So in our lesson today Jesus is just arriving in a new land, we learn that is a gentile land, a ways away from where Jesus spends the rest of his ministry. We're not sure why he went there but many people think it is because he heard about a man who needed healing. There was a man there who was tormented by demons. He was violent and mentally very unwell, he wouldn't wear clothing and couldn't be a functioning part of society. The local solution to this problem was to regularly chain him up, keep him under guard and make him live in the tombs. So Jesus came to this man looking to heal him. By this time rumors would have spread about Jesus' power to heal but despite this no one from the community comes out to ask Jesus to heal the sick man And when he tried to speak to the man the first thing Jesus heard was "what are you doing here son of God, leave me alone". This doesn't seem to matter though undaunted by the lack of welcome Jesus proceeds to heal this man who seems so hopeless.
Once healed all the man wants is to be Jesus' disciples he kneels at Jesus' feet and asks to follow him. This is a familiar reaction, we have heard this kind of thing about other people that Jesus encountered but once the man is healed other people from the community start to show up too, people who have heard about the amazing work that Jesus did. But they don't do what you might think they would. They don't praise Jesus, they don't ask for healing themselves, they don't even question Jesus. The scripture says they were afraid of Jesus and they asked him to leave. They acknowledge that Jesus is the son of God but even more than this they make it clear that they don't want him around.
This isn't how we expect a story to end, not a story from the bible and really not any other story. Jesus was a hero here, he healed a man who was literally chained in a tomb to protect himself and everyone else. Common sense demands a hero's reception for Jesus after that kind of thing right? At least a friendly reception right?
Maybe, though, when we think about real life it doesn't. Perhaps the people's fear made sense. Maybe Jesus was something to be afraid of. You see these people had a system. They had it figured out. Their solution might not have been the best but it worked, everyone was safe and sheltered. Maybe they had a community rotation to keep track of the sick man, everyone could feel good about it, they rallied around it and anyway it sure did make other problems seem smaller. But then Jesus showed up and turned that all on it's head.
What he had to offer might have been great, it might have meant healing for all, but what might they have to give up, they were scared, what would the new community look like if they let this man stick around? If they listened to this powerful teacher, if they exposed their weaknesses to this powerful healer. It was better that now that he had taken care of the worst of there problems he go away and not make any more changes to the lives that they had made fairly comfortable.
I recently went to listen to a speaker at Whitworth. Her name was Anne Lamott. She has written quite a few books and each one is more successful than the last to the point that she enjoys a great deal of fame and success nowadays. She writes books about her life and her family, about raising her son as a single parent and about her faith. She tells a story about a time when she was a young adult, say 25 and she was an alcoholic, unemployed and living full-time in a houseboat. She will certainly tell you now that these were times for her when she was tormented just like the man in the gospel lesson. At the time she might have called herself an atheist maybe a quasi-jew because she had a lot of jewish friends but she certainly wouldn't have let anyone call her a Christian! She had grown up believing Christians were hypocrites at their best and crazy at their worst. But as her life got more and more buried in pain and confusion there was this church that she would often walk by on Sundays that had beautiful gospel music that drew her to its door, she would stand there for the whole service but then during the last hymn she would practically run out the back door before anyone could talk to her or ask her to sit or stay. At the same time she happened to make friends with a local pastor of another church and as hard as she tried to hide all of a sudden everyone she encountered was calling her a child of God. She says that more than once she asked Jesus to leave her alone just like the people in the story but as many times as she asked people kept showing up, calling her a child of God.
This was the last thing she wanted because after a while she started to believe it. All of a sudden this new title started making her feel like she should give up the other titles, the title of drifter and alcoholic of unwanted and unemployed, so slowly at the prodding of many nice church people she started to realize that she was Anne, Child of God. Anne spends all of her time telling this story now, in news ways to new people, she tells about how it develops, how it moves forward (and backward because it does that too) how is stood with great fear and trembling and finally learned to let her herself be called child of God. Her story isn't very clean or pleasant, and she often isn't either but this might just make it one of the best examples of both what the people in today's gospel were afraid of and the ways that the gospel moves to overcome such fears.
