How does God’s love spread?

Sermon for the 2nd Sunday of Trinity, 14th June 2026 –   Exodus 19.2–8a  Matthew 9.35 – 10.8

How does the love of God spread in the world? In today’s Gospel, we find Jesus overwhelmed by the needs of the people around him. Everyone is coming to hear his teaching, to receive the Good News of God’s Kingdom, and to be healed, and so Jesus does something remarkable: he entrusts this ministry to his disciples. He commissions them to go out and do the same, proclaiming the Kingdom of God and bringing healing wherever they go. This is not a ministry of cultural conquest or forced conversion. He is sending his Jewish disciples to their fellow Jews, fulfilling the promises of Israel’s scripture, and inviting people to see in him the fulfilment of everything they had hoped for. Many of those who heard him had hoped for a military Messiah, an overthrower of Rome. But, as Jesus tells Pilate, at his trial much later, “My kingdom is not of this world.” His Kingdom heals the world rather than conquers its land.

This gives us our yardstick. Christians must always look to Jesus, his character, his words, his ministry and his behaviour, as the measure of how we spread the Good News. And yet Christendom has not, historically, covered itself in glory here. Too often the language of mission became the language of conquest and empire. We may acknowledge that good things came through Christian civilisation, the rule of law, healthcare, education, systems of justice, but the conquest and possession of other people’s homelands is very hard to marry with what we see in Jesus. This is a view some of you may already hold with confidence; but I simply want to name it as the right reading of Scripture.

To understand why, we need to go back further, to our first reading from Exodus. The people of Israel stand at the foot of Mount Sinai. Moses has led them out of slavery in Egypt and they are making their way towards the promised land. We hear bellicose statements from some world leaders claiming divine backing for military conquests: campaigns against Ukraine, Iran, Gaza, and often it is Old Testament scripture which is recruited to justify this way of thinking. So we need to read Exodus carefully.

This is not the tale of a journey of imperial conquest. This is a small and politically insignificant people, caught between the great Empires of their day, enslaved by Babylon and by Egypt. They have no King at this stage of their history, no Emperor. They are led by prophets and priests, and their calling is faithfulness to God. Listen to what God says to Moses: “if you obey my voice and keep my covenant, you shall be my treasured possession out of all the peoples.” God’s treasured possession is not land. Indeed, God goes on to say that the whole earth is already his. What he treasures is a holy people, called to shine as God’s light in the world rather than dominate it by force. They are to be, in God’s own words, a holy nation and a priestly kingdom – a bridge between heaven and earth.

We can get fixated on the promised land as a matter of ownership, seeing it through the prism of empire and modern geo-politics, when we should be seeing a people called to live in a land for the purpose of showing God’s love to others. And the more you mine Scripture, the further you get from any narrow, nationalistic reading of who God calls and uses. There is Ruth from Moab, who becomes part of the very lineage of David. There is Rahab the Canaanite, who sheltered the Israelite spies and was honoured for her faith. There is Cyrus the Great of Persia, whom God calls his anointed one and uses to free the exiles. The breadth is astonishing. God’s purposes won’t be contained within any one nation’s borders, or any one Empire’s ambitions.

So how do we spread the faith with integrity? We do what Jesus did, and what he asked his disciples to do. We commit ourselves to being people who bring healing to a hurting world. We spread love and the good news of God’s justice, love and peace, rather than conquer territory. We speak out against oppression, especially when it co-opts the language of the Bible to justify evil acts. We repent of the times when the Church has been complicit in conquest, in enslavement, in seeing our fellow human beings as anything other than our equals in God’s sight.

And then we go. We go as those commissioned by Jesus himself, carrying the Good News of a Kingdom that is not of this world, a Kingdom of justice, healing and peace. As God freed the people of Israel from the slavery of Egypt, so he frees us, his treasured people, from every oppressive and unjust way of thinking, and sends us out to proclaim and to live the life of his Kingdom, through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.