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a reading from Matthew, whoever welcomes you, welcomes me And whoever welcomes me, welcomes the one who sent me. Whoever welcomes a profit in the name of a profit will receive a profits reward and whoever

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welcomes a righteous person in the name of a righteous person will receive the reward of the righteous and whoever gives even a cup of cold water to one of these little ones in the name of a disciple truly

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, I tell you none of these will lose their reward, the word of the Lord. Well, I wish you hadn't said that thanks be to God because honestly this text is a bear. When I

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first looked at it, I read the text quickly and I love the word welcome, which is used six times in these two verses and I thought how hard could this be a sermon unwelcome, We're just

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getting started in this academic year. There are a bunch of new people here and today we have all the M A Y. M students with us both in Austin and in Nashville and what better word is

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there to preach on an occasion like this than the word? Well, but when you dig into this text a little bit more, you see how it's just plain hard all through this chapter in Matthew Jesus

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is facing his 12 newly called disciples and is giving them a pretty bleak picture of what discipleship looks like , Not just for them, but for all disciples across time, including us. It's all hard in

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this chapter, take no gold or silver or copper in your belts, no bag for your journey. If anyone will not welcome you or listen to your words, shake off the dust from your feet as

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you leave that house or town. I'm sending you out like sheep in the midst of wolves. They will hand you over to councils and flogged you in their synagogues. You'll be dragged before Governors and Kings

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Brother will betray brother to death and a father, his child and Children will rise against parents and have them put to death. Do not think that I have come to bring peace to the earth. I've

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not come to bring peace but a sword. I have come to set a man against his father and a daughter against her mother and a daughter in law against her mother in law. Those who find their

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life will lose it and those who lose their life for my sake will find it. And finally, these two verses are text for today. Whoever whoever welcomes a profit in the name of a profit will

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receive of profits, reward profits, reward. Spoiler alert. It's not much of a reward. Most of us are here today, at least in part because we are people who have been reasonably well rewarded

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. Some of you have received full ride fellowships. As you enroll, who enroll here, all of you on campus have got amazing housing. You're about to have access to one of the most inspiring theological

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libraries in this country. But honestly, who among us really yearns for a profits reward. Barbara Brown , taylor Episcopal priest and magnificent creature has written here and there about her life. She was born into

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a contentedly secular family, but when she was about 11 or rather seven, her family moved to Ohio and they tried church. It was a methodist church way out in the Ohio countryside and they started going

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there and they fell in love with their pastor. He was a kind young man with no family of his own. So often he was a supper guest at the table. I grew to adore him.

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Barbara writes, He was vital and funny and he could catch an airborne fly with one hand. He listened to me when I talked and let me lead him on tours of my projects around the house.

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He seemed able when he looked at me to see a person and not only a child and I loved him for it. This pastor became a friend became a friend. One day though, Barbara noticed that

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something was wrong. Civil rights had come to Ohio , a phrase that made adults talked loudly and lose their tempers. They chose sides and defended them rights . Barbara, they wanted my friend to choose sides

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to and he did. The doors of this church are open. He said he would stand there to make sure they remained open. He said, So that is where they hung him in effigy a grotesque

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stuffed figure that bore no resemblance to my friend swaying in the heat as he packed and left town. That was when I began to understand, she writes that God's call was not only wonderful, but also

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terrible. It had sharp edges to it. It was capable of cutting deep and those who reached out to grasp it had best be prepared to bleed. Who really wants profits reward In the small South Carolina

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town where I lived in the mid 1960s and where my father served the Presbyterian Church, there there was this successful dentist in town who ran for an open seat in the States House of Representatives. I was

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a child. But I remember this particular election so distinctly because this dentist was a black man and the white community in that county seat town was particularly upset about his candidacy. Never mind that he was a

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man of great integrity. Never mind that the greater portion of that counties constituents were overwhelmingly black, the white minority who had the money, were really upset about this man's candidacy. So much so that a

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couple of weeks before Election Day, the town's leadership pulled all the pastors of the mainline churches together. Read that white churches, the Baptists, Methodists, Episcopalians, the lutherans, presbyterians, and they urged

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them to be sure to announce on the sunday before that election day that all the members should get out and vote, there's a lot at stake this time , people. So let's get out and vote.

