Go and Announce

“Go and Announce”

The Kingdom Has Come Near

Matthew 9:35–10:8  ·  Exodus 19:2–8a  ·  Romans 5:1–8

Proper 6  ·  June 14, 2026  ·  Condensed Edition (8–10 minutes)

Series 1: The Kingdom Announced  ·  Week 3 of 5

INTRODUCTION

Over the years, church bulletin editors have given the world some of its finest accidental comedy. These are all real — collected from actual Sunday bulletins:

•   “The peacemaking meeting scheduled for today has been canceled due to a conflict.”

•   “Don’t let worry kill you off. Let the church help.”

•   “Remember in prayer the many who are sick of our church and community.”

•   “Ladies, don’t forget the rummage sale. It’s a chance to get rid of those things not worth keeping around the house. Bring your husbands.”

[Let them enjoy these. Don’t rush.]

Now — I love these. But notice what makes them funny. In every single case, the message got garbled.One small slip, and “the many who are sick in our community” becomes “the many who are sick of our church.”

[Pause for laughter.]

One wrong word, and the meaning flips completely.

And that points to something true about the church, because the church is, at its very heart, in the announcement business. We have been handed a message to carry. And it matters — enormously — whether we carry it faithfully, or whether we garble it.

Here’s the key distinction. There are two kinds of messages in this world. There’s the kind you compose— where you sweat over every word and the whole burden of getting it right rests on you. And there’s the kind you carry — where somebody else wrote it, somebody else is responsible for whether it’s true, and your only job is to deliver it without mangling it.

And the good news this morning is that when it comes to the Christian faith, we are not in the message-composing business. We are in the message-carrying business. In Matthew chapter 10, Jesus sends his followers out and hands them a message — seven words, which he wrote himself: “The kingdom of heaven has come near.”

This morning: how that message gets made, who gets to carry it, and what it costs us to deliver it — which turns out to be nothing at all.

Scripture Reading:

“Then Jesus went about all the cities and villages, teaching in their synagogues and proclaiming the good news of the kingdom and curing every disease and every sickness. When he saw the crowds, he had compassion for them because they were harassed and helpless, like sheep without a shepherd. Then he said to his disciples, “The harvest is plentiful, but the laborers are few; therefore ask the Lord of the harvest to send out laborers into his harvest.” Then Jesus summoned his twelve disciples and gave them authority over unclean spirits, to cast them out, and to cure every disease and every sickness. These are the names of the twelve apostles: first, Simon, also known as Peter, and his brother Andrew; James son of Zebedee and his brother John; Philip and Bartholomew; Thomas and Matthew the tax collector; James son of Alphaeus and Thaddaeus; Simon the Cananaean and Judas Iscariot, the one who betrayed him. These twelve Jesus sent out with the following instructions: “Do not take a road leading to gentiles, and do not enter a Samaritan town, but go rather to the lost sheep of the house of Israel. As you go, proclaim the good news, ‘The kingdom of heaven has come near.’ Cure the sick; raise the dead; cleanse those with a skin disease; cast out demons. You received without payment; give without payment.” (Matthew 9:35–10:8, NRSVue)

Let us pray.

PART ONE: It Starts with a Broken Heart

Before Jesus sends anyone anywhere, Matthew shows us something happening inside Jesus himself:

Matthew 9:36  —  “When he saw the crowds, he had compassion for them, because they were harassed and helpless, like sheep without a shepherd.”

The word for compassion is splanchnizomai — it comes from the Greek word for your guts. It’s not polite, arm’s-length sympathy. It’s the kind of compassion that hits you in the stomach, the kind a parent feels watching their child suffer.

And that phrase — “sheep without a shepherd” — reaches back to Ezekiel 34, where God condemns the shepherds who fed themselves and neglected the flock, and then promises: “I myself will be their shepherd. I myself will search for the lost.” So Matthew is making an enormous claim: here is the shepherd God promised, gut-punched with compassion, coming to gather the flock.

Notice the order, because it matters: the mission of the Kingdom doesn’t begin with a strategy. It begins with a broken heart. Not how do we grow this organization, but look around at these people God loves. If our mission ever becomes about numbers or survival instead of gut-level love for actual people, we’ve garbled the message before we’ve said a word. As a church we look around the neighborhood and the surrounding communities and we see people God loves, we see people we love.

PART TWO: Pray for Workers — Then Watch What Happens

Out of that compassion, Jesus says:

Matthew 9:37–38  —  “The harvest is plentiful, but the laborers are few; therefore ask the Lord of the harvest to send out laborers into his harvest.”

He doesn’t see a problem to manage. He sees a harvest — ripe, ready, full of promise. The shortage is workers. So he tells the disciples to pray for God to send some. And then watch the very next verse.

[Pause. Slight smile.]

Matthew 10:1  —  “Then Jesus summoned his twelve disciples and gave them authority…”

They pray for laborers — and immediately become the answer to their own prayer. This is real power, because Jesus gives His church His own authority.

[Let the laughter come.]

There’s a holy danger in that comic timing. When you pray for God to send workers into the harvest, be aware: you are volunteering. There’s a real chance the prayer you pray for someone to go gets answered by God tapping you on the shoulder.

And look who he taps — fishermen, a tax collector, a political zealot, a man who would later betray him. Not an all-star team. A ragtag group of ordinary, unfinished people. And he gives them his own authority. They go carrying not their own power, but his.

