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.