Ready, Set, Go - Sermon Transcript

see each and every one of you.

I'm grateful that you have found time to be with us.

And I hope, you know, especially if you're a guest, I hope you come back and worship with us again in the future.

My name is Mitchell, and I'm the senior minister here.

And as Joe mentioned, our work here as a church is

 Really to magnify God's love for all people by creating space.

And that space of belonging is essential for us.

And I hope that you can find that here and flourish in that belonging.

 I'm particularly reminded that we all need a place of meaning.

And as we sort of move out of the summer and into the fall, know that there are just a ton of opportunities for you to find that.

We are indeed, I think summer is over.

 There are like a few kids and youth in our church that have not yet started school.

But for us, summer's over.

We're moving into the fall.

And every summer, we try to take a trip.

This year, we made the just awful decision to take our family vacation in like the very beginning of June, which made the summer particularly unbearable at times.

 Having said that, we try to take a trip every summer.

And I don't know if it's like this in y'all's house, but we have this list that I don't create.

I just add to it.

But we start with a packing list.

 It usually sits on the kitchen counter, and I'll add to it, but somewhere along the way, the list grows legs, and without much thought at all.

And then the suitcases come out of the guest bedroom closet, and we start packing.

And by the time we're done packing for a five-day trip, it feels like we're permanently relocating across the country.

 rain jackets in case it rains, a backup phone charger in case the phone charger you're bringing fails, snacks in case the plane is delayed, and then snacks, extra snacks in case we run out of those snacks in case the plane is delayed.

And you would think that I'm not the worst offender in our house, but I actually am.

I bring far more than I need.

 I once packed like a roadside kit with flares.

Maybe it was just an excuse to buy flares, but I bought flares and, you know, those tools that break glass in cars and a thermal emergency blanket for like a three-hour road trip.

And look, some of that I think this need to pack and pack and pack is, you know,

 I'm learning as a parent that you prepare for chaos because chaos will happen, but a lot of it is really not about Declan skinning his knee.

As much as I'd like to say that's what it is, a lot of it, this need to

 to pack and pack and pack, to prepare and prepare and prepare.

A lot of it's about me, about my own need for control.

And this has gotten worse as I've gotten older.

Sometimes I'm shocked that the guy I once was who lived out of a 40 liter backpack for four months is now trying to prepare for a water rescue.

 that one catastrophe that might happen, the 17 seconds it takes to cross the Red River.

 And I wish I could tell you that instinct to over prepare and to pack and to plan stays in the suitcase.

It does not.

Sometimes it follows me to work and sometimes it follows me to my sermon preparation.

When I'm supposed to be writing a sermon, I continue to stare at a blank page, unwilling to write the first sentence until I have imagined every possible reaction

 that could come from a sentence

 What if an illustration falls flat and you don't laugh at my jokes?

What if someone misunderstands that line about grace?

Or what happens if they do understand that line about grace?

What if I say something that needs like six footnotes and a disclaimer?

I've delayed entire sermons, not because I did not know what I wanted to say, but because I wanted to know exactly how it would land with you all before I said it out loud.

 Which if you think about it, it's a very strange way to trust the Holy Spirit.

So I begin realizing something about myself.

And I suspect I'm not alone in this room.

This is not just about how we pack for a vacation or write sermons or get stalled out on a project at work.

This is how a lot of us live our life day in and day out.

Overpreparing.

 We wait to apply to the job until we have the perfect resume.

We wait to have the hard conversation until we've scripted every possible response that that conversation could elicit.

We wait to join the small group or show up to serve or say yes to whatever God might be nudging us toward until we have eliminated every

 possible unknown.

We've turned uncertainty then into an enemy, and planning and preparation is the weapon we use to fight it.

It's not just us being an organized people, though.

It's more ancient than that, because at the heart of it, I believe, well, I believe it's fear.

