In the Gospel for today we see the twelve sent out to do ministry. Their job was to cure, cleanse, cast out demons and proclaim the nearness of the kingdom of God. These were just average guys, fishermen, a government worker, a guy who fought against the government, a sarcastic guy who couldn’t hold his tongue, brothers that wanted recognition and prominence, a betrayer, some with doubts, one that had great expectations of himself but couldn’t manage to get it together in the clutch. As we watch these followers through the Gospels we find that they aren’t just defined by one trait or component in their lives but nevertheless were called by Jesus. These sound like people I know. Actually, I fit a few of the descriptions. They are called and given a ministry that, let’s face it, Jesus has made look pretty easy up to this point. To compound the perceived difficulty of their mission, he doesn’t send them far and wide, out to the Gentiles and Samaritans, but wants them to stick with their own people for now and help that people, first with what ails, troubles or afflicts them, and allow them to see something new. The apostles or “sent ones” are to display a ministry rooted in grace. This is no simple undertaking. There was an understanding in the culture and sacrificial system that one’s sin was the cause of disease and that when it came right down to it, that you had to pay your way out. This system greatly benefited some and took great advantage of others, but it built some great buildings. Remember how the disciples marveled at the temple and we see Jesus, not impressed. But this system was the way things had always been done. This is the same system and same theology that was in the run up to the reformation. With Jesus, the people’s freedom, the people’s wellness now came first, not the building up of treasuries.
God’s love, forgiveness and healing are all gifts of grace through Jesus. This was not the way things were done and not part of the tradition, once again a tradition that benefited some way more than others. Jesus told them that there would be trouble and rejection. It’s not easy to mess with tradition and the ways people are used to things being done, especially when it takes some of the power from the powerful. Here, at this moment in the Gospel Jesus is sending and commissioning his followers, those regular guys to do a new thing, a loving thing, a graceful thing. If we look back through our Biblical history we see so many times where God’s people fall into traditions that conflict with God’s will we first see destabilization and then God’s people reconstituted. Adam and Eve get kicked out of the garden, the flood, the tower of Babel, the whole Book of Judges over and over, the Babylonian captivity, the crucifixion, the persecution of the early church, the time of the reformation, the holocaust, slavery, apartheid, and now the struggle for equality for women, People of Color and the LGBTQ community.
At the very beginning with the story of Adam and Eve we see humanities efforts to get up and over, to have God’s knowledge or to build a tower to heaven or to place ourselves above others. Each time those actions have led to a destabilization, God’s refusal to let God’s kingdom be pushed away. Jesus tells the ones he sends that the Kingdom of God has come near. That kingdom of love and equality, that kingdom where the oppressed go free, that kingdom where the rough places are made plain and the valleys exalted and the hills made low, where no one suffers from lack or want. It is good news for all yet it is perceived as dangerous or bad news for some. The love of money, possessions and power stand as idols that oppose the Kingdom of God and seek to push it back. This has been going on ever since… well ever. Joshua really gets to the point in Joshua 24:14 “Now therefore fear the Lord and serve him in sincerity and in faithfulness. Put away the gods that your fathers served beyond the River and in Egypt, and serve the Lord. And if it is evil in your eyes to serve the Lord, choose this day whom you will serve, whether the gods your fathers served in the region beyond the River, or the gods of the Amorites in whose land you dwell. But as for me and my house, we will serve the Lord.”
Traditions can be tough, tempting and persuasive. They are easy to fall into irrationally, without rhyme or reason other than that’s the way I was always told to do it, or the way it was always done. Two brief stories. A grandmother was in the kitchen watching her daughter cook a Sunday meal. The daughter grabbed a ham and cut the end off and discarded it. The grandmother asked why on earth she did that. The daughter said, “Because that’s what I always saw you do.” The grandmother thought for a moment and said, “Honey, I did that because we never had a pan pot big enough for a whole ham.” That’s a true story. Or my wife and I were following a recipe, a very old 1700’s recipe, to make an apple stack cake that my wife’s mom had always talked about from her childhood but she could never find a recipe for. We found a recipe book in a museum and it had the recipe for what my mother in law described. The recipe called for essentially dehydrated apples. So we spent the day peeling and drying apples, a very long process. The next step was to reconstitute the apples. I took to heart, way to deeply, what were instructions for a people that generally did not have access to fresh apples for the majority of the year. My wife and I laugh about that to this day, but I learned, for the most part, a very important lesson about questioning traditions.
In the early days of Christianity, Christians found persecution, torture and death around about every corner. Early Christians endured and proclaimed the nearness of the kingdom of God for about 300 years, until the Emperor Constantine made it the State Church of the Roman Empire. Christianity, a movement, a religion founded on a cross of shame, based in giving and sacrificial and a tradition of generosity, grace and forgiveness, even to and especially its enemies, was given the reigns of power. It was then the emperor’s role was to enforce doctrine, root out heresy, and uphold ecclesiastical unity. The Emperor ensured that God was properly worshiped in his empire; what proper worship (orthodoxy) and doctrines and dogma consisted of was for the Church to determine. A new tradition began, one of division, power and control. The tradition shifted and focus went from being a servant to being dominant or in control Love Jesus because we said so. And do it this way because we said so. Constantine, himself was a case in point for the effects of the shift from grace and love to fear. He planned on converting but did not wanted to save baptism for his deathbed so he couldn’t foul up his golden ticket to eternal life. This is not what the kingdom of God is about. Focusing on the kingdom as our personal reward curves the focus back on ourselves and leads to self centeredness.
Are we living this way? In fear, unable to act, are we in fact turning eternal life into an idol, a thing of self centeredness that we worship above all other things including the mission that Jesus gave us, an idol that it binds our hands and feet and holds us hostage, unable and even more dangerously so, unwilling to act or even feel that ache and churn of compassion in our guts. Are we guilty of dismissing the methods, instructions, commissions and mandates of Jesus to serve, do justice, love our enemies, heal and proclaim the kingdom of God, to reach out and serve the disadvantaged, the poor, the alien, the outcast, those who do not look like us or act like us or sound like us, in order to create our own system of salvation that is more palatable, easy and through self serving delusion assures us that we won’t be corrupted by our proximity to “those people” and like Constantine’s fear, foul up our golden ticket to heaven. When we live in this kind of fear, when we live for our own interests, our own protection and are living under the assumption of earning our way in, we are setting ourselves back over 500 years. We are not hearing Paul in our second lesson,”Therefore, since we are justified by faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ, 2through whom we have obtained access to this grace in which we stand; and we boast in our hope of sharing the glory of God. 3And not only that, but we also boast in our sufferings, knowing that suffering produces endurance, 4and endurance produces character, and character produces hope, 5and hope does not disappoint us, because God’s love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit that has been given to us. But God proves his love for us in that while we still were sinners Christ died for us. The Kingdom of God is near! Rise up and pray that God will send us into action, because the harvest is plentiful and the laborers few.
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