“Being Someone Who Is Willing to Help Jesus”

Matthew 9:35-38

The last four verses of Matthew 9 lead up to the events of Matthew 10:5-8. Jesus chooses and empowers the twelve disciples and sends them out to proclaim the Gospel, cure the sick, raise the dead, cleanse the lepers, and cast out demons. He sends them out with various instructions and words of warning, instructions and warnings that will be dealt with in separate sermons.

Matthew 9:35 briefly describes the entire ministry of Jesus in Galilee: “Then Jesus went about all the cities and villages, teaching in their synagogues, and proclaiming the good news of the kingdom, and curing every disease and every sickness.” Jesus preached, taught, and healed. He also cast out demons and raised the dead. He then sent his newly called and empowered disciples to do the very same ministry, a ministry of preaching, teaching, and healing.

He, the Good Shepherd, sent them out to be shepherds in his name. The sheep – the people to whom he was ministering – were harassed and helpless. They were lost and injured just like the sheep described in Ezekiel 34. Those sheep were the children of Judah. Their shepherds, the priests and the prophets of the day, were not ministering to them. They not only left them unprotected, they themselves were the ones doing them harm. What did God proclaim through the mouth of Ezekiel? “I myself will search for my sheep, and will seek them out… I will bind up the injured and strengthen the weak…”

Jesus had come to be the Good Shepherd, the incarnation of God who would shepherd his sheep. As Jesus went about his ministry in Galilee, he would look out over the crowds flocking to him. What did he see? Lost, harassed, and helpless sheep, sheep without a shepherd. The text says that he had compassion for them. He hurt for them in the deepest part of his being.

Then the Good Shepherd asked help: disciples willing to go out into the world and be shepherds in his name. He needed people, who as Will Willomon put it, were willing to assist him in his shepherd ministry of preaching, teaching, and healing. He called and empowered the twelve, spending three years mentoring them in the way of the cross. After his resurrection and ascension he sent the Holy Spirit to empower them to continue his work until he came again.

Changing metaphors, he commissioned and sent them – and us – out to labor as harvesters in a world rich and full with those in need of harvesting. Switching back, to be shepherds to all those lost and hurting people out there, people hungry for the Gospel message of God’s grace, mercy, and love.

Lost sheep in need of a shepherd to find them, feed them, heal them, and save them – a rich harvest of lost and lonely souls: these are the people near and far our Lord Jesus has called, commissioned, and empowered us to find, feed, heal, and befriend, people who are lost without the love of Jesus. These are the people for whom our Lord God has compassion. These are the people who comprise the twenty-first century mission field. We must never forget that, “to be a Christian is to be willing to assist Jesus” in ministering to them.

Years ago in a sermon I preached just before stepping out of pastoral ministry for a while I rather self-righteously complained that I had become a manager instead of a minister. What I forgot in my mostly self-imposed distress is that good ministers must also be good managers. There is preaching to do, teaching to do, pastoral care that must be done. There are service projects, mission efforts, and evangelism programs for which people must be recruited and trained.

The Session must be moderated. Committees must be staffed. Stewardship issues dealing with budgets and buildings must be addressed. The work of the church must be prayerfully managed if God’s people are going to do ministry in the name of Jesus.

Another thing I forgot was that seminary had prepared me to be a better manager than minister. That’s what pastors did in 1977. Times, however, they are a changing. Management skills must be translated into leadership skills. And while the day in and day out work of the church must be maintained, our focus can no longer be inward. The pastor and other leaders of the church must still attend to a certain amount of management. To not do so would be lousy stewardship.

Despite my very public and personal moaning, groaning, griping, and whining about being a manager way back there in 1985, the truth is that deep down I love this management stuff. Sandy helped me confront this reality several years ago. I was complaining one day about having to attend another synod meeting, you know, moaning, groaning, griping and whining. Finally Sandy looked at me and said, “You know that you love that ‘stuff’.” I did, and still do.

However, if the management doesn’t lead to mission and ministry, it’s a waste of time and energy. Grace Church gets that. You guys know how to do ministry. And as some of us worked through the process of last weekend’s leadership retreat, it became obvious that there is a hunger in this church to do more. We dealt with the building, especially the roof, but only as part of a broader discussion about remodeling and maybe adding on to the building in order to have the space and tools we need to engage in a more effective ministry to those around us.

We focused on Christian education and ministry to and with the youth in our church and in our community. And while some of our dreams will not come true without some major modifications to our facilities, we came up with ways to begin doing what we feel God is calling us to do in the very near future, especially Sunday school and youth activities next summer led by a seminary or college intern hired for that purpose. While we can’t yet afford to build a large combination multipurpose meeting area and gym, we will look at putting up a basketball goal in the parking lot. Just so you know, our youth have outgrown the space we provide for them. That’s a good thing. It’s also a ministry and mission problem that must be – wait for it – managed.

We also focused on outreach and in-reach. Even as we do a better job of ministering to our own by way of better communications and more intentional pastoral care, we must begin to turn outward toward the community around us – all those lost souls and hungry sheep to whom Jesus has called us to minister. So we’re going to try some things, some that are old, some that are new. This outreach - and in-reach – is going to require training and supervision for a lot of you who probably don’t yet realize that you’re going to be put to work. And by the way Session members and Deacons, your training is going to become more intense. If it makes you feel any better, your pastor is going to have to bite the bullet and do some things that are outside his comfort zone. Yikes!

All of this is going to require leadership, training, and supervision, you know – management. It’s also going to require some intense prayer and Bible study. As we move forward toward reaching our goals it’s eventually going to require a whole lot of money. Your pastor, session, and deacons are going to have to lead like they’ve never before: praying more, studying Scripture more, focusing outward a whole lot more. But think about it this way, we aren’t being asked to heal the sick, raise the dead, and cast out demons. As Dr. Phil might say about our growing sense of ministry and mission, “We can do this.”

Just before I started this sermon I shared with Paul how tired and stressed I was over Sandy’s mother’s slow march toward death, the need to meet with Sheila about the mission trip, having to write two sermons and otherwise clear the decks before next week’s vacation, writing up the retreat report, and having to deal with the reality of bringing two brand new elders and one brand new deacon on board in a year when we’ll begin moving into what looks like a greatly intensified workload. I was wondering out loud about where those two sermons were going to come from over the next few days. In mid-complaint it dawned on me that they would come from where they always do. I simply needed to open myself to the Spirit.

And then this sermon came fast and easy, at least in terms of writing it. Reality is, though, that I’d been chewing on it for days. I never intended to deal with last weekend’s retreat, but that’s where the Spirit led me. I am not surprised. The retreat was a prayerful exercise in discerning the will of God for Grace Presbyterian Church. The Spirit didn’t stop working when we left the retreat center last Saturday night. The combination of that retreat with today’s text really was a match made in heaven. Both the retreat’s outcome and the text push us to answer the question raised by that brief sentence of Will Willomon that I quoted. Are we willing to be people who are ready to assist Jesus in ministering to all the lost sheep and hurting souls out there, to allow his compassion for them to become our compassion for them, compassion that we will exercise in his name. Amen.