June 21 - “Worthy?”
Worthy?
Matthew 10:24-39
Genesis 21:8-21
21 June 2026
Rev. Mary Nelson – First Congregational Church UCC of Williamstown MA
The original audiences of the biblical texts are often easy for us to overlook. We think of ourselves as so sophisticated compared to them, with our computers in our pockets and our fast transportation and our modern conveniences. We give our ancestors in the faith too little credit. Biblical historian John Dominic Crossan has pointed out on occasion that the problem there “is not that those ancient people told literal stories and we are now smart enough to take them symbolically, but that they told them symbolically and we are now dumb enough to take them literally.” We tend to downplay the experiences of the people for whom the texts were written, imagining them in ways that serve our interpretation rather than listening to them and understanding how they would have heard the words that were written for them.
We’ve danced around their identity a bit – we know that the people of Matthew’s community were probably living in Antioch, in Syria, a big cosmopolitan city. They were a minority community living in a diverse multicultural context. They were Jews who were wrestling with what it meant to be Jewish in the first century, not really sure they identified with the experience of Judaism anymore, but sure what else they could be.
We’re not entirely certain when Matthew’s gospel was written, but it seems to have been produced sometime between about 75 and 85 CE. This community’s telling of the stories and teachings of Jesus was influenced by their lived experience as a minority community—importantly for today’s reading, we need to remember that they would have been not just a struggling people, but a traumatized people. In the decade or so before Matthew was writing, Rome had waged the so-called “Jewish War,” sending armies all over the territories of Syria and Judah, Galilee and Samaria, to subdue Jewish communities who were rebelling against Roman rule. Roman armies sacked Jerusalem in 70 CE, destroying the temple, and displacing even more Jewish people into what we call the “diaspora,” the dispersal: exile. In this same time period, in Rome itself, Emperor Nero began torturing and executing Christians for sport beginning in about 64 CE, and although he died 4 years later, his eventual successor Vespasian built the Colosseum and executed Christians there, among other pursuits. Five or ten or fifteen years after the sack of Jerusalem and the building of the Colosseum, it was a terrible time to be Jews or to be Christians, and Matthew’s community knew that. And that’s when Matthew was writing down the stories of Jesus for this community to learn them.
Against this backdrop of violence against both Christians and Jews, Jesus’s words to his disciples take on a very different tone. These are Matthew’s words to his community as much as they are Jesus’s words to his. In Jesus’s time, there were several different sects of Judaism emerging in Jerusalem—two generations later in Matthew’s time, the sect known as the Pharisees seemed to have gained the upper hand in determining which theological perspectives counted as “in” or “out” of bounds in Jewish understanding. And Christians were only just emerging as something separate from Judaism, and there wouldn’t be an attempt at standardizing anything about Christian theology or practice for another 300 years or so. But martyrdom was a real, present, active threat for both Christians and Jews. Violence sanctioned and organized by the Empire against both groups was pervasive everywhere in the territory of the Roman Empire. So imagine what it meant to Matthew’s community to hear Jesus saying to his followers, “Have no fear of those who persecute you. What you have heard whispered in secret, you must proclaim from the rooftops. Do not fear those who kill the body but cannot kill the soul. …those who lose their life for my sake will find it.”
For roughly 1700 years in Europe and other places dominated by the Roman Empire’s historic influence, and for 400+ years in the New World, Christians have experienced the privilege of living openly, freely, as a dominant cultural influence. We’ve fought among ourselves about the right way to be Christian, but in western cultural landscape we have not been persecuted and martyred in widespread systematic ways. Jews have not always had this privilege, it should be said, and often the violence against Jews that has taken place in the last two millennia has been at the hands of Christians (particularly white Christians) seeking to assert dominance at the expense of Jews and other religious and ethnic minority groups. The genocides that have been perpetuated by our Christian ancestors were sinful and shameful, no different from or better than any other genocides or persecutions committed throughout human history.
But these words of Jesus have also been an inspiration to Christians who have stood up against genocide and violence. Bonhoeffer, Martin Luther King Jr., and other modern martyrs held fast to the inspiration found in Jesus’s words here. “Do not fear those who might kill the body but not the soul.” Fear those who can kill the soul as well as the body: what might that look like?
We live now in a time when Christianity and Christian language have been twisted in public and corrupted into something unrecognizable to many of us. The misquoting of movies passed off as scripture, the use of Christian language to assert dominance over other Christians, other people, to determine who is in and who is out, who has rights and privileges and who doesn’t. Maybe the experience of Matthew’s community sometimes feels a little more …familiar to us than it would have even just a decade or two ago. Do we need to hear Jesus telling us not to fear those who can only kill the body? Are these words we might need hear differently than we might have five years ago, or ten, or fifteen? My God, I hope not!
We have before us also this question of worthiness. In addition to Jesus’s words of comfort and assurance in the face of persecution, we also have words of assurance that we are worthy of God’s love. That we are worthy of peace and security. We are worthy of the covenant, the promises of God. We’re reminded in the Genesis scripture today that those promises don’t just extend to one line of Abraham’s family, but to all his descendants. There is a place for Ishmael, there is a place for Hagar, there is a place of safety and worthiness for all people by virtue of being children of God, being created by God.
Worthiness is not contingent on what we do or do not do, but simply by virtue of being created by God and loved as God’s children. Jesus reminds us that sparrows are two for a penny, and yet they don’t even fall out of the sky without God knowing it and caring about it. And if that’s the case, then how much more must God know every time we fall, and care about us?
It’s a big question, the question of worthiness. Because we have used it against each other throughout human history. We’ve used it as an excuse to hurt, to kill, to persecute, to punish. But the promises of God, the covenant of God, extends to all people. And we are made worthy by virtue of God’s love for us.
We may be called to hard places. We may be called to speak truth when it is difficult to do so. But we are worthy to do that by virtue of that calling. Let us pray that we never need to lose our bodies for the sake of the gospel. Let us instead not let anyone need to lose their bodies for the sake of the gospel! Let’s build a different world, where violence and destruction are no longer a threat; where the worthiness of all, the belovedness of all God’s children, is what guides our treatment of one another. Where God’s love for all is reflected in our love for all. In Jesus’ name, may it be so. Amen.