Know Fear! No Fear!
Original sermon given on The Fourth Sunday after Pentecost, June 21, 2026 written and delivered by Pastor Jeff Leininger at First Saint Paul’s Lutheran Church.
Watch the sermon live.
“Know Fear! No Fear!”
Matthew 10.24-39
Know Fear! No Fear!
In the name of the Living God and the risen Christ. Amen.
Let us start with the sparrow. Or two of them, rather, sold for a penny, Jesus tells us. These are the food for the very poor, and you could purchase a pair for 1/16th of a day laborer’s wage. We might say they’re worth a cup of coffee, but on the North Side a cup of coffee these days can really set you back. (I feel like I need to take out a loan for my afternoon Americano). The penny is also soon going away, apparently, so new translation work will have to be done on this passage, in the future. (Are not two sparrows sold… rounding up to the nickel? I’ll keep you posted on this one.)
But we can all understand the Lord’s point: Not one of these most common of creatures falls without the Lord’s knowledge and concern, and of how much more value are we — made in his image, the crown of his creation, redeemed by his blood, called and sent by him? Shakespeare’s great line from the final act of Hamlet comes to mind, “There’s a special providence in the fall of a sparrow” (V, ii). How much more special providence for each of us? Jesus says even the hairs of your head are numbered.
Let’s move on from the sparrow to the hair… or hairs. The vast number of incalculable hairs on the human head was proverbial at this time — too many to count. Like when God tells Abraham in Genesis to look up at the stars or down at the sand: his descendants will be innumerable — and how amazing that we are counted in that uncountable number, through faith in the promises of God fulfilled in Jesus?
Of course, the hairs on our head are not uncountable for us anymore. Some of us are finding it all too easy to count them these days, as we grow older. But a quick google search gives us some interesting results. According to bionumbers.com, if you’re blond, you’ve got 150,000 hairs on your head (blonds always come in first?); brown haired, 110,000; black haired 100,000; and for the “gingers” among us, you red heads unfortunately come in last with a mere 90,000 hairs on your head.
Just for fun, I did another quick google search, and in a matter of seconds it calculated the total number of all the hairs on all the heads of all the people of the world. Ready for the results? Somewhere between 640 trillion and 1.2 quadrillion. Let’s round it off to an even quadrillion human hairs.
All this counting of hairs serves not to lessen Jesus’ point, but rather to strengthen it. He knows, loves, cares for, directs, is intimately acquainted with the smallest details of our lives: bald, blond, brown, black, or ginger.
Jesus’ disciples needed to hear this precisely at this time — whatever the color of their hair. You see, Jesus is sending them out as his followers on his mission. And it’s going to get rough. Real rough. He’s painfully, specifically, enumerating for them the cost of discipleship.
1) It’s unavoidable — if they’re faithful, they’ll meet resistance, because the cause is not them, but Jesus himself. “If they have called the master of the house Beelzebul, how much more will they malign those of his household.” (Matt. 10.25)
2) We know how true his words are, as they apply to our own lives of Christian discipleship. You know this, don’t you: when you faithfully follow him, it causes division, though hopefully not literally via sword — with your friends, your coworkers, and even your own family. “He demands of his followers a loyalty which transcends even the closest of family ties.” [1] His first disciples would come to know this personally, as their own family members would betray them. Those in the persecuted church throughout the world today have zero problems interpreting these words of Jesus, “and one’s foes will be members of one’s own household” (Matt. 10.6).
So, discipleship means 1) unavoidable, 2) personal conflict. And 3) following Jesus is fearful. Three times in a dozen verses he says, “Do not fear!” If it wasn’t going to be difficult, he’d say something else like, “Don’t worry, be happy” or “No worries, mate” or “Yeah, man, no problem, man.” But he doesn’t. He says, “Do not fear!” because the cost of their discipleship, being associated with him — his household, his students, his followers — would shake them to the core of their being.
