The Lord now chose seventy-two other disciples and sent them ahead in
pairs to all the towns and places he planned to visit. These were his
instructions to them: “The harvest is great, but the workers are few. So pray
to the Lord who is in charge of the harvest; ask him to send more workers into
his fields. Now go, and remember that I am sending you out as lambs among
wolves. Don’t take any money with you, nor a traveler’s bag, nor an extra
pair of sandals. And don’t stop to greet anyone on the road. “Whenever you enter someone’s home, first
say, ‘May God’s peace be on this house.’ If those who live there are
peaceful, the blessing will stand; if they are not, the blessing will return to
you. Don’t move around from home to home. Stay in one place, eating and
drinking what they provide. Don’t hesitate to accept hospitality, because those
who work deserve their pay.
“If you enter a town and it welcomes you, eat whatever is set before you. Heal the sick, and tell them, ‘The Kingdom of God is near you now.’ But if a
town refuses to welcome you, go out into its streets and say, ‘We wipe even
the dust of your town from our feet to show that we have abandoned you to your
fate. And know this—the Kingdom of God is near!’
When the seventy-two disciples returned, they joyfully reported to him,
“Lord, even the demons obey us when we use your name!”
The “Who”?
Quick quiz time: I will give $1000
to anyone who can correctly name even one third of these 72 disciples… anyone?
Surely someone knows their names – these people were sent by Jesus Himself!!
They walked with Him, felt His touch, heard Him commission them and send them
and guess what it worked!! Surely these people should have an exalted place in
the history of the Christian movement. They must be “somebodys”! We don’t even
know their names. All we know is that there were 72 of them, and Jesus sent
them out in pairs to announce the Kingdom of God. That tells us something
vitally important: The Mission is for Everyone. You don’t have to be one of the
12 or even one of the inner 3 – if Jesus has transformed you then He has also
sent you. So what is your part in this
grand Mission of God? That is the Great Big Question…
The Instructions: #1 Pray For More Hands!
The rest of the passage is the
instructions for the “sent ones”. And since you and I are “sent ones”, these
instructions are for us. The first instruction is to pray: “The harvest is
great, but the workers are few. So pray to the Lord who is in charge of the
harvest; ask him to send more workers into his fields.”
There are a number of important things to note. First, the harvest is there,
and it is ready. Interesting to me is the fact that these workers had nothing
to do with this – they weren’t in charge, they don’t own the field, they didn’t
sow the seed or pull the weeds – the harvest is ready because someone else is
in charge: “the Lord who is in charge of the harvest”. So when we are sent, we
aren’t in charge, and isn’t that great news! I’ve been in charge of things
before, and it is really stressful. You feel like you are responsible for the
whole thing, it is on your shoulders, “the buck stops here”. But in the grand
mission of God, God is in charge! And that sets us free from control, power,
pressure, and expectations of grand success. It is God’s field, God’s harvest,
and God’s responsibility. But it doesn’t stop there, as if then it doesn’t
matter what we do. He is the Lord, but we’ve signed on to His Kingdom and so we
are His to direct. His to send. He gives us the tools we need, and then sends
us into the fields to do what He tells us. If we disobey, all kinds of bad
things happen: grain rots, the King is forced to confront our disobedience, and
instead of being fed and singing songs of bounty and harvest and blessing as we
work hard together, we become lethargic and dour and grumpy and focused on all
the wrong things.
By the way, who do you think really
prays this prayer for “more workers into the fields” – the people sitting on
the edge of the field doing nothing, or the people in the middle of it, working
hard but seeing how desperately needed are more hands, more strong backs, more
voices of encouragement, more basket carriers – because they are seeing good
ripe grain dying and rotting for lack of a few more hands to harvest?
Instruction #2: “Now go.”
When we look for the second instruction it is tempting to jump to the
sheep/wolves bit, but then we’d be missing something critical. Jesus’ second
instruction is simply, “now go”. Just like the sending of the 12 disciples on the
first missionary journey, Jesus simply sends them. He trusts them. He empowers
them as His representatives, His ambassadors, His emissaries with His power and
His message. Remember the context: these are the same disciples that only one
chapter earlier were completely blowing it – missing the whole point – wanting
to call down fire from heaven – arguing about superiority. They haven’t gotten
it all figured out. They don’t know about “love first”, about the various
theologies of sanctification and atonement, about the different strategies for
incarnating the message of Jesus amongst a people group. They haven’t been to
seminary, in inductive Bible studies, done spiritual gifts inventories. None of
that. They are just ordinary followers of Jesus. Just like you. Just people who
have heard Jesus speak, given Him their all, and are now sent to give it a try,
learn as they go, stay reliant on the very simple and basic things that Jesus
has told them.
I really believe we’ve made it way too complicated, when really it is very
simple. Jesus sends us. We go and tell and show what Jesus has done in us and
we invite people to be a part of a different Kingdom. We’ll come back to that
in a moment.
Instruction #3: Danger and Dependence
In an effort to speed this up, I’m
going to sum up verses 3-8 with the two words: “danger” and “dependence”. The
lambs/wolves thing, all the specifics about what to take and where to stay,
really boil down to those two things.
The funny thing is, even in our church culture we’ve modeled and taught the
exact opposite: “safety” and “personal independence”. What kind of crazy person
would send an innocent, defenseless, cute and cuddly little lamb into the
middle of a pack of wolves? We wouldn’t do that! We’d fire someone who did –
get them out of leadership as fast as possible before they do some real damage.
