(Note: This blog entry is based on the text for “Dependence Day”, originally shared on July 1, 2021. It was the 127th video for our YouTube Channel, Streams of Living Water (https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCB7KnYS1bpHKaL2OseQWCnw), co-produced with my wife, Rev. Sally Welch.)
When I first arrived in Compton for my first call as a young single man,
I didn’t have any place to stay. I was looking for a place. So, in the meantime
I found accommodations in a house owned by a sister congregation in town that
had just been fumigated, then in a room with a church member until her son got
home, then in a Sunday School classroom of the church I was serving until we
took that over for something else, and then at the back of the worship area until
I got a place of my own to stay.
It was not bad. I was a younger man; I don’t know if I could do the same
thing today. But I was able to go out and stay wherever I could find an accommodation,
much like the disciples in today’s reading from the Gospel of St. Mark.
Today’s reading from Mark 6 somewhat
parallels where we are in the pandemic. In the pandemic, we’ve taken two steps
forward and now one step back with the variant and those who have not yet
gotten their vaccines making it now necessary to return to wearing masks
indoors. In our reading from St. Mark, we take one step back and two steps
forward with Jesus.
In the part of the gospel that we looked at
last Monday, Jesus is rejected in his hometown of Nazareth. Today, Jesus takes
two steps forward with the calling and sending out of his 12 disciples. They
are given some very interesting instructions and amazing authority from Jesus
before they go.
In today’s reading, Jesus’ disciples have zero ministry experience. They
are sent out to get some as soon as they are called.
Our reading starts with the second half of verse 6:
“Then he went out among the villages teaching.”
Jesus is not discouraged by failure. He simply returns to his mission
and trains his disciples to do the same.
Then, in verse 7:
He
called the twelve and began to send them out two by two, and gave them
authority over the unclean spirits.
All we get
from Mark about Jesus calling his disciples is that he called them. And then he
sent them out. That made them apostles. Disciples are those who follow.
Apostles are those who are sent. They don’t reach full apostle status until the
Day of Pentecost, the birthday of the church. Then they receive the Holy Spirit
and go out into the world as apostles of the Church, the Body of Christ.
Jesus sent
them in pairs, which would have given them a measure of safety, defense against
loneliness, and a means for accountability. But most significantly, under Jewish
law, two witnesses were required for a valid testimony. The disciples are going
to testify to what they have seen and heard in Jesus Christ. Jesus gave them
authority over unclean spirits, the presence of evil. The did not have
authority of their own. It came from Jesus.
And what
were they to take with them for the trip? Jesus gave them a list of things not
to take that was way longer than what they were to take, starting at verse 8:
8 He ordered them to take nothing for their journey
except a staff; no bread, no bag, no money in their belts; 9 but
to wear sandals and not to put on two tunics.
The disciples
would now depend upon Jesus.
A staff
was an object of authority in the Bible. It is also useful to travel faster and
with more stability as one moves across uneven ground. I take a staff when
Sally and I go on walks in case we run across crazy dogs or coyotes.
Some scholars
say that it was hooked by the arms behind the back to help one move more efficiently
and faster. I haven’t tried that, but maybe it worked. Otherwise, they were to
trust Jesus and depend entirely on the hospitality of those they met in the
journey.
They
were to give no appearance of an ulterior motive, but to only bring the good
news. Their housing was to take on the same form, continuing with verse 10:
10 He said to them, “Wherever you enter a house,
stay there until you leave the place. 11 If any
place will not welcome you and they refuse to hear you, as you leave, shake off
the dust that is on your feet as a testimony against them.”
Hospitality
was a huge social obligation at the time of Jesus. It still is today,
especially outside of cities. So, what?, they just walked around and waited for
someone to take them in? Yes! Exactly!
When I
studied in Israel for a semester when I was in college, I used to enjoy walks
in the countryside. I got more a sense of it being a holy land there than in
the cities or at the sites of the great events in the Bible that were now often
encrusted with gold and silver and had churches or monuments built over them.
It’s very difficult to get a sense of what happened in those places by looking
at them now. For example, people from all over the world come to Jerusalem, especially
during Lent, to walk the route that Jesus walked from his trial to the place of
his crucifixion. That level is actually about 6 feet below the route people
walk today. The settled dust and dirt of almost two millennia are what people are
actually walking on. They aren’t walking in the footsteps of Jesus.
