This is the second week in a row when the gospel reading (Matthew 10:24-39) mentioned families. Last week on Father's Day, brothers, fathers, and children turned against each other. This week, daughters are turning against mothers and mother-in-laws. The two readings are from Jesus' instruction to his disciples before he sends them to do his work. Jesus tells his followers that this journey will not be easy. Jesus' followers will not always be welcomed and loved. The message they are bringing will challenge and confuse the wider Greco-Roman culture. There's something about Jesus changes the bonds we have with each other. And sometimes, the bonds inside our own families will break. 

This message doesn't seem to jive with the message we also hear in Jesus' words today. Jesus tells his followers that God cherishes them. God knows each of them in a real and authentic way. These words are filled with a theme of inclusion and welcome. Through their relationship with Jesus, the disciples are brought into a new family. This family is centered around a Jesus who will live and die for each of them. The people included in this Jesus-generated family are not perfect. Nor can each individual invite themselves into this group. Instead, Jesus calls them by name and loves them because that's what God does. God is creating a new family while the bonds of other families fall apart. 

We have many examples in our lives of broken families. Entire communities know what it's like to be abandoned. Too many friends of mine have been kicked out of their families for coming out as LGBT. Others have watched as broken promises, abuse, and addiction have destroyed the trust and love we believe all families should practice. When Matthew wrote down these words from Jesus around the year 75 C.E. (A.D.), the Christian community was very small. New converts to the faith were sometimes disowned by their families and friends. The experience Jesus described here is an experience the author of Matthew knew well. It's also an experience that is still too common today. Yet Jesus' word promises a new family that has, at its center, someone who will never break a promise of fidelity, love, and trust. This family is centered around someone who doesn't call the perfect to be his friends. He doesn't leave space at the table for only those who act and think and look like he does. Jesus points to a bond and love from God that transcends the bonds of human family. And this bond, even when threatened with the Cross, will not be broken. 

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I'm a big fan of First Thessalonians. Most scholars see this letter as the first piece of Christian writing that we have. Written around 50 CE, the letter tells us that Paul founded a community of believers in the capital of the Roman province ofMacedonia, Thessalonike. Paul was there only maybe a few month but he gathered together a group of Gentile (non-Jewish) believers in Jesus. When he left, probably heading to Corinth, the small community was flourishing and faithful. While in Corinth, a member of the community at Thessalonike named Timothy visited Paul, telling him all about what was happening back home.  Timothy brought Paul words of thankfulness and love but the community had a problem. They were looking for an answer to a big question. Members of their community had died and the Thessalonians didn't know how to handle it. They were concerned that their dead brothers and sisters had somehow missed out on salvation because they died before Jesus had come back. Was heaven and God's love no longer available to them now that they were dead? Would Jesus pass them over or not see them when he returns? The community in Thessalonike not only were mourning for the loss of their friends, they were also fearful of their friends' future. 

Paul hears what Timothy says and writes a letter in response. His words are gentle, kind, loving, and, above all, are encouraging. Paul tells the Thessalonians that those who have died are not lost. They have not missed out on the promise of Jesus. They have not, somehow, lost access to God. No, the ones who have died are fully caught up in Jesus' loving arms and Jesus is not letting go. 

This text from First Thessalonians (1 Thessalonians 4:13-18) has been used to justify the "rapture," a vision of the end of the world where "good Christians" somehow escape the world before Jesus returns. But Paul isn't talking about escape in his letter. Escaping never enters his mind. Instead, Paul is talking about living (and dying) in the world right now. He's telling his beloved community that grieving is okay, that the darkness that can come from sudden losses is part of our life, but that we are, first and foremost, a community rooted in a hope and love that even death cannot break. What matters in this text is not our being "caught up in the clouds" but, rather, that Jesus "will descend from heaven," into our lives, worship, and communion, in a million different ways. Not even death can keep us away from God's love. Jesus is running into the world and not away from it - and that truly is good news! 

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Jesus’ ministry and the church takes work and workers. This is one of the take aways from our reading in Matthew 9:35-10:23 today. At this point in Jesus’ career, Jesus is doing what Jesus does. He preaches, teaches, and heals. He shares a vision of God’s kingdom that includes tax collectors and others typically kicked out of holy places. He eats meals with people he shouldn’t. Jesus is being Jesus. And Jesus, in our verses today, compels his followers to do the same. 

The apostles’ mission is an outgrowth of Jesus’ own ministry. Jesus visits new places and tells his followers to do the same. Jesus tells his followers to share God’s message of love and hope using the same words he uses. Jesus’ followers are called to cure the sick, raise the dead, cleanse lepers, and cast out demons. And Jesus’ followers are told to provide this physical and spiritual care for free. A follower of Jesus doesn’t act only to benefit themselves. They are told to give freely and abundantly because that’s what Jesus does too. In the words of Colin Yuckman of Duke Divinity School, “To be sent by Jesus is, in some sense, to be sent as Jesus.” Jesus is training his followers on how they can be his disciples. When people encounter us, they are encountering and experiencing Jesus Christ and we need to act accordingly. 

