FIFTH SUNDAY AFTER PENTECOST – 09 JULY 2006
St Paul Lutheran Church, ABQ NM – the Rev P L Holman
Ezekiel 2:1-5; 2 Corinthians 12:2-10; Mark 6:1-13
“Pass It On!”
According to my old Webster’s dictionary (the one that does not include the word Google), a missionary is one sent out usually for a religious cause to propagate faith or carry out humanitarian purposes. The work of missionaries was central to what my friend Dorothy Brokering would highlight in Sunday school every year. Wherever she and her pastor husband Hal found themselves Dorothy would embrace with enthusiasm World Missions Sunday. The teachers would prepare maps, invite a speaker, collect special offerings and over the course of the year track the fruits borne of their outreach efforts half a world away.
Most of the images of missionaries I had in those early years came from literature, from caricatures that were less than flattering. People like the father in Barbara Kingsolver’s POISONWOOD BIBLE, folks who were so sure they had the answers and the only path to righteousness that they would stop at nothing, willing to expend even the personal integrity of their families and the cultural integrity of the people to whom they witnessed, to “bring people to Jesus.”
The Word of God this day reminds us that Jesus showed us another, life-giving way.
Paul was a missionary who used his early life experience as a persecutor of Christians to inform his work as a witness to the truth of the gospel. He traveled to cities of the Mediterranean region building communities of the faithful in each case contextually relevant to the place they lived yet in all ways centered on the good news of God’s saving mercy for all people in Jesus. There certainly were folks who disagreed with him, who tried to assert their own authority and draw people and their support away from Paul’s mission toward their own cause. Yet Paul remained undeterred: I have been given a thorn in the flesh, he said – perhaps an illness or disability, perhaps a cadre of folks whose opposition was persistent and nettlesome, perhaps even the thorn of humility which led him to be flexible in his interpretation of the Gospel’s call in any given context – a thorn in the flesh to keep him humble and focused on the truth that if anything good came of his efforts it was not by his own power but rather by the authority and the grace of God.
Paul was not perfect by any means; he was able to accomplish as much as he did in his years of travel and networking because he followed the model of Jesus before him. Wherever you find faith, Jesus told his followers, you might accomplish much in my name. And then Jesus sent them out, not as singular heroes but two by two, companions on the journey. Companions, like partners on a space shuttle or partners in the covenant of marriage, like sisters and brothers washed in the waters of forgiveness and bound to one another through the blood of the Lamb, companions in accountability and compassion and hope.
Notice what else Jesus included in this missionary job description: take nothing for your journey except a staff for balance, and dress according to the standard of the folks you are going to meet. The gospel is offense enough—the excess stuff will only get in the way of the message you’re given to pass on.
It is this humble posture of showing up and learning from the folks he met that endeared Bartholomaeus Ziegenbalg to the people of Tranquebar on the southeast coast of India when he arrived there 300 years ago today. Likely the first Lutheran missionary in Asia, the German Ziegenbalg did not adhere to the common missionary practice of his time that required the indigenous peoples to obey the beliefs and customs of the foreigners. Rather, this German sent by the Danish Mission Society to India first learned the Tamil tongue and Tamil philosophy, standing with and living among the Tamil people of India. He then developed grammar books and translated the scriptures into the people’s language, relying on the gifts and skills and partnership of the people among whom he lived and worked. His was missionary work not TO the people but among and with those who longed for justice and hope. Ziegenbalg’s ministry was one of accompaniment.
ELCA Presiding Bishop Mark Hanson, speaking on the occasion of this 300 year anniversary celebration, said that to be Lutheran in Ziegenbalg’s time as well as our own time is to live the paradox of not knowing fully and yet being expected to give social form to God’s word. It means in all ways to be a people in pursuit of justice whose discipleship vision is centered in the cross, a people called in all things to cross from fear to hope, from detachment to companionship, a people who in all times trust God.
A bus leaves early Tuesday morning to carry 50 youth and adults from ABQ to San Antonio on another sort of cross-centered journey. Cruzando, a Spanish verb meaning something like “crossing,” is the theme for this five-day experience. In the course of these first two weeks of July 2006 the ELCA will gather together 40,000 of the faithful in this Texas city only to send them back home changed. I am not sure exactly what we’re in for – I’ve never been to a national youth event before. I know we’ll worship and listen, pray and sing, work on a service project in town, offer gift cards to our neighbors in need and our Hamiltons for World Hunger. We’ll also spend a lot of time standing in line for meals. No doubt some of us will be thorn in the flesh to others; no doubt some of the stuff we think we absolutely must take with us will just get in the way of our experience. Yet in the midst of it all somehow God’s light will shine more brightly in dimly lit corners of our lives, showing us more clearly who God created us to be and how God is calling us to share our blessings in life-changing and life-giving ways back home. Pray for us, that our tongues and talents might be employed to make a difference in inviting and surprising ways – starting now.
When my own brother and his life-partner left for Ghana 25 years ago I must say I thought they were crazy. I couldn’t do that – sell my possessions, pack in barrels and leave home for four years to immerse myself in a strange culture and tongue and life-style. I’m not that patient. It has taken me this long to realize, through the persistent work of Tom and Mary and the stories of other people of faith as well who’ve crossed my path in those intervening years, to realize it isn’t about my patience. It’s about God’s patience – pass it on! It’s about God’s persistence – pass it on! The truth is here, just longing to be shared: God can use us, in our weakness and our ineptness, you and me just as we are to do amazing and wonderful things. And we don’t need to travel to a far country to do it. We need merely to shake the dust of rejection or fear or anxiety from our feet and open our hands and our hearts to let God lead us – across the aisle, across the street, across whatever dividing line of fear or anxiety keeps us from truly living and sharing the joy of this Gospel life with others.
Pass it on: God’s grace is sufficient for us all!