Wherever
I walked by a home in a village or settlement, if anyone inside saw me walking
by outside, they would run out and say, “Come in! Have some tea, or water. Have
something to eat.” Even if they had very little, it was expected that it would
be offered to strangers.
Jesus
told his disciples to count on that.
The
expectation was that someone in the village would invite them in, and then
would invite them to stay there. And if that happened, Jesus said, they were
not to look for better accommodations. They were to build their credibility by
seeking only to bring the message of Jesus Christ, that the Messiah had come,
and that the Messiah had sent them out with his authority to cast out evil and
heal the sick.
Staying
in one place meant that people would know where to find them.
If no
one invited them to stay, they were to do something shocking. They were to
shake off the dust on their sandals as they left.
When Jews
had traveled to other lands, gentile lands, pagan lands, they were to shake the
dust off their sandals before they reentered the land of Israel so as not to pollute
it.
To shake
off the dust on their sandals was a statement that the place that had not
welcomed and heard them could not consider themselves to be God’s people. They
were being regarded as a gentile place and would be under God’s judgement as
such. Jesus told them not to spend a lot of time there. Move on.
We
continue with verse 12:
12 So they went out and proclaimed that all should
repent.
Repentance is at the center of Jesus’ proclamation to repent and
believe, that the Kingdom of God is at hand.
, “Repentance’ doesn’t mean saying “I’m sorry”.
The Greek work here is “metanoia”; it literally means “to turn around”. It
means I am going in the wrong direction, away from God. If I realize this and
say, “I’m sorry for the bad things I’ve done,” that’s not repentance. To repent
means to turn around, to turn away from those things that are killing us, to stop
and be drawn back to God, in a life that truly is life. It is a change of heart
and direction.
That is
the beginning of the Christian life and its content when we are going in the
wrong direction.
This
passage concludes with the work of the disciples with the authority that Jesus
has given them, continuing with verse 13:
13 They cast out many demons, and anointed with oil
many who were sick and cured them.
This is their work. This is what they have to offer as their calling
card. It is a reminder to us that, as has been said by others, Jesus doesn’t
call the qualified. Jesus qualifies the called.
There is an African saying that “If you want to go fast, go alone. If
you want to go far, go in a group.” The disciples are equipped to go both far
and fast.
They are told to travel light, to bring only those things that will help
them move quickly and not to spend a lot of time with people who will not
listen.
They are also sent in pairs. Relationship is everything in the Christian
life. Faith itself comes in a living relationship with the one true living God.
But is two people a group? The state of California DMV seems to think
so. I think it’s funny that the far-left lane of some freeway stretches is
called the carpool lane, or more properly the HOV, or High Occupancy Vehicle,
lane. How many people do you need to have in your vehicle in order for it to be
considered highly occupied? Two. What is the smallest number you could possibly
have beyond one? Two! That’s considered high occupancy. That’s a group. 😊
The disciples are sent and equipped to go both fast and far.
And, when they arrived at a new community, they were told to burrow in
and be of service in the life of the community as they proclaimed the message.
One of my favorite books on church
development is a thin little book titled, How To Knock Over A 7-Eleven: And Other Ministry Tales by Michael Cheshire.
It’s about a group of people who go to a
smallish town of 9,000 people in Colorado to start a church.
The strategy was for each of the group to be a specialist in one aspect
of church ministry, so that a large church staff was present from the founding
of the church and potential members would have all the church’s programs right
from the start: Preaching, Administration, Teaching, Music, Youth, Worship,
Outreach. Everything. The staff would each get a part-time job to support them
until the church grew and they could make their church specialty their
full-time job.
That wasn’t working. The staff was getting more and more frustrated.
One night, they were having a strategy meeting
and their frustrations were bursting out. It got so heated that the lead pastor
had to yell at the staff, “You people are so disorganized, you couldn’t knock
over a 7-11,” and stormed out of the room and up onto the rooftop patio.
He said that he wished he could say that he went up on the roof to pray
but he just went up there to cool-off.
