Changing Plans
Luke 10:1-9
August 8, 2021
Emmanuel Baptist Church; Rev. Kathy Donley
Image: He Sent them out Two by Two (Il les envoya deux à deux) - James Tissot between 1886 and 1894
Note: A recording of the worship service in which this sermon was preached may be found here: https://youtu.be/oBsFQVNDqXY
Imagine with me. After a worship service on a high attendance Sunday, we’re all enjoying coffee hour in the fellowship hall. People are talking with each other and milling around and the energy is high. And then, Jesus appears, with a clipboard. He’s looking for volunteers to sign up for something, some project that he’s going to do that week. Except that he isn’t really waiting for people to volunteer. It’s more like he is pointing at people and making assignments – “You two, you’re going to Schenectady. And you two, to Cohoes. You to Green Island, you to Schodack, you two all the way to Hudson” . . . and then, when all 70 of us have our assignments, he says “OK, that’s it. Go now.”[1]
Imagine with me. What would you say? I mean really. It’s Jesus. How are you going to respond?
My answer would not be eloquent. It probably would come out something like “I’m not ready. I had other plans. This was not what I was expecting. I am not prepared.”
I’m pretty sure that would be my response in that hypothetical situation because it was my response earlier this week as the new reality of the Delta variant began to sink in. I do like to plan ahead. I like to be prepared. I had a plan for this summer. The plan was to go on vacation in July, to take a break, and then come back for the FOCUS service and Bill’s baptism last week. The plan was that the country would get vaccinated and we would be able to socialize freely again by this fall. And my plan was that, at Emmanuel, after a year of hibernation, we could do outreach in some new ways and engage people we haven’t even met yet. My plan for worship this month was that we would look again at passages like this one, where people went out on missions of peace as a way of getting ourselves ready to do that. That was my plan.
Then I realized that the pandemic is not close to over. I realized that we are not going to be completely free to socialize freely and form relationships with people we don’t yet know. To anyone who would listen this week, I said “I am not ready for this. I had other plans. This is not what I was expecting. I had other plans.”
You probably also had other plans. You are probably as frustrated or disappointed or angry or deflated as I am. For me, the pandemic has been one long reminder that we do not control as much as we think we do.
. . .
So, Jesus sends out the 70. Seventy is a Biblical number that represents all the nations of the world. The message is to go everywhere. The number 70 is also an indication that ministry is not limited to the 12 apostles. Sharing the good news is not task to be done just by the identified leaders, it is for all of Jesus’ followers.
This section has been called the missionary instruction manual, but there’s not much to it. It doesn’t provide a sense of orientation or preparedness as much as vulnerability.
I have a colleague in the church of England named Anne LeBas. About this text, Anne says, “Jesus starts by very deliberately stripping away from them the props they might be tempted to take with them on their journey. They aren’t to take any money – they will have to rely on the hospitality of those they meet. They aren’t to take a bag, so they can’t accumulate anything along the way that they think might come in useful in their encounters with others. They aren’t even to wear sandals to protect them from the ground on which they tread. It’s a very exposed and vulnerable mission.”[2]
I imagine if Jesus were to repeat this exercise on earth today, he would tell us to leave behind our credit cards, our GPS devices and our cell phones.
The pandemic has taken many of our church props – our sanctuary, our fellowship hall, our ability to see and touch each other on a weekly basis. It has knocked down my plans. I have railed against this. But I am trying, again, to understand the power of vulnerability.
It is the power that Jesus demonstrated – God choosing to be born as a baby, helpless, completely dependent on earthly parents for nurture and protection, even protection from King Herod’s army. It is the power of Jesus the adult, who entrusted himself to those who followed him, even to those who betrayed and crucified him. In some paradoxical way, we understand that power is the power at the center of everything.
We understand this best at Christmas and Easter. We understand it, but many of us live a great deal of our lives the rest of the year on another level. On this other level, we believe that we are self-sufficient. We act as though we are in control, of our calendars, our health, our families, our lives. We make plans.
Jesus sends out the 70 with a heightened sense of risk. They are to travel vulnerably, barefoot, without money or motel reservations. The biggest take-away from this passage is that they have to rely others. Their message will be welcomed by some and rejected by others, but their safety and well-being entirely depend on those who receive it.
That’s not how we think about evangelism today. We think of it as if we have something to give, something to share, not as if we need to receive from others. But then, we tend to think of evangelism as a dirty word and mostly avoid it. So, I wonder if we need to spend more time imagining what form that kind of vulnerable evangelism might take today.
