Word and Table

 Print This Post
I am indebted to many people for the shape and content of this sermon:  Nathan Nettleton, Will Willimon, Pastor Dan of Christ Our Savior Lutheran Church, Sarah Dylan Breuer, and Stephanie Hankey of the North Puget Sound Presbytery.

Anything good here probably comes from them.  Blame any bad theology, grammar, or mistakes on me.

A Sermon for Proper 9C, Ordinary 14C or Pentecost 6C - July 8, 2007.  The scriptures for this sermon were as follows:  2 Kings 5:1-14, Psalm 30, Galatians 6:7-16, and especially Luke 10:1-20.

———

When I sit down to watch the news on TV or to read the newspaper,
it’s because I want to know more about our world, nation or community.
But this often has the unfortunate side effect of making me depressed,
especially when it comes to reading our local rag, er . . . paper, The Mercury.
There are also times when, confronted with all the bad news I see or read,
I feel helpless in the face of it all.
Maybe you have had similar reactions.
Whether it is the drug problem in Pottstown,
increased political animosity in our national politics,
or the ongoing wars in Iraq and Afghanistan,
the problems seem too great, too insurmountable,
for me or any one person to do anything about.

Now I firmly believe that as followers of Jesus,
we are all involved in Christ’s mission of renewing the world,
of bringing hate and injustice to an end,
and of establishing God’s kingdom of love and peace.
As our bulletins state the ministers of First UMC are its members.
All who have been baptized in Christ have also been called into his ministry.
But in the face of the world’s overwhelming problems,
we can feel that our efforts are nothing but a drop in the bucket of what needs to be done.

Does what we do really make any difference?
In the cosmic struggle between the love of God and the forces of evil,
are our efforts at faithfulness and mission of any significance at all?
These are the questions I bring to you in my message this morning.
A message that focuses on Jesus commissioning some people to do his work for him in places that he cannot personally go.

Now the first thing to notice about our gospel lesson is the number of disciples Jesus sends out.
Luke tells us the number was seventy.
Seventy, like the number of books in the Septuagint –
the translation of books that some of our Jewish brothers and sisters accepted as scripture.
Seventy, the number of elders chosen to share Moses’ burden of leadership in the book of Numbers (11:16-17).
Seventy, the number of times time seven that we have been told to forgive.
Seventy, a number of completion, of wholeness.
One more fact about the number 70.
In Genesis there is a list of nations with, you guessed it, seventy nations in it.
So when Luke tells us that Jesus sent out seventy,
those hearing this would know that Jesus’ mission was for all the nations and people of the earth.
There would be no limitations on the spread of the gospel.

Further, the sending of the 70 had a sense of urgency about it.
Jesus says to them, “Take no purse, no bag, no sandals,
and, by the way, no chatting with friends along the road.”
Time is of the essence Jesus is saying,
and he backs it up with an image of a harvest.
As any farmer knows, when the harvest is ready, you get it in quickly.
Miss your chance and the crop can be ruined.
Jesus is saying, “The Kingdom of God is near now,
now is the time to proclaim it, and now is the time to respond.”

And that brings us to the curious phrase, “shaking the dust off your feet.”
Jews of that time had a custom that, if they went into a foreign land,
they would shake the foreign dust off their feet when they returned to Israel.
They did this because, to them, the land of Israel was holy,
and they didn’t want to contaminate it  with the soil of pagan lands.
But Jesus gives this custom a new twist.
He says that any place where people welcome the signs of God’s presence is a sacred place,
whether or not it is in Israel.
Further, Jesus says that the opposite is also true:
any land which rejects the signs of the God’s presence is a pagan place,
and this too is true whether or not it is in Israel.
But notice something else: in the end the message is the same for those who accept or reject the good news.
To those who accept say “The kingdom of God has come near to you.”
To those who reject say, “The kingdom of God has come near.”
Why?  Because when God’s kingdom arrived,
you were judged by how you responded to it.
Either you jumped on the bandwagon when it came your way or you didn’t. You heard the message of love and acceptance,
you saw the signs of healing and welcome,
and you made your choice when you had the opportunity.
The kingdom of God has come near to you.
Nothing more needs to be said.