Not the fear of failing exactly, although that I think is part of it,

 It's the fear of being exposed, the fear of needing someone else, the fear of what happens if we run out of what we packed and there's nobody to help us.

It's the instinct to survive.

And we all, every one of us, we carry that instinct within us.

Last week, we talked about that inward bend towards self, the quiet curve every one of us has towards protecting ourselves first.

This is that same bend just from another angle, if you will.

Control does not always come from a desire for power.

 sometimes control just originates from fear when it is looking for safety.

And then, like a stack of books slamming down on a table, Jesus has the audacity to say this in Luke chapter 10.

So as we read the gospel this morning, I invite you to rise in body or spirit.

 Luke chapter 10, verses 1 through 9.

After this, the Lord appointed 70 others and sent them ahead of him in pairs to every town and place where he intended to go.

He said to them, the harvest is plentiful, but the laborers are few.

Therefore, ask the Lord of the harvest to send out laborers into the harvest.

Go on your way.

See, I am sending you out like lambs amongst the wolves.

 Carry no purse, no bag, no sandals, and greet no one on the road.

Whatever house you enter, first say peace to this house, and if anyone is there who shares in peace, your peace will rest upon that person.

But if not, it will return to you.

Remain in the same house, eating and drinking whatever they provide, for the laborer deserves to be paid.

Do not move from house to house.

Wherever you enter a town and its people welcome you,

 Eat what is set before you.

Cure the sick who are there and say to them, the kingdom of God has come near to you.

For the word of God in scripture, for the word of God among us, and for the word of God within us.

Thanks be to God.

You may be seated.

 Let us pray.

May the words of my mouth and the meditations of our hearts be pleasing and acceptable to you, oh God, our rock and our redeemer.

For you are the one who sends us out seemingly unprepared while always ensuring we have more than enough.

Amen.

 So while Jesus would not approve how much stuff I've learned to fit into the back of my Kia, he clearly instructs his followers to carry as little as possible, no purse, no bag, not even a pair of sandals, which seems a bit ridiculous, especially in a world where travel without provisions was genuinely dangerous, where a broken sandal strap could mean that you're walking barefoot through rocky terrain for miles.

This is not simply then a minor inconvenience.

 This is Jesus stripping away every safety mechanism his followers would have instinctively reached for.

So why would he do that?

And I do not think it is because Jesus enjoys watching people suffer.

And I do not think it's some kind of spiritual endurance test.

 to prove how tough his disciples are.

I think Jesus is making this claim, a claim on purpose about how the kingdom of God actually works.

He's betting, Jesus is betting the entire mission on something most of us would never risk.

He's betting on the hospitality of strangers.

 This matters more than it might sound like at first, because in the ancient Near East, hospitality was not simply a nice personality trait that some folks had.

It was a sacred obligation.

 to welcome a traveler, feed them, house them, protect them.

That was not optional kindness.

It was a covenant.

Communities understood that anyone could find themselves on the road one day needing exactly this kind of welcome.

So refusing it was not simply rude.

It was a violation of something rather holy.

 that held the whole social fabric together.

That is why the story of the Good Samaritan hit so hard.

So when Jesus sends the 72 out with nothing, he's not sending them into chaos.

He's sending them directly into a sacred obligation.

Jesus is just betting that it's going to hold, which means Jesus is not just making a claim about how the disciples should travel.

He's making a claim about people,

 Fundamentally, Jesus is making a claim about the nature of people, about the ones, the 72, who have not ever met anyone, right?

The 72 have never met yet.

He's betting that grace is already active in the house they have knocked on.

 before the disciples show up and offer anything at all.

Before they've preached one sermon or healed one person, before they've done anything at all to earn a welcome, Jesus assumes the welcome will already be there waiting, planted in people by a God who got there first.

And I find that rather remarkable, honestly.

 We spend so much of our time and energy trying to control outcomes because we assume deep down that if we do not manage every variable, things are going to fall apart.

