4 Pentecost - Matthew 10:40-42

The glass is half both.

You can be an optimist or a pessimist and be right, which could be why the debates in our

polarized society never seem to get resolved.

The truth is always larger than my portion of it, and some parts contradict other parts: this part of the glass is empty and that part is full and it's the same glass, but only one of many.

Sorry if that pours cold water on your worldview, but complexity and paradox and contradiction

and polarity and messy disorder are, alongside consistency and clarity and order, all

ingredients in the rich recipe of life.

Matthew's gospel understands and illustrates this.

No other gospel is so withering and merciless in its demands to show mercy.

No other gospel showcases the parable of wheat growing in the same field with weeds.

And this morning's snippet about welcome and water round out a bigger picture we've

been seeing only in part the last two weeks.

Jesus is finishing his instructions to the twelve he is sending out like sheep into the midst of wolves.

With word and power over demons but no budget or change of clothes, they are being released to the world with no guarantees about how they will be received.

Jesus is not optimistic.

He predicts rejection, arrests, inquisitions, trials, mockery, division, possibly death,

possibly worse – don't be afraid, he repeats several times, because of course they are.

He counsels them to expect a lot of empty; prepare for disappointment, because that's a big part of working for God, who is not welcome in a lot of places unfriendly to truth and love.

If you've hung in there through the last two weeks, you remember it's a grim view that doesn't

match the Pollyanna idealism some people entertain of church and faith.

Why else would there need to be a parable warning us not to try to pluck out the weeds?

Jesus will not let us settle for half-glass optimism.

Nor will he let us settle for jaded pessimism.

There is water alongside the emptiness in the glass.

There is a welcome for the word in the world.

And God notices and rewards it.