And that brings us back to the mission to which we are all called.
Jesus tells us, “The harvest is plentiful, but the laborers are few.
Therefore ask the Lord of the harvest to send out laborers into his harvest.” Many people are fatalistic about their lives,
seeing them as essentially meaningless.
The message of the gospel is that things can be made new.
But where are the messengers?
Many people feel overwhelmed in the struggle to stay afloat and keep their heads above the troubled waters of life.
The message of the gospel is that you can be saved.
But where are the messengers?
Many people are trapped in cycles of evil and abuse and sin.
The message of the gospel is that you can be set free.
But where are the messengers?
Ask the Lord of the harvest to send out laborers into his harvest.

Now I realize when some people hear this they think that what we really need is more ordained clergy.
We need to attract and train more people for the pastoral ministry.
But I want to argue that this is wrong,
for the calling of Jesus is given to every Christian.
You are called by Jesus Christ to be his laborers in the harvest field.
You are called to share the message of God’s love and goodness to everyone who needs to hear it.
You don’t need any special expertise or training to love people and show them the grace, love and acceptance that God has shown you.
You don’t need a seminary degree to talk about what has happened to you and how Jesus brings healing and hope into your life.
And it doesn’t take any great prophetic gift to to recognize the people out there who know there is something wrong with their lives.

You are the people that Christ sends out, like lambs among wolves,
to share the peace of Christ,
to eat and drink with people,
to respond in mercy to sickness and brokenness,
and to talk about the coming of God’s kingdom into the world.
That is Christ’s commission to the whole church.
You are all ministers and priests,
for the New Testament words for minister and priest are never used of church leaders - they are always used to describe the whole people of God.
You are a royal priesthood, it says.
You are the ministers of Christ,
the light of the world,
and a sign of God’s kingdom.

But even so, there will be plenty of times when our work as Christ’s ambassadors seems of little consequence,
especially when compared to the needs of the world,
There will be plenty of times when we will feel inadequate as ministers of Christ.
After all, the harvest is so large and the returns for our work seem so little compared to all the effort we expend.
But I want to suggest that this is merely our perspective and not God’s.
God sees things in a very different way.

Good News from North Haven, written by Michael Lindvall, is a fictional autobiography of a Pastor Dave,
who serves the Presbyterian church in town.
In Chapter Two of the book, entitled “The Little Things,”
Pastor Dave is mulling over his life and work.  He says:
Forty years lived and four of them in this one place,
and what difference has it all made?
Second Presbyterian Church has two fewer members than four years ago.  There are four more children registered in the Sunday school.
I have preached 187 sermons here,
baptized 8 babies and 1 middle-aged lady.
And I have married 17 couples and buried 28 people.

At my current pace, that means over the next twenty-five years:
1,175 more sermons,
50 more babies, 6 middle-aged ladies,
104 happy couples,  and 175 funerals, not counting mine.
Is anybody keeping track?
And if all this is being tallied in some cosmic computer,
will my file be distinguishable from that of a million other well-meaning clergy who worked hard enough and did a pretty good job?
In fact, everything I’ve ever done looks like a series of fumbles and small-time blunders.
One day I will step across home plate, pass from the field,
and in no time drop right out of the world’s memory.
Any squeak I had made in history would soon be silenced out.
The little wake that trailed my stern would soon smooth over.

Pastor Dave continues.
I couldn’t abide my office the next Tuesday morning,
so I went to get my haircut.
The town barber’s name is Harry.
He’s about seventy and a chatty type with a repertoire of stale barber jokes. He says he’s “R.C.,” but I don’t think he’s been in church for years.
He starts every one of my haircuts with “I’m Catholic, but . . .”
I think he says that so I won’t ask him to come to church.
[Today] Harry asked what ministers did on the other six days of the week.
He wasn’t teasing - it was an honest question.
I talked about meetings, hospital visits, and counseling with people who had problems to talk over.

Something I said touched a nerve in Harry and he started to talk.
He talked about being a kid and what a pain it was.
He started to talk about his father, whom he called “my old man.”
This seventy-year-old was calling his father “old man.”
My haircut was done; we were alone in the shop.
A scissors in one hand and a comb in the other,
he was resting them both on my shoulders as he talked.
He talked about how his old man mercilessly beat him and his mother most every Saturday night.
He talked about how afraid he was,
about how much he loved and hated his father.
He said he had never told anybody about this before, not in sixty years.
His mother, he said, carried the secret to her grave.
Nobody had ever guessed.
We were both facing the big barbershop mirror.
His eyes were turning red.
We looked at each other in the mirror in a way we wouldn’t have face to face.  I reached to my shoulders and held his hands,
and said something about when you forgive somebody it doesn’t mean that you are saying that what they did was all right.