 And Jesus believes the opposite.

He assumes that grace is already moving in people before we arrive to witness it.

That the stranger opening the door might already have more goodness in them than we give them credit for.

This is a much higher view of humanity than most of us walk around carrying day in and day out.

And this actually matters.

 It's not just a footnote or an interesting point that Jesus is making.

This matters.

This is why we need to be clear as a church about who we are and what it means to be United Methodist.

Because a lot of American Christianity right now, especially the loud segment, the resurgent neo-Calvinist strain of it, wants to tell you a very opposite story.

 It wants to tell you that human beings are at their core and apart from any grace, wholly bent toward evil.

Totally depraved, incapable of a single good impulse until someone, until some external switch gets flipped.

And they are the only ones who know where their switch is and how to flip it.

 And that theology sells a lot of books, sells a lot of books and it fills a lot of churches because certainty is always better selling than mystery.

It gives people a tidy closed ecosystem.

It tells you exactly who's in and who's out.

It defines who's carrying the light and who's still sitting in the darkness.

And it lets you sort the whole world accordingly before you ever have to knock on a single door.

 And if we follow that logic all the way to where it actually leads, we realize that there are plenty of churches that believe that we as humans are depraved at our core.

And if that is what they believe, then they also believe that only the most pious, the most faithful, the most holy among them can lead the rest.

 That's how you end up with communities building rigid hierarchies right into the family itself, where women are quietly or not so quietly treated as second-class citizens in their own homes.

That's how you end up with a regressive political agenda that survives by othering the stranger instead of welcoming her, because a theology built on depravity needs someone to distrust in order to make sense of itself.

 It's why we're watching a rise in self-identified Christian nationalists and white identity movements wrapping themselves up in the language of faith while abandoning the actual posture of Jesus toward the stranger at the door.

And so when you start from the belief that people are fundamentally dangerous until proven otherwise, it's a very short walk to deciding some people simply do not deserve the benefit of the doubt at all.

 But that is not the God we meet, sending 72 people out with empty hands into towns filled with strangers.

Jesus does not bet everything on human depravity.

 Rather, it's very clearly the opposite.

Christ is assured that there is a goodness planted so deep inside people that it does not need our permission to exist and does not wait for our theology to authorize it.

This is very much a Wesleyan instinct quietly running beneath God.

 this whole text.

Because even as we are designed to bend inward, and I believe that we are, to protect ourselves first, to fortify and pack and prepare against the world, there is another trait within us, church.

There is another trait that lives within us, an inherent goodness that

 is alive in each and every one of us not because we cultivated it or earned it or unlocked it through right doctrine or right practice but simply because it is the nature of the divine God is good and if God is good if God is good then we have been given that goodness as a gift

 in creation itself.

Before sin, before failure, before we ever had a chance to disappoint God or disappoint ourselves, we are stamped with the image of God and no amount of bending inward can fully erase that stamp.

And if it is inherent within us, if pervenient grace is already moving in us before we ever feel the need to hit the restart button, then the image of God is not something we have to install

 in the strangers we encounter.

It is something we get to discover.

Something that is already there.

Something we get to experience if we are willing to show up empty-handed enough to notice it.

 And that's where the text takes its real turn, right around verses 7 and 8.

Because Jesus does not just tell the 72 to give, he tells them to receive.

Remain in the same house, eating and drinking whatever they provide.

And whenever you enter a town and its people welcome you, eat what is set before you.

Receive what is offered to you.

 Jesus is not sending out relief workers to show up, to deliver aid, and then to leave a community.

Jesus is sending out people who must be fed by the very people they came to serve.

They cannot fulfill their mission without becoming in some sense dependent on the ones they are sent to.

That is a hard pill for us to swallow, myself included.

 Because most of us, we like being the ones who give.

Why?

Because giving lets us stay in control.

Giving lets us keep some distance.

Giving allows us to set the terms, walk away feeling generous and untouched.

