We Are the Sent Ones: What It Means to Be God's Representatives

A Time to Reflect on Being the Church

Last Monday, the Uniting Church celebrated 49 years, and this Sunday happens to be Uniting World Sunday. So this is a time to reflect on what it means to be the Church, and how we can be the Church today.

It also happens to be the Sunday where we have one of the shortest gospel readings we've ever had in the lectionary — just three verses. But it all talks about being sent.

The Ancient World of Sending

I don't know if you remember the days when you didn't have a telephone. Maybe you grew up with no telephone. We grew up with no telephone and no car. Those were different days. We had a postal service, so we could send letters. But I can remember, for many years, even when we went overseas, to make contact with my parents would be a big thing because it was a toll call all the way from Europe, and we couldn't afford to do that every day, let alone every week. We'd do it every month. The distances and the costs were so high.

In the ancient world, they not only didn't have the internet and they didn't have telephones, they didn't have a postal service either. And that meant that if you were in Ephesus and you wanted to do some business in Rome, you actually had to send somebody. That person might be a slave, a member of your household, your brother, or your son. It usually would be a man because of the dangers of travel in those days.

But you'd need to be able to trust that person to act on your behalf. The person who's gone to Rome is negotiating, and he can't ring up and say, "Hey, boss, is this okay?" No. He has to know. He has to have your mindset, be full bottle on what you want, and be able to act on your behalf.

Envoys, representatives, people who acted on others' behalf — these were really essential in the ancient world. They were crucial.

Jesus: God's Envoy

It's not surprising that when people started to think about how to talk about Jesus, they said, "Jesus is God's envoy. Jesus is the one sent by God, full bottle on God, and so we can listen to Jesus and know that he's representing God."

One of the words in Greek used for a sent person was a technical term: apostolos. We recognise it, don't we, because that's where we get our word "apostle" from. It's now a churchy word, and we've forgotten the background of the meaning, but it really just means a sent one.

People said Jesus is God's sent one, and then Jesus sends out the disciples, and they are apostoloi — apostles, sent out by Jesus. And then you can look at your own discipleship. You can look at what it means to be a member of the Church. There's a sense in which we are all sent. We are sent ones, sent on behalf of Jesus, sent on behalf of God.

It's like we're being asked to be God's representatives. Not to boss people around, but to share what's really at the heart of God, which is love and compassion.

Welcoming the Sent Ones

The interesting thing about the passage we've just read in the gospel is that it ends up by saying: when you accept and welcome and help one of these people who comes to you, you get the same reward as the person who's coming to you. It talks about little ones — you give a cup of water to one of these little ones, and you'll get your reward. God will recognise that.

Matthew's Gospel is quite interesting because when they wrote the gospels, they had to put together all kinds of stories in a certain order. Matthew uses Mark, generally follows Mark's order. But the last bit of teaching that Matthew has Jesus give is a parable about the sheep and the goats — a picture of the Judgment Day — and the focus is on how you treat the little ones.

Now, that sounds like little children, but it's not. Matthew uses "little ones" to refer to followers of Jesus, those who are sent. So how do you treat the ones who are sent? How do you treat fellow members of the believing community?

It's About the Living Relationship

Matthew is quite clear. He has Jesus say, "Don't say to me, 'Lord, Lord,' and all this sort of stuff if you're not prepared to really be involved and be supportive." It's not about having had a conversion or something like that in the past, like you've got a status.

It's not about having had a wedding — it's about having a marriage. It's being committed to it. It's being alive in the relationship.

What Matthew is having Jesus say is: we need to be committing ourselves. We need to be loving each other. We need to be caring.

In that particular parable where Jesus is portrayed as talking to the sheep, he says:

"I was in prison and you visited me. I was sick and you helped me. I was in need of clothing and you gave me clothes. You did all these things for me. And when you did it for the fellow in need, it's like you were doing it for me."

It's not that Jesus is saying, "Pretend you can see Jesus in somebody and help them because you're helping Jesus." No. The people who were helped in the parable end up saying, "Oh, gosh, you mean when I helped John down the road, I was actually helping you?" And Jesus says, "Yeah, that's right. Help John because John is in need. You want to support him or Judy — help them. But know that when you're doing that, you're connecting to all of us, and you're really helping Jesus as well."

Being Sent as a Community

Uniting World Sunday. We can't all go out to various places in the world and be engaged. You're 90 now, you can't do it. Maybe you can't even do it when you're 70. But we're a community. We all belong together, and so we can — and we need to — act as a body.

There are people doing it out there on our behalf. We can support them financially and in other ways through prayers. That's what it means to be a community.

We are sent ones. We are commissioned. We've got a job to do, and we're given God's love to enable us to do it.

Prayer

O God, we give you thanks that you call us to be your representatives, to be your envoys, to be people sent by you to carry your love into the world. Help us to be partners in everything that we do in our daily lives, in the way that we look at the wider world, in our support of UnitingCare and Uniting World. Help us, we pray, to be your partners, true and faithful, for we ask it in the name of Jesus. Amen.