The Rev. Dr. Deacon Bette Kauffman homily from July 6, 2025, at Christ Episcopal, Saint Joseph, LA

 

Choose Hope, Choose Love

6 July 2025

Christ Episcopal Church, St. Joseph, LA

Year C, Pentecost 4

2 Kings 5:1-14; Galatians 6:1-16; Luke 10:1-11,16-20

 

In today’s gospel lesson, Jesus sends seventy followers ahead of him, two by two to heal the sick and proclaim the Kingdom of God. They go, they do, and they return rejoicing.

That’s the point I want to focus on today: They return rejoicing.

You have perhaps experienced this phenomenon. You have perhaps heard others talk about their experience. We go out to minister and we are ministered to by those we sought to serve.

I went to the Dominican Republic a number of years ago with a handful of deacons. We traveled about the countryside with several Dominican deacons and worshipped with folks in tiny, unairconditioned churches. Those churches were mostly bare of ornamentation; they might have one cross, one painting of the Holy Family, but very little else. The altars were a wooden table made by the local carpenter. The pews were crude benches.

But the worship was heartfelt and joyful, the people in awe that we had come to worship with them. I came home a different person, a little bit haunted by the stark contrast between those churches and most U.S. American churches, but also deeply grateful and refreshed.

This phenomenon of returning joyful, having been ministered to by those we serve is, not merely the joy of a job well done. It’s not merely the good feeling we get when those we minister to are grateful. Or that glow of virtue we get from having done a good deed. There’s something deeper than all of that going on.

The people Jesus sent out were ordinary folks, probably what we would consider working class—literally laborers. We know that because those are the kind of folks who followed Jesus: fishermen, carpenters and such. They most assuredly were not religious leaders—pharisees, sadducees, priests, deacons and such—because those folks spent their time arguing with Jesus and plotting against him, NOT following him.

These ordinary folks lived in a terrible time, a time of oppression by centralized political power, a time of corruption and of poverty and food insecurity. Life was fragile.

In sending them out, Jesus warned them that it would not be easy. Some would reject them. They were like sheep going among wolves.

But these ordinary folks went as sent by Jesus, and they were changed by their acts of mercy. They came back rejoicing, exulting in what they had been able to accomplish—which clearly exceeded their fondest hopes and expectations. You can hear the glee in Jesus’ voice as he greets them, proclaiming that he had seen Satan fall from heaven like a flash of lightening.

Jesus also explains to them that he had given them power over enemies, but then he cautions: don’t rejoice over the power; rejoice that your name is written in heaven.

Here’s what I think all this means: WE, in our mixed motives, are not what bring about the Kingdom of God. Rather, the Kingdom of God comes forth, pretty much in spite of us, through our actions and interactions in service to others. We do not first love God then serve others. We serve others and in serving others become lovers of God.

See, I think we pay a lot of lip service loving God. Yes, yes, I love God, we say. But how do you love… an entity that you cannot see or touch? The only way we can put our arms of love around God is by putting them around another human being.

Now that is easy to see and do when it comes to friends and family. Of course we experience hope and joy and the love of God when we put our arms around friends and family! We would be less than human if we didn’t.

Just a quick aside here. It should come as no surprise that our prisons are full of people who did not experience the love of God through loving relationships with friends and family as they grew up. This is attested to by the experiences of the men and women who conduct Kairos ministry—like Fr. Ned Webster--and report that hardened criminals break down into tears when given a dozen cookies baked for them by a complete stranger. It speaks to them of love they have never known.

I do not think we fully comprehend how hollow it is to say “I love God,” all while ignoring the plight of the millions of God’s children who live in fear and in poverty and poor health.

Serving others—especially outside our circle of family and friends, those who cannot do anything for us in return, those Jesus describes as the least of these—transforms us--even more than them.

Here’s how Mother Teresa of Calcutta put it: “Only in heaven will we see how much we owe to the poor for helping us to love God the better because of them.”

Today we are sent into a world full of “wolves” of war, violence, greed, divisive politics and conflict over scarce resources—like food and water—due not only to war and greed but climate change accelerated by our own behavior.

Today’s primary disease is no longer leprosy or tuberculosis, but possibly the utter loss of hope that comes from feeling unwanted, uncared for, abandoned by everyone and unable to make a difference in one’s own life, much less the world.

It is hard to have hope in today’s world. Yet we are sent, and as we go, I think we will find that hope is like love: It’s not something we have that enables us to act, it’s something that we create by acting.

Moreover, love and hope are contagious. Our acting transforms not only us, but those around us. Our hopeful act, our loving act make us more hopeful and loving, and those around us start acting in a more loving and hopeful way.

Hope and love are not feelings we have so much as choices we make. And by making and acting on those choices, we are transformed into loving, hope-filled people.

In the name of God, Father, Son & Holy Spirit, AMEN.