 But receiving, receiving requires something else entirely.

Receiving means admitting we need what someone else has to offer.

It means sitting at someone else's table, eating what they chose to prepare on their terms, not ours.

Mutuality is so much harder than generosity because mutuality asks us to actually need one another.

 which is why this idea of potlatch that I mentioned in my email a few days ago is still rather haunting.

When I lived in Anchorage, I learned about the ceremony practiced by the Inglit and other indigenous peoples of the Pacific Northwest and Southeastern Alaska.

Families would spend an entire year hunting, fishing, and gathering, not to build up their own wealth,

 but to give nearly all of it away at a great gathering, feeding and gifting their whole community, guests from other villages.

Status in that culture then was measured not by how much someone is able to accumulate.

Status in that culture was defined by how much they gave away.

And while both the Canadian and United States governments banned the practice,

 The ceremony was never completely done away with.

And through reclaiming it, indigenous peoples remain great teachers to us who need lessons on not just generosity, but mutuality.

The potlatch ceremony only works because it assumes then a return.

 Not a transactional return, not a scorecard, but a woven ongoing return where the next year someone else hosts and you become the one who receives.

Nobody stays only the giver.

Nobody stays only the receiver.

The whole system depends on everyone eventually sitting at someone else's table eating what is sat in front of them.

Trusting that the circle will keep turning.

Generosity as mutual value.

 practiced on purpose over and over and over until it becomes the entire shape of the community.

That is what Jesus is asking of the 72.

And honestly, I think it's what Jesus is still asking of us.

Not just go be generous.

 You should be, but go be willing to receive from people you did not expect to need anything from.

Go be willing to sit at a table you did not set yourself and eat what someone else decided to serve and let that be enough.

We're far more comfortable inviting people to receive from us than we are admitting how much we need to receive from them.

We'll host dinner, we'll lead the group,

 Many of you will chair the committee.

You'll show up with a casserole.

Good Methodist.

But how many of us have let someone else feed us lately in whatever form that takes?

How many of us have shown up somewhere with empty hands, genuinely unsure what we would find, and let that be the posture instead of arriving already in control of the outcomes?

 That's the invitation of today's gospel reading.

That's the good news in this text.

Participation was never going to be about showing up with everything figured out.

If it were, Jesus would have let the 72 at least pack a bag and put some sandals on and tighten up their chacos.

But Jesus decides not to do that.

 He sent them out with nothing but a message of peace and a willingness to be dependent on people they had not met yet.

Trusting that grace had already gone ahead of them into those communities, into those houses before they ever arrived.

The mission did not depend on their preparation.

It depended on their ability to trust the goodness found in strangers.

 So I don't know what your version of the suitcase looks like.

Maybe it's a decision you keep circling because you're waiting to feel certain before you move.

Maybe it's a relationship you're holding firmly

 at arm's length until you know exactly how that conversation will go.

Maybe it's this church and some part of you that is still deciding whether you're ready to actually participate or whether you would rather keep observing from somewhere safe, purse packed and bag zipped and sandals double knotted just in case.

 But I want to tell you, friends, there is so much opportunity for you to serve, to participate, to grow in your faith here at our church.

And you do not have to know what your participation is going to require of you before you are willing to say yes to it.

You do not have to have the whole trip mapped out before you walk out the door.

So I wanna end with this question.

 I don't have a lot of answers, but I do have a question.

What are you still trying to pack before you're willing to walk out the door?

What are you still trying to fit into the bag before you say yes to what's ahead of you?

And as you think about that, as you contemplate what you're still thinking needs to go into whatever bag you're determined to carry, know this, that the grace of God has already gone ahead of you into whatever this week holds.

That's the truth.

 The grace of God is already present in whatever room you're about to walk into, into whatever table you're about to sit down at.

May you learn then, church, may you learn to carry trust with you, and may that be enough for today.

In the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, amen.