At the font each of us is given a new name, as infants, teenagers, young adults or parents ourselves even as whole communities of people who ask Jesus politely over and over again to heal the big problems and then go away we are forever given the name child of God. Despite the fear and pain that surrounds change we are invited to the font and Christ slowly and gently washes all of our old broken places and makes us into shiny new creations who bear his own name.
In our second reading today Paul says that among the children of God there is no greek or jew, no male or female, no slave or free, no titles. Instead of these old names we are given something much better than any title we might ever have. We are all made one in Christ ans we will be cared for and healed according to the promise of Christ because in baptism we have been marked with the cross of Christ forever and we no longer have anything to fear.
This is good news. Amen
Sunday, July 1, 2007
Pentecost 5 C
Well, it is definitely summer here now, the fourth is this week, I live just off of highway two on the north side and I swear everyone who goes by has some kind of a boat with them, they aren't all big boats some are just kayaks or canoes but there is clearly an exodus to lakes happening in Spokane. It seems urgent. People are desperate to get out of town. It is a road-trip frenzy! Even our gospel lesson today is talking about a road-trip. Jesus and his disciples are on a road-trip with sandaled feet to Jerusalem.
Really a great deal of Luke's gospel is committed to Jesus' journey to Jerusalem. We get ten chapters out of only 24 filled with traveling and with stories from the road about the people and things that they encounter. I get the sense from this then, that ministry is a journey and a great deal of it takes place on the road. Jesus teaches on the road, he heals on the road, he tells stories on the road, he sends out disciples from the road and he teaches us to pray from the road.
The journey that we hear about is fascinating, like nothing most of us have ever experienced. As Jesus and the disciples are walking along people are coming up to Jesus asking him all kinds of things including can I come too. Imagine traveling around and having people stop you to ask if they might join in as well. Jesus responded in some pretty interesting ways to these people. The first one who comes along says "Jesus I will follow you wherever you go" and Jesus calls his bluff. He says following me isn't easy, even birds have nests and foxes have dens, even wild animals are more settled than me. I am just walking along, I don't even know what I will eat or where I will sleep tonight, are you sure you want to come?
Jesus wants to make sure that any follower he has knows that ministry is a moving, changing thing, there might be rewards but certainly it won't be easy. There is no road map but it takes a lot of travel.
As part of my time at seminary I did an internship, you all kind of know the process, I think, as there have been some interns here in the recent past. I spent a year as a kind of assistant pastor under a seasoned pastor in Philadelphia named Gordon. Gordon looked at ministry as a journey. For him it was a daily journey through the neighborhood that housed the church. When he first started there the church was dying and they weren't sure they were going to be able stay open, much less pay him. He and his wife decided she could be the bread winner for a year and he would see what came of the church. They thought it would be an adventure for a while. So he started out with no map but some pretty big travel plans.
The church knew that they were going to have to start thinking in new ways so as part of the agreement when he was hired the traditional role of a pastor, in the church office during the week and up at the pulpit on Sunday's was thrown out. The kind of ministry they were going to need was going to involve a new approach. So 60% of his paid time was to be devoted to traveling around the neighborhood. Visiting with people outside of the church.
He got himself a bicycle and rode around the neighborhood, keep in mind we have tightly packed city homes here, knocking on every door. He didn't knock to say, hey please come and join our church though, he knocked to say "Hi, Tell me about your neighborhood". This was his ministry. He very slowly traveled around knocking on, I think it turned out to be 1700 doors, saying tell me about where you live. This was his ministry or rather this was how it started.
He knocked on doors not to try to get new members but to try to find out how to be the church in a neighborhood that looked so different from when the church had first started there. He learned things and he took them back to the congregation. He learned the the neighbors wanted a Sunday school so they started one. He learned that the local AA chapter had been kicked out of their meeting place down the street so they opened the church doors. He learned that the kids in the neighborhood were running around unsupervised in the summer so the church started a vacation bible school that turned into an eight week long day camp for low income families. The people of the neighborhood did things for them too, a faithful woman down the street who could type fast and loved to answer the phone volunteered to take way too little pay to be the church secretary. A woman with a degree in music stopped in and heard some potential in the voices around and started a choir that now sings all over the city.