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Other pastors made the announcement. But my father didn't . It was my custom after church in those years of my childhood that I guess I was eight years old. Then right after the benediction I would run

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down the aisle and proudly stand next to my father and hold on to the folds of his robe out there on that churches portico as he shook hands with the departing worshippers. And so I had a good

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view on that sunday. As I watched one particular member come out just boiling. His face was red as he got into my father's face and shook his finger at him and let fly a barrage of profanity

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and hate speech. His words were weapons that cut deeply to be clear. My father was more of a Rotarian than a profit. Not a martin Luther . King jr not a john lewis, he didn't

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go to Selma, he didn't march in Washington. He just declined to make an announcement, hardly a prophetic action. But on that sunday he received a prophets reward. Who wants that? It's texts like

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this which reminds me of why I would not have wanted to belong to Matthew's church. Maybe john's church where the liturgy was so beautiful. Maybe Lukes church where so many marvelous things were revealed at table when

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people were eating and fella shipping and so often in that moment getting glimpses of resurrection life but not something as severe or his dour as Matthew's church where the good news so often sounds like unmitigated bad news,

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where a man gets set against his father and a daughter, against her mother and a daughter in law . Against her mother in law and the most faithful among them receive of profits reward. We know what

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it's like in these days, don't we? To live in a world in which bearing witness to the faith so often and easily places us in direct conflict with the loudest, most dominant voices of our society

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when jesus command to love one another as I have loved you run so regularly and routinely against the rocks of mean spirited rhetoric, when the words, you shall know the truth and the truth shall make you

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free crash headlong into a society in which depending on what network you watch truths, compete with one another for the cultures attention so that my truth competes with your truth and each of us is able to marshal

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facts in support of our particular versions of the truth and the profits reward is to bear a witness that people are hardly able to believe columnist frank bruni from the new york Times wrote an eloquent lament a while

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back in which he reflected on how we talk to each other these days, fueled as we are by the way in which the internet and social media have changed the game. If you reflected on the essays

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available in various newspapers and blogs on this past Saturday , September 11th The 20th anniversary of 9 11, you could have seen passion and provocation blur. One Admiral admirable, the other adolescent And as Frank Bruni

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said too many of us have lost sight of the line between the two. Where does all this end ? Friends says bruni for more and more americans. The other side isn't merely misguided in the extreme,

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it is evil in the absolute and virtue is measured by the starkness with which that evil is labeled and reviled. There are emotional satisfactions to this, he acknowledges and then he concludes there is also a terrible

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price in Matthew, Jesus looks at the world and sees it all better than we ever have. Jesus sees how prone we have been to see peace as simply the absence of conflict rather than that beautiful possibility

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that conflict can often name and expose. Jesus sees how we've often desired to occupy the moral high ground , not factoring in the huge price we pay for our moral superiority. Jesus sees us fighting other people

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and thus ignoring the internal wars going on inside of us. Each one of us and Jesus sees the terrible price of it all. But here's what Jesus also sees. He sees beyond all that and toward

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the other side of this fray in which we live toward the other side of the cross, where by faith we are given the eyesight of resurrection the capacity to see the world as God sees the world,

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what Matthew, bleak as he can be, wants us to know above all else is that through that kind of eyesight we can see what is priceless about the prophets reward. We see how it aligns us

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with something larger than ourselves and offers us the cup of cold water that quenches the thirst for righteousness, not merely the thirst to be right for such a reward. Is not about us getting what we want

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, but rather about us learning to want what God has to give. I have a friend almost 80 years old who has a better than average grasp of this kind of eyesight. He's lived a long and

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interesting life and across time he has become a kind of philosopher. We have often sat together in front of his fireplace pondering the ultimate mysteries. He wrote me a letter a while back, the purpose of

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which was to set out the details of his funeral and to request if possible that I preach at it . He's not dying near as anybody can tell. But he's being intentional. He's making his plans.

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We like to tease with each other. And so I called him when I got the letter and said , I'd like to accept your request, but I need to know what the honorarium is first. And

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then I said, of course, you know, I'm not looking forward to doing this anytime soon. He said, you know the deal in life and in death we belong to God. And when I'm

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done, you're going to get the last word. The letter he had written was astonishingly specific with regard to the details of the service. The particular old testament lesson in psalm and epistle and gospel. The

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anthems to be sung by the choir. He wants the Eucharist to the feast of the table and by the way he said on the phone, there is one particular him which if we don't sing, I

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will haunt you for the rest of your life. It's not a familiar hymn. It fell off the Presbyterian Playlist three hymnals ago, but it's an amazing him about discipleship and so we will sing it.

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They cast their nets in galilee just off the hills of Brown. Such happy simple fisher folk before the Lord came down, contented, peaceful fishermen before they ever knew the peace of God that filled their hearts

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brimful and broke them too young john who trimmed the flapping sale homeless and Patmos died. Peter who hauled the teeming net head down was crucified. And then the last verse, the reason he wants us to

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sing this hymn, the peace of God, it is no peace but strife closed in the sod. But let us pray for just one thing. The marvelous piece of God. It's the cup of cold

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water. It's the feast at the table. It's what sustains us. Finally, it's the prophets reward in the name of God creator, christ and holy