July 4, 2010

John Bluck, Retired Bishop of Waiapu

Pentecost 6     Luke 9:51-62

Have you met Jack Reacher yet? He’s the hero of the mega successful best seller writer Lee Childs. Jack is an ex military cop turned lone ranger who stalks the highways of mostly rural America, a cross between a Kung Fu outlaw and a reluctant Robin Hood, doing good but never settling down.

What makes Jack extraordinary and an all time great fictional hero is not just his laconic speech (he’s never been guilty of anything longer than a seven word sentence), or his lethal elbow jab (eat your heart out Bruce Lee), but his steadfast refusal to carry any luggage. Nothing. A credit card, a fold up toothbrush but no wallet, no change of clothes, no home address, no IRS number. Nothing. Jack is utterly unencumbered, available where he’s needed, free to move on where he’s not welcome.

Jack Reacher is a great mystery, but he’s not as great a mystery as today’s gospel reading. The 70 disciples that Jesus sends out ahead of him can’t do kung fu, and they certainly didn’t serve time in the military, but they do travel light like Jack, and they don’t look back, like Jack, and they are confident about themselves and their mission, like Jack, only a hundred fold more so.

But there’s a big difference. Unlike Jack, the confidence of the 70 disciples doesn’t rest in their own skill and strength (which probably was in short supply). We’re not told who the 70 are or where Jesus dug them up locally, but if his earlier efforts to recruit a team are anything to go buy, Jesus wasn’t very fussy. A random collection of fishermen and tax collectors.

Which in today’s terms would be a bit like stopping your car where there’s some road works going on and saying to those guys in the orange jackets, you’ll do, you’ll do, get out of that digger and come with me.

The 70 have had no training, no skill set testing. Their confidence comes in the brief they’ve got from their master, and the unqualified trust and unshakeable belief he invests in them. Somewhere Jesus has got them to believe they can help him change the world. The spirit of what drives them here is the same as the spirit of that Isaiah passage we read and sing every Advent:

And every valley shall be lifted up and every mountain and hill laid low. And in the desert, make straight a highway for our God. (Is 10:4) Maybe recruiting a road works crew would make sense.

But what makes this story so extraordinary is the confidence of the disciples. Where do you find anything like it today?

In some of the fundamentalist churches who are so utterly convinced about their own righteousness? The ones who come to your door and speak about God as though he is sitting on their shoulder, dictating the words. I don’t like it. I say have a nice day and close the door. But I’m left marveling at their conviction.

(And even more powerfully, you find it in the confidence we invest in consumer products that promise to change our world. We wonder about God sometimes but I have no doubt about the power of my Apple computer (which I do own) and my Armani suit (which I don’t, yet). We believe these things will make us sexier and smoother and more desirable. Why else would we buy cars and clothes and flat screen TVs and furniture that cost three times more than we need to pay, if we need them at all.

As someone who lusts after a bigger, flatter TV myself I can answer that. Because when I do get the model I hunger after I know my viewing evenings will be brighter and happier and I’ll go to bed more relaxed just as the ads tell me I will. Millions of us have been taken prisoner by a huge confidence ini the consumerism dream and breaking the habit is harder than giving up on nicotine.

The 70 disciples brought that sort of confidence (but expanded a hundred fold) to their mission. It’s almost impossible for us in our cynicism and world weariness to imagine just how confident they were. It so exceeds anything we know, even the worst of our consumerist captivity.

Jesus promises them the moon and the stars as well. Oh to revel in the sheer excitement of that promise. I remember the intensity of the anticipation we knew as children when the circus promotions man came to town ahead of the circus itself. He’d stick up gawdy colour posters and throw a few free tickets around to the local shops and trigger our dreams about the greatest extravaganza about to play in the local showgrounds. I’d tick off the days on the grocer’s calendar that hung in our kitchen. Nothing would stop me getting to the tent on time.

The disciples’ expectations were nothing less. We aren’t told what happened when they went out but we do know that it exceeded all their dreams. They came back with great joy, we’re told and whatever they did it caused “Satan to fall from heaven like a flash of lightning.” Better than any circus.

This gospel passage is more about the style than the substance of Christian life. It’s a style that demands we walk with a confidence that is not our own, with bigger dreams than we would ever dare to invent for ourselves, with expectations that the world can really change and the future is going to be hugely better than all the present gloomy evidence suggests. The stuff we strut as Christians is not our stuff. It belongs to God, comes from God and will take us if we dare to let it, right into the heart of God one day.

Don’t ever fool yourself that your achievements in the Christian life of peace making, justice working, relationship building, forgiving, hoping, healing, keeping faith are anything to do with how smart and good looking you are, says Jesus. “Don’t rejoice in the strength I give you,” he warns, “ just be happy that your names are written in heaven”.

Christianity in that sense is a life style, a way of being in the world as much as a way of doing. Let’s face it, the 70 disciples are not asked to do much of anything in this passage. Go out there and tell people God is close, (the Kingdom surrounds them), promise them that, bless them with the peace of God, pray with them for wholeness and healing, be present and available so God can work through you as you eat and drink with them.

And that’s about it. You don’t have to preach any sermons, sign up any members, enforce any moral rules, demand allegiance to any creed, or pray ten times before bedtime. It’s a pretty minimal job description for doing anything.

But it’s a massively challenging way of being. Deeply confident, filled with great expectation, never discouraged or taking offence. If you get knocked back then smile and move on. Carry no baggage of regret, drop off the weight of loss and failure. Break out of the undertow of old sadnesses that suck you back and down. Leave it all behind as emphatically as you shake off the dust from your sandals.

St Matthews prides itself on being the home of progressive Christians. It’s a big, bold claim to make about ourselves. We spend a lot of time saying what we mean by that – and what we don’t have to believe, sometimes more often than what we do

But the biggest challenge from this text for progressive and any other brand of Christian is to live and act as though God really is present in charge of the world, holding the future in loving hands, working out the divine purposes of justice and mercy with a grace that overturns and overwhelms and undergirds everything we try to do.

People stay away from church and don’t think much if anything about God because people like us, even if we’re progressive, don’t look, let alone act as though we’re confident that God really is still creating and transforming the world.

It ain’t easy to be that confident. And that’s because confidence is wrongly equated with certainty, with having all the answers, with conviction that dares admit no doubt, no hestitation.

The gospel is not calling for that sort of confidence. What Jesus is calling us into is a love affair built on risk and trust rather than a contract of unquestioning obligation. He’s calling us to give ourselves over passionately, wholeheartedly to a relationship that matches the excitement and risk of what our faith is all about. And he’s expecting us to dream dreams and live as though anything and everyone are capable of transformation.

The call is nothing less than this: to be the people who believe that what began on the first morning of creation is ongoing, unfolding, and taking us into a future that is something more than we can imagine or desire.