Sermon at The Church of the Holy Apostles, New York City
July 8, 2007
The Reverend Elizabeth G. Maxwell
Isaiah 66:10-16
Psalm 66
Galatians 6:1-10, 14-18
Luke 10:1-12, 16-20

   

     Whenever you enter a town and its people welcome you, eat what is set before you, cure the sick who are there, and say to them, “The kingdom of God has come near to you.”

     In the name of Christ, who sends us out and welcomes us home.

     Today’s gospel raises vital themes of mission (that is, to be sent forth), and evangelism, which is to say to proclaim good news.  Now, these themes- central as they are- of mission and evangelism are sometimes uncomfortable for us.  The discomfort, I think, comes from several different places – from the very pluralistic society in which we live, from our awareness of our urgent need to learn from and respect those of other faiths, from our growing understanding that to be Christian is not necessarily to require that everyone else in the world be Christian.  I imagine that many of us don’t want to be identified with a certain kind of Christianity, a coercive kind, that hits people over the head and insists that they must believe in a certain way.  That’s really spiritual violence, and it’s wrong.

     And yet, mission is central to our identity as people of faith.  In our baptismal vows, we are asked: “Will you proclaim by word and example the good news of God in Christ?”  And we say that we will, with God’s help.  In our baptisms, each of us is called, and yes – each of us is sent forth.

     So, this passage focuses us on the question of what is our call, and what is our sending.  Why are we here?  It may help us to look more closely at this passage, maybe more than we expect.

     The first thing that strikes me about this gospel text is its urgency.  Jesus is on his journey towards Jerusalem, where destiny, where his passion, await.  And indeed, the kingdom has come near in his ministry.  It has come near in his healings, in his words, in his very being.  There is a message that needs to be heard and experienced – as he says, “The harvest is plentiful, the laborers are few."  The need is immense.  In the passage that parallels this in Matthew, Matthew says, “The crowd is harassed and helpless like sheep without a shepherd,” and yet there are not enough laborers to work in this harassed and helpless crowd, this urgent harvest.

     So the disciples, the followers of Jesus, are commissioned to share the work, to share bearing the message in their being, as it were.  They are sent forth to embody the reign of God, which is coming near.  Matthew, Mark, and Luke all speak of sending out twelve disciples, but only Luke has this doublet passage in which Jesus sends seventy others – or in some readings, 72 others.

     Clearly, the early Christians had a memory that Jesus sent out his disciples and charged and commissioned them with his own authority, but Luke is making a theological point to the early church about the ongoing mission of his community.  So we might take a little detour and ask, “Why seventy?” or “Why seventy-two?”  As you can imagine, scholars have a field day with this number: some suspect that it’s the number of nations in the known world in Luke’s day, others think that it refers to the number of translators of the Septuagint, those who translated the Hebrew Bible into Greek.  But the theory that makes the most sense to me is that this number, seventy, harkens back to a passage in the Book of Numbers in which Moses says to God, “I am not able to carry these people alone.”  And God tells him to gather seventy elders to help him, so that the spirit that is on Moses may be shared with those other leaders.  The spirit comes on the seventy, and then two others who are outside their group start to prophesy, and Joshua wants to stop them.  But Moses says to Joshua: “I wish all the Lord’s people were prophets.”

     Seven is a number of completeness, and fullness, and there is the sense here that all God’s people must be a part of God’s great work.  There is a sense that each one of us here, just as each one of those in Luke’s community, is an answer to that prayer of the church – for workers to go out into the harvest.  In that old chestnut of a hymn that we’ll sing a little later in this service – “no arm so weak but may do service here.”

     Every one of us is called and needed, unique, sent forth.  The urgent work demands it.

     The second thing that strikes me about this passage is the vulnerability of the disciples as Jesus sends them.  They are to go like lambs in the midst of wolves, they are to choose to relinquish violence and most forms of security that might help them feel safe.  They are to take no bag, no sandals, to make none of the usual social contacts.  But they do have what we hope is the comfort of one companion. (That one other person will be either a comfort or a real annoyance.)  They travel light.  They shed their ability to provide for themselves or to rely solely on their own efforts, and when they arrive in a town, they are "dependant on the kindness of strangers".

     But they also come with the authority, the authenticity of being grounded in their experience of Jesus and in the presence of God’s reign.  They are able to say with conviction, “Peace be to this house”- and it’s fascinating the way peace is talked about, isn’t it?  It’s like it’s a kind of a living thing – substantial and energetic, an actual thing that can come upon a house, and that has the potential to be even more.

     The word for peace, of course, in Hebrew is shalom, which refers not just to the absence of conflict but to a kind of a wholeness, an abundant life that is within people and among people, that is within and among the entire creation.  Peace in this sense is life in its fullness, justice and reconciliation shared with all.  It is the “new creation” that Paul speaks about in the letter to the Galatians, in which the barriers between the circumcision and the uncircumcision, between male and female, slave and free, people of all different types are broken down so that nothing matters in comparison to this living, life-giving peace.

