William Yagel
Grace Radford
July 3, 2022
Proper 9, Year C
Holy and Loving God - may the words of my mouth and the meditations of all of our hearts be pleasing in your sight oh Lord for you are our rock and our redeemer.
Good Morning!
When I was learning about liturgical theology at VTS I was taught that a liturgy often embraces or provides tension. It is not always obvious, in fact, it usually escapes notice. The tension that often appears in a liturgy can be subtle, working on us a deeper level than we might be aware. Those tensions can help express the broadness or our understanding of the Trinitarian God that we worship. They work to remind us that we are all complex beings who can, say, laugh and weep at a funeral, a wedding, or a baptism. Those tensions can help remind us that the nature of our faith and the nature of God is complex and varied, and the moment we are comfortable with a simplistic or linear understanding is the moment that we should be preparing for a shift.
I think of the Ash Wednesday service: full of the gravity and somberness of the season of Lent that is to follow, calling us into a time of fasting and reflection. But often that service ends with a Eucharistic meal celebrating God’s sacrifice for us?
In a Eucharist, we confess our sins for those things we have done and left undone before receiving the sacraments, but we are still those flawed people that are invited to the Lord’s table. We the broken receive perfection broken for us. My professor of liturgics was fond of saying that our Eucharistic meal is ordinary bread and ordinary wine, like any other. AND it is bread and wine like no other in the world. I mean, the concept of the Trinity itself: God as one and God as three in one. God is singular and God is community at once to our minds. Tension.
Bearing that in mind, I think the liturgists might be pleased with the Gospel of the day. It seems a fitting challenge to us as Americans that Luke’s words for this morning fall on the week of Independence Day. On this, the most American holiday, the lectionary challenges our concepts of security and really, I would say our very notion of independence..
When Jesus sends out his seventy laborers, he sends them out with nothing extra. Only the clothes they are wearing. They are to rely on the generosity of strangers. Like lambs. Among wolves. They are sent with only who they are, and who God has called them to be. Armed with love, go change the world. It gets even better, once you get there and find a place that will feed you and give you shelter, you are not to look for another place to go.
“You are to remain in that same house, eating and drinking whatever they provide, for the laborer deserves to be paid. Do not move about from house to house.”
They couldn’t upgrade to a house with more square feet and a more comfortable bed. Once they were there, they were there, and they had to rely on that family for care. These seventy travelled with nothing. No way to provide for themselves, and they had to depend on their neighbors to support them.
Yes, I think the liturgical theologians might be appreciating the tension, as this Gospel is proclaimed a day before we celebrate our “independence”. Tomorrow we celebrate breaking ties with England, but it also brings to mind for me some of the narratives that we celebrate in our culture: rugged individualism, dogged determination, and self-reliance. Pulling oneself up by one’s bootstraps seems an operable phrase here?
Now believe me, I know and participate in all these narratives from time to time. Often I would say I love them to my detriment. For example, I don’t always like asking for help, and if I search deeply, I might find that I consider that a weakness in myself, but at the same time, a strength in someone else. Maybe you can relate? It is good for everyone else to lean on each other, but somehow, I should be able to do it myself. More tension.
Anyway, I expect and hope that you might recognize the ethos I am referring to in our national consciousness. I also hope you see the tension and the challenge that our reading offers this morning. How do we do God’s work with so little. I mean we have a full pantry in our house pretty much all the time, and though it always seems to be lacking that one ingredient for any dish we want for dinner, there is no denying that we live in a house of plenty. I am glad that we do, but I recognize how uncomfortable that makes me when I think of our passage to day. The notion that we are to be equipped with only ourselves can be unnerving. It can be defeating. It can be terrifying. It is terrifying as individuals, but maybe even more so as a church.
Outreach.
There is a budget item for us. How do we take what we have left, after we have covered the salaries, repaired the buildings, paid our utilities, our worship expenses, and then go out and give to the community? So often anymore that number is written in red on the balance sheet! How in such scarcity do we give? How can we be present in our community and a voice for God’s love if we don’t have enough money, enough people, enough youth, enough programming? It is easy to set our mind on how we are supposed to do this ourselves, and lose sight of the fact that doing it ourselves was never asked of us!
In the late 1990s a group of theologians and missiologists were studying trends and spotted where we were headed. In their work, edited by Darrell Gruder entitled Missional Church, they examined this question. Early in the book they identify the paradigm shift that is essential for us to understand as we consider this question. They note that we should consider the Church not as an organized body that creates programs for sending people out. Rather, we are to come to understand ourselves as God’s sent people in the world. The mission of the church is God’s mission in the world.
And that is the part!
We are called to be God’s message of abundance, and to refuse to see God’s abundance as limited by our means!
In our gospel today we hear of the seventy coming back. We hear of their joyful return to be back together in community, they are telling of the things they accomplished in Jesus’ name, and what do they hear?
“I have given you power, and nothing will hurt you.”
God was present with them the whole time.
God remains present with us today!
And I want you to hear that. I want you to know that today, here, in Grace Church in Radford, God is with us, calling us to be God’s mission in the world. We are not the individuals that we might think we are. We have a companion in our work that is not counting the Average Sunday Attendance, not trying to get more people in the pews, I mean sure, that can happen too, but that is not God’s mission! God is not running numbers to evaluate our worth, else we would all be lost.
Our work is to hear and to be God’s Mission to Radford to the New River Valley, and to the world, and to do that work with the power of the spirit in our midst. We are asked to do this not out of our abundance once everything else is done, but rather we are called to be fearless and to walk with God in God’s mission for us. We are called to this work with our very lives. So, be of good hope, and be comforted as we imagine scarcity and as we listen for God’s call to us as a church and as individuals - for God is with us. God knows this tension and is asking us this morning to remember that the struggles of this world are not to overshadow God’s call to us. Know that God is sending us and as we hear God’s call for our mission know that the harvest has always been plentiful,
and the laborers have always been few.
Amen