Christ the King Epiphany Church, Wilbraham

The Rev. Martha S. Sipe

June 14, 2026 / Pentecost 3 (Lect. 11A)

Matthew 9:35-10:8

Last Friday evening at the New England Synod Assembly, I saw an old friend and colleague during the evening worship service.  I waved to him across the church, but we weren’t able to connect directly.  We don’t get together socially at this point in our lives, but there was a time (30 years ago) when we were close, and I still feel a great deal of affection for him, and so I was alarmed to see that, even from a distance, he looked weary and worn.  Leaving the assembly the next day, I was able to connect with him, and learned that his church has been without a head of staff for a long time, with no candidates in sight, and that the added stress was stealing the joy he customarily found in his work.  It wasn’t a long conversation and he had to rush off, but before he did, I hugged him, told him I loved him, and said that he would be in my prayers.  But I have to tell you, all week long, I’ve been troubled, remembering my promise to pray for him.

I’m not troubled by the promise itself.  In fact, I have been praying for him.  But “You’re in my prayers” can seem like such a hollow response.  I’m not saying that prayer isn’t a comfort.  It is.  It is a marvelous tooI in our box as we work to bring God’s kingdom to earth.  But then I think about how officials offer “thoughts and prayers” to victims of gun violence . . . and then do nothing to prevent further tragedies.  I think about how we can lift our prayers for those affected by natural disasters . . . but our attention is drawn to something else before we get around to following up our prayers with contributions to Lutheran Disaster Response or Episcopal Relief and Development.  I think about the way we pray earnestly for peace . . . but we hesitate to pick up the phone or send an email to let our elected representatives know just how firmly we believe that aggression and violence and war are not what God wants for God’s people.  The world does need our prayers – but the world needs more than our prayers.

Jesus knew this.  At the end of the 9th chapter of Matthew,  we find Jesus travelling all over the countryside teaching and preaching and healing.  And when he looks at the crowds, he sees that they are “harassed and helpless, like sheep without a shepherd.”  Harassed and helpless – that feels like a perfect description of how many of us feel today – at the very least bothered about the trajectory of our world, or even downright terrified of the direction we’re going – harassed and feeling helpless about turning things around, wondering who will be our shepherd.  We are, indeed, like the crowds that Jesus observed, and now, just as he did then, Jesus looks at us with compassion.  He sees the struggles, he sees the pain, he sees the fear, and then he turns to his disciples and instructs them to get to work.  And that work starts with prayer.  He says, “The harvest is plentiful, but the laborers are few; therefore ask the Lord of the harvest to send out laborers into his harvest.”  It is a commission, to be sure.  But he first instructs them to pray:  Ask the Lord to send out laborers.  Ask God.  Pray.

But Jesus knew that it doesn’t end with prayer.  Because then, at the very beginning of chapter 10, the next thing Jesus does, after telling his disciples to pray, is to send them out.  He tells them to pray for workers to be sent – and then he sends them out to be the workers. “Sometimes our prayers are an urgent petition for God to do what only God can do in the world.  Other times, prayer is aligning our hearts with God’s will for us to do what God asks of us.”  Or said another way:  we are called to pray – and then invited to consider that God might just be seeking us to be the answer to our prayers. 

In his book, Half Truths, Adam Hamilton recounts the story of an event, perhaps the event, that changed the trajectory of the civil rights movement in this country.  It was an event that started with prayer, and then used the pray-ers themselves to answer their prayers.

In 1965, African Americans in Alabama were being blocked from exercising their right to vote.  In order to register, they were subjected to absurd tests and questions no one could answer.  As one example, African Americans had to guess the exact number of jellybeans in a large jar before they could register to vote.  The clear intent was to keep them disenfranchised.

In response, people began to organize, and churches were at the center of it. . . . On Sunday, March 7, 1965, approximately six hundred marchers gathered for worship in their churches, then met at Brown Chapel African Methodist Episcopal Church.  They began with prayer, and then they went about nonviolently protesting for their rights.  They prayed for strength, and then they worked.

. . . The group planned to march fifty-four miles, but they had barely gotten underway before police blocked them as they crossed the Edmund Pettus Bridge.  The police attacked – some were on horseback – and the people who started their day in church were physically beaten for their efforts to march. . . . These church people did not simply pray and wait for God to fix things.. . .They prayed and worked.  They were willing to sacrifice, and even to risk death, because they believed God was calling them to work on behalf of a just and moral cause.  Bloody Sunday was a turning point in the civil rights movement.

Jesus set the tone:  we ask God for laborers, and then we get busy doing the laboring.  Even when the challenges seem insurmountable – like protecting civil rights (still today), like ending the war in Iran, like responding to natural disasters, like preventing gun violence, like all the times we see people we care about who seem harassed and helpless, like sheep without a shepherd – even when it seems like there is nothing that we can do to make a difference, we pray.  And then we open our hearts to the ways in which God is calling us to bring about the kingdom.  Maybe that means making our voices heard by participating in a protest or signing a petition.  Maybe it means making financial donations or writing to our elected officials.  

And if the challenges are too big or too far beyond our reach for us to make a direct impact, then we can act on an adjacent path.  Perhaps we can’t feed those in war-torn regions; but we can feed our neighbors.  Perhaps we can’t bring about world peace; but we can model peace in our families and communities.  Perhaps I can’t send a pastor to my friend’s congregation; but I can be willing to support neighboring congregations in transition.  There is always something that we can do because just as surely as God summoned Simon and Andrew, James and John, Philip and Bartholomew, and all the rest, so does God summon ____ and ____, ____ and ____, you and me to go out and do whatever we can do with whatever gifts God has given us to  make this world a little more like God intended it to be.  We may feel harassed, but we are never helpless.  Our Compassionate Shepherd hears our prayers and guides us to act, in tiny ways and in great, for the sake of his whole flock.

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1    https://www.workingpreacher.org/commentaries/revised-common-lectionary/ordinary-11/commentary-on-matthew-935-108-9-23-3 

2    Half Truths, Adam Hamilton