PROPER 9, YEAR C

Sunday, July 6, 2025

Saints Matthew and Mark, Barrington, R. I.

 

Isaiah 66:10-14

Psalm 66:1-8

Galatians 6:1-16

Luke 10:1-11, 16-20

 

Lately, it seems that we’re being inundated with a never-ending stream of bad news, leaving many of us feeling discouraged and demoralized. This morning, we woke up to reports of more than fifty people drowned by floods in Texas, including fifteen children, with something like twenty more children still missing.

 

Overseas, dozens more people are being killed each day in Gaza—many if not most of them innocent civilians, women, and children—in the midst of a humanitarian disaster of starvation and disease that defies imagination. Meanwhile, the war between Russia and Ukraine seems as far from a diplomatic solution as ever, with daily drone strikes and missile attacks wreaking death and devastation among Ukraine’s civilian population in particular.

 

As for the current administration’s policies in this country, well, I recognize that we may have differences of opinion within this parish, as within the wider Diocese of Rhode Island and Episcopal Church. But I’m duty-bound to acknowledge that many among us are experiencing dismay at what seems an unrelenting tide of disturbing developments threatening to undermine the very foundations of democracy and the rule of law that we celebrate during this Fourth of July holiday.

 

Others among us may disagree with that diagnosis. And we all have a right to our opinions. But here we encounter more bad news. Americans are more divided than at any time in living memory. In some cases, people stop talking to one another, and friendships and family ties are broken, on account of political and ideological differences. So there’s plenty of bad news to go around.

 

The problem is, however, that the bad news all too easily comes to occupy our entire field of vision. Some of my friends and relations are so consumed by anger and indignation at everything happening in the world today that they seem unable to think or talk about anything else.

And that is a problem, because as Christians we’re called to see everything in the context of a bigger picture: namely, the Good News of God’s salvation. The Good News, that is, of what God has done for us in the past, of what he’s promised us in the future, and of what he continues to do for us in the present, even here and now, in our very midst. So, without discounting the reality or importance of the bad news of everything that’s wrong with the world, Christians are nonetheless called to be people whose lives are dominated by the Good News of the Gospel of Christ.

 

Today’s readings draw our attention to this good news. And it’s crucial to recognize that these passages were often written in the context of political, economic, and military challenges, even catastrophes, that gave God’s people as much if not more reason for despair as anything facing us today. Nonetheless, the biblical writers constantly proclaim the Good News of God’s salvation.

 

The reading from Isaiah calls on the people to rejoice with Jerusalem and “be glad for her, all you who love her.” At the time he said this, however, Jerusalem lay in ruins, and its inhabitants were living in exile in Babylon. Still, the prophet proclaims God’s good news: “As a mother comforts her child, so will I comfort you; you shall be comforted in Jerusalem.” The psalm re-echoes the theme, not just for Jerusalem, but for all the nations: “Be joyful in God all you lands … Come now and see the works of God, how wonderful he is in his doings towards all peoples.”

 

In the Gospel reading, Jesus commissions seventy disciples to go ahead of him into the towns and villages of Galilee. (Incidentally, that’s a representation of the seventy on the cover of today’s bulletin.) And he gives them a specific message of good news to relay wherever they go: “Whatever house you enter, first say ‘Peace to this house’…” and “Whenever you enter a town … say to them, ‘The Kingdom of God has come near to you.’”

 

Moreover, Jesus commissions the seventy not merely to proclaim the good news of peace and the kingdom drawing near, but also to help bring it about. He commands them to eat and drink with the inhabitants of the towns they visit, and then to cure the sick people that they find there. On returning from their mission, they report their success: “Lord, in your name even the demons submit to us.” (In this case, the demons were the spirits believed to cause illness and disease. In other words, the prayers for healing had the desired effect.)

 

In the same way, in the Church we’re called not only to proclaim the good news, but also to be the good news—a community of love, fellowship, and active concern for those in need. In this way, our life together conveys something of God’s peace and God’s kingdom to all who come into contact with us.

 

Saint Paul describes the kind of community we’re called to be in today’s reading from his Letter to the Galatians. “Let us not grow weary in doing what is right …” and “whenever we have an opportunity, let us work for the good of all, and especially for those of the family of faith.”

 

But before we can communicate the Good News to others, whether in word or in deed, we need to hear it and take it on board ourselves. As Saint Paul also says in today’s Epistle, we reap whatever we sow, either corruption from the flesh, or eternal life from the Spirit.

 

And as Jesus says to the seventy after they return from their mission, “Do not rejoice in this, that the spirits submit to you, but rejoice that your names are written in heaven.” And that’s the best news of all: God has written all our names in his Book of Life! So long as we don’t do anything by our own free choice to cause our names to be blotted out from that book, our destiny is to spend eternity with God in heaven. And that’s the Good News that gives us the courage and strength we need to keep on doing what’s right, loving God and our neighbor, no matter what bad news this world may throw at us.