Sixth Sunday after Pentecost

July 8, 2007

Sermon by Rev. Marc Kolden

The Gospel according to Luke, Chapter 10. (Luke 10:1-11, 16-20)

After this the Lord appointed seventy others and sent them on ahead of him in pairs to every town and place where he himself intended to go. He said to them, “The harvest is plentiful, but the laborers are few; therefore ask the Lord of the Harvest to send out laborers into his harvest. Go on your way. See, I am sending you out like lambs into the midst of wolves. Carry no purse, no bag, no sandals; and greet no one on the road. Whatever house you enter, first say, ‘Peace to this house!’ And if anyone is there who shares in peace, your peace will rest on that person; but if not, it will return to you. Remain in the same house, eating and drinking whatever they provide, for the laborer deserves to be paid. Do not move about from house to house. 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.’ But whenever you enter a town and they do not welcome you, go out into its streets and say, ‘Even the dust of your town that clings to our feet, we wipe off in protest against you. Yet know this: the kingdom of God has come near.’”

“Whoever listens to you listens to me, and whoever rejects you rejects me, and whoever rejects me rejects the one who sent me.”

The seventy returned with joy, saying, “Lord, in your name even the demons submit to us!” He said to them, “I watched Satan fall from heaven like a flash of lightning. See, I have given you authority to tread on snakes and scorpions, and over all the power of the enemy; and nothing will hurt you. Nevertheless, do not rejoice at this, that the spirits submit to you, but rejoice that your names are written in heaven.

The Gospel of the Lord.

Dear friends in Christ: Grace to you and peace from God the Father and our Lord Jesus Christ. Amen.

We just heard about this one incident in Jesus’ life, in his sending out of seventy two-by-two and in their coming back and reporting. One of the difficulties, I think, we have when it comes to thinking about Jesus—and many parts of the Bible, generally—is that the way we understand most things in our lives don’t always work so well when it comes to thinking about stories that include God, and Satan, and things that we just haven’t ever seen before.

Normally, when we confront a new situation, we try to understand it in light of what we already know and have experienced; not that they will all be the same, but that there are analogies and similarities, and we can make sense of something. And so we do this with the Bible, also. We read about God's power, and we think we know what power means—it’s force, strength, ability to control things—and we apply it to God, rightly or wrongly. Or we hear about the kingdom of God, and all we can relate it to is kings of the distant past who ruled with absolute power. And so we understand God’s kingdom in this way, also, for better or for worse.

But in our own daily life even, it doesn’t always work to try to understand new things in relation to what we already know. If you have ever been to a very different foreign country, or with a very unusual group, perhaps the Amish, sometimes it’s just baffling. Their customs and behaviors are so different that we’re mystified, and we make all sorts of blunders, and even offend them, because we can’t make sense of these people in terms of our experience, and often we don’t even know it. We don’t mean to be offensive. Sometimes I think it’s also that way with the Bible or thinking about Jesus. We read what we can understand, and then we kind of skip the parts that don’t mean anything or seem too strange; don’t fit with what we expect.

Consider today’s reading that we just heard. It begins with a sentence that seems pretty clear: “After this the Lord [Jesus] appointed seventy others and sent them on ahead of him in pairs to every town and place where he intended to go.” Nothing confusing there: disciples going two-by-two to witness to their faith in Jesus and his coming. Well, but, the first sentence began with these words: “After this . . . .” After what? Well, just turn back one page and get the last half of Chapter 9, and there’s so much packed into that you realize that that was all before them when Chapter 10 started. In a space of just a few verses, we hear of Jesus feeding the 5,000 with only five loaves and two fish; then Jesus’ disciples confess him to be the long-awaited Messiah. Then he warns the disciples that if they continue to follow him they’re going to have to deny themselves, take up their crosses, and lose their lives for him.

No sooner has that happen than Jesus is transfigured or transformed on the mountain top, appearing in dazzling white with Elijah and Moses, who had been dead for centuries, followed by the voice of God from heaven saying, “This is my Son, my Chosen; listen him!” Then Jesus comes down the mountain, and a great crowd is waiting for him, including a boy possessed by an evil spirit, convulsing and foaming at the mouth. And Jesus, it says, “rebuked the evil spirit and healed the boy.”

