SERMON Mission!

Pentecost 4 B, Proper 9, Lectionary 14, 2009:

Ezekiel 2:1-5; Psalm 123; 2 Corinthians 12:2-10; Mark 6:1-13

There is something so very contemporary -- so very entrepreneurial -- about Jesus' empowering and sending out his disciples. Even, as we celebrate the Fourth of July this weekend, something so very American about it. Mission -- especially in this country -- is big.

This was brought home to me one Friday when I was getting ready for a new members' party while planning a sermon for Sunday, finishing the bulletin, and preparing for a synod workshop on Saturday. The door bell rang. Expecting the UPS man, I raced down the two flights of stairs to reach the door before he decided no one was home. I made it in time. But it was not the UPS man. Instead, there were two young men, both dressed in suits and ties, each wearing a plastic badge. The badges were obscured by the materials they were carrying. I was, however, able to read "Jesus Christ" on one of the badges. "This won't take any time," I thought.

I was wrong.

I told them that I am a pastor and that at that very moment I was working on a sermon for Sunday. They looked at me blankly. "We just want to talk to you," one of them said. "I am the pastor of Wicker Park Lutheran Church," I explained. "It's right around the corner and down the street, and I am really, really busy right now trying to get ready for Sunday. And probably you don't need or want to talk to me." "But we do want to talk to you." "But I don't have time to talk!" "Okay," the spokesman for the two said, "Can we come back?" I was probably a little more emphatic than I intended to be when I told them "No, you may not come back!"

And it occurred to me after I closed the door that the "Jesus Christ" on the badges probably went with "Church" and "of the Latter Day Saints" and my being a traditional Christian made me a prime candidate for Mormon conversion and salvation. The Mormons are very entrepreneurial.

But, so too, are the Lutherans. I learn about our entrepreneurial mission efforts at the synod workshop the next day.

The workshop was on transformational ministry. It was conducted by an expert from the ELCA. The 1990s was a decade for evangelism for the ELCA, and a great deal of money and effort was put into redeveloping dying congregations. Much of that effort focused on pastors' knocking on doors (not unlike my Mormon visitors) and congregations' getting praise bands and dropping "Lutheran" from their names.

What the church discovered at the end of the ten year evangelism effort was that only a very few of the redeveloped congregations actually survived and even fewer of those that survived actually grew. And in analyzing the very few successes, the church discovered that it made no difference whether pastors had knocked on any strangers' doors or congregations had traditional or contemporary liturgies. Or became "community" or no-Lutheran "!" churches. The only thing that made a difference was whether lay members were part of the visioning and transformation processes. Whether they as well as their pastors had caught and shared a vision.

All this analysis has changed the redevelopment and mission strategy of the church to include lay members in visioning and reaching out. Part of visioning includes sharing faith journeys. And one of the entrepreneurial requirements of reaching out to grow churches, the expert told us, is for us as Lutherans to witness to our faith by telling one and all -- strangers and friends alike -- at every available opportunity that we are Christians. And he provided us with an illustration.

Here is his example. The winter before, he and his wife shoveled the snow for someone they did not know who lives on their block. When the person thanked them, they said, "We are Christians." Later they learned that their remark had sparked a dinner table conversation with the person's Muslim son. This kind of mission will grow churches, he told us. It is entrepreneurial.

And most American. Sometime around the turn of the century Katherine L. Bates wrote the hymn we sang this morning. At a time of great optimism and expansion she wrote:

"O beautiful for pilgrim feet, whose stern, impassioned stress

A thoroughfare for freedom beat across the wilderness"

Manifest destiny in this country was (and, one might suggest, still is) a mission.

All of which brings us back to Jesus' empowering and sending the disciples. The Mormons would seem to have it right in sending their missionaries out in pairs. Jesus in Mark directs that his disciples go two by two, and most scholars believe that Jesus' order reflects the practice of the early church. That practice could have developed for safety reasons. More likely, however, it stems from Jewish law that required two witnesses to charge a person.

But beyond the pairing of missionaries, Jesus' other directives have translated less directly. The Mormons undoubtedly travel light during their missionaries years -- which is essentially what Jesus is saying his disciples should do. But unlike those disciples, they do take money and a change of clothes with them.

And Mormon missionaries need to know where they will be staying. By contrast, in first century Palestine and throughout the Mediterranean, there was no need to plan ahead because hospitality was something that was extended only to strangers. As wayfarers in strange towns, the disciples could and did rely on the hospitality of strangers.

Jesus' directive to his disciples to shake off the dust from their feet if someone refused to hear them reflects the first century Jewish practice of wiping off the dust of impure pagan soil from one's feet when returning to Palestine. I don't know whether my Mormon missionaries shook the dust from their feet when they left my house. Jesus would direct that they should have.

And while the directives for us may not be literal, they are relevant. They are relevant because what they are in essence saying is be efficient. If your message is rejected, move on. If, on the other hand, you are invited to stay in a place, don't waste time and effort by trying to stay somewhere else. Get about your business.

And move on. Don't worry if it doesn't take. That's not your problem. Don't look back. And the Mormons have all that down pat.

But what they don't have is the message. And the message of the disciples is nothing more or less than the message of Jesus and John the Baptist before him: "The time is fulfilled, and the Kingdom of God has come near; repent [which means turn your lives around] and believe in the good news!" (Mark 1:15) And reinforcing that message -- inseparable from it! -- is Jesus' empowering the disciples with the authority to make individuals whole and well and the disciples' doing that.

The United States is not the Kingdom of God. Manifest destiny is neither mission nor message. But what about telling people that we shovel sidewalks because we are Christians? Is that mission and message?

Well shoveling the sidewalk may well be mission (although I find it hard to believe that shoveling a stranger's sidewalk is not something a non-Christian would do). But telling someone that we are shoveling their sidewalk because we are Christians (even if true) is not the message.

And it is not the message because it is about us, and not about God's Kingdom or God's grace. It becomes exactly the kind of boasting that was rampant among some super-Christians in the Corinthian Church -- Christians whom we hear Paul condemning this morning when he writes of his own weakness that, rather than being removed, was answered by God's grace. By power in weakness.

And, not boasting and because of God's grace, we are free to be, as we are called to be, the Body of Christ in and for the world. The commitment of this congregation to nurture and build up the Body of Christ is strengthened every time one of us visits a sick friend, sings for a child, cooks for a neighbor, welcomes a visitor, sings in the choir, bakes Communion bread, plays an instrument, plants our gardens, studies the Bible, brings garbage for the worms, tends our plants, cleans the sanctuary, works with The Night Ministry or Habitat, organizes on an issue of social justice. Is this entrepreneurial? Of course. But more -- much more -- than that, it is God's mission. For this church. Here and now. And for that we give God thanks and praise. Amen

July 5, 2009

Ruth VanDemark, pastor

Wicker Park Lutheran Church

Chicago