It is not for the elite. You need not be a professional. It is not an exclusive club, private fraternity, or social clique. The “Bold and the Beautiful” are welcome, but the “Humble and the Homely” will be in charge. Jostling for power or position is counterproductive and will not be tolerated; feeling not as important or not as useful is an especially insidious lie. There is only one entrance fee, the same for all, and everyone has the exact same ability to pay. It is, quite simply, your all. Once you give your all, prepare to be transformed. You will be renewed, set free, forgiven, adopted, and blessed; and then you will be sent into danger with nothing except this transformed self and a new companion. Sent into possible rejection. Possible pain. Possible situations where you will love and work and have your heart broken and your work discarded. Once you are transformed you are sent – no other options or alternatives; no cushy desk jobs with lazy feet up reading a trashy novel, no lounging around in big comfy couches with funny movies and bottomless bowls of popcorn and soda.
Nope. Once you are transformed and begin to find out what it really means to be alive – fully, completely, wholly alive – the things you have “gained” in this transformation are not things to make your life nice and easy, but are tools to be used in hard rewarding work of eternal value, and if you lay them up against the side of the house they’ll just rust and be useless.
The Mission is for Everyone. I really believe that the church at the beginning of the 21st Century has forgotten this. “No, the mission is for the missionaries, not for ordinary people like me…”. “That should be the pastor’s job…”. And besides, we think, what can I do anyway? Enter Jesus:
Luke 10:1-11, 17 (NLT):
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,
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