Third Sunday after Pentecost
Exodus 19:2-8a; Psalm 100; Romans 5:1-8; Matthew 9:35–10:23
The Very Rev’d Bertrand Oliver, Dean and Rector
We gather this morning in a building of stone and stained glass, a place where history is etched into the mortar and silence is held in the rafters. It is easy to look around and feel the weight of tradition, to see the Church as this magnificent structure, safe and established. But today, the Spirit invites us to step out of these walls and ask a radical question: Who are we, really?
Our Gospel reading from Matthew 9 brings us before Jesus, weary and compassionate, moving through towns and villages. He sees the crowds—harassed and helpless, like sheep without a shepherd. And then, he turns to his disciples. Who are they? They are not a committee of theologians. They are not a polished board of directors. They are a motley crew. There is Simon the Zealot, a political revolutionary who might have killed for his cause; Matthew the tax collector, a collaborator with the Roman occupiers, despised by his own people; fishermen with rough hands and tempers.
They were strange to one another. They had nothing in common except their willingness to follow. Yet, Jesus does not send them out after a course in spiritual perfection. He sends them as they are. He takes their “irrelevant” skills—the accounting mind of the tax collector, the persistence of the fisherman, the fire of the zealot—and declares that these are exactly what the Kingdom needs.
This is the first truth we must hold: The Church is not the building. The Church is the motley crew. The Church is the sum total of our diverse, flawed, and seemingly mismatched gifts.
I invite you now, just for a moment, to do something quiet and personal. In the silence of your heart, think of one skill, one talent, or one aspect of your life that you often feel has no place in the church. Perhaps it is your work in finance, your skill at fixing things, your struggle with mental health, your love of art that seems “too secular,” or even your anger at the world. Hold that thing in your hand, so to speak. Now, imagine Jesus looking at you and saying, “I did not send the perfect. I sent the ones with the relevant messiness. Bring that to me.” Keep that image in your mind as we continue.
When we gather here, we are not assembling a perfect choir; we are gathering a community of strangers who have decided to walk together.
In the epistle to the Romans, Paul reminds us of the depth of this grace: “While we were still sinners, Christ died for us.” Think about that. We did not earn this love by becoming relevant. We did not qualify by fixing ourselves up. We were loved while we were still broken, still “strangers” to God’s holiness. Our worth is not derived from our utility to the institution, but from the sheer, unmerited love of Christ.
But there is a danger, my friends, a seduction that has plagued the Church since the days of emperor Constantine in the 4th Century. In a recent presentation at the Shared Ways conference by the theologian Kayko Driedger-Hesslein, she warned us against the church’s desire to become the “in-group,” to leave behind our strangeness and seek the comfort of power. For centuries, the Church has been tempted to align itself with the empire, to build big cathedrals, to define “orthodoxy” in ways that keep order but exclude the stranger. We have sometimes – perhaps often – forgotten that we are not the lords of all, but the servants of all. We have forgotten that we are grafted onto the vine, not the root itself.
The author challenges us: What if we stopped trying to be the “host” and started being the “stranger”? What if, instead of welcoming others into our way of doing things, we allowed our way of life to be reshaped by those who are different from us?
Look again at the disciples. They were sent out with no bag, no bread, no extra tunic. They were vulnerable. They were dependent on the hospitality of others. They were forced to rely on the very people they were supposed to be ministering to. This was not a strategy of charity, where the giver holds the power, but a strategy of mutual aid.
Mutual aid is not the same as charity. Charity says, “I have enough, so I will give some to you.” It creates a hierarchy: the giver above the receiver. But mutual aid says, “I am incomplete without you, and you are incomplete without me. Our survival depends on our difference.”
Think of the snowflake. A single snowflake is fragile, fleeting. But when billions of snowflakes bond together, each unique, each different, they form a snowpack that can sustain a whole ecosystem. In her book, Theory of Water (2025), the scholar Leanne Betasamosake Simpson calls this “sintering.” We are meant to bond to one another through our differences, not despite them. The tax collector needed the zealot to understand justice; the zealot needed the tax collector to understand grace. They were strangers to one another, yet they became the body of Christ.
This is the challenge for us here in Montreal, and for the Anglican Church in Canada. How do we stop asking, “How can we help the poor?” and start asking, “Who do we need to survive together?” Who are the strangers in our midst that we must rely on?
And let us remember that this web of life includes the very ground we stand on. We are gathered on the traditional territory of the Kanien’kehá:ka (Mohawk) people, the keepers of the Great Law of Peace. The land does not belong to us; we belong to the land. Just as the Kanien’kehá:ka teach us that the land is a living relation – a community of spirits comprising rocks, trees, waters, and animals – we too are called to realize that we are strangers to this land if we do not know its name, its stories, or its voice.
The rain falls on the just and the unjust alike here in Montreal, whether in the cathedral or the alleyway. The earth does not ask if we are members of the parish before it gives us food.
If we want to learn how to be a “Stranger-Church,” we must first learn to be strangers to the land in humility. We must learn to serve the land not as masters, but as neighbors who are indebted to its life. When we acknowledge that we rely on the wisdom of Indigenous elders to guide us in right relationship with this soil, we practice the very mutual aid that Jesus commanded. We stop being the “lords of all” and start being the students of the earth.
So, what does this mean for us? It means that when we leave this cathedral, we do not leave the Church behind. We carry it with us. The liturgy continues on the metro, in the grocery store, in the school, in the workplace. It continues wherever we choose to practice mutual aid.
It means we stop looking for relevance in our titles or our abilities. Recall that talent you held earlier—the one you thought was irrelevant. That is your gift. Your ability to fix a sink, your patience in raising a child, your skill in listening, your capacity to simply be present—these are not irrelevant. They are the tools of the Kingdom. You are part of the motley crew. You are a necessary strand in the sintering of the Body of Christ.
We are called to be a priestly kingdom, a holy nation, a family of God. But let us never forget that we are also strangers. We are the ones who know we do not have all the answers. We are the ones who know we are dependent on the grace of others. And in that dependency, in that vulnerability, we find our true strength.
Let us go forth, not with the pretense of perfection, but with the confidence of those who are loved by God despite our flaws. Let us share our diverse talents, not because they are “holy” in the traditional sense, but because they are ours, and because they are given to us to serve the sheep without shepherds.
May the God of all comfort, who loved us while we were yet sinners, strengthen us to be the Church—not in these walls, but in the world. May we be comfortable with the unknown, comfortable with the stranger, and comfortable with our own strangeness. For in the end, it is only in the breaking of our own shells that we discover we were never alone, but part of a vast, sintering, living whole.
Amen.