To our teens we say “be safe!”, we pray that they would be “protected”, we want
to create a safe community where they would be comfortable and able to grow in
the sun. But Jesus says, “remember that I am sending you out as lambs among
wolves”. Isn’t Jesus the “good shepherd”, and isn’t the shepherd’s job to keep
the sheep away from the wolves? Something is really backwards here…
The reason is this: the importance of
the mission outweighs the danger. Jesus isn’t callous about the value of
the sheep, He is just far more acutely aware of how vital, life-and-death, is
the rest of the mission. He sends these 72 ahead of Him to announce that the
Kingdom of God is close, and that mission means life and death for eternity for
those to whom the message is sent. And the same is true today. I sometimes
wonder what God sees when He looks at our world and our circles of
relationships from this perspective of mission – I doubt God sees my needs and
wants and safety as a higher priority than the needs of people in my circles
who don’t yet know Him. The importance of the mission outweighs the danger.
Likewise, Jesus’ instructions are all about dependence. The sent ones are not
to spend years preparing everything and then packing it all along, they are to
go and just accept what is offered, and trust God to care for them. I laugh
when I imagine these 72 responding at the end of Jesus’ instructions, if Jesus
were to say, “ok, so any questions?” Um, ya, like a million questions! But the
answer to all of them is simply, “go”, and “trust”.
So to summarize, Jesus is sending us out into hostile, potentially fatal
territory without any preparations. Danger and Dependence.
Why would anyone say yes?
Because the importance of the
mission outweighs the danger. We read verse 17, we know what happened. The 72
go, and as a result people who were stuck were set free. People who were sick –
who couldn’t function or provide for their families or touch their loved ones –
were healed. People who were out of control, tortured by demons, lives more
miserable than you or I can imagine unless you’ve been there yourself, were
liberated, renewed, and invited into this same Kingdom of God. And that, my
friends, is worth it.
There is something about truly giving to others, truly serving them, truly
seeing them transformed and changed, that lifts us to heights of joy that
personal pleasures can’t ever even come close to. If you’ve experienced this
then you know – there is no greater joy than the joy that comes from knowing
that God has worked through you to make an eternal difference in the lives of
someone else. In our culture where everything is focused on “us” and on “me”
and on “what will I get out of it” we’ve been deluded into thinking that those
personal individual pleasures are the greatest and highest and most full of
life, but that is a load of lies. The results of going and sharing and giving
make any danger or discomfort or times of dependence completely and totally
worth it.
The Message of the Mission:
The last 3 verses make very clear
what is the message of the mission. The specifics are about welcome and
rejection, but what stands out to me is that the message is the same whether
the message is welcomed or rejected. Specifically, “the Kingdom of God is
near.” That is the “good news” of Jesus. The message is not “you are a
miserable hopeless sinner but you can be forgiven because Jesus died on the
cross”. The message is “the Kingdom of God is near”. Now in explaining what
that means we have to go to the cross and experience forgiveness and believe in
Jesus’ death and resurrection, but the message of the mission is actually
larger than that. That message is just about us, what God can do for us, and
that is only the starting place. The message of the Kingdom of God is that God
is close, God wants to transform the world through us, God invites us into a
whole new way of living and dying and seeing one another that is the path to
the fullest life imaginable that only comes when we give up our lives, give
Jesus our all, and choose to live for Him and fully engage His mission.
Conclusion:
So what is your part in this grand mission of God? I asked that earlier, to
that question I return. There is absolutely no question. When we study the New Testament, it says that
all who respond to Jesus are then sent. We are all to be Jesus’ witnesses,
Jesus’ representatives, Jesus’ hands and feet, and once we take the name of
Jesus we already ARE those things. Some do harm to the reputation of Jesus by
taking His name and then living contrary to the way Jesus commanded us to live,
but that is another topic… What is your part in this grand mission of God?
I can’t answer that for you. I can’t wrap up this sermon in a nice little
bundle, all neat and tidy and safe, with a cute story. Actually engaging this
mission of Jesus gets messy. It gets personal. It calls us to sacrifice. And it
depends on each of us listening to God’s call, individually put also
collectively in community together, and then obeying.
You need to answer that question –
what is your part in this grand mission of God. You need to wrestle with it,
experiment with it, take risks with it, and above all just go. Just try. Just
get off the benches on the edges of the harvest field and dive on it. Maybe
you’ll end up carrying buckets or bringing water or cutting grain or threshing
it out or something else, but you won’t find that by standing on the edges
looking in. It might be dangerous. You
might have to depend on others. But that is exactly what Jesus intended, so it
must be good, and in fact it must be best. My experiences tell me that it is
best, it is worthwhile, it is full of life and joy. God’s mission is for
everyone, the importance of the mission outweighs the dangers, and the result
is life for the dying, hope for the hopeless, strength for the weak,
significance for the wanderer, and purpose for life. You’ve been invited,
you’ve been sent, and you’ve been entrusted with the message that “God is
near”. Go, work and watch and pray as “His Kingdom comes, and His will is
done.” And this is the Good News for
this Sunday.
Many thanks to Dave Buttgen for delivering this sermon during Pastor French's absence,
.jpg)
