Just before today's passage, Jesus speaks of signs and prophets and the coming of the reign of God and our seeming inability to recognize or accept it. Perhaps, in our own turn, we are "this generation," too.

When someone opens their heart to the promises of God and their door to one who bears them (the "sent" ones, the "little ones" who are small and humble but speaking with the authority of the One who sends them), it does not escape God's notice. God pays attention, after all, to small things and humble acts.

So how do we make sense of this somewhat distressing passage? Barbara Brown Taylor calls it a "burr from Matthew's Gospel ... one of those passages I wish he had never written down."

What is the church to be about? In today's Gospel passage from Matthew, we learn that the church is to be about healing, teaching, and proclaiming the good news. The church is to be about movement, not static, stay-at-home, preserve-our-level-of-comfort-and-let-them-come-to-us spirituality.

How do you define faith? Is your understanding of faith expressed in your spiritual practice? Do you think of faith as right belief or as trust, as a relationship with God that seeks just the hem of God's garment, throws caution to the wind, and breathes expectation of grace and healing in spite of all evidence to the contrary?

There's no avoiding the problem of a God who would destroy so many people. But getting stuck on that problem would be missing the point of story: as Towner puts it, this was "a destiny that the human community unleashed on itself." It was not the act of a capricious or cruel God.

Reading the Gospels, we wrestle with the deepest truths about God, and ourselves, and the world around us. And in today's passage from the Gospel of Matthew, Jesus is going right to the heart of the matter.