The Gospel Free From Baggage

A sermon for the seventh Sunday after Pentecost given at the United Church of Acworth, Acworth, NH on July 15, 2012.


Mark 6:6b-29



tell the Gates Mountain -- pack mule Joel story
sometimes we are so prepared we look foolish.  and our backs pay for it.
last week the gospel reading told the story of how Jesus sent his disciples out on their first mission.  and since today’s focus in our Faith and Covenant is mission I think it’s worth looking again at that passage.one of the things we immediately notice is that the disciples were not sent out as pack-mules for the gospel.
they traveled light.  very light.  only a staff.
“He ordered them to take nothing for their journey except a staff; no bread, no bag, no money in their belts; but to wear sandals and not to put on two tunics.”
this sounds like a good reality TV show -- right?  a kind of amazing race.
To get everyone on the same page, Amazing Race is a reality TV show 

where 11 teams, each comprised of two members, are pitted “against each other on a trek around the world for approximately 25 days. At every destination, each team must compete in a series of challenges, some mental and some physical, and only when the tasks are completed will they learn of their next location. Teams who are the farthest behind will gradually be eliminated as the contest progresses, with the first team to arrive at the final destination winning $1 million.”#
So that’s what’s going on here, right?  Jesus is splitting them up into pairs and sending them to complete challenges and win a million dollars.
Well, maybe.  Except for the million dollars.
The difference is obvious.  This is not a game; it’s for anyone’s entertainment.  It’s not a competition among the pairs and it’s definitely not about the money.
So why would Jesus send them out defenseless and resourceless if it’s not for the sake of some new form of amusement?
Well, to answer this question I think we need to first look at today’s addition to the gospel reading -- the story about Herod and John the Baptizer.
Herod lives the million dollar life.  Herod can afford non-stop entertainment.  If reality tv shows had existed, Herod would have funded them.Herod’s life is centered around Herod and making sure that everyone knows that Herod is control.  Like so many in power, Herod fears the crowd because his power consists in people recognizing or believing him to be powerful.  So appearance is everything.  Herod wants to believe and wants everyone else to believe that he is not accountable to anything but his own desires.  Because appearance is everything, Herod lives his secure life founded in insecurity.  He must constantly think about how what he does appears to the people around him and if there is anyone who tries to expose his insecurity or unveil any kind of weakness, that person must be done away with.As Stanley Hauerwas puts it:  “The powerful lack the power to be powerful, which means that they live lives of destructive desperation.  That desperation, moreover, often results in others paying the price for their insecurity.”#So for that very reason John, we are told, was put behind bars.“For Herod himself had sent men who arrested John, bound him, and put him in prison on account of Herodias, his brother Philip’s wife, because Herod had married her. For John had been telling Herod, ‘It is not lawful for you to have your brother’s wife.’”Another way we might look at Herod is that he worshipped not the one true God but the many false gods:  money, status, influence, self-importance...We worship these gods because they seem to promise happiness and pleasure -- but they create in us an insecure need to keep striving to maintain them.  We become like the individual described by Socrates who try to fill a bucket full of holes with water that we are carrying in a cup that’s also full of holes.Or like the people of Israel described in the words of the prophet Jeremiah who, having forsaken God, “the fountain of living water... dug out cisterns for themselves, cracked cisterns that could hold no water.”
Herod’s party puts on display his insecurity when after thoroughly enjoying his wife’s daughter’s dance, he publicly promises to give her anything she wants up to half of his kingdom.  This kind of boast is obviously meant to impress the other wealthy and influential partiers.  But Herod had no idea that Herodias had coached her daughter to ask for the head of the prophet John.  Not wanting to disappoint or seem weak, wanting to maintain all that he had so far built up for himself, Herod did as she asked and killed John.
Now I think the writer of the gospel of Mark interjected this story at this point in the gospel so that if we read it closely we would compare the way of Herod with the way of Jesus.
Our question was: So why would Jesus send them out defenseless and resourceless?
I answer:  to embody the come-as-you-are grace of God and way we are to live if we are going to live by faith and not fear.
The disciples have responded to Jesus’ good news regarding the kingdom by repenting, confessing the truth about themselves and embracing the grace of God’s new life.  Their lives are not grounded in some sense of security they’ve built up by their possessions or pretense to power.  Their lives are grounded in truth, the unshakeable truth that God is God and we are not and every moment is a miracle of grace which we experience out of the abundance of God’s goodness and gift.