When he had, as he came down and approached the room where the staff was
meeting, he heard them laughing and someone had taken charge and was saying
things like, “OK Jim, you get the get-away car. Julie, you get the guns. I’ll
watch for the police…”, and they had bonded over their plan.
Everyone had also cooled down and they decided to take a new approach.
They decided to be a servant church first and a professional nonprofit church
organization second.
The asked around to see what was needed and learned that the community
really needed a handyman business. So, they started one. They learned how-to
skills on YouTube and kept their prices low. Then, they found that a restaurant
was needed, so they started a cafe and hired local people needing a job. If you
didn’t have the money for a meal, you could trade work for it. They started a
low-cost car repair place for single moms and people who just needed
transportation so that they could get to work.
Then they started a summer outdoor movie theater and kept admission and
snack prices low so that a family could afford to go. A flier showing the
movies and dates was sent around and, almost immediately, one of the major
supporters of the church asked to see the pastor. He wanted to know why a movie
supporting witchcraft was on the list. Which movie? A Harry Potter movie. The
pastor explained that he thought it was more about friendship, and loyalty, and
courage, and resisting evil. He asked the supporter what kind of movies he
would recommend. He said that he liked “Lord of the Rings”. Then the epiphany
came and, the pastor said, they didn’t have a Harry Potter movie that summer.
They had two Harry Potter movies.
After several years of serving and getting known in the community as
people who genuinely came to serve, they opened their worship ministry.
They have thousands of members in a town of 9,000 because they were
known as servants of the community first.
Like the disciples in today’s passage from Mark 6, they burrowed into
the community and gained credibility by not serving their own interests first.
That’s just the opposite of the way most churches are developed, and we
spend a lot of time making up for it and getting known as communities of
service to the larger community as well as people with a needed message.
Think about how you first came to be a Christian. Chances are it was
because of the influence of a credible witness.
Study after study on how people come to faith and are members of local church
for decades have shown that 80-85%, depending on the study, come to faith in
Christ through the influence of a friend or relative. They are credible because
they are not seen as having an ulterior motive, just our best interests at
heart.
People may come to a church because it’s in their neighborhood, or they
like the preaching or the counseling, or the music, or the youth program, but
that only accounts for 15-20% of all those who come to Christ. People are most
likely to come to Christ because of the influence of a friend or relative, a
credible witness, as the disciples were credible witnesses even when they were
away from home, with nothing to gain personally, only something good to give to
those who heard it.
We trust God to provide us with everything for life that truly is life
and eternal salvation because God is trustworthy. We see it first in the lives
of credible witnesses around us, and then we see God working in our lives. We
see it in our baptisms, in God’s presence for us in Holy Communion, in the Word
of God revealed to us by the Holy Spirit, God’s ongoing personal presence within
us, moving like streams of living water to nourish and sustain us in the
Christian life. We are totally dependent on God for all of life that truly is
life. We can’t do any of it ourselves.
Like the disciples, we confront evil and cast it out, we seek the
healing of what is broken. We call for repentance, for turning away from the
things that are literally killing us and our communities, and turning toward God
to be drawn to the life that truly is life.
We proclaim the already and not yet Reign of God by both deed and word.
We serve others as a sign, but we proclaim the Gospel as the substance
of the Christian life, the death and resurrection of Jesus for the sake of
everyone, and transformed life for all who receive God’s gifts.
Americans celebrate our Independence Day once a year on July 4th,
the anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence from the unjust
colonial rule of Great Britain.
Christians whose lives are a new creation, who
have been called to follow Jesus, who are fed and nourished by the Holy Spirit,
are people who have been equipped and sent to bear witness to the presence of
God in the world in response to the unearned and undeserved gifts that God has
already given them. We are completely
dependent upon God. We declare that God has given us everything, including our
faith, including our salvation, including our ability to recognize God’s
presence in the world and share it with others.
And we are dependent on one other in the Church, each of us with
different gifts, just as there are different parts in the Body of Christ. We exercise
our gifts for the sake of the whole Church. We contribute our time, treasure,
and talent in glad response to what God does for us freely so that we can
accomplish the work that God has given us to do together.
We celebrate our dependence day every day of the year because it is in
our dependence upon God that we have been made free.
Let us declare our dependence upon God today and give thanks to God for all
God has done and continues to do for our lives now and for eternity.
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