I’m part of a team working on the “Faith in Us” initiative. Clergy who are active in ISAIAH here in Minnesota are reaching out to colleagues around the country to invite them to join. This past week, hundreds of faith leaders from 39 different states, representing every major faith tradition, gathered on Zoom webinars. The focus of this initiative is to activate clergy to play our unique role in defending democracy and building a just and abundant society. We can function as trusted truth-tellers and moral witnesses, and we can mobilize our congregations as centers of community and civic infrastructure. We do this work in partnership with congregational leaders and in coordination with a broad coalition of faith based and secular organizations all working under a shared strategy.

I love the name of the initiative, “Faith in Us” because it puts the question of agency at the forefront—creating a just and equal and loving society depends on us. No one is coming to save us. No one can do this for us. The poet Annie Dillard counters the author of psalm 24 who insists that only those “with clean hands and pure hearts” are worthy to be with God. Her blunt reply: “There is no one but us.” Our future as a nation will be determined by what ordinary people decide to do. We all have a place in this movement. The particular job of clergy is but one among a multitude of roles and responsibilities. I also love how the name “Faith in Us” makes community central. Individualistic greed is what got us where we are. We can only claim a different future through interdependence and cooperation.

In today’s text from Matthew, as Jesus traveled around, teaching, proclaiming, and curing, the crowds grew. Matthew describes the people as “harassed and helpless, like sheep without a shepherd.” This line is a clear echo of Ezekiel 34, which criticizes the behavior of Israel’s leaders. Those charged to be shepherds, to tend and encourage their people with care, instead exploit them and use them as pawns in their own quest for riches and power. Jesus, by contrast, “had compassion for crowds.” Compassion is what made his leadership different. Compassion was the healing, connecting, liberating force that created that plentiful harvest. Amid this success, Jesus faced a dilemma. What to do with this great abundance of human resources? How would he have enough bandwidth to tend the needs and the wounds, to gather up the energy and potential? So Jesus urged his disciples to pray for more help: “Pray to the Lord of the harvest to send out laborers.”

And then, it’s as if Jesus had his own “aha” moment. He “summoned” the disciples, because he realized they were the answer to their own prayers. Jesus had previously called each of them to follow, to be disciples, to learn by sharing life with him. Now there’s a major shift as he “summons” them again, this time to send them out into the world to do the same work he had been doing with the same authority, sharing with them his own God-inspired capacity to heal and liberate. In one sentence of this reading, they are called disciples. In the very next sentence, they are, without fanfare, given the title “apostles” (those who are sent).

So the real answer to the prayer for help, it turns out, is the insight that divine power is not something to be hoarded. It must be released, dispersed, unleashed. That’s the essence of how God works, and how God is: a shared, communal, mutual power. In Bible study we discussed the fact that these lists of twelve disciples only include the men. We know there were also female followers who were pivotal leaders in Jesus’ movement. They are (despite the sway of patriarchy) mentioned all over the New Testament. Even though Matthew chose to erase them from this part of the story, I believe they were there. They too, were apostles being summoned and sent out. (Which is why I love the art by Mary Jane Miller on today’s bulletin cover. At first glance, it looks like an old-fashioned traditional depiction of Jesus’ twelve disciples. Look again—notice the women, and the baby. And see their feet, touching the earth, its globe held in the chalice that holds their shared ministry.)

The list of apostles is more than an attendance record; it is a statement about the type of people Jesus chose to be part of his work. The disciples weren’t star students. They chronically failed to understand. They often lacked faith. And when things got scary, they typically chickened out, betraying Jesus, denying they even knew him. These guys had baggage. The tax collector, Matthew had worked for the empire, oppressing and exploiting his neighbors. Simon the Zealot, came from the group seeking armed conflict with Rome. Throughout the Bible we find a pattern. God calls unqualified people, people who aren’t prepared. Moses wasn’t good at public speaking. The shepherd boy David was the youngest of his siblings. Ruth was a foreigner. Mary was a poor teenage mother. Paul was complicit in murder. During the Faith in Us call, Rev. Traci Blackmon, UCC pastor and former member of our national staff, said this: “God does not call perfect people. God calls the willing. And the call is not to become extraordinary. The call is to become available.”

This past weekend we gathered with UCC folks from around Minnesota for our annual meeting. Our delegates are going to share a fuller report and reflection in a couple of weeks. Today I offer just a little hint. Jessica Vasquez Torres from Crossroads Anti-Racism and Training serves as an ongoing consultant or thought-partner to our Conference. At the meeting, she continued this work, teaching with stories, inviting conversation, helping us deepen community and cultivate vision. Grounded in the work of indigenous Zen teacher Norma Wong, Jessica summoned us to look to the far horizon, to the place beyond the collapse of our unsustainable ways of living beyond all that must change and die beyond the pangs of rebirth to wade into the deep, turbulent waters of the unknown and unknowable, with trust that the water will hold us, that we can stay afloat in the strength of love and community. She asked us, again and again, to consider, when people look back at this time from that far horizon, what story could they tell about you and your faithful collaboration with God and each other?

Friends, we are being summoned and we are being sent. How can you become available? What will it take? How might your life need to change, in specific, concrete ways? How can you become available to the holy power of compassion, mutuality and abundance… available to our shared work of healing and liberation… available to the divine imagination that is always dreaming within us about who we can be together? There is no one but us. There never has been. Amen.