When your life is grounded in grace, you can walk by faith.  When your life is grounded on pretense, you are doomed to be enslaved to the never ending task of maintaining an image which is never secure.  In destructive desperation you may even strike out violently at those who expose your weakness.
But the disciples are to exhibit the peace and confidence of lives founded in grace and lived by faith in the God who is ultimately protecting and guiding them.
So as it has been said, “the medium is the message.”  These disciples are going out communicating the grace of God by exhibiting that grace in their peaceful and self-abandoned presence.
If they were to go out laden like pack-mules with methods and strategies and tricks to “win” people over to Jesus’ side -- that would show that gospel is really just another game and people are means to the end of our winning.
But the gospel is about love and love does not coerce or force or manipulate.  The disciples witness to the grace of God by their quiet confidence in God’s care for them.
But more than that -- and this is where it gets real offensive -- they go out presuming on the hospitality of others.
They don’t go to the village, set up a tent and then go door to door getting people to come to their program -- perhaps convincing them that the speaker is a very charismatic and entertaining one -- and there will be guitar music and drums to boot!They go to people’s homes and are welcomed in or refused.This doesn’t make sense to us because we expect that what it means to spread the gospel is to manipulate circumstances so that we’ll get more numbers in our church.  But we must remember that “the church is not called to  be significant or large,” the church is called to be faithful to embody and proclaim the grace of the God who has no need for our pretense.#
Too often it’s the reality that we are eager to get people into church or make the church bigger -- we’ve become obsessed with supersized churches and all their glory.  And in our eagerness to grow the church we lose sight of the real reason the church exists -- to manifest a community that is sustained by truth and grace and not by any gimicks or coercions.
We’re called to realize that the way of Jesus is not the way of Herod.  But that we’ve been indoctrinated in the way of Herod by our culture and desperately need to detox.
To put this in practical terms:  we need to spread the good news to our neighbors.  the church does not grow without people creating friendships with other people and communicating in their actions and speech the grace of God.
as Paul puts it in his letter to the Romans:  “how are they to call on one in whom they have not believed? And how are they to believe in one of whom they have never heard? And how are they to hear without someone to proclaim him? And how are they to proclaim him unless they are sent? As it is written, ‘How beautiful are the feet of those who bring good news!’”
But we must bring the good news in the way of Jesus -- the way that is vulnerable.  The disciples were to go into others’ houses and allow the other to control the circumstances and guide the encounter.  They were to be strangers and not presume to have the upper hand.  They were to be guests and not hosts.  And that’s tough for most of us to swallow.  
I don’t like being out of control -- I don’t not having the upper hand.  I’d rather people conform to my schedule, my way of having a conversation.  But Jesus sends us out empty-handed, to be gentle and faithful examples of the transformation that grace is able to make.
if we try to share the gospel with the mindset of a Herod who cares all about appearances and maintaining control and the pretense of power -- we cannot actually share the gospel.  We can share gospel words but they’re like a gold ring in a pig’s snout.
so to conclude and tie this in to our faith and covenant which reads: “We hold it to be the mission of the Church to proclaim the gospel to all people and to exalt the worship of the one true God”
as we go out in our daily lives, in the friendships that we have and in the encounters with strangers, let us remember that we are sustained not by our own efforts, but by God’s gracious care.  So whether we feel it or not, we are completely secure and have no need to fear or be anxious no matter what.  We can proclaim in our way being and our speech the good news without pretense because we are fed by the one true God who is a fountain of living water and not the broken cisterns which never satisfy.  we are led on the way of Jesus, not the way of Herod.  The one who was vulnerable but faithful, not the one who pretended to be strong and lived destructive desperation.  when we live a life grounded in the one true God, the source of all that is, the sustainer and redeemer of creation -- we no longer need to serve the many false gods of image, status, wealth, influence, self-importance -- gods which only ever enslave us and never give us the freedom to live in the delight and true happiness of God’s free grace and unconditional love.
may we go our ways this week and be mindful that our lives are sustained by a God of grace and we have no need to lie to sustain ourselves or protect our image.  we are free from the weight of all of that baggage.  Amen.