Which brings us to last Sunday’s Gospel from Luke 9, which began, “When the days drew near for Jesus to be taken up, he set his face” to go to Jerusalem. “He set his face” is a funny Old Testament expression that we can maybe almost figure out. When somebody is so determined that they have clenched their teeth and you can’t dissuade them from doing what they’re going to do, they set their face almost “as a flint,” it says in one place, like it’s a rock. And it applied to the prophets, who were so fiercely determined to go to the Holy City, Jerusalem, and prophesy against false religion and unjust government, that when people back then heard this about Jesus, they would have been aghast, because they knew he would be inviting, as the prophets did, almost certain death. And yet at least the seventy are still ready to follow him.

It was after all those things, squashed together by the Gospel of Luke in just a few days, that they were sent out. Jesus appoints them and they are sent out two-by-two, which may tell us that, unlike our first reaction, this is not about friendly, every-member visits to homes in our neighborhood inviting people to church. But even so, the seventy accepted their appointment. So then Jesus continues: “The harvest is plentiful but the laborers are few.” Now, as good Jews, they would have known that “the harvest” is a symbol of the long-awaited ingathering of the people of Israel. We heard about it in the first lesson, coming back to Jerusalem, being part of this celebration. And the people of Israel had been exiled, and persecuted, and scattered all over the near east for centuries. And the laborers are those people through whom God will work to accomplish this.

But there weren’t enough laborers. Now, we might think, “Well, let’s get a recruitment plan and find some.” But Jesus says no, they should ask, that is, pray to the Lord of the harvest to send more laborers. The God of the Bible actually does things. Ask him! And he says, “Go. Oh, and by the way, I’m sending you out like helpless little lambs among wolves.” It sounds more like war than evangelism; more like a civil-rights march in a raciest neighborhood than a nice walk-a-thon for Jesus. “Don’t take any money, don’t take any luggage, don’t stop and shoot the breeze with people on the road. You are a part of something bigger and much more urgent. Go directly to the towns and village where I will go on my journey to Jerusalem. When you come to a town”—remember, this will just be just two of them on foot, nobody knows them—“when you come to a town, go up to a house and greet the people who live there by saying 'Peace to this house’.” That’s not just "hello.” It’s more than a greeting. It’s a blessing. It was used by King David’s messengers to welcome people and whole tribes and nations into his kingly rule. Now it’s being used by Jesus and these seventy. It’s shalom, wholeness, harmony, righteousness, the peace that passes all human understanding. It’s a really important announcement. But it’s in a kind of Biblical code that might miss us.

Jesus tells these pairs of messengers that if people receive this gift of peace, they will invite them in, give them food and lodging, so they should stay with them and carry out their divine assignment. “Eat what they serve you. Cure the sick, and say, ‘The kingdom of God has come near to you.’”

Notice that the coming of God’s kingdom here is not a threat, not like he’s coming and he’s mad. No, it’s good news. It’s a promise of the divine rule of the loving God, whose steadfast love endures forever, who will come to them in Jesus. Now, all this is what will happen to the disciples on a good day, when the people welcome them. When they are not welcomed, they aren’t just to say, “Okay. Thank you for your time.” No, they are to make a big deal of their being rejected and stand on the main street and shake the town’s dust off their feet in front of everybody and say, "The kingdom of God has come near to you.” But it’s a threat this time, because the townspeople have rejected it by rejecting the two men, or two people.

The world that this story takes place in is different from the world as we usually perceive it. I bet it didn’t even fit so well for those seventy disciples. Think what they must have thought when he said, “Cure the sick.” He’s the one who has been curing the sick. They have never cured anybody in their life, but they’re supposed to do it. And they don’t even ask any questions, so they can’t figure out what to ask. Perhaps that’s why Jesus ends his speech to them before they leave, in verse 16, by saying: “Whoever listens to you listens to me, and whoever rejects you rejects me, and whoever rejects me rejects the one who sent me, God the Father.” Not only do those seventy face a scary assignment, but Jesus tells that much is riding on them—no only in human terms, but in terms of God being able to carry out his purposes and promises for salvation.

