Monday, July 14, 2014

The Strange New Ways of God Sending the Seventy—a Guide for Our Times Part 1 Luke 10:1-12

A Proposal for Understanding Our Time of Crisis

   As I have said often, the Spirit of God breaks boundaries, a work that can be for us confusing and disturbing and well, painful. The well-worn patterns and traditions of Christian life that shaped once dominant churches are eroding as our whole world enters a new and as yet undefined time. The patterns of Christian life that shaped and gave meaning to Christian life in America for much of the twentieth century, especially convictions about the place of the church,… are breaking apart. How do we figure out what God is doing in the world? …It is only as we focus attention on this primary question that we can ever ask what it means to be the church in this new time—but honestly this is a secondary question at this point. Luke may not have had just these questions in mind when he wrote his Gospel. He did, however, write with an eye toward Gentile communities in crisis that needed help in reorienting their thoughts and imaginations with the times they found themselves in. Together,… we will imagine what Luke’s response would have been to these questions as he tells the story of the sending of the seventy to all the places Jesus intended to go as he set his eyes toward Jerusalem and his suffering. Luke’s readers already knew the outcome of this journey with its rising opposition toward Jesus and then the post-Pentecost communities.

    What I propose is that in retelling this story, Luke is shaping for these Gentiles the question of what God is doing in the world and, therefore, how to be the church. The proposal to be offered in the sermons to follow is that Luke 10:1–12 describes a way of breaking the “church” conversation and opening up to us a radically different way of being God’s people. …Stated very simply… It is about becoming cross-cultural missionaries in our own culture. …Such a missionary steps out of the conversation about church. …. He or she isn’t preoccupied with themselves. …When entering a different culture, this missionary knows that he or she can’t begin the conversation with church questions.
    As a missionary who has gone into the international mission field with all the educational training and culture of university and Seminary life, I realized I would be of no good to the kingdom unless I learned to enter the culture and dwell among the people to whom I had come. … I made a practice of living with and sitting among the people in the towns and villages to which I had been sent. This sitting in their midst was one of the ways I sought to be present to them and attend to their stories, because I knew that until I did this, I would not be able to understand the gospel in this new place God had sent me. In the midst of these listening dialogues, I learned to be present to the other, to hear, read, and perform the gospel in ways I couldn’t have ever imagined.

Dwell in the Story

Luke 10:1–12 speaks into our crisis in a similar way. It’s important to read this Scripture, because we might assume we already know it. I invite you to read this text as often as possible, over and over again, until it starts to live inside you. Dwell in this story, seeking to hear what the Spirit of God might be saying to us through the text.

I assure you that the ways this text shapes our responses to the questions of what God is up to in the world and what it means to be the church will surprise us. This narrative asks us to turn away from deeply held patterns of response (Our Traditions); ways of doing things a certain way simply because it is the way we have always done it. And so I’m asking you to listen to the Spirit, and not to respond out of custom, comfort or tradition but as a Disciple, as a follower of Jesus Christ. 

Radical Discipleship
      Now, the narrative begins in the setting of discipleship. In other places in Scripture, we read of numbers of people coming up to Jesus and asking what they need to do to become disciples. His responses were so counterintuitive (not customary, not comfortable, not traditional) to their expectations and desires that they turned away from Jesus. (For example, he tells a rich, young ruler to go and sell all he has and then come back and follow him. He tells a Pharisee that he must be born again, to die to his life as he knows it) this discipleship is more radical than anything anyone has imagined. Hear me, it is not about fixing something or adjusting some small area of one’s life. This discipleship requires a very different kind of response and it will probably not align with our expectations or fit with the categories of meaning that have shaped many of us to this point in our lives.

    It is after these kind of encounters with would-be disciples that Jesus sends out seventy followers ahead of him to all the towns and villages where he intends to go in Galilee of the Gentiles. This story is set in the midst of Jesus’s journey down to Jerusalem where he will lose his life. Almost the entire Gospel from this point forward is built around the journey south, its results, and the resurrection. While we now know the story well, for those listening to its first readings, it was filled with huge surprises and turns that no one could have imagined. The events that were foreseen in the story were unexpected; nothing seemed to fit their established ways of thinking.
    
    For Luke this had to do with the why and the way these seventy are sent out. For the second-generation Gentile Christians spread across the empire who were reading the Gospel, what must it have meant for them, as they were reading about their Lord’s journey to Jerusalem and death, to come upon this story? What would it have been saying to their questions about the crisis of identity and meaning they faced?
   
    In Luke 9:51–56 Jesus and the disciples encounter opposition from a Samaritan village. They were not welcomed because “he was heading for Jerusalem.” Old hostilities between these two people who hated each other flare up. The disciples respond with the same old formula from a thought process and imagination that instinctually reacts to Samaritans: “Call down fire on the village and blot out these no good Samaritans! Teach them a lesson of power and authority; show them who’s in charge once and for all.” And, Jesus will have none of it; he will not get involved in the fight despite the Samaritans hard opposition and lack of recognition of who He is.
  
    See, Luke is helping his readers understand that opposition is the norm, it is normal when the Spirit of God breaks the boundaries of expectations and predictable ways of relating to people. At each turn of this story, Luke is providing these second-generation Gentile Christians with a radically different way of thinking from which to reframe their imagination about the promises of God and their place in the movement of Jesus.

    Following this encounter with the Samaritan town, which is a foretaste of Jerusalem—it’s not just Samaritans who don’t get it and resist—Jesus talks to the disciples about the cost of discipleship (vv. 57–62). There are going to be lots of people who want to follow the Jesus movement as long as it fits in with their expectations of how things should turn out. …. But when the directions Jesus takes, deviate from peoples “expectations” of what God is doing in the world, resistance is prompt and fierce. Luke does not hold back in orienting these Christians as they look back over half a century of the church’s young life and wonder why it’s no longer working the way it did for the first generations. This is the setting in which he sets the story of the sending of the seventy. A setting not so different from where we find ourselves in 2014.

    At the conclusion of this story, immediately following their return from the towns and villages, Luke tells a very different story about Samaritans. This story, that of the Good Samaritan, asks questions about welcoming the stranger and who is my neighbor. Luke is pointing to and anticipating that, in regard to the new experience of the seventy, the Spirit of God is working even among the Gentiles; and for us, it means we have to be open to the strange new ways of God as boundaries are broken and expectations have to be reoriented.


    Luke writes these stories of the sending of the seventy and the Samaritan on the road to suggest that what God is doing in the world has a lot more to do with being the stranger and receiving hospitality than being in control of the resources and having all the answers. Here expectations are turned upside down as it turns out that the strangers who need to be welcomed are those being sent. What could this mean for those of us asking confusing questions about what God is up to in the world and what it means to be the church? We must and will unwrap the story further.

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