Third Sunday after Pentecost                                                                      Romans 6.12-23

Proper 8A                                                                                                      Psalm 13

                                                                                                                        Matthew 10.40-42

Imagine with me, if you will, a world where Jesus is here with us in the same way that He was with the Disciples in Galilee.  In this world you and I could walk down the street to ask Him what to do when we are hurt and confused:  Jesus, I’m having trouble with my kids; or, Jesus I have this problem at work, or school.  And Jesus could walk up to someone on the street, like he did in the New Testament and say, “Come, follow me.”  What a world that would be!  But we don’t have Jesus with us in the same way that the disciples had Him with them.

Four weeks ago we celebrated the Feast of the Ascension, when the Church remembers the day when, 40 days after His resurrection, Jesus bodily left this earth.  In the presence of 11 of the disciples the Gospels of Mark and Luke tell us that after blessing them he was carried up into heaven.  The Acts of the Apostles says more poetically that he was taken up, and a cloud received him out of their sight.  We live in a post-Ascension world.  We were not privileged to see Him face to face; but the fact that we live in a post-Ascension world is an essential fact of our Christian faith.  That we live in a post-Ascension world has an enormous impact on how we, as baptized followers of Christ Jesus, interact with the world around us.

On a Middle Eastern farm a man, the farmer whose family has farmed this land for four generations, is stooping to pick up apples in the ruins of his orchard.  He picks up the scattered fruit from the ground, the ground that has been scarred and broken by a bulldozer.  One of the farmer’s neighbors tells him that he saw the bulldozer, driven by a government employee.  The orchard had been planted nearly eight years before with apple and almond trees.  Some of the apples could be salvaged, but the almonds never had a chance – at the very edge of the field the crushed and mangled branches of an almond tree reach out from a mound of dirt and rocks, the unripe almonds still clinging to their stems.

This man and his family are the proud descendants of an ancient Christian family.  Since the fall of the Ottoman Empire his ancestors have farmed this land.  Most of the Christians in his part of the world had left for places they though would be more tolerant.  This family, however, had decided to stay; convinced that the small remaining population of Christians had a role to play in their people’s future they remained on their farm.

Now, though, the government claims that they are living and farming illegally on government property.  The family believes that things like the destruction of their orchard are the government’s way of convincing them that it would be far easier if they just gave up and left.  Despite living regularly with such tactics and witnessing the destruction of years of back-breaking work and the family’s pride this farmer’s sister responded to the latest push, the bulldozing of the orchard, by saying:

Nobody can force us to hate.  We refuse to be enemies.

This family, facing hardships and struggles that many of us can only imagine, know what it means to live in a post-Ascension world.  They refuse to hate because they believe that when Jesus said “Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you,” he was calling on his disciples to show the world who He is and, through that knowledge, what kind of God we worship. He said, “Whoever welcomes you welcomes me, and whoever welcomes me welcomes the one who sent me.”

These words of Christ from the Gospel of Matthew come at the end of what scholars call the “Missionary Discourse.”  This is the speech in which Jesus tells his disciples that, as they go out to declare that the kingdom of heaven has come near, they’re not to take anything with them on the road – no gold or silver or copper, no bag, no extra tunic, extra sandals, or even a staff – the speech where Jesus tells them, as we heard last week, that he has not come to bring peace, but a sword. And, most encouraging of all, Jesus says, See, I am sending you out like sheep among wolves!  This isn’t the most impressive of missionary pep-talks, it doesn’t exactly instill a lot of confidence does it? I often wonder what the disciples were thinking.  But this “Missionary Discourse” begins and ends with the most vital piece of information: all of these dangers can easily be met because of one important detail:  we disciples are like the Master, whoever welcomes us welcomes Jesus – we are Jesus!

In these three verses we overhear the Lord instructing his twelve disciples, and through them us, in an important doctrinal belief about the Church.  We are, as St. Paul says in 1 Corinthians the Body of Christ and each and every one of us are individually members of it.  The Church as the Mystical Body of Christ is an important belief about the Church because we live in a post-Ascension world.  Christ Himself is no longer present in the world in the same way He was present with the Twelve, walking through the Galilee.  You, each and every one of you who have been baptized into Christ’s Body the Church, are the way that Christ walks through this world now. 

