Lectionary Reflection for Proper 6A on Matthew 9:35–10:8, (9-23)
WE ARE ALL LOST
We are all lost people living in a lost society.
We are lost to the presence and power of the Divine: we have lost our capacity to be consciously and wondrously aware of the sacred, the good, the true, and the beautiful that permeate our world and our lives. We are lost to each other: we have lost our willingness to be vulnerable with one another and to risk intertwining our lives with those of other human beings. We are lost to our Earth: we have severed the roots that nourish us and have fallen for the lie that we lose nothing by treating our planet as an endless supply to feed our insatiable hunger. We are lost to ourselves: we have created a society where masking our uniqueness and performing a conformity we neither desire nor enjoy is the only way to survive.
Make no mistake—there are, and always have been, those who feed and manufacture our alienation and polarisation for their own political and financial benefit. And so, as Debie Thomas puts it, “We get lost. We get so miserably lost that the shepherd has to wander through the craggy wilderness to find us”. But despite our deep personal and collective lostness, all is not lost. Thomas continues:
God is where the lost things are…God is where the search is at its fiercest. If I want to find God, I have to seek the lost. I have to get lost. I have to leave the safety of the inside and venture out. I have to recognize my own lostness and consent to be found….
God looks for us when our lostness is so convoluted and so profound, we can’t even pretend to look for God. But even in such bleak and hopeless places, God finds us.1
This hope that we can be found, and the profound recognition that we can—that we must—participate in our own foundness, are at the heart of the Gospel reading from Matthew 9 for Proper 6A.
JESUS’ REMEDY FOR LOSTNESS
The writer of Matthew’s Gospel tells us that as Jesus travelled around, preaching and serving people in village after village, he had compassion on them “because they were harassed and helpless, like sheep without a shepherd” (Matt. 9:36 NRSV), and when he sent his apostles out, he directed them to the “lost sheep of the house of Israel” (10:6). But when Jesus spoke of people being lost, he didn’t mean it the way some churches do. He wasn’t saying the people were bad or doomed to hell because they hadn’t confessed the right words, committed to the right doctrines, or joined the right religion. Rather, he was using an image from Ezekiel 34 in which the prophet confronted the religious leaders for exploiting and abusing the people.2
Jesus was deeply moved by the oppression his audiences experienced at the hands of the Roman Empire and of the religious elite who had used the Roman occupation of Israel to amass wealth and power.3 He was acutely aware of the people’s fear and their struggle to survive in a world where a few thrived while the majority suffered. He knew that they were longing not just for a different kind of leadership, but for a different kind of world, and so he dared to offer a remedy for their lostness. And to ensure that his invitation spread as far as possible, he chose twelve of his disciples to be apostles (sent ones). He had instructed his disciples to pray that God would send labourers out into the “harvest“ (9:37), and now his disciples discovered that they were to be the answer to their own prayers.4
Chapter 10 begins with Jesus giving his apostles authority to bring liberation and wholeness to the people, the same way he had been doing in the chapters leading up to this moment. While the writer lists the names of these apostles, the important thing to note is not what they were called, but how many of them there were. Three times in just five verses, we are told that there were twelve of them. Anytime a Gospel writer says something more than once in a short space, we need to pay attention. As Tom Wright notes:
…at the heart of what Jesus was up to was his belief that through his work God was at last renewing and restoring Israel, which traditionally had been based upon the twelve tribes. But now the Twelve were not just to be a sign that God was restoring Israel; they were to be part of the means by which he was doing so.5
The apostles were to preach the same messages they had heard Jesus proclaim multiple times: “The kingdom of heaven has come near” (10:7). In response to the lostness of people, Jesus sent his apostles to declare and demonstrate that God’s reign was present and available to them. They were to spread the good news they had seen him preach and demonstrate by freeing people from evil, from political oppression,6 from skin diseases, and from the loss of sight, hearing, speech, and mobility. It wasn’t just that they were to heal people physically. They were “restoring people to wholeness—socially, spiritually, and physically”.7
At the heart of the apostles’ mission were three simple practices. Firstly, they would draw their listeners into communities—small pockets of foundness—based on the values, priorities, and purposes of God’s reign. Secondly, they were to be generous (“You received without payment; give without payment”—10:8b). And finally, they were to share hospitality, both by receiving it from their hosts in the villages in which they would stay, and by practising it in their demonstration of God’s welcoming, inclusive, liberating, and restoring reign.
Jesus stressed that they were to begin with Israel. This wasn’t because Jesus was excluding Gentiles—the writer had already included Gentiles in the Gospel,8 and would end the story with Jesus sending his disciples into the entire world (28:19).9 Rather, it was because the people of Israel understood the divine covenant that called them to find belonging in the divine presence and community, and then to go and be a blessing to all people.
Essentially, then, the apostle’s task was to let lost people know that God had come to find them and that they could participate in their own being found and in the being found of others.
WE ARE ALL FOUND
Jesus looked at the people who had come to hear him, and he felt compassion because they were lost. And so he determined to help them know that they were found by inviting them to join him in creating communities of belonging, generosity, and hospitality—small pockets of shared foundness. This is Jesus’ remedy to human lostness.
But Jesus didn’t call people into community because it’s nice to have friends, and sharing is caring. His invitation is rooted in our fundamental nature as relational people who cannot live fully and healthily alone. We are products of a universe in which interconnection and interdependence are not optional. They are fundamental elements of reality.
