Poolesville Presbyterian Church
07.03.16; Rev. David Williams
LISTEN TO SERMON AUDIO HERE:
Summer time is travel time. It’s the season of the road trip, but those trips just aren’t what they used to be when I was a kid, or when I was a young man. Yeah, the roads are more or less the same. But getting ready for a trip when you’re a dad of younglings was nothing like getting ready for a trip as a kid, or as a twenty year old.
I still have old faded sepia memories of those first road vacations, back when I was a tiny little spud. A week of vacation involved one large suitcase for my parents, and one for my brother and myself. They’d get stuffed into the tiny front trunk of our well-worn white Volkswagen Beetle, and five year old me and my three year old brother would clamber into the back. Off we’d go, two suitcases, no carseats, bouncing along the modestly maintained roads of 1970s Kenya towards Lake Malindi or the beach at Mombasa, or rattling along the dirt roads of the savannah on our way to some safari lodge or another. It was a...different...time.
When I was a younger man, my idea of packing was even more streamlined. I’d get off my shift as a dishwasher at U.VA’s academic dining facility, rush back to my room, and preparing myself for a trip to Williamsburg to visit my girlfriend.
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 the “I’m wearing my own snacks” 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. 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 preparing for a journey...even a three-day trip...has taken a bit longer than seven and a half minutes throughout the majority of my years as a modern parent. 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 was 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 are quite tasty in coastal Delaware, we’ve discovered that Bethany actually has stores.
To the list were added laptops and iPads and iPhones and chargers, so that we can’t be away from our electronic leashes for even one moment. Then the packing began. It was a three stage process. First, the suitcases were packed and canvas bags are filled up. Then, they were moved to a staging area near the carport, where they waited until the next morning, when the coolers full of food joined them. After the staging area was 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 its 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 my college boy road trips...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 a bizarre concept, one that reminded me of a story in one of the car mags I read from a couple of years back, in which two journalists did a road trip across the American South in a Rolls Royce with no cash at all, relying on their charms and the appearance of wealth to finagle free rooms, food, and gas. That’s...um...not what Jesus meant.
What may be being conveyed here is the ferocious urgency of that moment. Go to these towns. Don’t let yourself be distracted. Through both a seemingly nonexistent packing list and the instruction not to dawdle in conversation on the way, what may be being conveyed here are two things.
First, 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.
Second, Christ seems to 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 meet 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 like a journey into an unknown space, a place that is neither familiar nor safe. It is not an easy or comfortable thing. The message of the Gospel is one that requires you to risk the unknown, in the same way that reconciliation requires you to risk the unknown. Healing the breaches and broken places requires you to set aside what you know...with certainty...about another person or another group of people.
You know how terrible they are. You know how badly you’ve been treated. You know all of these things, carrying that knowledge with you and allowing it to shape your relationship with them.
You fill the great empty hold of your minivan soul with every last bit of that baggage, and in doing so, you lose the ability to stand in that deeply risky place of reconciling and restoration.
Carry nothing with you, says Jesus. And just as that would have given the disciples pause, so too does it sound strangely off of our souls.
Yet that willingness to leave behind security and risk an encounter with newness is an essential part of the Gospel journey. It’s not easy, not for any of us, particularly not now.
But it’s the strange, dangerous, transformational path we’re called to journey. Let that be so, for you and for me, AMEN.
No comments:
Post a Comment