This encounter with Jesus Christ is an unexpected mission God invites us to share. It’s also a mission that is not easy to do. An invitation to follow Jesus is an invitation to live a different way. An invitation to live in God’s kingdom means we need to realize the hard truths about the brokenness of the world around us. An invitation to live as Jesus is an invitation to recognize the ways we push ourselves and others away from God. Jesus decides that people like us can, through the help of the Holy Spirit, show others Jesus Christ. This seems like a daunting task. It can make us feel afraid. But, like we heard last week, we don’t do this job alone because Jesus is with us to the end of the age.

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Imagine, after a super busy week, being confident enough to take a break. And if God rests, why can't we?

Our first reading today (Genesis 1:1-2:4) is the opening to our Bible. These verses share with us the first creation story in our scriptures and how God created in seven days. The universe began as a formless void. God, in this story, doesn't create out of nothing. Instead, God brings order to a chaotic soup of randomness. For six days, God creates. Animals, birds, plants, and people are formed. I love how the giant sea monsters are named specifically in this story and how humankind begins their lives as vegetarians. The opening words of the bible are not meant to be a timeline detailing the history of the universe. Rather, these verse show God's relationship with everything. Unlike other creation stories floating around during the time of ancient Israel, the world isn't created through a violent act. There is no war between various gods that caused the earth to come into being. The world, instead, is created by a God who declares that creation is good. Everything within creation matters because God says it does. The sea monsters and the blades of grass are connected to a God who loves them.

So after creating everything, God took a break. God, for a brief period of time, stops working. In our modern context, we are used to the idea of weekends. We live in a society shaped by over a century of people, systems of thoughts, organizations, and labor unions that created the weekend. In a sense, the weekend is an ideal. We take a break from a normal workweek to instead, rest. This is an ideal because not everyone's work week begins on Monday and ends on Friday. And our lives are so dedicated to busy, we stop working on Fridays only to start again with other projects, sports games, homework, and more on Saturday. We work because we have to. We keep working because, if we don't, we imagine what we're doing will never get done. We've built lives where we need to be busy because we don't receive the help we need to take a break. We are, in the words of some, a society addicted to being busy. 

But God, who doesn't need to take a break, actually stops working. God rests. God, who has a relationship with every blade of grass, every sea monster, and every person, has created a world where taking a break matters. God invites us to live in a world where everyone has the time and resources they need to stop doing everything. Instead, we can  sit, enjoy, and bless each other and the world. When we take a break and help the people around us take a break, we're not encouraging laziness. We're encouraging people to connect with creation and the God who created it. And when we can connect with God, we discover how we can bless what God has blessed. And we discover the blessing God wants us to be. 
 

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When you picture the Holy Spirit, what do you think of? Unlike Jesus, the Holy Spirit has no physical form. The Holy Spirit is not something we can touch or objectively see. Even though the gospels describe the Spirit of God in the form of a dove, the dove is merely a metaphor. The metaphor describes what the Holy Spirit is like but the metaphor shouldn't limit what the Spirit can do. For centuries, the translation of Holy Spirit as Holy Ghost misidentified what the Spirit can do. We know ghosts. Ghosts go by the name of Casper. They are something we see in a horror film. They can walk through walls, vanish in an instant, and help us make pottery when we star in a Patrick Swayze film. But because ghosts are recognizable, they seem containable in some way. The Holy Spirit, as depicted in scripture, is the opposite. The Holy Spirit, as we see in our reading from Acts today, is not contained by anything. Like the cry of a dove across a large valley or a rush of wind blowing through a small room, the Holy Spirit moves, breaking the ways we keep to ourselves and forcing us out of our self-imposed containment. 

Pentecost (Acts 2:1-21) is sometimes described as the "birthday" of the church. That's a metaphor that's not quite right. The church is always the community of believers who proclaim Jesus Christ, crucified and risen from the dead. This new kind of community began the moment Mary and other women told their friends that Jesus was raised from the tomb. Pentecost is really a celebration of the different kinds of people God is calling into this new kind of community. The city of Jerusalem is filled with Jews from all over the world. These pilgrims speak many different languages and have many different nationalities. The Holy Spirit gives the apostles the ability to make Christ's story heard in many different languages. The miracle of Pentecost is not the apostles' ability to speak different languages. The miracle of Pentecost is God calling many different kinds of people to be part of this new community because Jesus' message of hope, reconciliation, and love is for everyone.

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