That evening I had a meeting at church but got home fairly early.
My wife said that the kids were waiting up for me and would be wanting their story and kisses.
I was exhausted and would have sooner dropped myself in front of the TV.
But I went upstairs and found two little peanuts fighting sleep.
They had the book ready,
a slip of yellow construction paper marking the spot where we had stopped reading the night before.
So I read chapter six of Ramona the Pest.
They fell asleep before its end.
I kissed them both and sat at the edge of the bed for a moment and said their prayers for them.

Sitting there it came to me that of all the meetings I had recently attended,
of all the sermons I’d preached,
and of all the programs I’d introduced or tried to introduce,
the most important things I had done in all my busy-ness were to touch Harry the barber’s hands and to read chapter six of Ramona the Pest.
These were important things -
not because the other things were unimportant.
Theses were important because the mark a man or a woman makes on this world is most often a trail of faithful love,
and quiet mercies, and unknown kindnesses.

Like the seventy in Luke’s gospel,
and like Pastor Dave in North Haven,
Jesus sends us to proclaim, embody, and create the kingdom with him.
He sends us out against the great injustices and problems of a fallen and troubled world,
and often we break like a wave against it’s rocks of sin and despair.
Our enthusiasm dissipates and we ask, “What good does it do?”
“What can we possibly accomplish?

But then we return and make our reports.
We fed only 50 of the hungry people on Friday at our Community meal.
I only delivered 15 meals on wheels.
I was only able to visit 3 shut-ins and one person in the hospital.
And Jesus says, “I watched Satan fall from heaven like a flash of lightening!”
What?
“I saw Satan fall from heaven like a flash of lightening!”

All we did was make a few repairs to that home on our mission trip.
Hundreds, even thousands more, are still uninhabitable.
All we did was host a fun night at the church for some youth
All I do is teach Sunday School to a couple of kids each week.
But Jesus says, “I watched Satan fall from heaven like a flash of lightening!”

Only 80 or 90 people showed for worship last week, Lord.
Jesus, on a good Sunday we only have 25 or so people in Sunday School.
All we did was knit a few prayer shawls for some sick or grieving people.
We’re just renting out some unused rooms for a school for troubled youth and for a church without a home.
But Jesus says, “I watched Satan fall from heaven like a flash of lightening!”

And then we understand . . . Jesus sees something we cannot see.
He sees our simple, ordinary, everyday efforts through a much larger lens.
Jesus is using us for something big, something gigantic-COSMIC even!
In and through our little ordinary, everyday lives,
Jesus is working out the kingdom of God.
We look at the church and we see the mundane-the unspectacular-the routine.  But Jesus looks and sees heaven and earth being transformed through us.
He sees us bringing in the kingdom of God one day at a time.
Friendships begun.  Families being fed.  Children being taught.
Bridges of peace being built.
Seeds of God’s love are being sown

Jesus sees heaven and earth being transformed through us, of all people.
We can’t always see it, human as we are,
caught up, as we are, in the normal workings of the church and our lives.
And yet, in our meetings,
our Sunday School classes,
our feeding the hungry and helping the poor,
in our worship and in our daily interactions with others,
in all these little and seemingly insignificant ways,
the kingdom of God is taking shape.
And Satan is losing ground to us.
Satan’s grip over the world is loosening and God’s kingdom is breaking in,
through us!

We look at our congregation and at our own lives and we see the church,
the poor, ordinary church,
full of ordinary people.
But Jesus looks at us and at the meager work of our hands and says,
to our delight and utter amazement,
“I was seeing Satan fall from heaven like a flash of lightening!”
 Print This Post

Technorati tags: Sermon, Proper 9C, Ordinary 14C, Pentecost 6C, 2 Kings 5:1-14, Psalm 30, Galatians 6:7-16, Luke 10:1-20, lectionary, Satan, Satan’s fall

Popularity: 6% [?]

Share This