The following homily was shared at our Sunday Evening Eucharist Service 6/14/26.

Old Testament Reading:

In those days, the Israelites came to the desert of Sinai and pitched camp.
While Israel was encamped here in front of the mountain,
Moses went up the mountain to God.
Then the LORD called to him and said,
“Thus shall you say to the house of Jacob;
tell the Israelites:
You have seen for yourselves how I treated the Egyptians
and how I bore you up on eagle wings
and brought you here to myself.
Therefore, if you hearken to my voice and keep my covenant,
you shall be my special possession,
dearer to me than all other people,
though all the earth is mine.
You shall be to me a kingdom of priests, a holy nation.”

(Exodus 19:2-6)

Gospel Reading:

At the sight of the crowds, Jesus’ heart was moved with pity for them
because they were troubled and abandoned,
like sheep without a shepherd.
Then he said to his disciples,
“The harvest is abundant but the laborers are few;
so ask the master of the harvest
to send out laborers for his harvest.”

Then he summoned his twelve disciples
and gave them authority over unclean spirits
to drive them out and to cure every disease and every illness.
The names of the twelve apostles are these:
first, Simon called Peter, and his brother Andrew;
James, the son of Zebedee, and his brother John;
Philip and Bartholomew, Thomas and Matthew the tax collector;
James, the son of Alphaeus, and Thaddeus;
Simon from Cana, and Judas Iscariot who betrayed him.

Jesus sent out these twelve after instructing them thus,
“Do not go into pagan territory or enter a Samaritan town.
Go rather to the lost sheep of the house of Israel.
As you go, make this proclamation: ‘The kingdom of heaven is at hand.’
Cure the sick, raise the dead, cleanse lepers, drive out demons.
Without cost you have received; without cost you are to give.”

(Matthew 9:36—10:8)

As we step into our Gospel passage today, we are told a verse before the one we start with that, “Jesus went through all the towns and villages, teaching in their synagogues, proclaiming the good news of the kingdom and healing every disease and sickness.” From the beginning of Matthew 9 (which is where we read today) Jesus has seemingly been on a non-stop healing marathon – he heals the paralyzed man whose friends bring him on a mat to be healed; then Jesus goes to raise a girl from the dead; on his way to do that, he heals the woman who has been bleeding for twelve years; he heals two blind men; and he drives a demon out from a man who was mute. Jesus has been doing all of these good works, and finally we find him at what I can imagine is a tipping point – at the beginning of our passage we can imagine Jesus in the streets of his home region, looking out before him at a sea of people who have heard of his power and his ability to heal, all gathering to receive their portion and Jesus being full of compassion for them in their desperation, but also a little overwhelmed! He is the Son of God, but he is also just one man, and so we see him declaring to his disciples that He needs more hands to join in the work. As I first began preparing for this homily, I was sure that I would end up diving into Jesus’ words about the harvest and the laborers. But what actually ended up grabbing me the most in this passage was the shocking inclusion of the word “abandoned.”

“At the sight of the crowds, Jesus’ heart was moved with pity for them because they were troubled and abandoned, like sheep without a shepherd.”

As I meditated on this scripture, I found myself disturbed by this word – abandoned. For someone to be considered abandoned, someone or something must do the abandoning. I found myself asking, “who abandoned them?”

Was it the Pharisees? A likely culprit, those Pharisees. We see time and time again throughout the Gospels, Pharisees acting not as community building religious leaders, but instead gatekeepers, impeding and denying whole hosts of marginalized, broken peoples access to their centers of worship, to themselves as faith leaders, and to their society as a whole in turn. I think we could say pretty easily that the Pharisees did some abandoning.

Or, perhaps more scandalous to think, was it God who abandoned them? This thought was the source of my aforementioned disturbance – had God been the one to abandon these crowds of desperate people? Surely that is not the God that we know, a God who abandons His people? However, as disturbing as it is to think, a case can be made that He is! The Israelites at this point in Matthew are a people who have been left to their devices for the last 400 years. Between the last words spoken by Malachi (who was the last prophet of the Old Testament) and Jesus’s birth, the Israelites received no prophets, were given no visions, and heard no direct word from their God. They did not see freedom as an independent people, falling into the hands of the Babylonians, the Persians, the Greeks, and then the Romans. If the Pharisees are to blame for these people’s abandonment in the near past, God’s abandonment is all the greater. The Pharisees have abandoned these people systemically and obviously, while God has abandoned the Israelites generationally and silently.

Still, another thought is: was it, after all, the Israelites who abandoned themselves?

We know that even when it seems that God is the one doing the abandoning, it is really us who step away first. God does not abandon us, we abandon God, and because it is in Him that we live and move and have our being, when we abandon Him, we abandon our very selves, our very Life. In the Exodus reading from today, we find the Lord doing something miraculous for the Israelites:

“You have seen for yourselves how I treated the Egyptians and how I bore you up on eagle wings and brought you here to myself. Therefore, if you hearken to my voice and keep my covenant, you shall be my special possession, dearer to me than all other people, though all the earth is mine. You shall be to me a kingdom of priests, a holy nation.”

In this Exodus passage, the miraculous thing that God does is telling Israel who they are. He gives them their identity – “special possession,” “kingdom of priests,” “holy nation.” But that identity is dependent on some conditions: “If you hearken to my voice,” “If you keep my covenant.”

In the case of the 400 years of silence, 400 years of “abandonment” by God, those four centuries were preceded by thousands of years from Abraham onward of God repeatedly raising up, providing for, warning, reprimanding, saving, and forgiving – contending with His people over and over and over again because they are His people, his special possession, dearer to Him than all other nations. And those were also thousands of years where the Israelites did not hearken to his voice and did not keep his covenant over and over and over again.

Whoever it is that we choose to blame for these people’s abandonment, or for our own abandonment when we feel desolate, Jesus is the answer. If the Pharisees are to blame for the people’s abandonment Jesus is the answer. As Jesus sends out his disciples, his laborers for his harvest, he instructs them to “not go into pagan territory or enter a Samaritan town. Go rather to the lost sheep of the house of Israel.” He reconnects His people with their identity as the chosen people of God by anointing some pretty uneducated, unworthy, unclean people with priestly authority, and by letting the crowds know the good news - that The Kingdom of Heaven is at hand. God is here for you once again. If we want to blame God for their abandonment, Jesus is the answer. He reconciled the whole world to God through himself, for it says in Romans 5:

“Indeed, if while we were enemies, we were reconciled to God through the death of His son, how much more, once reconciled, will we be saved by his life?”

And if the people themselves, if we ourselves, are to blame for our abandonment, Jesus is the answer too – “For I am sure that neither death nor life, nor angels nor rulers, nor things present nor things to come, nor powers, nor height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation (including our own stubborn, hard-headed selves, Thank God!) will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.”

As we come to this table, I pray that we would not take for granted the lengths to which God went, how intentionally He orchestrated the lives of His people throughout Scripture, how He sent His Son, and how He is still doing the same today for us, all with the goal that we would never be left without Him. Amen.

Like Sheep Without a Shepherd: Chlese Henderson

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