Packing List

Trinity Presbyterian Church of Bethesda
07.08.07; Rev. David Williams

Scripture Passage: Luke 10:1-11; 16-20

Summer time is travel time, as all of America gets itself loaded up and noodles across state after state of superslab. It’s the season of the roadtrip, but those trips just aren’t what they used to be a decade or so ago. Yeah, the roads are more or less the same. But getting ready for a trip when you’re a dad is nothing like getting ready for a trip as a twenty year old.

Back when I was a younger man, my idea of packing was considerably more streamlined than it is now. I can recall getting off my shift as a dishwasher at U.VA’s academic dining facility, rushing back to my room, and preparing myself for a trip to Williamsburg to visit my new girlfriend Rachel.

I had a very manageable checklist. Item one was to take a quick shower, because the frenetic pace of the dishroom tended to result in me heavily crusted with condiments and little chunks of broccoli. I learned pretty early on that most women don’t really appreciate that look. Item two was to pack everything I needed for a weekend away. That involved, in total, two pairs of underwear and a toothbrush. Total packing and preparation time: ten minutes, seven and half if I was feeling particularly motivated. And after a week or two of being away from her, I was usually feeling pretty darn motivated. Then I’d start up my Honda 750 with a dozen hard stomps on the kickstarter...not that I needed to, but pressing the button on the electric start didn’t have that Marlon Brando feel...and off I’d ride, lickety split, with my mostly empty backpack flapping in the wind behind me. For some reason, my wife to be found my approach to packing strange.

But now we fast-forward eighteen years, and I’m no longer relying on my motorcycle for family trips. Preparing for a journey...even a three-day trip...takes a bit longer than seven and a half minutes. Two days before the trip, there’s a twenty minute list preparation meeting, as we carefully go over every conceivable thing that we might need. At least one point seven five complete outfits is selected for every member of the family for each day of the trip, and several different pairs of footwear, each selected for function. Then there’s the food, which is packed as if we were planning an expedition into a vast and trackless wilderness where the only other option would be to forage in the underbrush. Though the roots and berries in Western Maryland are quite tasty, we’ve found taking the WalMart option just a bit easier.

To the list are added books and DVDs and games and toys for the kids, so that they might not have to spend an unoccupied moment. For the grownups, laptops and cell phones and Blackberries and organizers need to be corralled, so that we can’t be away from our electronic leashes for even one moment. This is followed by a long matching game in which you make sure that you’ve got a charger that matches every one of your devices. Then the packing begins. It’s a three stage process. First, the suitcases are packed and canvas bags are filled up. Then, they’re moved to a staging area near the carport, where they wait until the next morning, when the coolers full of food join them. After the staging area is reviewed to confirm compliance with the established list, they’re moved one by one into the gaping maw of the minivan. I understand that George Mason University now offers vacation logistics coursework as part of it’s executive MBA program.

But that level of preparation seems utterly lacking from the instructions given to the disciples by Jesus in our passage from Luke this morning. This segment of Luke comes as a follow-on to a passage that comes at the beginning of chapter nine, in which Jesus commissions the twelve disciples and sends them out after giving them a set of packing instructions. Back in that chapter, we hear Jesus sending the 12 disciples out with a similar list of what to do and what to bring. Here, we have a mirror of Christ’s demands, and they’re no less challenging when they’re issued to seventy disciples instead of twelve.

Jesus begins his instructions to the seventy with an exhortation, calling them to go out into the world like laborers to a harvest. But then, his instructions get a little challenging. His followers are to “carry no bag, no sandals; and greet no-one on the road.” Here they are, intended to travel through the countryside of Judea, and they can’t even take a bag? What sort of preparation is that? It sounds...even by the standards of the college boy road trip...like a pretty half-baked journey.

Scholarly commentaries on Luke give us several options for how to interpret this peculiar demand that followers not actually go on their journeys in a prepared way. First, because it was structured like a history of the time, and because the structure and language of the Greek used in Luke is very sophisticated, most Bible scholars feel that the Gospel of Luke was written for an audience of well-educated Greek-speaking Christians. Luke’s double emphasis on this act of sending reinforces it, and it may have been kept as part of Luke’s tradition because it was just so hard for his sophisticated audience to hear.

How can you go off unprepared? No money? No way to carry things? No...shoes? Well...you can do it if you are intending to be utterly dependent on both your message and the response of those who will receive you. It’s an act of trust.

That makes sense, but what are we to make of the latter portion of verse four? In it, Jesus counsels “not to greet anyone on the road.” Here the seventy are being told to get out there and spread the Gospel message, and they can’t even talk to the people that they encounter on the way? How does that help? Aren’t they supposed to be sharing information about the Gospel?

What may be being conveyed here is the ferocious urgency of that moment. Through both a seemingly nonexistent packing list and the instruction not to dawdle in conversation on the way, what may be being conveyed here is the intense need for action in the now. The seventy followers of Christ are being told...in no uncertain terms...that they need to get out there and engage the world with Christ’s message of hope and reconciliation. There wasn’t room for fiddling around or worrying over what you brought or didn’t bring. The moment’s pressing, it’s intense, and the need to act upon it is such that you just can’t dawdle.

In that, what Christ may be telling us is that the journey of faith is not like the vacation of a modern American family, in which our immense vehicles are filled with 5 cubic yards of supplies to meed every potential eventuality. The journey of Christian faith may not be like the carefully planned business trip, in which we make sure that we schedule every last moment full of meetings so that we can justify the every penny of the journey to the folks down in accounting.

Instead, our journey of faith and our spreading of the Good News is more like the headlong rush of someone desperately eager to see someone they love. For all of our desire to organize, to be structured and reasonable and decent and orderly, it’s important that we not lose that vital yearning in our own journeys. We’ve got to walk that path with eager intensity, because it is better walked when it that journey is more filled with passion, more filled with urgency, more filled with the desire to share in that presence once again.