Luke 10:3-4
Journeying Sentness
For Luke, our faithful God sends the boundary-breaking
Spirit of God to form communities of Jesus characterized by a journeying
sentness. This means that Luke, in writing what is today the two separate
volumes of Luke-Acts, used the mission of God in the world as the lens for
interpreting events to these Gentile communities. In one sense this is part of
the question with which these Christians were wrestling, namely, what had gone
wrong with the mission of God? His telling about the seventy is part of Luke’s
vigorous counter-narrative, which says that mission is still central but not in
the ways they had anticipated.
The overall sense of this story is that Jesus sends his
followers out on a counterintuitive journey of mission for the sake of the
kingdom. This was a difficult image for these second and third generation
Gentile questions. End of time expectations had faded. The heroes of the church’s
birth, leaders like Paul and Peter who drove the mission of the kingdom across
the Roman world, were gone from the stage, creating anxiety about who was
leading and what the next steps might involve. Most have grown up in small
churches in homes linked together by the reports of an expanding movement in
which they had seen lots of people coming into the faith.
But, toward the end of this first century followers did not
share the same fervor of the earlier generation, so they were characterized by
a loss of energy and enthusiasm for the mission of God. They had taken the
mission of God, the Good news of Jesus Christ that in Him, the Kingdom had
come, and turned it into a religion. … In the light of these realities, we see
Luke returning to the founding stories of Jesus and the disciples to provide
these Christians with a new basis, a new foundation, for being faithful communities
of Gospel witness. This will mean reshaping their imagination about how the
Spirit of God was moving this witness of Jesus forward.
This metaphor of journeying faithfulness in the midst of
opposition must have made for struggle for them to hear. By this time they
expected Jesus to return. By now God’s future should have been all wrapped up
rather than this situation of crisis, conflict, and confusion and persecution. They
were communities that had been waiting, expecting; they had a predetermined
conviction that there was but a short period of time before the end 0f time
future dawned. What would these changes in expectation mean for their formation
as communities of Gospel witness? ….How could they go about discerning what God
was doing? Luke’s metaphors of discipleship and conflict, of journeying and
entering communities without baggage, painted a wildly different interpretive
framework from the one into which they had settled. The implication is that in this setting of crisis and identity, it is
journeying people who are ready to risk entering the ambiguous and vulnerable
spaces of mission that follow the contours of God’s engagement in the world.
Ordinary People
So, by the later part of the first century the heroes of the
initial outburst of missionary fervor were gone. What happens when the heroes,
the great figures of the faith who pioneered an immense movement of the Spirit,
are gone from the stage? Where do you turn to find new heroes who can lead into
the crisis-ridden future? …. Luke’s answer is different from anything that
could have been expected. His message was that God’s Kingdom is announced and
lived in the midst of ordinary people, not the heroes, the professionals, or
the stars of the faith.
The seventy who are sent out are nameless, but that doesn’t
mean they’re unimportant, just used to make a point. I think Luke is saying
something important to his little church communities and us about the nature of
the gospel in the midst of their confusion and lostness. These people are
looking back to the first generation of Christians and to the stories of the
apostles their brave deeds, and their amazing miracles. But these heroes of the
faith are all gone-that time is over and this new generation feels lost and a
little lost.
In the nameless seventy, Luke is saying something about how
the gospel indwells a time and place as well as the nature of the community and
its tasks. It is among ordinary men and women, whose names will not be recorded
or remembered, that God shapes a future. And, contrary to the way we set
everything up in the modern world we live in, it will not be from the stars and
professionals, the so called great leaders and church and spiritual gurus, that
the direction of God’s future is discovered. It will not be through some who
get to the top of some proverbial mountain and come down with the directions and
solutions of what God is up to in the world emerge. It is through the ordinary
people of God, the nameless people who never stand on stages and platforms like
this one or get this, that the gospel will indwell our world. This is the
strange, counterintuitive imagination Luke seeks to give to these Gentiles and,
over thousands of years to us Ridgecrest.
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