These things didn't happen overnight and they weren't necessarily free or easy but the congregation figured out how to make them happen because they came to realize that there really was ministry to be done on the road, the one right outside the church doors and that the best way to be a church is to be one on a journey!
I wonder how much of what we get of Jesus ministry came out of people he happened upon because he was traveling, did he share the Lord's prayer because he met someone who needed help praying, did he send out his disciples because he met someone who told him of the great needs in the surrounding towns? Certainly Jesus knew what he was doing setting his ministry up as a journey.
One of the things Jesus did on this journey was to send out scouts, messengers the text calls them, to kind of make up a path to Jerusalem. It was the task of these messengers to be ahead of the rest of the group, to find them places to stay and people willing to feed them as they went along.
They told people that Jesus was coming and they prepared a place for him within communities.
I think that is our job, they way we fit best into this story, we are the scouts, messengers. We are each messengers sent by Christ. Gordon was a messenger sent by a congregation of messengers. Emmanuel is a church full of messengers. And as messengers we are called to spend our time preparing the way for Christ, doing our best to let people know about him and doing our best to be his disciples down here on the road.
The great part about the messenger bit of the story is that sometimes the messengers fail. Right at first in our story they failed. They tried to tell a town that Jesus was coming and that they should open their hearts, arms and homes to Jesus. the town said no and the messengers went back with their tails between their legs but it really didn't phase Jesus much, he said don't be mad at them, just move on. He told the messengers that he loved them anyway even if they didn't accomplish what they set out to do. Perhaps this was because they were doing ministry just announcing Jesus presence, just by being part of the journey.
So do we know where we are going? Has our ministry been a journey? I think of Emmanuel about 15 years ago when I first walked through the front doors, I see some of the same faces and some new ones. Certainly ministry here has been a journey, I hear great things about the campus ministry program based here. I know that past members of the youth group have gone on to do great things. The congregation has sent several members off to seminary and nurtured other seminary students as interns. Members have worked with the town of Cheney on the food bank and other projects. I look forward to seeing where the journey leads next and I feel blessed everyday to be a part of where it has been. What a blessed ministry this community has. What an exciting journey it will always be on and what a joy it has been to be a part of it both up close and from a distance.
It can be dizzying to think that our life with God is always moving and changing. I get tired of my own life always moving and changing I would like a place to be still, but this is the great news about Jesus' journey and our own Journey, as the church on earth, both journeys end in great joy and celebration, in resurrection and life everlasting and in peace at the last. Ministry might be a living, moving, changing thing but God is unchanging, and in Christ we always know our destination.
This is good news, thanks be to God. Amen.
Really a great deal of Luke's gospel is committed to Jesus' journey to Jerusalem. We get ten chapters out of only 24 filled with traveling and with stories from the road about the people and things that they encounter. I get the sense from this then, that ministry is a journey and a great deal of it takes place on the road. Jesus teaches on the road, he heals on the road, he tells stories on the road, he sends out disciples from the road and he teaches us to pray from the road.
The journey that we hear about is fascinating, like nothing most of us have ever experienced. As Jesus and the disciples are walking along people are coming up to Jesus asking him all kinds of things including can I come too. Imagine traveling around and having people stop you to ask if they might join in as well. Jesus responded in some pretty interesting ways to these people. The first one who comes along says "Jesus I will follow you wherever you go" and Jesus calls his bluff. He says following me isn't easy, even birds have nests and foxes have dens, even wild animals are more settled than me. I am just walking along, I don't even know what I will eat or where I will sleep tonight, are you sure you want to come?
Jesus wants to make sure that any follower he has knows that ministry is a moving, changing thing, there might be rewards but certainly it won't be easy. There is no road map but it takes a lot of travel.
As part of my time at seminary I did an internship, you all kind of know the process, I think, as there have been some interns here in the recent past. I spent a year as a kind of assistant pastor under a seasoned pastor in Philadelphia named Gordon. Gordon looked at ministry as a journey. For him it was a daily journey through the neighborhood that housed the church. When he first started there the church was dying and they weren't sure they were going to be able stay open, much less pay him. He and his wife decided she could be the bread winner for a year and he would see what came of the church. They thought it would be an adventure for a while. So he started out with no map but some pretty big travel plans.
