jesus.
SPEAKER_00: We see in this beautiful passage in Matthew, Jesus is going into ministry in Judea, and he looks upon the peasants there in these villages.
SPEAKER_00: And we know throughout the rest of the Gospels, all the Gospels attest to these very powerful things, right, that Jesus will do, miraculous things.
SPEAKER_00: He'll heal the sick, he'll heal illness, he'll raise the dead, he'll exercise demons.
SPEAKER_00: And as we saw in our readings today, he even gives the power and authority to do this over to the disciples, that they can do this.
SPEAKER_00: Why does Jesus do what appears to us these miraculous things?
SPEAKER_00: Why does he heal the sick?
SPEAKER_00: Why does he exercise the possessed?
SPEAKER_00: Why does he feed the hungry?
SPEAKER_00: Is it to prove that he's God, to prove that, well, you can listen to me?
SPEAKER_00: You know I'm telling you the good stuff or the true stuff because, hey, look what I can do.
SPEAKER_00: I'm sure that that's a dynamic, and that dynamic comes out in the text at times in Jesus' story.
SPEAKER_00: But what does Matthew say?
SPEAKER_00: It says that Jesus is standing and he's looking upon these villages that he's about to go into ministry, and he has compassion on the people.
SPEAKER_00: Because they look like sheep without a shepherd.
SPEAKER_00: What is sheep without a shepherd?
SPEAKER_00: I imagine sheep without a shepherd.
SPEAKER_00: They're scared, confused, sick, haven't known where to get water, where to find rest, where to find food.
SPEAKER_00: Jesus looks out on these villages, these peasants, as he sends out the twelve, and his heart is full of compassion.
SPEAKER_00: And this is where the manifestation of the power of the Spirit through the disciples is manifesting from, from this compassion of God.
SPEAKER_00: This is the vision that we see.
SPEAKER_00: And what does this mean?
SPEAKER_00: Very clearly, according to this passage, God, simply put, God cares whether people have heat in their home in the winter.
SPEAKER_00: God cares whether people have enough food on the table.
SPEAKER_00: God cares if a single mom feels completely stressed out of her mind.
SPEAKER_00: God cares if people are sick.
SPEAKER_00: What you see embodied in Jesus and the disciples is the deep concern and care for God for the pain that people carry in this world.
SPEAKER_00: God is deeply concerned.
SPEAKER_00: God cares if you had a hard week.
SPEAKER_00: God cares if you're struggling right now.
SPEAKER_00: God cares if work is not going well.
SPEAKER_00: God cares if you're scared.
SPEAKER_00: God cares if you don't feel like yourself.
SPEAKER_00: If you're sick.
SPEAKER_00: God cares.
SPEAKER_00: And Jesus in his ministry, moved by compassion on the crowds, sends out empower the twelve disciples.
SPEAKER_00: And what we see in the ministry of Jesus is that God cares about all these things.
SPEAKER_00: And God cares if his children care about these things.
SPEAKER_00: It's interesting, it's in this context, right, that Jesus says, the harvest is plentiful, but the laborers are few.
SPEAKER_00: What's the harvest?
SPEAKER_00: Apparently, looking, reading the text, the harvest is the lost sheep of the house of Israel.
SPEAKER_00: It's Judea.
SPEAKER_00: It's all these scared, sick, needy, tormented people.
SPEAKER_00: That's the harvest.
SPEAKER_00: A harvest of needy, weak people, hurting people?
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
SPEAKER_00: Jesus says the harvest is plentiful, but the laborers are few.
SPEAKER_00: I can't help but imagine that what Jesus is saying is that those, the laborers being those who imitating Jesus, full of compassion, empowered by the Spirit, going to the world's need.
SPEAKER_00: I think that's the laborer.
SPEAKER_00: Full of compassion, empowered by the Spirit, meeting the world's need.
SPEAKER_00: Why?
SPEAKER_00: Because God cares if people are sick.
SPEAKER_00: This is a powerful image that we see of Jesus.
SPEAKER_00: And may we know that when God Christ looks upon us, God does so with compassion.
SPEAKER_00: God does so full of deep concern.
SPEAKER_00: One of the favorite things to remind myself, remind others often if there's a counseling event that I learned from a couple of other priests, is the saying that God cares more about this, this being the situation, your fear, your concern, what seems to be the most important thing to you right now.
SPEAKER_00: That God cares more about this than you ever could.
SPEAKER_00: Even though at the very moment it feels like nobody cares about this more than me.
SPEAKER_00: I mean, who could possibly care more about my joy than me?
SPEAKER_00: Or my peace?
SPEAKER_00: My future?
SPEAKER_00: Who could possibly care more than me?
SPEAKER_00: I've not even told anybody that my concerns.
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
SPEAKER_00: Christ is more concerned.
SPEAKER_00: Full of compassion.
SPEAKER_00: May we know that we have been beckoned by this Christ full of power, full of compassion.
SPEAKER_00: The same power and compassion that he has shown to us on the cross.
SPEAKER_00: That we've been empowered with the love of God.
SPEAKER_00: May we be concerned with suffering.
SPEAKER_00: And one of the things I love about this passage, too, is that Jesus is explicit, right?
SPEAKER_00: He says, Don't go to Samaria, don't go to the Gentiles, go to the lost sheep of the house of Israel.
SPEAKER_00: Jesus isn't being anti-evangelistic here.
SPEAKER_00: There's a time, Samaria, that'll come, the Gentile, that'll come.
SPEAKER_00: But it's almost like an invitation for us.
SPEAKER_00: Like, go here, go to each other with deep compassion and the power of the Spirit.
SPEAKER_00: I wonder if some of the reasons why we don't see what we would often call in a modern time miraculous things may not be, in fact, due to our hearts not full of compassion and trusting in the power of the Spirit.
SPEAKER_00: Who knows?
SPEAKER_00: But we do see this: this calling, this one that we are called to imitate, the one that we are called to worship.
SPEAKER_00: May we worship the Jesus who stands over Jerusalem.
SPEAKER_00: We know other times weeps, full of compassion, and goes in mighty works of power.
SPEAKER_00: And may we be like this Christ as we follow him to the cross, through the grave, into glory.
SPEAKER_00: Amen.