PART THREE: Carry His Announcement — Don’t Garble It

Here’s the commission:

Matthew 10:7  —  “As you go, proclaim the good news, ‘The kingdom of heaven has come near.’”

Don’t miss this: that sentence isn’t a new message Jesus invents. It’s his own message — the exact phrase Matthew used in chapter 4 to summarize Jesus’ entire preaching ministry. He hands the disciples his own words and says: carry this. Say what I say.

[Settle in; this is the story.]

There’s a famous story from the First World War — probably more legend than history, but it makes the point so well I’m going to tell it anyway, which I’m fairly sure is a long-standing privilege of preachers.

[Wait for laughter.]

A British commander in the trenches needed reinforcements. So he gave a verbal message to be passed down the line, soldier to soldier, all the way back to headquarters: “Send reinforcements, we’re going to advance.”

Simple enough. But it traveled through dozens of mouths, down miles of a muddy trench, and every soldier felt just a little freedom to tidy it up. To improve it. By the time it reached headquarters, the message had become:

“Send three and fourpence, we’re going to a dance.”

[Let them laugh.]

That’s what happens when the people carrying a message decide they’re actually in the composing business. “Reinforcements” becomes “three and fourpence.” And the troops who desperately needed help got loose change and an invitation to go dancing.

The church has done this. We’ve taken “the kingdom of heaven has come near — there is a new King, and his name is Jesus” and tidied it down into “be nice,” or “try harder,” or “attend more meetings.”

[Pause.]

But Jesus didn’t ask us to compose. He asked us to carry. And the message he handed us is breathtaking good news: the King has come, his reign has already begun, and it is near enough to touch.

And here’s the relief. If the message belongs to Jesus, the pressure is off us. We don’t have to be brilliant or win every argument or explain the Trinity at a dinner party.

[Pause for laughter.]

We just have to carry it faithfully — and resist, with everything in us, the temptation to turn reinforcements into three and fourpence.

PART FOUR: Freely You Received; Freely Give

Look at how the commission ends:

Matthew 10:8  —  “You received without payment; give without payment.”

The Greek word is dorean— freely, as a gift, without cost. This is the whole economic logic of the Kingdom in five words. Everything the disciples have was given to them for free; so that’s exactly how they give it away — without keeping score, without making people prove they deserve it first.

Hear how Paul describes the gift in Romans 5: “while we still were sinners Christ died for us.” Not after we cleaned ourselves up. While we were still a mess — that’s when the gift came. And a congregation that truly grasps it received everything for free becomes one of the most generous communities on earth — because you cannot hoard a gift that was never yours to begin with.

CONCLUSION

At Mount Sinai, before any commandments, God told Israel: “You shall be for me a priestly kingdom”(Exodus 19:6). From the beginning, God’s people were meant to be priests — not for their own sake, but for the world. Blessed in order to be a blessing.

What God began at Sinai, Jesus brings to fulfillment in Galilee: he takes ordinary people, fills them with his compassion, hands them his own announcement, and sends them out. And that commission has not expired.

[Slow down. Warm and direct.]

The harvest is still plentiful. The laborers are still few. The crowds are still out there — tired and harassed, in our neighborhoods and workplaces and families — and the Shepherd’s heart still breaks for every one of them.

You don’t have to compose a message. You don’t have to be impressive. You just have to carry the announcement — seven words, written by the King himself. And whatever you do, don’t turn them into three and fourpence.

[Let the callback land with a smile, then go quiet.]

The Kingdom of heaven has come near. Right here. Right now.

So go and announce it — freely, joyfully, with a broken heart and open hands. You received it as a gift. Now go give it away.

Amen.

SOURCES CITED

1.  The “sheep without a shepherd” motif draws on Numbers 27:17 and most fully Ezekiel 34, where God condemns Israel’s failed shepherds and promises, “I myself will search for my sheep… I will rescue them” (Ezekiel 34:11–16, NRSV). Matthew’s use in 9:36 identifies Jesus as the promised shepherd of Ezekiel 34. See Walter Brueggemann, Theology of the Old Testament (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1997), pp. 622–627.

2.  Ulrich Luz, Matthew 8–20: A Commentary, Hermeneia series, trans. James E. Crouch (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2001), pp. 64–73. Luz demonstrates that Matthew portrays the disciples’ mission as a direct extension of Jesus’ own ministry — sharing his message (10:7 echoing 4:17), his authority (10:1), and his works of compassion (10:8).

3.  The “Send reinforcements, we’re going to advance / Send three and fourpence, we’re going to a dance” anecdote is a well-known piece of military folklore, widely used to illustrate the distortion of a message passed orally through many intermediaries. Its historical authenticity is doubtful, and it is best presented — as here — as illustrative legend rather than documented fact. The church-bulletin bloopers in the introduction are likewise long-circulated examples of real (and in some cases embellished) parish-newsletter humor, in wide public circulation for decades.

4.  Christopher J.H. Wright, The Mission of God: Unlocking the Bible’s Grand Narrative (Downers Grove: IVP Academic, 2006), pp. 222–264. Wright develops Israel’s election as a “priestly kingdom” (Exodus 19:6) called to mediate God’s blessing to all nations — a people blessed in order to be a blessing, a vocation fulfilled in the sending of the church.

All scripture quotations are from the New Revised Standard Version (NRSV), © 1989 National Council of the Churches of Christ in the USA.