The church knew that they were going to have to start thinking in new ways so as part of the agreement when he was hired the traditional role of a pastor, in the church office during the week and up at the pulpit on Sunday's was thrown out. The kind of ministry they were going to need was going to involve a new approach. So 60% of his paid time was to be devoted to traveling around the neighborhood. Visiting with people outside of the church.
He got himself a bicycle and rode around the neighborhood, keep in mind we have tightly packed city homes here, knocking on every door. He didn't knock to say, hey please come and join our church though, he knocked to say "Hi, Tell me about your neighborhood". This was his ministry. He very slowly traveled around knocking on, I think it turned out to be 1700 doors, saying tell me about where you live. This was his ministry or rather this was how it started.
He knocked on doors not to try to get new members but to try to find out how to be the church in a neighborhood that looked so different from when the church had first started there. He learned things and he took them back to the congregation. He learned the the neighbors wanted a Sunday school so they started one. He learned that the local AA chapter had been kicked out of their meeting place down the street so they opened the church doors. He learned that the kids in the neighborhood were running around unsupervised in the summer so the church started a vacation bible school that turned into an eight week long day camp for low income families. The people of the neighborhood did things for them too, a faithful woman down the street who could type fast and loved to answer the phone volunteered to take way too little pay to be the church secretary. A woman with a degree in music stopped in and heard some potential in the voices around and started a choir that now sings all over the city.
These things didn't happen overnight and they weren't necessarily free or easy but the congregation figured out how to make them happen because they came to realize that there really was ministry to be done on the road, the one right outside the church doors and that the best way to be a church is to be one on a journey!
I wonder how much of what we get of Jesus ministry came out of people he happened upon because he was traveling, did he share the Lord's prayer because he met someone who needed help praying, did he send out his disciples because he met someone who told him of the great needs in the surrounding towns? Certainly Jesus knew what he was doing setting his ministry up as a journey.
One of the things Jesus did on this journey was to send out scouts, messengers the text calls them, to kind of make up a path to Jerusalem. It was the task of these messengers to be ahead of the rest of the group, to find them places to stay and people willing to feed them as they went along.
They told people that Jesus was coming and they prepared a place for him within communities.
I think that is our job, they way we fit best into this story, we are the scouts, messengers. We are each messengers sent by Christ. Gordon was a messenger sent by a congregation of messengers. Emmanuel is a church full of messengers. And as messengers we are called to spend our time preparing the way for Christ, doing our best to let people know about him and doing our best to be his disciples down here on the road.
The great part about the messenger bit of the story is that sometimes the messengers fail. Right at first in our story they failed. They tried to tell a town that Jesus was coming and that they should open their hearts, arms and homes to Jesus. the town said no and the messengers went back with their tails between their legs but it really didn't phase Jesus much, he said don't be mad at them, just move on. He told the messengers that he loved them anyway even if they didn't accomplish what they set out to do. Perhaps this was because they were doing ministry just announcing Jesus presence, just by being part of the journey.
So do we know where we are going? Has our ministry been a journey? I think of Emmanuel about 15 years ago when I first walked through the front doors, I see some of the same faces and some new ones. Certainly ministry here has been a journey, I hear great things about the campus ministry program based here. I know that past members of the youth group have gone on to do great things. The congregation has sent several members off to seminary and nurtured other seminary students as interns. Members have worked with the town of Cheney on the food bank and other projects. I look forward to seeing where the journey leads next and I feel blessed everyday to be a part of where it has been. What a blessed ministry this community has. What an exciting journey it will always be on and what a joy it has been to be a part of it both up close and from a distance.
It can be dizzying to think that our life with God is always moving and changing. I get tired of my own life always moving and changing I would like a place to be still, but this is the great news about Jesus' journey and our own Journey, as the church on earth, both journeys end in great joy and celebration, in resurrection and life everlasting and in peace at the last. Ministry might be a living, moving, changing thing but God is unchanging, and in Christ we always know our destination.
This is good news, thanks be to God. Amen.
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