Sermons

“Lambs Into the Midst of Wolves”

Galatians 6:1-10; Luke 10:1-12 – Rev. Rebecca Littlejohn

Vista La Mesa Christian Church (Disciples of Christ), La Mesa, California – July 7, 2019

 Holy God, bless the speaking and the hearing of these words that our hearts might welcome your gospel and our lives be shaped by your righteousness..  In Jesus’ name we pray, Amen.

There is a lot going on in our scripture readings this morning!  We often forget to be surprised at just how relevant to our 21^st-century lives these writings from 2000 years ago turn out to be.  So I want to walk us through three major lessons we can find in these passages, along with a couple observations that can help us apply them.

First of all, both of these scriptures remind us that the life of the Christian is not always a walk in the park.  It’s weird to me that anyone would assume it would be, but you hear people acting like once you know Jesus everything is sunshine and daisies after that.  When I was a kid in junior choir, we used to sing a song that went “Nobody said it was going to be easy.  Nobody said it would always be fun.  If you want to live a life that’s simple and breezy, don’t take up your cross, don’t ever follow the Son!”  If a middle schooler can sing about that, surely we can accept it as true?

These two passages point out that not everyone is going to welcome the gospel message and that, even within the family of faith, there are going to be conflicts and issues.  Did we really need the reminder?  And yet, somehow we’re often taken by surprise when things don’t go as smoothly as we’d assumed they would.  There are two different contexts examined in these two readings, and in each one, a different approach to dealing with the conflict is suggested.  Jesus is sending disciples out to carry the gospel message to villages for the first time.  Not all of them will welcome it, he warns them.  And as we heard last week, there’s no need to rain down fire on the ones who don’t.  Your peace will return to you if they don’t accept it.  But do make clear what they’ve missed out on.  It’s such a powerful image he describes: “Go out into its streets and say, ‘Even the dust of your town that clings to our feet, we wipe off in protest against you.  Yet know this, the kingdom of God has come near.’”  No need for threats, no need for punishment or wrath.  Just clarify that if you refuse the gift, you don’t also get to receive it.

In Galatians, on the other hand, Paul is discussing conflict within the community of faith.  “If anyone is detected in a transgression,” he writes, we are to “restore such a one in a spirit of gentleness.”  A much harder challenge than shaking the dust from our sandals!  There is practically nothing in our culture today that helps us cultivate a spirit of gentleness.  And there are very few of us for whom it comes naturally.  Paul implies that such a thing is only possible for those “who have received the Spirit”.  Restoring a transgressor in a spirit of gentleness is not something we can do unless we are thoroughly embedded in the spirit of God’s love and mercy.  It is never something we should attempt on our own power. “Take care that you yourselves are not tempted,” Paul writes, knowing how easy it is for us to slip into transgression ourselves once we’ve placed ourselves in the position of judge.

We could have a six-week study just on the difference between these two ways of dealing with conflict and when each is appropriate, but for now, let’s just notice their distinct natures and the fact that different situations call for different approaches.  A note of hope though: both of these passages remind us that we are not called to deal with any of these challenges by ourselves.  Jesus sent those disciples out in pairs.  We’ve always got partners.  Paul is clearly calling the Galatians to deal with their internal conflicts as a community, rather than giving just one person the burden of disciplining all transgressors.  We are not in this alone.  Thanks be to God!

The second lesson I’d like to draw out of these passages is about owning our own stuff.  Or as Jesus might put it, not owning stuff.  When Jesus sent out those disciples, he asked them to commit to radical vulnerability.  Don’t take a purse or a bag or a change of shoes.  Eat when people feed you.  Can you imagine being part of a community without the protection of your possessions? Why would anyone accept me if I didn’t have something material to offer?  The vulnerability Paul recommends is more subtle: ‘test your own work,’ he says. This same passage that started out telling us how to deal with other people’s transgressions ends up being more about minding our own business and examining our own souls to ensure we’re not deceiving ourselves about our own righteousness.  ‘Carry your own load,’ Paul says, that is, take responsibility for the emotional baggage you’re bringing into the situation.  We can be vulnerable physically or spiritually, and it looks like maybe both are required to truly be part of the community of faith.

Again, this sort of vulnerability is barely possible without the support of the Spirit.  But Jesus reassures those disciples that when they are welcomed, they should eat and drink whatever is provided, for “the laborer deserves to be paid.”  The underlying invitation is to trust in God. There will be hungry days, and there will be times when we end up feeling humiliated, just as there were for Jesus.  But God is faithful and will not abandon us.  If we can bring our true and whole selves, owning up to all our weaknesses and fears, we can experience what it means to trust in God in deep and meaningful ways.

