I Am Sending You On Mission, But Do Not Be Afraid

Our Gospel reading for today is a very profound and provocative reading where Jesus is speaking to the twelve. The Gospel of Matthew has five discourses; the first being the Sermon on the Mount, and this our reading for today is a second. It is also called “a mission discourse.” It is Jesus missioning his twelve disciples, and in missioning the twelve, he is sending them out on mission while making them into missionaries at the same time.

I would invite you when you get back to your homes, to take out your Bibles and read the whole of Matthew chapter 10. You see he starts by naming those that will be missioned, and then he gives a number of instructions, and this is a last set of instructions to those that will be missioned. Hopefully, in reading it, you may make the connection with what we are doing as Church – we are missioning the domestic church. We are helping the domestic church to first find its identity, which is what Jesus does first in Matthew chapter 10, to find their identity as those who belong to him, then through their identity to understand their mission, and then to go out on mission and be part of the mission that God had entrusted to Jesus Christ himself.

Jesus starts by saying to them, “do not be afraid . . ” – he said this three times in today’s text, “don’t be afraid.” What is the most fearful thing that God could ask you to do? Go to Africa on mission, or go to your family on mission? Which one more fearful? The toughest mission that there is right now is the mission to your own family. That’s the hardest mission that there is and it’s the one that most people are terrified about. When you think of it in terms of the capacity of our young to push back, makes it all the more challenging.

Many of us lived in a time – thirty or fifty years ago – where we had the illusion that we were living in a culture that was basically Christian. We are living in a time today where we do not have that illusion. We are not living in a Christian culture. The values of the of the Kingdom of God are actually looked at as suspect, as somehow esoteric, as somehow naive, as somehow in bigotry. There are so many ways in which the values of the Kingdom are being wrongly portrayed in our world today, that to hold those values and holding them up is so difficult in this time in which we live. That is what is being addressed in today’s text, because it was the same thing in the time of Jesus. The values of the Kingdom were not being accepted readily, and Matthew writes his gospel at a time when the Jews had expelled the Christians from the synagogue, and where the world had become hostile towards Christians. That is the same context in which we are living right now. That’s why missioning the domestic church is not the easiest prospect. It’s one of the most difficult challenges, but it is a challenge that you and I have to take up, and the challenge that the whole church has to take up.