As you go about your daily lives, shopping at the grocery store, filling your car with gas, paying bills, interacting with your neighbors co-workers or fellow students, or perhaps most important of all on this Sunday which we Episcopalians are celebrating as “Social Media Sunday” – when you send your virtual self into the ether-world of Social Media, and every other interaction we have with our fellow human beings, you are Christ to them.  You may be their first or only encounter with Jesus Christ.  By simply offering a smile and a pleasant “hello,” or by offering to help someone with their grocery bags or their flat tire you are communicating the ever-present love of God in Christ. 

You are empowered for this being Christ when you receive the Eucharist.  Because we believe that Jesus is truly present in the Eucharist, when you receive the consecrated bread and wine you take Jesus into your body.  We take Jesus into ourselves so that we can carry Him out into the world.  In that moment of reception you are strengthened in your communion with God the Father - through Jesus Christ - in the power of the Holy Spirit; and with our brothers and sisters in Christ, both living and dead, in the Communion of Saints.

One of my favorite saints, though not one that is recognized on our calendar, was a Polish Roman Catholic priest and a Franciscan – Father Maximillian Kolbe.  Father Kolbe was arrested by the Gestapo in February 1941 for hiding 2,000 Jewish men, women, and children from Nazi persecution inside his friary.  After being held in a Polish men’s prison for three months, he was transferred to Auschwitz concentration camp as prisoner 16670. 

Housed in Block 14 with other Polish nationals, Father Kolbe became a spiritual father to the other men with whom he was imprisoned.  In late July 1941 three prisoners from Block 14 disappeared,  it was assumed that they had found some way to escape the terrors of the concentration camp.  All the men of Block 14 were ordered into the yard where they stood at attention.  In a cruel exercise of his power over the prisoners the commander chose 10 men from Block 14 to be punished in order to deter any future escape attempts. They were to be starved to death in an underground bunker.  One of the men, when chosen, cried out “My wife! My children!” -- Father Kolbe stepped forward and volunteered to take the man’s place.  He argued that a priest would make a better example than this poor man. 

After two weeks of dehydration and starvation, only Kolbe remained alive of the ten sentenced to that prolonged death. Finally, the guards wanted the bunker emptied so they decided to give Father Kolbe a lethal injection of carbolic acid. Eyewitnesses say that when the soldiers approached, Kolbe raised his left arm and calmly waited for the injection.  Here was a man who truly knew what it meant to be a member of the Body of Christ – who knew what it means to be Jesus in the world.

God willing none of us will be called upon to give up our lives in a martyr’s death.  The same mind, however, should be in us that was in Maximillian Kolbe.  Our interaction with the world around us should be so infused with the Spirit we received at Baptism that it colors the way we see our fellow human beings – just as it does for that Middle Eastern farming family, just as it did for Maximillian Kolbe.  That farming family doesn’t live their lives in peace and understanding, refusing to be anyone’s enemy, because they believe it will attract praise and give them glory – no, they do it because they believe that being Christ to the world means loving your neighbor as yourself.  Father Kolbe didn’t offer himself in that other man’s place in the hopes that he would be recognized for his holiness and self-sacrifice – he reacted as he believed Christ would have when faced with the unbearable pain of another.

And you…what is it that draws you to this place?  Most, if not all, of you drive past several suburban parishes to come to St. John’s.  When you could easily stay close to home and avoid having to see the pain and suffering in the streets around this cathedral, you come.  Why is this place the place to which the Holy Spirit has called you?

Men and women like these poor, long-suffering farmers, like Father Maximillian Kolbe, and like so many others whose stories aren’t recorded like theirs, know that at the Core of who we are as the Body of Christ, is Love.  As you go out into the world remember – someone out there desperately searching for Christ, even if they don’t know it, may have only you – only you, to make Him known.