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So last week, I was on a hike in the park, and I woke up super early to hike alone.

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I think I was, like, the second car in the parking lot.

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And I had looked at the map ahead of time. I had a plan as to where I was going.

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But I had this very unusual experience, which is that I made it a couple miles on the hike, just through some basic kind of low alpine woods kind of stuff. And then I saw ahead of me a cliff. I saw the woods ending, and all I could see beyond where the woods ended was clouds. And I was like, that's a cliff. Did I take a wrong turn? Like, where am I?

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And.

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But I looked back, and I was like, this is definitely a path. And I've been staying on the path, and the path seemed just to go, like, straight over the cliff.

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And so I just sat there for a minute. I looked at it, and then I was like, okay, well, I mean, maybe there's a cool view. I'll keep walking forward.

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And I walked forward. And as I got to the edge of the cliff, I realized that it was not a cliff. It was a body of water.

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Have you had this experience? You're hiking early enough in the day when the wind has not awoken yet, and all the water is as still as glass. All it can do is reflect the sky above you. And so I just did this crazy thing to my mind all of a sudden. It was like the world had been kind of flipped upside down before me. What I thought was sky was actually water.

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That's what Jesus Christ does, flips our world upside down. That's the kind of experience that Abraham had, I believe, on the mountain with his son. He thought he was going up worshiping one kind of God, the kind of God that demands that you sacrifice your firstborn. And came down realizing that, no, this is not one of those gods.

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This is one that says, do not lay your hand on the child.

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It's the same kind of experience that St. Paul is talking about in our reading from Romans. The new life that is available to you in Christ, a life of dying to sin. Being raised with Christ is the kind of life that flips everything upside down.

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But I want to talk just for a minute about the kind of flipping that Jesus is doing in this Gospel reading, if you don't mind.

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Over the last couple weeks in the chapel and Episcopal churches around the world, we've been making our way through Matthew chapter 10.

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Matthew chapter 10 is.

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It's like the commissioning of the disciples.

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You can think of it as, like, Jesus, big Pre game speech to his athletes.

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It's a big pump up speech. Basically, Jesus starts by saying, I am granting you authority.

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Go out into the world and do amazing things. You are going to go and you are going to heal the sick, you are going to heal the blind.

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You are going to go out and do amazing things.

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But it is going to cost you everything.

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He says to the disciples, he pumps them up and he warns them, it is going to cost you everything. I am sending you out like sheep into the midst of wolves.

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So be wise as serpents and innocent as doves. Governors will drag you before them because of me. Kings will drag you before them because of me.

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Don't be afraid of those who can kill the body.

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Be only afraid of those who can kill the body and the soul.

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Then last week Jesus came and said, I have not come to bring peace, but a sword. I have come to divide father against son and mother against daughter and daughter in law against mother in law.

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You're going to do amazing things, but it's going to cost you everything.

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Go get them guys.

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And this very short gospel reading that we have for today is the last note. It's the last part of Jesus speech and it sounds simple, but I think it's quite beautiful. You can imagine the disciples sitting there.

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We're Matthew chapter 10, so that's like 28 chapters. So he's gathered the disciples, they've seen a couple cool things.

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They're like, wow, this is very amazing. This is very serious. We're going to follow this guy Jesus anywhere. And now he's telling us like, we gotta go do it ourselves. Like I'm a little bit intimidated by that, like it's time to show up or shut up kind of stuff.

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And what does Jesus say? He says, whoever welcomes you welcomes me.

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And whoever welcomes me welcomes the one who sent me.

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He's trying to end this speech with a note of encouragement and consolation to his disciples. He's saying, I know you're intimidated, I know you're scared, but you are not going alone.

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I am going with you.

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Wherever you go, there is going to be a little bit of Christ with you. He is actually kind of articulating this, call it nesting doll anthropology.

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Like wherever you go, I'm going to go, and wherever I go, the Father goes. So just, you know, nesting dolls work.

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So imagine how encouraged you'd feel as a disciple to know that you're not going out to do these intimidating things alone. You're going and you're bringing a little bit of God with you. You're bringing a little bit of this prophet Jesus with you, who you might not yet know as God, but in bringing this prophet with you, you're also bringing God the Father, the Father of the universe. You have a little spark inside of you that is from the God of the universe that created everything, the beautiful mountains.

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Doesn't that feel encouraging?

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And then Jesus flips it completely on its head.

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Not in this chapter, but in a couple chapters later. This is kind of the setup to something that Jesus says later. So towards the end of the story, Matthew chapter 25, Jesus is talking to his disciples again. He has them gathered around and he says, let me tell you what this is going to be like in the end.

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At the end of the ages, at the final judgment, when the Father is separating the sheep from the goats, the Father will gather the blessed and he will say, come into your kingdom.

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Receive the blessings that have been prepared for you since the foundation of the world.

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For I was hungry and you gave me food.

