Overpacked

7th Sunday after Pentecost
July 3, 2016

Listen to todays sermon here:

1After 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. 2He 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. 3Go on your way. See, I am sending you out like lambs into the midst of wolves. 4Carry no purse, no bag, no sandals; and greet no one on the road. 5Whatever house you enter, first say, ‘Peace to this house!’ 6And if anyone is there who shares in peace, your peace will rest on that person; but if not, it will return to you. 7Remain 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. 8Whenever you enter a town and its people welcome you, eat what is set before you; 9cure the sick who are there, and say to them, ‘The kingdom of God has come near to you.’ 10But whenever you enter a town and they do not welcome you, go out into its streets and say, 11‘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.’ ” 16“Whoever listens to you listens to me, and whoever rejects you rejects me, and whoever rejects me rejects the one who sent me.”17The seventy returned with joy, saying, “Lord, in your name even the demons submit to us!” 18He said to them, “I watched Satan fall from heaven like a flash of lightning. 19See, I have given you authority to tread on snakes and scorpions, and over all the power of the enemy; and nothing will hurt you. 20Nevertheless, do not rejoice at this, that the spirits submit to you, but rejoice that your names are written in heaven.” – Luke 10:1-11, 16-20

I tend to overpack. I get better the more I travel, but I still get the largest possible carry-on bag allowed and I get it with the expanding zipper so that I can either smoosh stuff in tighter or squeeze it into an overhead bin. I mean you never know when you might unexpectedly need to be dressed up or you’ll get drenched in a downpour and need an extra set of clothes or you’ll be stuck in an airport for hours on end with nothing to reador whether all the drug stores will suddenly go out of business at your destination and you need to have a full stock of toiletries at the ready. I realized just how much I had packed when on a recent trip the retractable handle on my rollerboard broke on the way to the airport and I had to carry the bag the rest of the trip. I realized lugging this bag through the airport how encumbered I was by my need to be overly prepared.

But I’m beginning to feel like it’s not just extra clothes and books that I need to pack, but perhaps body armor as well. With another airport attack at a major international airport this week, more bombings in Afghanistan, hostages killed in Dhaka, a constant stream of gun violence headlines including one that crossed my Facebook feed this week of a deadly shooting of teen near my old neighborhood in Philadelphia, I’m beginning to feel like I need to be more prepared every time I leave my house, like I need to be ready for the worst.

But into this world of wolves, into an inhospitable, often violent world, Jesus sends his sheep with nothing but the clothes on their back – no purse, no bag, no sandals, no food, no change of clothes, no map, no spare reading material and most certainly no weapons of any kind. 70 unnamed women and men, people who had been following Jesus, at least enough that he thought they were ready to go out as his messengers of the kingdom drawing near. They luckily didn’t have to contend with guns and bombs, but there was threat enough from robbers and dishonest folk on the road. There were plenty of inhospitable people and otherwise unpleasant situations to encounter.

Why? What is Jesus trying to prove? That his followers are fit contestants for one of those TV shows where they drop you in the wilderness with nothing but a match and piece of twine? Or maybe just to teach them some kind of lesson about God’s provision and the futility of their own preparations? Maybe there’s a piece of that at play here. It’s not a bad lesson for us to learn – to travel light, to let go of our real and figurative baggage, to remember that our plans, our efforts, our ingenuity and creativity are not what bring in the kingdom of God. It’s especially a good lesson for those of us in a wealthy nation where we tend to accumulate things around us even when we might try to do otherwise. And if Jesus is teaching a lesson, at least one reasonable application in our current climate is that one thing we don’t need to pack for the kingdom of God is more weapons for the purpose of killing other human beings. Whatever they are, letting go of our deep attachment to the things we think will keep us safe would be a lesson worth learning.

But though good lessons come along the way, Jesus isn’t primarily in my mind a teacher of lessons. Jesus doesn’t instruct us with clever tricks to put us in our place. Instead Jesus is about bringing the kingdom near to the messengers and the towns that welcome them and even the towns that don’t.

If we want to see what Jesus is doing by sending his sheep out empty-handed, perhaps we should take the lead of professor Fred Niedner and look at the stories Jesus tells about people who go on journeys and end up with nothing but the clothes on their back, and here I quote Niedner’s brief retellings of the parables of the prodigal son and the rich man and Lazarus: “like the one about the young man who traveled to the far country carrying his whole inheritance with him. He would never be dependent on anyone. His purse was full! Until it wasn’t, and he ended up with pigs at dinner as companions. Only then, the story says, did that young man ‘come to himself,’ or find himself, and in that moment he knew that somewhere there was still a place he belonged. He had to go back to the arms of his father, even if only as a servant.

“Or we might recall that rich man in another parable found only in Luke, the one who feasted sumptuously every day and dressed in fine linen, who soon enough took that longest of journeys, and found himself with nothing, or nothing but thirst to be more exact. Only then did it dawn on him that he might benefit from actual contact, some face time, with that poor fellow who used to lie on his doorstep back when the two of them dwelled in space and time.”*

The stories Jesus tells are stories about people who only discover the kingdom of God present for them when they have been emptied of everything else. Yet Jesus doesn’t stop at just telling stories about how emptiness brings us into the kingdom, Jesus lives it out. Not that Jesus was traveling with much to begin with, but on this journey to Jerusalem, he will lose his traveling companions, his freedom, the clothes off his back, and in the end his very life. Even to the end Jesus still had something to offer – words of comfort to the women who wailed on the streets, welcome for the criminals hanged with him, and forgiveness for the soldiers who drove the nails. And there at the cross, Jesus says, is the heart of the kingdom of God. Not in the stripping away but in the discovery of who and whose you are apart from everything else. In finding in our utter emptiness, our defenselessness, our pain, our confusion, that we are children of God, an identity that cannot be stripped away.

This isn’t some kind of game that Jesus plays to teach us to live lightly, but an invitation to approach the feast of all creation with open hands and hungry bellies, an invitation to be fed and nourished. We cannot feast and we cannot serve others at the feast if our arms are stuffed full of our baggage. It’s hard to sit down at the table lugging a heavy suitcase filled with our possessions. It’s hard to sit down at the table carrying our hatred for others. It’s hard to sit down at the table laden with armor and weapons and fear of the next terrible act of violence. It’s hard to sit down at the table already filled with the confidence that we have it all figured out already on our own. And what Jesus wants more than anything for these seventy men and women, and for the people they will encounter, and for you and for me is to invite us to the table that we might both feast and serve one another with unencumbered hands. That we might there receive the promise again that names our identity that cannot be stripped away. Come to the table, children of God, the kingdom has come near!

-Pastor Steven Wilco

*These are quoted from materials shared by Professor Frederick Neidner at the Institute of Liturgical Studies, 2016, with additional thanks to his sermon on these texts for inspiring the overall focus of this sermon.