One of the words quantum physicists use to describe the “relational wholeness”10 of the Cosmos is entanglement (which Albert Einstein famously called “spooky action at a distance”). Essentially, entanglement has given us a window into how inextricably connected the entire universe is, and how illusory our divisions and “pigeonholes” are.11 As I wrote in my meditation earlier this week,12 the so-called butterfly effect reveals how small actions—like creating small pockets of foundness—can transform the world way beyond their boundaries. And, from an evolutionary perspective, love and collaboration within groups are far more significant than competition and selfishness in driving the evolutionary process forward.13
We can never find ourselves by causing others to be lost. We will never find belonging and safety by alienating and threatening others. The truth is that we are all already found. We are connected. We are interdependent. We do share this planet, this life, and whatever outcomes and consequences we create for ourselves. And we do have everything we need to experience liberation, wholeness, generosity, and hospitality. We just need to remember our “foundness”.
There will always be those who seek to find themselves and their happiness in isolation, selfishness, domination, and destruction. As Stanley Hauerwas writes:
The kingdoms of death, the kingdoms that rule through violence legitimated by the fear of death, are challenged by this one who has come to put an end to the rule of death.14
But while we do need to resist these kingdoms of death and the people who live by their values and priorities, the best way to resist them is Jesus’ way. His strategy for resisting the oppression of the empire is to create pockets of foundness for outcasts, lost souls, divided hearts, and those broken by broken relationships and abusive systems. It is to create communities of liberation and restoration, of generosity, and of radically, recklessly shared hospitality. This is the work of those who know that they do not need to be found because they already are.
PRACTISING FOUNDNESS
If our world has left us feeling lost, if we can see the lostness of those around us and long to help them know what it is to be found, we do not have to create evangelistic rallies and manipulate them to pray a pre-scripted prayer and commit to our religious organisation in the guise of giving their lives to Jesus. We just need to find them and let them know that we recognise their dignity and humanity. We simply need to be generous toward them and to share hospitality in the small pockets of belonging, of “foundness”, that we can create with our friends, families, and neighbours.
If we are serious about learning to be “found lost people” who share foundness with the other lost humans in our immediate circle, here is a simple spiritual practice that can train us.
Set aside some time to be still, and for a moment, try to lay aside the fear and brain-spin that can arise from living in times of chaos. When you manage to find a measure of stillness in your soul, identify any lostness that may be within you, in your loved ones, and in your neighbourhood. Don’t rush through this. Allow time to name the lostness and, where possible, its source. And then open your heart and allow yourself to feel compassion for all of the “lost sheep” (including you) in your world.
Then, when you’re ready, call to mind a memory of foundness that you have experienced. Take time to relive that moment, and to allow it to strengthen and encourage you again now. Then, drawing on the power of that memory, identify one thing you can do to live into whatever foundness and belonging you have in your life and relationships.
Finally, commit to one thing you can do this week to share liberation, generosity, and hospitality with the people in your world. It could be as simple as committing to smiling at strangers, or as elaborate as hosting a dinner party for friends and including any lonely, isolated, or homeless (literally or figuratively) people you may know.
We do not have to accept the lostness our society imposes on us. We do not have to submit to those who would control us by dividing us and forcing us to perform conformity for the sake of their power. We can create, for ourselves and those around us, small pockets of foundness, of liberation, restoration, generosity, and hospitality, even in our lost and fragmented world.
Debie Thomas, Into the Mess and Other Jesus Stories: Reflections on the Life of Christ. (Cascade Books, 2022), 130–131. Cited in Richard Rohr, “Parables: Stories from Jesus: To Be Lost and Found,” Center for Action and Contemplation: Daily Meditations, November 26, 2024; https://cac.org/daily-meditations/to-be-lost-and-found/.
Cleophus J. LaRue, “Commentary on Matthew 9:35—10:8 [9-23],” Working Preacher, June 18, 2023; https://www.workingpreacher.org/commentaries/revised-common-lectionary/ordinary-11/commentary-on-matthew-935-108-9-23-2.
Danny Zacharias, “Commentary on Matthew 9:35—10:8 [9-23],” Working Preacher, June 14, 2026; https://www.workingpreacher.org/commentaries/revised-common-lectionary/ordinary-11/commentary-on-matthew-935-108-9-23-3.
Stephen Westerholm, “Matthew,” The New Interpreter’s Bible One-Volume Commentary, Beverly Roberts Gaventa and David L. Petersen, eds, (Abingdon Press, 2010), Kindle, 1667-1668.
Tom Wright. Matthew for Everyone Part 1. (SPCK, 2004), Kindle, 111.
To get a sense of how the Synoptic Gospel writers used healing narratives to highlight social and political liberation, see John van de Laar, “Lectionary Reflection for Proper 7C on Luke 8:26-39,” Sacredise Your Life on Substack, June 16, 2025; https://sacredise.substack.com/p/lectionary-reflection-for-proper.
Zacharias, “Commentary on Matthew 9:35—10:8 [9-23].”
Ibid.
Wright. Matthew for Everyone Part 1, 111.
Ilia Delio, The Not-Yet God: Carl Jung, Teilhard de Chardin, and the Relational Whole. (Orbis Books, 2023), Kindle, 120.
Diarmuid O’Murchu. Quantum Theology: Spiritual Implications of the New Physics. (The Crossroad Publishing Company, 2004), Kindle, 110.
John van de Laar, “Making Waves: A Meditation on Hosea 5:15–6:6 for Proper 5A,” Sacredise Your Life on Substack, June 02, 2026; https://sacredise.substack.com/p/making-waves.
Bruce Sanguin. The Way of the Wind: The Path and Practice of Evolutionary Christian Mysticism. (Viriditas Press, 2015), Kindle, Location 94.
Stanley Hauerwas. Matthew (Brazos Theological Commentary on the Bible). (Brazos Press, 2006), Kindle, 108.