The third lesson I want to examine from today’s scripture readings requires us to back up just a bit.  We’re all pretty familiar with this image Jesus gave us of “shaking off the dust from our sandals” when we’re rejected.  In fact, we’re so familiar with it, and it’s such a satisfying response, that I think we’re often tempted to mis-use it.  There are moments when we need to check ourselves, to see if we’re taking on a point of view in scripture inappropriately.  Most of the time, as modern-day disciples, we tend to take what Jesus said to those first-century disciples as something he’s saying to us.  In the case of Luke 10, we may be tempted to assume we are the lambs being sent out into the midst of wolves.  We get rejected plenty often, so it’s nice to think we can ‘shake the dust off’ and move on in sassy but biblical style.  May I suggest that justifying our personal mic drops like this can be a form of taking the Lord’s name in vain?  It’s so enticing to play the victim, because it absolves us of responsibility.  But as Paul told us, we need to test our own work.

What if we aren’t the disciples in this story, but rather the towns?  The reference to Sodom in verse 12 makes clear that this is a story about hospitality. What if we’ve been taking the wrong point of view by assuming we’re the lambs sent ‘into the midst of wolves’?  What if this story, for us, is more about how we’re receiving those God is sending us, rather than about how we’re received? What if we’re the towns?  Our natural tendency is to place ourselves at the center of the story.  That’s how we so easily turn the dust-shaking into a snappy comeback to personal insult rather than the faithful response to a rejection of the gospel of Jesus Christ the story intends.

If we can pry ourselves out of the center of the story, if we can imagine that we might be the towns rather than the disciples, we can create some space to discover who the lambs are that Jesus is calling us to welcome.  Who is it that is bringing the kingdom of God near to us in this moment?  I look around and the answer seems heart-breakingly clear: the lambs in our current moment aren’t threatened by wolves, but by coyotes. The stranger, the hungry, the naked, the children Jesus called to his side, all the least of these in whom we know Christ to abide, have arrived in our towns, proclaiming that the kingdom of God has come near.  And right now, in this historical moment, we are deciding whether we will share in the peace of God by welcoming them.  And as of today, the answer is No.  But instead of letting them move on and shake the dust of our inhospitality off their weary feet, we have locked them up, separated them from their families, taken away their meager belongings, and even forbidden the frightened children from comforting one another with hugs.  The kingdom of God has come near, and we locked it up in a cage.

We are sowing corruption, as Paul might put it. The long-term consequences of this horrific moment in history can only be imagined, but we must know that “God is not mocked.”  Honestly, I find that sentence the most intimidating in all of these verses we heard today.  “God is not mocked.”  We cannot excuse, we cannot rationalize, we cannot cover up, or paper over, or explain away the unholy inhospitality that we, as a nation, are perpetrating on God’s beloved children right now.  God hears the cries of God’s people.  God sees the injustice and the degradation.  If God weren’t locked up in a cage, all the dust in the West would be shaken off in protest by now.  God is not mocked.

When we dare to uncenter ourselves from the stories Jesus told, we discover the call of the gospel is bigger than we ever imagined. “How can I dismantle a government detention camp?” we might ask.  How can God ask that of me?  I’ve been wrestling with this question for weeks now.  “Let us not grow weary in doing what is right,” Paul commands.  I grow weary and heart-sick just reading the news reports.  But there are signs of hope here as well.  Jesus told those disciples that they should remain in a house if there is even just one person who shares in their peace.  Each of us can make a difference, by choosing to share in the peace of God, resisting the inhospitality however we can.  But more importantly, we need to go back to those earlier lessons: we knew this wasn’t going to be easy, and that’s why God isn’t asking any one of us to do this on our own.  We have one another, we have many partners, and we have the power of the Spirit of love.  This is how we dare to pace ourselves so that we don’t grow weary.  We have the confidence of living in Christ that gives us the courage to make ourselves vulnerable, whether that’s in speaking up when others would prefer we be silent, or in sacrificing our resources to provide assistance to those in need, or in civil disobedience.  We have a faith that reminds us again and again that every person on this earth is a beloved child made in the image of God, giving us the conviction we need to stand up to the forces of dehumanization and division.

The kingdom of God has come near to us, like lambs surrounded by coyotes.  How will we welcome the Spirit of Christ in our midst?  Let us pray that we might be found faithful, generous, and holy. Alleluia and Amen.