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I was thirsty and you gave me drink. I was naked and you gave me clothes. And the disciples will say, but when we don't remember that when Christ were you hungry and we gave you food, when were you thirsty and we gave you drink? When were you naked and we gave you clothes? And Jesus says, when you did it to the least of these, you did it to me.

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You see, the disciples, up to that point, they were assuming that they were like the Jesus superheroes with Jesus superpower carrying around in their chest and that they were supposed to bring Jesus to the unsuspecting populace of the world in which Jesus was absent.

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But what is Jesus telling the disciples here at the end?

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Jesus isn't just in you.

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Jesus is also in them.

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Christ isn't just in your heart.

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Christ is waiting to meet you in the stranger.

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You disciples do not have exclusive rights to the presence of Christ.

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Let me tell you a little story that I think illustrates this nicely. This is about, let's see, about 15 years ago, I was in graduate school in seminary. I was volunteering at my church. I was teaching a Thursday morning, 5:00am Men's Bible study.

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And as is typical at all men's Bible studies, we always had lots of coffee and that was very nice and kept us all awake.

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And on the way back to my house after every Thursday, a few blocks away from my house, there was a stoplight. And I began to notice that at that stoplight, every single Thursday was the same homeless person panhandling at that stoplight. It took me maybe Too many weeks to kind of put two and two together. But eventually I was like, oh, I finished this men's Bible study. We always have all this extra coffee and stuff. Why don't I just like, offer to bring this guy a cup of coffee?

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And so I did that. So every. Every Thursday morning on my way back, about 6:30 in the morning, I would bring this guy a cup of coffee.

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His name was John.

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And I did this every Thursday for six months.

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And it was lovely. You know, we got a little bit of, like, exchange. We would pretty much exclusively talk about, dude, basketball. This was in North Carolina.

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And then, you know, the stoplight would change and I'd be on my way.

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And then about six months into this arrangement, the stoplight was like broken or something. Like it was the longest red light of my entire life.

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And we had just exhausted all of those typical points of conversation.

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We had gotten to the point in this interaction where it was like, neither of us really know where to go next. This is kind of uncharted territory.

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And for whatever reason, I was just like, you know, John feels silly, but like, I've never had the chance to ask you, like, how do you take your coffee? We've got, you know, we've got milk and sugar. I can kind of doctor it up for you the way that you want it and bring it to you that way. And without skipping a beat, John was like, oh, I don't drink coffee.

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I love it.

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And I felt very ashamed, Went back to my house and sat in my room. Thought about that for a while.

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Fast forward like another year.

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I kind of finished seminary, but I was in a very confusing, kind of doubtful place about my future and faith. I wasn't totally sure whether or not I really wanted to be a priest after all. I wasn't really sure that God was real after all. Maybe this is all a sham and I suggest go into real estate or something.

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A friend of mine invited me to start going to morning prayer at this church right next to my house.

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It's right around the corner from this same stoplight and this church.

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They had morning prayer every morning. And they also served breakfast every morning. And I was very poor. And so I was like, cool. Free breakfast every morning. That seems good.

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So I started doing that. And it turned out that it was a breakfast for the homeless population of the middle of this city. And John and all his friends were there.

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And there wasn't some magical kind of moment and some interaction there, but it was in going to morning prayer there and sharing breakfast with these folks.

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Somewhere in there, I kind of realized I was a Christian after all, and that God was calling me to do this work.

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You see what I'm trying to tell you?

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The first story is just an example of me thinking that, like, I had exclusive rights to the Jesus stuff. And wasn't I so great to be going out to share the Jesus stuff in coffee form with all of the world?

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That's a huge mistake.

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My own faith was saved when I became open to meeting Christ in others and letting others be Christ to me.

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I think we need both of these things.

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And it maybe depends on where you are today or this week or this season. Maybe the encouraging thing that you need to hear and feel is that Christ really is in you.

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Christ really is growing in you.

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And that the degree to which Christ really is you is the same degree to which the God of the universe that made everything, that made these mountains is actually a power pulsing in your body. Think about when we receive the Eucharist, how that is actually kind of physically reenacting that nesting doll theology.

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A little piece of Jesus is coming into your body.

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God really is acting in your life, has particular love for you and has particular desires for your life.

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If you're in a season of feeling like a little too good about yourself, like I was in seminary, blessing the homeless population with coffee they didn't want to, maybe you need to hear that Christ is also in everybody else, that Christ is in every other person in this room waiting to meet you.

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How much would that transform our daily life if we actually had the capacity to hold that truth in our head at all moments, how much would that affect us? Complaining about the traffic going back into Jackson, you know, How much would it affect how we look at the world around us every day?

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An old story about the last thing.

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Whole story about a monastery in which none of the monks could get along.

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Were constantly fighting.

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There was a knock at the door late one night, and a stranger in a hood just announced to the monk that answered the door, one of you is Jesus Christ.

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Shut the door and left.

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Overnight, the behavior of the monks was transformed.

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They didn't know which of them was Jesus Christ, but they knew one of them was.