4) And the cost of discipleship is ultimate. Jesus words, “Whoever does not take up his cross and follow me…” (Matt. 10.38) were specifically chosen. The cross wasn’t just a metaphor or a symbol like what we wear around our necks; or on our earrings; or when we turn and face the procession on a Sunday morning. Jesus’ first hearers would shudder at the sound of that word “cross,” for it was the most painful and shameful form of execution known. As it goes with Jesus, so it goes with his disciples. For most of them, it would mean the ultimate sacrifice. Jesus has to prepare them for this and exhort them to stick with it even to the end… to their very end.
Which leads us back to the sparrows and the hairs. You can see, now, how comforting this would be for them… and for us. Jesus is not a generalist. He knows the very details of our lives, everything we must suffer on his account, every sword which cuts through our hearts, every difficult step we must take for him. He sees it, measures it, holds it, promises to preserve us whatever comes. In a way it’s frightening to know that there’s no detail which escapes his providential notice — which is why we begin every Sunday on our knees, and we cling so firmly to his grace given to sinners at the cross, and we receive so eagerly his body and blood from this altar. But the comfort is that whatever we have to go through, whatever cost in being his disciples, we have innumerable worth, by his providential grace.
So, how can we lead to live lives of faithful discipleship, whatever the cost? Jesus’ overarching point here in Matthew 10 is that there is a greater fear for us, and a greater destiny for us.
“Fear not!” he says — the persecution that will come for being my disciples. But he curiously counters it with an even greater fear. “Fear, instead, the one who can destroy both soul and body…” (Matt. 10.28)
Ultimately, he’s the one you have to stand before. He’s the one you’re accountable to. He’s the one with eternal power. He’s the one to whom all allegiance is owed. He’s the one whom we must be slaves to. If we know this fear, we can have “no fear” for anything or anyone else. So, we “know fear, to have no fear.”
There’s a greater fear, but also a greater destiny. Because our Lord went to the cross for us, because he was forsaken by the world for us, because he gave up everything for us, we know that he’s secured a place for us with him in eternity. This means that whatever we lose for his sake in this life cannot be compared with what he has gained for us in eternal life. How comforting to know that no matter what comes, he’s got us, and he’s got us for eternity.
So live a life knowing a greater fear and a greater destiny.
Living a life of knowing a greater fear and a greater destiny can’t help but remind me of the inspiring life Deitrich Bonhoeffer, the Lutheran pastor who bravely resisted the Nazi takeover of the Christian Church during World War II, and who ended his life hanging naked at the Flossenbürg concentration camp just a couple weeks before that camp was liberated by the Allies. We’re studying his Life Together on Sunday nights. He also wrote a famous book called The Cost of Discipleship, which many of you will have heard of.
I’d like to paint the picture of the origin of this morning’s sermon hymn, which is Bonhoeffer’s only hymn text. It’s Christmas time 1944, and Bonhoeffer is imprisoned by the Nazis in the basement of a bunker in Berlin, with Allied bombs dropping around them. He pens a Christmas poem, not knowing if he’ll ever see any of his loved ones again. By Gracious Powers is his Christmas greeting for his fiancée and his family.
“By gracious powers so wonderfully sheltered, and confidently waiting come what may, we know that God is with us night and morning, and never fails to greet us each new day.”
May Jesus bless us in our costly lives of discipleship. “He leads the way; stay close to him.”[2]
Come soon Lord Jesus. Amen.
[1] R. T. France, The Gospel of Matthew, 407
[2] Cost of Discipleship, 97
Image: Audubon, John James, 1785-1851. Song Sparrow, from Art in the Christian Tradition, a project of the Vanderbilt Divinity Library, Nashville, TN. https://diglib.library.vanderbilt.edu/act-imagelink.pl?RC=59666 [retrieved June 22, 2026]. Original source: https://www.flickr.com/photos/vintage_illustration/27012412387.
