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Lectionary for June 14, 2026
Third Sunday after Pentecost
Exodus 19:2-8a; Psalm 100;
Romans 5:1-8; Matthew 9:35–10:8
My job is to help college students integrate their faith-driven values into their daily lives and adapt and deploy religious practices to support them in a confusing and difficult world. At the end of the spring semester, the students wrote nice evaluations for me, saying that our class was one of the most impactful in their undergraduate careers. That’s lovely and appreciated.
But the beginning of the semester didn’t start with gratitude. Instead, many of the students expressed concern and trepidation at the task before them. My teaching team asked them, as much as they were comfortable, to do the difficult work of exploring 1) what they wanted out of life; 2) to whom they were responsible; 3) their vision of a sustainable, thriving community; and 4) how their answers to the previous three questions shape their actions.
The students had to ask themselves if they wanted to do the challenging work of asking why their hopes and realities weren’t aligned (yet). Their answers were spiritual, systemic, communal and personal. Then they were challenged to plan how to implement actions they could control to make the world, and their lives, better. That’s a lot to ask of a 21-year-old! Almost everyone rose to the challenge. The starting question for them and our lectionary texts is the same: Is the outcome worth all the work? In other words, do you really want it?
Almost 50 days after leaving the “house of slavery” in Egypt, the Israelites and the mixed-multitude with them came to Sinai. God was waiting for them there with a question: Would the people be willing to obey God’s commandments in order to become God’s segulah, a closely guarded treasure?
All those gathered at the base of the mountain had seen God’s miraculous judgments on a society built on xenophobia and ethnicity-based slavery. God’s power to do what was promised was not in doubt. The question was, “Would the people agree to the trade-off?” Would they trade away their rights to follow their own desires and practice whatever worship they wanted. Or would they become a holy nation and a kingdom of priests, serving and teaching about God in spirit and in truth.
God put the question to Moses, who put the question to the elders, who put the question to the people. And the national response was, “All that the Lord has said, we will do” (Exodus 19:8). Anyone who has read much of Scripture knows that the working out of this vow was uneven, to say the least. At the same time, that was the beginning of a national quest to live with, and struggle with, the God of grace, justice, love and wisdom. The Israelites—and God—really wanted it!
Healing, connection, reintegration and even life from the dead are possible in the kingdom of heaven. But there are trade-offs. Do you really want it?
Fast forward several hundred years. Jesus was traveling around the Galilee proclaiming the good news of the kingdom, healing sicknesses and diseases. He felt compassion for the descendants of the people who had promised to obey all God’s words. They were like sheep without shepherds, like crops that had yielded plentiful fruit without anyone to harvest them (Matthew 9:36-37). Jesus said the problem was not with the people but with the absent leaders.
So, Jesus sent his disciples out to the descendants of those at Sinai. Their mission was centered around proclamation and healing, not teaching. They were to announce that the rule of the Great King of Heaven, not the Roman Caesar nor the Idumean Herod, had come. Neither a human monarchy nor an equitably governed “kin-dom,” the kingdom of heaven proclaimed that Jesus is Lord and we are not—none of us. And the sign of that kingdom was healing. The sick were healed. The dead were raised. The lepers were cleansed. The possessed were liberated. That sounds good! But as at Sinai, there was a choice to be made.
If we read on beyond the lectionary readings for this week, we see that Jesus already knew that some wouldn’t find the trade-offs of the kingdom of heaven to their liking. I don’t think anyone was against healing. But acknowledging God as king comes with costs. Some communities didn’t receive the disciples in peace, and some dust was shaken.
The truth of the kingdom is this: We don’t get to obey the Caesars or the Herods of the world without subjecting their proclamations and laws to the true king for alignment. More difficult still, we don’t get to obey ourselves or our communities’ collective will without running our desires and hopes past the true king for alignment either. Healing, connection, reintegration and even life from the dead are possible in the kingdom of heaven. But there are trade-offs. Do you really want it?
