A Journey That Will Change Your
Life
Exodus 13:17-22; Luke 10: 1-11,
16-17
Preached at Midway Hills Christian
Church
In a few moments many of us will gather in the fellowship hall for a
4th of July celebration that will include stories and pictures of a
trip that some members of our congregation made to
Many of us have been on similar
trips. Sometimes we make them
knowing they will be significant because we are going to
sa
I took a trip like that in 1991 to the isle of Canna in the Inner Hebrides of Scotland. I had received a faculty development
grant from the college where I was teaching to go to the island for a writer’s
retreat. The isolation and beauty
of this island owned by the Scottish National Trust was supposed to inspire a
group of 10 of us to write something profound.
I went there to write, but instead I experienced a renewed call to
ministry. For months I had been
considering leaving the church altogether.
I had become discouraged by my denomination’s ambivalence and at times
downright discrimination against women in ministry. Not to mention that I was also a lesbian
in ministry.
The weekend we were on the island members of my writers group wanted to
have a Sunday worship service.
There was no active church on this island of 14 people, so my traveling
companions asked me to lead a service for them. It was in their asking and my
leading that my calling to the ministry was reaffirmed. That trip to
Have you ever been to the travel section of a book store? There are tons of travel guides for
every country of the world that tell you what to pack, where to eat, and what to
see. Those are the practical books.
Then there are those books that are collections of Traveler’s Tales—testimonies
of the ways certain journeys change us.
Our gospel lesson for today is a combination of the two. Jesus’ sending out the 70 is part of a
larger narrative in Luke’s gospel called the Travel Document which describes the
travels of Jesus and the disciples from the north region of Samaria, to
Jerusalem in the southern part of Israel.
Early in chapter 9 Jesus calls the twelve disciples together and sends
them out to proclaim the kingdom and tells them, “take nothing for your
journey, no staff, nor bag, nor bread, nor money—not even an extra
tunic. Whatever house you enter,
stay there, and leave from there.
Wherever they do not welcome you, as you are leaving that town shake the
dust off your feet as a testimony against them.”
Now here in chapter 10 we have Jesus’ sending out 70 more disciples and
he gives them some of the same travel advice. Jesus sent them ahead to all the places
he intended to go. They are not sent not in lieu of Jesus but in advance of
Jesus. Much like John the Baptist, they are to be heralds of the good news that
is to come.
The message Jesus gives them is
brief and to the point—the
What can we
learn about the journey of discipleship from Jesus words to the 70?
·
It is a difficult and dangerous
journey—“See I am sending you out like lambs into the midst of wolves.” Jesus doesn’t sugar coat the cost of
discipleship. This is not a journey for sight seers or the faint of heart. Just a few verses earlier someone had
said, “I will follow you Jesus but first let me say farewell to my folks at
home.” To which Jesus replied, “No one who puts a hand to the plow and looks
back is fit for the
·
They are to travel light—“Carry no
purse, no bag, no sandals.” I do not think Jesus’ travel tips would
be a best seller at Barnes and Noble.
No luggage?! Even preachers
need a change of clothes and matching shoes! But there is much wisdom in Jesus’
words. He knows that extra baggage
can slow us down. He knows how much
energy it takes to own things. That’s what’s really at the root of
consumerism. Having material goods
is not bad, but when the amount of what we own begins to consume us, our energy
for discipleship is diminished. Jesus says that energy needs to be
focused on the journey and the proclamation of the
kingdom.
·
They are to greet no one on the
road. Now that sounds rather
odd. I mean if you don’t have any
luggage, you might need to borrow something from someone, so the last thing you
want to do is be a snob! Once
again, Jesus words have a deeper meaning.
You see in the culture of Jesus’ day the ritual of greeting was elaborate
and time consuming. For Jesus there
is a sense of urgency about this journey.
He has set his face toward
·
Which leads us to what I believe is
the most important bit of advice Jesus gives these 70 travelers—practice
hospitality. In ancient cultures
hospitality was crucial to the survival of travelers. It often meant taking in strangers and
offering them protection from enemies.
Jesus says to the 70, “Whenever you enter a town and its people welcome
you, eat what is set before you; cure the sick who are there.”
Sometimes I
think the church gets caught up in the notion that greeting someone on the road
is the sum total of hospitality. It
is so much more. For Presbyterian
minister Marjorie Thompson, hospitality is a spiritual discipline. Listen to how she defines it, “Hospitality means receiving the other, from
the heart, into my own dwelling place.
It entails providing for the need, comfort, and delight of the other with
all the openness, respect, freedom, tenderness and joy that love itself
embodies….It is the act of sharing who we are as well
as what we have.”
That kind of hospitality moves us beyond mere politeness; it moves us
beyond the token ‘stranger in our midst.’
That kind of hospitality challenges us to be at home in ourselves in
order to be able to welcome and celebrate those who are different. And it is that kind of hospitality that
prepares the way for the gospel.
Notice that Jesus told the 70 to eat what was set before them. What an unsettling statement. Remember all the dietary laws of the
Torah? In the book of Acts it took
a vision from God before Peter could eat what was set before him. Being able to eat what was set before
them was not a matter of being polite, it was at the core of hospitality and
that kind of vulnerability and welcome created a space for healing. That was the difference between the
towns that received the 70 and the towns that did not—the disciples were able to
cure the sick.
I love verse 17 of this chapter.
It may be the world’s shortest travelers’ tale: “The seventy returned with joy, saying,
“Lord in your name even the demons submit to us!” It is a surprising testimony to the way
the journey changed their life.
As a young child in a working class
family of six I can remember taking family vacations in our big red
Sometimes I think as disciples of
Jesus we keep asking the question “Are we there yet?” and we miss the
transforming power of the journey.
Like those 70 we have been given the message—the kingdom is near to you.
Jesus invites us to let the journey of discipleship change
us.
The Israelites discovered the
transforming power of the journey when they left
In her book A Celtic Way of
Prayer, Esther De Waal makes this profound
statement: “I shall not find Christ at the end of the journey unless he
accompanies me along the way.”
In John’s gospel Jesus makes this
one: “I am the way.” It wasn’t a
statement about world religions; it was a statement about journey.
Being a disciple of Jesus is about
proclaiming the nearness of the kingdom, and about who we become on the
way.
Let us
pray. In the words of St. Patrick,
Christ
beside me, Christ before me;
Christ
behind me, Christ within me;
Christ
beneath me, Christ above me;
Christ to
right of me, Christ to left of me;
Christ in
my lying, my sitting, my rising;
Christ in
heart of all who know me,
Christ in
eye of all who see me,
Christ in
ear of all who hear me.