Ephesians 1:11-25
When I was a child we played a travel game we called “when I go on a trip.” It went like this, the first person would say “I am going on a trip and in my suitcase I packed an Aardvark.” The next person had to say: “I’m going on a trip and in my suitcase I packed an Aardvark and a banana. The idea was to see if we could get the whole alphabet into the suitcase and leave nothing out.
According to Mark’s gospel, Jesus went to the other extreme when he sent his disciples on a trip. He told them to leave everything out. Take no bread, no money, no credit cards. Not even a cell phone. Only their sandals and a staff, that’s all they could take with them. They are utterly dependent on the goodwill and hospitality of people they had yet to meet. People they did not even know. In my imagination they are like missionaries knocking on our door offering to give us a religious tract or a witness. I confess to you that I was not very welcoming when they knocked on my door. They had to shake the dust off their feet when they left. I was never rude, but I never invited them in for a meal either.
Today the shoe is on the other foot, so to speak. Many people who once looked to the church have shaken the religious dust off their feet and joined the “nones” or the “ungeneration.” For them the church has not been a welcoming place. Too often too many people have heard the church preach a message of shame instead of a word of grace. Sadly, in many instances the church even now seems to have packed a suitcase of binding legalism instead of liberating love. Religious nationalists want to take over the public square and public schools. It’s not just the nation that is divided, the church is house divided.
If it helps, the Jewish community was divided in Jesus’ time too. The text says when Jesus went home, he preached a sermon in the local synagogue and the people who heard him speak got so angry they chased him out of town. Another gospel says that they dragged him to the edge of a cliff and meant to throw him off. They wanted to kill him. The Bible is short on the details, but I can imagine what some of those folks who got so hot under the collar were saying. “We never did it that way before!” “He’s preaching something that’s not in my Bible.”
Last week when Travis was with us, I heard some new things, maybe you did too. Nobody got upset. We were all glad he came to be with us. But I heard some new things, did you? One of the phrases Travis used that was new to me was “next church.” I have heard about the “emergent church,” and the “new church,” but last week was the first time I heard about the “next church.” So, of course, I had to look it up online. There is a whole national movement called “Next church.” The website says that next church is, “a network, a movement, of people who believe that the church of the future will be more relational, more diverse, more collaborative, more hopeful, and more agile, so that congregations can be strong enough and healthy enough to be a strong, effective, faithful, moral voice that is engaged in the transformation of our community toward the common good.”
I like all that kind of talk. Whatever we decided on Travis’ offer to partner with the Region, whether we do that or don’t do that, we can talk more about that next week in our business meeting, but I want to learn more about this next church movement. It feels like that might be shoe that fits Pine Valley.
Mark says when Jesus left his hometown and went about teaching in villages. He took the message that he had delivered in the synagogue out into the streets. With his words and his actions, he was telling anyone who would listen that the ways of the past do not have to determine what will happen in the future. The future does not simply arrive on our doorstep. We build it. Withour hands and our hopes, our plans and our pains, our stubbornness and our sensitivity, we build our future according to our understanding of God and the presence of the divine. That’s what it means when Jesus sends out the disciples two by two to cast our demons and to heal. Mark is not talking about something that we cannot understand. He is talking about the mission of the church to build communities based on the values of human dignity and respect and integrity and honesty. Casting out demons means naming the things, the public policies and practices that violate those core values.
And when he sends them out, Jesus gives them a tool kit, a method. He tells them to go house to house and meet people who are ready to become agents of change. The rejection of injustice, Mark teaches us, is grounded in God’s generous love. That’s the spiritual foundation for ministry.
Here’s the most interesting part of Jesus’ strategy. The disciples are to take nothing with them but the clothes they are wearing, the shoes on their feet, and a walking stick. It is a strategy of radical hospitality. If you were to go to a mission training program today, they would call this is “decentered” strategy of radical hospitality.
When we think about hospitality in a conventional way, we imagine a host who invites guests to a party, maybe a dinner, arranged by the host. The host is in charge of arranging the space, planning the meal, preparing everything down to the smallest detail so that the guests feel warmly welcomed and leave well fed. That’s a conventional model of hospitality.
Jesus’ model is different. Jesus is sending out the disciples to find people who will help them so that together they can create a safe space where change can take place. They are starting house churches—small communities—that become agents of transformation. Our challenge is to learn to think theologically about the meaning of God’s love. To say that God loves all people does not mean that God is neutral. It means that God’s love is mediated through people and through the particular person of Jesus. This is our tradition, but we recognize that God’s love is also expressed in other traditions and ways–