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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