Sermon preached at St. Mark's Church Penn Yan, New York on the 4th Sunday after Pentecost, July 7, 2019: Galatians 6:7-16, Luke 10:1-11, 16-20
A favorite movie of
mine is The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel. The manager of the hotel is a naïve young man;
at times he is inept, but he is always enthusiastic. At several points in the movie he says,
In the end all will be well,
And if it is not well, it is not the
end.
It is a message about
hope, of course, and it hits the nail of hope on the head because hope in the
short-term is often elusive. When it
comes to hope, we must learn to play the long-game.
Three phrases in the
readings this morning are good examples of playing the long-game of hope. The Gospel reading gives us the phrase,
twice, “The kingdom of God has come near to you” (vv. 9 & 11). That is the message the seventy disciples are
to proclaim on their mission trip. But
more than proclaim, it is also the message that they themselves are to
experience and help others experience.
For Jesus, the kingdom of God is not some abstract notion. It is something to be on the lookout for, noticed,
and experienced. Walter Brueggemann says
of the kingdom of God,
God is about to bring well-bring into
the world that will displace the kingdom of Rome and every other exploitative
power. … This good governance is displacing the governance of defeat and
despair that is sponsored by Rome or any other [combination] of ruthless power
and oppressive money. …We can trace the emergence of that new governance [in]
the life of Jesus.
The Gospel gives us
another long-game phrase from the lips of Jesus when the seventy return. Do not
rejoice in the power you experienced on the road, he says, but “rejoice that
your names are written in heaven” (v. 20).
This is not meant to articulate a belief that no matter what happens in
this life there is “pie in the sky in the sweet by-and-by.” It means that God’s love and mercy are things
we can count on now and forever.
And lastly we have from
Galatians a message from Paul that is basically, “don’t sweat the small
stuff.” “A new creation,” he says, “is
everything” (v. 15). Again, a long-game
view of hope.
Now none of these
things have been achieved, although they are all glimpsed from time to time,
and even experienced from time to time, enough so, that they remain strong
promises for us. They remain for us “the
hope of things unseen,” or Christianity would have died out a long time
ago. We learn to play the long-game in
faith because we have seen who God is in the life, death and resurrection of
Jesus.
The kingdom of God has come near to you.
Rejoice that your names are written in
heaven.
A new creation is everything.
Having said this, it is
not enough, of course. All is not well among us, not well with violence, with
hateful prejudice, with greed, with anxiety, and the exploiters of anxiety.
So what do we do? We
have this long-game hope, on the one hand, and on the other hand, our
experience of a very different, broken, alienated, competitive world. The current state of our national government,
continued regular instances of gun violence, the less than dignified treatment
of those seeking asylum in this country from a dangerously chaotic Central
America, the Middle East in tension and outright war from Syria to Iran to
Yemen. How can we play the long-game in
this dangerous short-term which testifies less to hope than to despair?
Three things:
1.
First of all,
I have to hearken back to the epistle for Independence Day from the Letter to
the Hebrews (11:13-15), which said,
All of these died in faith without having received the
promises, but from a distance they saw and greeted them. They confessed that
they were strangers and foreigners on the earth, for people who speak in this
way make it clear that they are seeking a homeland. If they had been thinking
of the land that they had left behind, they would have had opportunity to
return. But as it is, they desire a better country.
It is vitally important to be alert, to know that we
never reach perfection, that we strive always in our life together for
something better. This means being honest about our flaws, the ways we fall
short of God’s dream for us. Brueggemann says,
We belong to a tradition that notices,
that exposes, that insists, that tells the truth about failed reality, failed
reality in the neighborhood and in the larger world. … Right in the midst of
the [struggle], we make insistent claim for better.
2.
The second thing
we long-game hopers can do in the short-term is to act in concrete ways to
participate in God’s transformative mission in the world. Hope is grounds for action, not passive
waiting. So the disciples are sent out with specific instructions, and they
report back, “Hey, this stuff works!”
Then Jesus says a very odd thing:
I have given you authority to tread on
snakes and scorpions, and over all power of the enemy; and nothing will hurt
you. (verse 19)
Brueggemann says,
This is not a mandate to handle
snakes! It is rather to say that the
power for life given to the disciples will be authority to make life possible
where death seems to have the last word.
The demons want to negate life, want hate to win, want fear to prevail.
Disciples of Jesus refuse this way of death.
3.
Lastly, again to
Paul,
So then, whenever we have an opportunity,
let us work for the good of all, and especially for those of the family of
faith (verse 10).
On my way home from church in Rochester most Sundays I would travel through
the intersection of East Avenue and Goodman Street. For many years there were a
handful of people on that corner holding signs protesting the war in Iraq and
Afghanistan. I stopped once and talked
with a man I had seen there most Sundays.
“How long will you keep doing this,” I asked. “Until the war is over,” he said.
We live in a “me first” world, and any act for the common good, from which I
get no reward, is a radically Christian act.
So we are called to
play the long-game, with the unshakeable vision that
The kingdom of God is near.
We can rejoice that our names are
written in
heaven.
A new creation is everything.
We live in a world that
does not share those values, and, in truth, we struggle with them ourselves,
because at times the long-game seems way, way too long.
But Jesus and Paul give
us short-term ways to keep on keeping on in the long-game:
Be critically alert, and be honest.
Act daily in ways that transform death
to life.
Work for the good of all.
Interestingly enough
these perfectly align with three of the promises of our baptismal covenant:
We will persevere in resisting evil, and
whenever we sin, repent and return to the Lord.
We will seek and serve Christ in all
people, loving our neighbor as ourselves.
We will strive for justice and peace
among all people, and respect the dignity of every human being.
Short-term ways to play
the long-game of hope.
In the end all will be well,
And if it is not well, it is not the
end.
It is rather, the time
to be disciples.
The first time I walked into the office of Bishop James
Winchester Montgomery I was anxious. I
was seeking to re-enter the ordination process after leaving it in another
diocese. The leaving had been unpleasant, and I wasn’t sure if anyone would let
me back in. I had received, however,
many assurances that Bishop Montgomery would be welcoming.