     The peace lands or it doesn’t.  If it doesn’t, it boomerangs back, but if it does land, Jesus says to the disciples, stay in that first house and eat what is set before you.  Did you notice that Jesus actually gives the instruction about eating what is provided twice?  Why is that so important?  Is it just about having good manners?  One commentator suggested, very provocatively I thought, that humility and the ability to receive are vital parts of mission.  So often, we think, that mission is something that those who have deliver to those who have not, whether by word or example.  But this passage points us to something that is more complex, more profound, and more mysterious – to a discovery of where God is already, what God is doing, what gifts God wants to make manifest.

     I was reminded in reading this particular commentator about an experience that I had, quite a long time ago now actually, because it was before I came to Holy Apostles.  I was on a trip with a group of people from my former diocese to Nicaragua; it was during the contra war in the late 80’s, and we had the opportunity to experience the lives of the people, both their poverty and their great spirit, and to see with grief what our foreign policy had wrought there.  One of the highlights of the trip was a night that we spent in a remote village, where the people living there had really not ever met North Americans before.  They had experienced the ravages of the war, but they welcomed us with great hospitality.  I was given a bed in the one-room house where I stayed – I knew that I displaced a family member.  I passed a somewhat harrowing night – there were lots of noises in that village that weren’t familiar to me.  (Indeed one member of group heard such commotion that she was sure it was the contras attacking, and later learned that a pig had gotten on the roof of the house where she was staying!)

     When I woke up in the morning, the woman of the house made me breakfast.  I was given an egg – they only had one egg.  No one else in the family was eating one.  I had such a sense of shame with my North American privilege, taking this one egg from this very poor family.  I also admit that I was wondering if I would get sick from eating it, but somehow I knew that I needed to accept their hospitality.  I needed to eat what was set before me, and in so doing, I needed to move into a kind of healing that can only come when the relationship between privilege and lack of privilege shifts and the one who has always thought of herself as the giver is able to receive.

     I wonder if this is partly what Jesus meant when he says that out of the hospitality that the disciples accept, healing can flourish.  Unexpected possibilities may emerge.  "Healing" and "salvation" are actually the same word in the New Testament, and it applies to the body, the mind, the spirit, to relationships.  It has the sense of finding one’s place in the whole family of things.  It doesn’t always come as a cure, but it comes as a deeper wholeness.  For that there are words: the Kingdom of God has come near you.

     It is possible, of course, that this peace, this healing, this hospitality, will be rejected.  In that case, Jesus says to the disciples, don’t beat yourself up and keep moving.  He mentions Sodom, which many of us don’t realize is notable not for any kind of sexual sin, but for its great failure of hospitality.  The judgment that comes may be understood as a consequence of refusing to enter into that mysterious exchange of peace, giving and receiving, hospitality, host and guest.  And host and guest actually are also one word in the New Testament - just as in the Eucharist we speak of Christ as “the host” and also the “divine guest,” in whom the reign of God draws near.

     The disciples return full of joy; they’ve had a tremendous experience.  They’ve not only survived, but they’ve been effective – they’ve overcome evil.  It will not always be so easy.  It certainly will not always be so easy for Jesus, who after all, is going to Jerusalem.  But his words to them spoken next have a deep reassurance that also challenges us: “Ultimately,” he says, “nothing will hurt you.  Your names are written in heaven.”

     However remarkable the experience, the power, the joy and enthusiasm of mission, the central reality for these disciples as for us is that they and we belong to God.  The wonderful images from Isaiah that we heard this morning evoke that for me – "as a mother comforts her child," God says, "I will comfort you."  It’s as if they’re held that close, that tenderly, that intimately.  More than anything that we do or do not do, the source of our mission is that God has claimed us and loved us with a love that will never let us go.

     So out of these reflections, I want to leave you with some questions about our mission as the people of God here at Holy Apostles.

     About what do we feel an urgency?  The burning need to share good news, the urgent needs of the world…where are we in that paradox and duality?  It may be that we are challenged – indeed we all should be challenged- by the crisis of our planet, inspired by the possibilities for actually ending poverty in out own day, grieved by the violence and oppression all around us, called to speak a word to the kind of alienation that is so much a reality in our own affluent society.

     You might want to take a look at our mission statement, which is on the inside of your bulletin.  It says: “We are called together by the God who loves all people, and we, the people of the Church of the Holy Apostles, seek to share God’s love with one another and the world around us.”  It goes on to flesh that out, but those words are not a bad start for urgency in our day.

     I found some other mission statements, as I was poking around with that, that I thought were worth reading to you today as well.  The Episcopal Chaplaincy at Cornell University says: “We are a community of awe-struck Christians, learning to be faithful stewards of the Earth.”  At a church in San Francisco, the mission statement says: “We invite people to see God’s image in all humankind, to sing and dance to Jesus’ lead, and to become God’s friends.”

     What are we urgent about, and how do we understand our mission?

     The second question: whose hospitality do you need to receive?  Our experience here in the soup kitchen is that the lines between guest and host are often blurred, and giving and receiving is a mutual dance.  It may be that there are others to whom we need to listen – our families, our enemies, parts of ourselves.  It may be that in that exchange we need to declare peace and discover a mysterious mutuality.

     And finally, how has the Kingdom of God come near to you?  This passage calls us to cultivate awareness of that tender and mysterious and constant presence – to cultivate amazement and gratitude and joy, that God is always loving and claiming and calling and sending us, and that our names are written in heaven.

     Amen.