Sermons from St. Paul’s Episcopal Church
Pentecost 5: July 8, 2007
The Rev. Melissa Skelton
Luke 10:1-11, 16-20
After 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. He 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. Go on your way. See, I am sending you out like lambs into the midst of wolves. Carry no purse, no bag, no sandals; and greet no one on the road. Whatever house you enter, first say, `Peace to this house!' And if anyone is there who shares in peace, your peace will rest on that person; but if not, it will return to you. Remain 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. Whenever you enter a town and its people welcome you, eat what is set before you; cure the sick who are there, and say to them, `The kingdom of God has come near to you.' But whenever you enter a town and they do not welcome you, go out into its streets and say, `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.'
“Whoever listens to you listens to me, and whoever rejects you rejects me, and whoever rejects me rejects the one who sent me.”
The seventy returned with joy, saying, “Lord, in your name even the demons submit to us!” He said to them, “I watched Satan fall from heaven like a flash of lightning. See, I have given you authority to tread on snakes and scorpions, and over all the power of the enemy; and nothing will hurt you. Nevertheless, do not rejoice at this, that the spirits submit to you, but rejoice that your names are written in heaven.”
“After 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. He 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. Go on your way. See, I am sending you out like lambs into the midst of wolves. Carry no purse, no bag, no sandals; and greet no one on the road.”
They and we are never ready; they and we are always sent.
The end of Chapter 9 in Luke, right before our gospel for today, is a series of little vignettes about how unprepared, incompetent and ambivalent Jesus’ followers are to be sent out into the world to proclaim and enact the kingdom of God.
These are the vignettes:
- After a Samaritan village will not receive Jesus, James and John, ask Jesus whether they should bid fire come down from heaven and consume that village. Jesus rebukes them.
- An unnamed would-be follower wants to wait to follow Jesus in order to bury his dead father. Jesus replies that the need to proclaim and enact the kingdom takes priority over every concern or duty.
- And finally, a would-be follower says he wants to delay following Jesus in order to say goodbye to those at his home. Jesus replies that one cannot proclaim and enact the kingdom while looking back.
Yet even with all this incompetence, this ambivalence, this lack of preparedness at the end of Chapter Nine in Luke, at the beginning of Chapter Ten, our gospel for today, Jesus goes ahead and sends out the seventy. They are sent forth, in other words, without being completely up to the task, without feeling ready and without being completely prepared.
About being unprepared, I remember a very wise and somewhat annoying pediatrician’s comment to me as I sat in the obligatory hospital wheelchair with my firstborn in my arms waiting to be wheeled out and loaded into the car to go home. He said, “Melissa, when parents go home with their firstborn child, it’s like a baby being taken home by two other babies.”
This in a sense is the story of our lives. We often feel we’re being sent out or sent into something we feel unprepared for or incompetent to do. How many of us felt prepared and competent, for instance, for college, for our first job, for our second career? For marriage or partnership, for parenthood, for significant loss, for midlife, for the care of our own aging parents? How many of us have felt dragged, prodded, or catapulted into a role, a relationship, a phase of life, a vocation we did not feel ready for or capable to do?
I speak of this as if it only applies to new ventures. But this is only half of the story. Many of us have found ourselves in an existing relationship or role when suddenly we have the feeling that God might be sending us into it in a new way, a way that asks us within the familiar to leave the familiar and to travel, as our passage from Luke says, empty-handed, with only ourselves to offer, with focus and greater self-definition, staying the course whether we’re well-received or not, learning to move among wolves.
Ed Friedman’s book A Failure of Nerve: Leadership in the Age of the Quick Fix, deals with some of these very things. Friedman’s focus is leaders, but what he says applies to the challenge of leading our lives in situations that call for us to show up more fully. Friedman believes that leaders these days, whether in families, in parishes, in other organizations or in cultures, are anxious about clearly defining themselves in terms of who they are and what they stand for. Instead, he says, many leaders either withdraw or give in to their own anxiety about the negative effect their own self-definition will have on others. For Freidman, then, healthy leadership, leadership that’s capable of guiding others into a new and creative future, is more about focusing on one’s own self definition while staying connected to others, than it is about a kind of technical competence or expertise or about gathering more and more information to be sure the leader makes the right decision. For Friedman, healthy leadership is about non-anxious, well-defined presence.
Finally, Friedman comments that one of the marks of this kind of well-defined leadership, leadership that has the potential to create something new, is the emergence of what he calls saboteurs, those whose impulse is to undermine the organization or community’s new and healthy direction. Saboteurs, Friedman says, are an inevitable accompaniment to this kind of leadership.
As I read Jesus’ words to the seventy about being sent out to proclaim and enact a kingdom of peace, freedom and wholeness, words that are also directed to us as we’re sent into the places that need renewal in our lives, I’m reminded of Friedman. For Jesus tells the seventy not to focus on taking accoutrement—a purse, a bag or sandals—but to take just themselves, to enter a house and to stay there, that is, to stay in touch with people they are there to serve, and to be clearly defined about their purpose of healing and proclaiming the kingdom. And consistent with Friedman’s ideas about well-defined leadership, the seventy are to be ready to stay the course whether they are welcomed in a town or not, continuing to assert that the kingdom of God had come near. And as for moving among wolves, like Friedman’s saboteurs, Jesus simply tells his followers that they can count on wolves being there.
As I think about taking this kind of leadership in our lives, being well-defined in the face of our own and others anxiety, I wonder how it is that we do it as well and as often as we do—how you and I in so many cases, manage to go ahead and venture into something when we feel we’re not up to the task, manage to define ourselves to others after balking at doing this and running and though anxiety rages within us and while those wolves roam about. How do we do it as often as we do?
It can only be that we have unseen help along the way. It can only be that though we don’t perceive it, what feels so laborious and difficult to us is connected, caught up and supported in God’s larger action of birth, growth and harvest. It can only be that what feels like our solitary struggle with defining ourselves and staying the course and dodging the wolves, is not as solitary as it feels—that we, like the seventy, have been sent out with a partner, the Holy One who defines what it means to be well defined while staying in touch with the those he has come to serve, the one who renews the world in the face of those who would not welcome him and in the midst of wolves. It can only be that somehow the way it works is that when we first commit ourselves by stepping out into the places we are sent that somehow God move in to assist us
In 1951 William Hutchinson Murray, one of a group of Scottish mountain climbers, wrote the following about an expedition to Tibet that he and some others were planning and were having a hard time getting going on. His words, that are a reflection on the significance of taking the first step, capture the the mysterious sense of support we can discover when, though unprepared, we take a step and move into the places we believe we are being sent. He writes: “(Taking a first small step) may sound too simple, but is great in consequence. Until one is committed, there is hesitancy, the chance to draw back, always ineffectiveness. Concerning all acts of initiative and creation, there is one elementary truth the ignorance of which kills countless ideas and splendid plans: that the moment one definitely commits oneself, then providence moves too. A whole stream of events issues from the decision, raising in one's favor all manner of unforeseen incidents, meetings and material assistance, which no (one) could have dreamt would have come his way.”
Works Cited or Consulted
Edwin Friedman’s A Failure of Nerve: Leadership in the Age of the Quick Fix
William Hutchinson Murray, The Scottish Himalayan Expedition. Murray's book (J.M. Dent & Sons Ltd, London, 1951) details the first Scottish expedition in 1950 to the Kumaon range in the Himalayas, between Tibet and western Nepal. The expedition, led by Murray, attempted nine mountains and climbed five, in over 450 miles of mountainous travel.
