Year C
 Isaiah 66:10-14
 Psalm 66:1-8
 Galatians 6:7-16
 Luke 10:1-11, 16-20

May the words of my mouth O God…   speak your truth…

One of the things my parents taught my brother and me…  was how to accept a gift graciously…  without feeling obligated to offer a different gift in return…  to even the score as it were…  and one of the things that my first Spiritual Director clarified…  was that true gifts have no strings attached…  if the giver expects something in return…  then it’s really not a gift at all…  but is some kind of contract…  I give this to you…  and you give that to me…  and the sometimes complex patterns of gift giving…  can have subtle motivations…  some people give gifts because they may want the recipient to be beholden to them…  or perhaps they give gifts to increase their social standing…

Jesus now sends out the seventy…  to gather the harvest…  because the laborers are few…  and he wants the disciples to be dependent on others…  to be vulnerable…  because the kingdom which comes near to us is vulnerable…  and when you’re vulnerable…  you’re more sensitive to subtlety…  because you don’t have the trappings of society to fall back on or distract you…  and you can ask…  do your hosts share in your peace…  and what might that feel like…  or does your peace return to you…  and because peace…  like love…  can’t get used up…  and isn’t wasted…  it would come back to them undiminished…  and Jesus continues…  don’t start going from house to house…  it’s enough if you are welcomed in one house…  and while you’re there…  cure the sick…  and let them know that healing and wholeness come from God…

But if you enter a town and you’re not welcomed…  go out into the streets and protest…  because the kingdom of God has come near… and it’s God who’s really being rejected…  and this is such a subtle but profound rejection that the disciples don’t even want to carry the dust of the streets along with them…

And in the missing verses…  vv. 12 – 15…  Jesus says:  I tell you…  on that day it will be more tolerable for Sodom than for that town…  remember…  the sin of Sodom was the sin of being inhospitable…  in Ezekiel 16:49… God said… the guilt of your sister Sodom was that she and her daughters had excess food… prosperous ease… and were prideful…  but did not aid the poor and needy…  so Jesus is saying that to not accept the gift of the kingdom of God which comes near…  to not accept the peace which the disciples bring…  to not accept God’s hospitality…  has serious consequences…

And Paul’s letter to the Galatians…  describes a Christian karma of sorts…  Do not be deceived…  God is not mocked…  you reap whatever you sow…  this is action and reaction…  cause and effect…  Matthew 7:12 says it another way…  do unto others as you would have them do to you…  for this is the law and the prophets…  and to paraphrase Matthew 7:16…  no one expects to gather grapes from thorns…  or figs from thistles…

And the seventy returned…  and said…  Lord…  in your name even the demons submit to us…  they were pretty excited…  while they gave God’s gifts they probably felt their own standing increase…  maybe it was going to their heads…  and Jesus had to reel them in a little and say…  Yeah…  yeah…   the kind of things you do in my name are pretty cool…  but that’s really not what it’s all about…  what it’s really all about is where that ability comes from…  what it’s really all about is moving past all that false-self power…  and being remembered in Heaven…

But the shift from coveting power to relinquishing it…  the shift from contract to gift…  as the seventy experienced…  can be a subtle shift…  and I think there are two sides of the same coin which inform our experience…  the first is that we’re such an impatient lot… we have so much to do…  that we’re often better at rushing through things…  instead of looking deeply at how complex and interwoven some things can really be…  like a plate of spaghetti…  or how long they can take…  and we’re not good with gratification delay…  we want what we want…  and we want it now…  and the culture in which we live chants that mantra over and over again…  and so when our efforts don’t yield immediate results…  it becomes that much easier for us…  using an image from the Gospel…  to move on to another house or another town…  or to something which goes faster or delivers more of what we think we need…

And the other reality…  is that Kingdom building is really slow going…  and many of us have experienced that the church speeds along as fast as a glacier…  and as T. Denise Anderson writes [ in Sojourner’s magazine ]…   in truth…   not everyone will welcome Jesus or the church’s good counsel…  not everyone will want to hear it…  and so when Jesus sends his disciples out to share the Gospel throughout the region…  he prepares them for when they’re not welcomed…  not if…  but reassures them that being rejected doesn’t compromise their authority to defeat demons…  or remove their names which are written in heaven…

As we look back beyond the sweep of Judeo-Christian history…  we see that it took thousands of years for people to realize that each city didn’t have its own god…   and for the Israelites to write down in the Shema that there is just One God…  it took 400 years for stone pillars erected to the goddess Asherah…  who was considered to be YHWH’s consort…  and which stood in the Temple…  it took 400 years for them to be torn down by King Hezekiah…  it took almost 200 years to build Notre Dame Cathedral…  and 290 years to build Canterbury Cathedral…  44 more years than the age of this country…  this experiment in democracy…  which is only 246 years old…  and so why do we think we’ve got it all figured out…  when people of every stripe reject God’s welcome of everyone… 

So what kind of investment in the future are we willing to make…   how much are we willing to sacrifice now…  for a better outcome later on…  only for our children and grandchildren…  or for generations of people we will never know…

There’s a story…  one who reads the words of prayer with great devotion may come to see the lights within the letters…  even though one does not understand the meaning of the words one speaks…  and such prayer has great power…  mistakes in reading are of no importance…  because when a father has a young child whom he greatly loves…  even though the child has hardly learned to speak…  his father takes pleasure in listening to the child’s words…

The seventy disciples are us…  when the service is over and we’re sent from this place sounding out the words…  to simply share the Word and the radical grace and forgiveness that we have received…  to go and tell everyone about God’s non-contractual gift to us…  about how much God has done for us…  and like the disciples…  I believe we’re simply called to give to others the way God gives to us…  because…  and at its deepest…  most subtle and vulnerable level…  it’s all gift…  all we need to do is open ourselves up to it…  accept it…  let it seamlessly flow through us to everyone we meet…  and expect nothing in return…  Welcoming God…  make it so…