Another thing to note – we tend to think of the church as a gathering, but here and elsewhere, Jesus speaks of it more like a scattering. The 70 have been gathered around Jesus, but Jesus scatters them, sending them out in pairs.
My friend Anne LeBas says, “The harvest Jesus talks about is not a harvest of souls to be gathered into the protective bubble of a congregation where they will be safe from the world. Quite the reverse. It is about learning to spot God and work with God wherever we happen to be, whatever we happen to be doing, and to spot God in others and work with God there as well.”[3]
Changing plans happens on an individual level. The pandemic is revealing how many of our communal and systemic plans also need to change. For generations, Protestant churches in America have been welcoming people into our protective bubbles. Our plan for ministry is to gather people under our roof. That plan worked well for a long time. But for decades now, it has not been working. Fewer and fewer people come in on their own. It seems that a change of plans is in order. Perhaps what we need is to recover this model that Jesus gave us – to put ourselves out there, where we are not in control, to share a message of peace, to form relationships with strangers, to discover those places where God is already at work.
“The harvest is plentiful, but the laborers are few,” Jesus said. Many of us hear that, and because we’re not farmers, we do not understand the sense of urgency Jesus intended. Harvest time is intense. The farmer has tended the crop and waited for it to ripen all season. How well the farmer’s family will live for the next year will be determined by what happens during the harvest. There is a narrow window when the crop is ripe enough for harvest, but not ripe enough to spoil. In many places, the weather is changing. Crops must be gathered quickly before the rains or snows come. I have seen Midwestern farmers in the fields long past dark with lights on their combines and tractors, urgently gathering in grain or beans before the crop is lost.
Barbara Brown Taylor, the gifted Episcopal preacher, tells a story about a visit she made several years ago to southern Turkey. She shares it in her book, The Preaching Life, a book that was published 28 years ago. She writes that while hiking with some friends and a Turkish guide, “We turned a bend and the outline of a ruined (Christian) cathedral appeared ~ a huge gray stone church with a central dome that dominated the countryside. Grass grew between what was left of the roof tiles and the facade was crumbling.”
Taylor goes on to describe the shell of a once magnificent church, which now was filled with trash and indications that it was a play place for children. On the massive walls were still visible the fading frescoes … lambs of God and angels and medieval saints. In the dome you could see one outstretched arm of the victorious Christ who had dominated the building ten centuries earlier.
She observes: “It is one thing to talk about the post-Christian era and quite another to walk around inside it. Christianity died in Turkey – the land that gave birth to Paul – the land of Galatia, Ephesus, Colossae, Nicaea. Today the Christian population of Turkey is less than one percent.”
In place of the cathedral in Turkey, she imagines her own church, collapsed and ruined because no one practices the faith any more. She concludes, “such a thing is not impossible; that is what I learned in that ruin on the hillside … that knowledge keeps me from taking both my ministry and the ministry of the whole church for granted. If we do not attend to God’s presence in our midst and bring all our best gifts to serving that presence in the world, we may find ourselves selling tickets to a museum.”[4]
Her story speaks to same kind of urgency that Jesus was describing. There is a window of opportunity, a generational shift in faith that is happening all around us.
Friends, this is where I am today. I feel an urgent sense to be on mission, to bring all of our best gifts to serving God out in our community. I feel less in control that I ever have been and I’m trying to trust that is a good thing. At the same time, I am aware of the reality of the coronavirus and the need to protect ourselves and our community. I was not ready for that. I had other plans.
I find hope in two things. The first is in trusting that the pandemic will not last forever. There will be a time when we scatter and move out on mission again. The temporary restrictions may simply give us more preparation time than Jesus original disciples got. And secondly, we have come through more than a year of pandemic. In that year, we have adapted. We have changed plans more than once. We have been faithful. That gives me hope and confidence that we will follow Jesus’ directions into a new future together. May it be so for you and for me.
[1] I am indebted to the Rev. J.C.Austin for the sermon title and the opening scene which I adapted from his good work, https://day1.org/weekly-broadcast/5d9b820ef71918cdf2003568/changing_plans
[2] https://sealpeterandpaulsermons.blogspot.com/2013/07/trinity-6-eat-what-is-set-before-you.html
[3] https://sealpeterandpaulsermons.blogspot.com/2013/07/trinity-6-eat-what-is-set-before-you.html
[4] Barbara Brown Taylor, The Preaching Life, (Cambridge: Cowley Publications, 1993), p 3-5