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The scope of this passage—which includes not only earthly places and persons and events but also God, God’s kingdom, evil spirits, healing, divine judgment, eternal salvation—the scope of this passage is much bigger and more ultimate than the way we think and live. There is not much else we can do. We usually think in terms of our historical lives, about days and weeks, and home and work and school, specific tasks and occasions, about wishing we could grow up, or fearing we might grow old, about health care, childcare, car repair, you know. We hear about and care about larger things, too; but, even so, we think about them in human terms, mostly. Few of us live out of a truly big picture of reality that includes all history and eternity and people within God’s activity and purposes. And yet our faith in our Lord Jesus calls us into this larger view, even though for now we know it only by faith and not by sight, by hope and not by certain knowledge, and by love, despite how fragile it is.

But the four Gospels, and especially the Gospel of Luke, tell us that the God, whose kingdom, or a better meaning would be whose kingly rule, whose reign, came among us in Jesus’ life, death, and resurrection, is still at work today on the earth, ruling in steadfast love and mercy; even though we never hear this on the news, read it in the papers. Much of God’s work remains hidden from us in that we can’t be sure exactly what God is doing in his continual, creative, preserving, and governing activity in the natural world, and in society, in institutions, and in human activity.

But God worked through Jesus in a decisive way, a clear way, revealing God’s own self and being. And through Jesus’ words and deeds, conveyed in the word of scripture, God is working to grant us that we become new creatures, new creations, new beings, who do have an opportunity to see a bigger picture. God was working today in the words of scripture that we heard, and the words of proclamation, through the words of confession and forgiveness.

When we confess our sins, God’s spirit gave us the faith and the words to do so. When we heard the words declaring that God forgave our sins on account of Jesus, the spirit gave us the faith to believe those words. In addition, God is active among us not only in words, but in the Word; the word made flesh, the risen, living, always present Jesus Christ, who claimed us, who adopted us in baptism, and abides in and with us always. As we trust in Jesus, God is able to act also through us to get good done and neighbors loved, and words spoken, to make the world a more trustworthy place.

God also acts on us today in other ways. In the words of the hymns, where they help to shape our understanding of God, or our understanding of how we are to be, in the confession of a faith and the creed; for as the Apostle Paul says, “No one can even say ‘Jesus is Lord’ except by the Holy Spirit.” We may think, you know, we decide to believe. But, in retrospect, it’s like the V-8 commercial, “Oh, it wasn’t I; it was the grace of God.” The fact that we’re here this morning is not just our doing, but we have been called and gathered by God’s spirit.

God in Christ continues to act today when we hear the words of “The peace of Christ be with you always” and we say them to each other. It sounds almost like the greeting that the seventy gave to those homes. God works through our praying, through our offerings, and in special ways acts on us and for us in the Lord’s Supper, where the words of Jesus from the Bible are added to the bread and wine so that they become, and we may receive in them, Christ’s body and blood for our forgiveness and salvation. These physical elements are a means that are visible, touchable, tasteable, to get inside us, to assure us that Christ is in and with us. We can taste it, feel it.

And, finally, God will act to send us away in joy and thanksgiving, not as our last encounter for the week with God, but as a way of opening our eyes and enlarging our minds to understand everything we see and do and think and say as being located in some way within his purposes and will, or opposed to sometimes.

Now, this may sound so grand for those seventy, but also for any of us who follow Christ, that it would be overwhelming. And so I think it’s really important that we hear Jesus’ words to the seventy when they come back. You’ll notice, the lesson didn’t saying about what they did in all those towns, it’s just immediately from his sending them away and they come back. When they came back, you remember, they were excited and rejoicing, they couldn’t wait to tell Jesus about it. “Even the demons submitted to us,” they say. And Jesus already knew that and put it in a larger context. He said, “As you carried out your assignments, I watched Satan fall from heaven. I have given you authority over the power of the enemy, and nothing will hurt you. Nevertheless, do not rejoice in what you have done—that the evil spirits submit to you—but rejoice that your names are written in heaven.” Perhaps he might have added for us, “It’s not primarily about you, it’s about something much larger that includes you. Your names are written in heaven.” That’s the gospel truth!

Amen.