Sermons
February 4, 2024 (5th Sunday after Epiphany)
“…but his soul goes marching on”
Mark 6:1-29
Quite some time ago, I was driving somewhere and had the car radio tuned to NPR. It was a Saturday morning, so I was listening to “Car Talk.” I didn’t really care one way or another about that program, but it was on, so I listened to it.
A woman named Tara called in to ask the guys’ advice about a trip she and her boyfriend were planning. They were going to leave Stanford University in California, drive north into Canada, and then head east across Canada, ending up in their new home in New Hampshire. They had no particular schedule to keep, which Click and Clack thought was a good thing, because the vehicle they were taking—a mid-1980s vintage Volkswagen camper-van—was almost guaranteed to break down several times over the course of the trip.
The brothers and Tara all agreed that this would be a make-or-break trip for the couple; not only would they be living in that VW van, in very close quarters, but they would have the added stress of frequent car trouble in unfamiliar places—not just being broken down by the side of the road, but also the expense of urgent repairs.
Now, in the years since I heard this show, we’ve learned of a similar couple’s road trip that ended in horror and tragedy, as the couple were embroiled in domestic violence, and the young man killed his girlfriend out in the middle of nowhere, then returned home where he took his own life. But even before that incident, as I listened to Tara talking about the road trip she and her boyfriend were planning, I could feel my blood pressure going up.
I couldn’t any more go on a trip like that than I could sprout wings and fly. Leaving on a trip where I’d have no idea where we would be stopping on any given day, or when the next breakdown would happen, or whether there would be a mechanic to help us—and whether that mechanic would be a trustworthy one (like Don) or leave us worse off than we’d been before—or how long it’d be before I could sleep in a normal house and a normal bed again…Nope, I just plain couldn’t do it.
You might say, well, you’re a bit older than you used to be; maybe when you were in your twenties you could have. But I promise you that’s not the case. I’ve never had that kind of adventurous spirit.
But here in today’s reading we have Jesus sending his disciples out on precisely that kind of trip—only worse, I think: not only are they going out with no idea where they’ll be staying on any given night, but they don’t have even a broken-down van to sleep in. They can’t take anything with them but a walking stick, not even an extra shirt to keep of the cold night air if they find themselves sleeping outside, no bag, no money, no picnic lunch, nothing. When they go into a community, they’re to accept the first offer of hospitality they receive, and stay at that house until they’re ready to leave town.
Some of these restrictions have to do with the kind of mission they’re on. Well, actually, they have more to do with the kind of mission they’re not on: They’re not on a mission to make themselves look good, or to throw their weight around in a community.
They are to accept the first offer of hospitality and not move from there to another house during their stay because they are not to be seen as shopping for the best possible accommodations. And why carry no bag? Probably this is a small bag like people would carry money in; if they have no bag to carry money in, they can’t, so the thinking goes, be in the business of doing miracles for money, earning a profit from other people’s need.
I wonder how the conversation would go if Jesus chose twelve of his modern-day American disciples to go out on this kind of mission trip. He is seriously sending them out with nothing, so that they have no choice but to depend on the grace of God and the kindness of strangers. We’re conditioned to be self-sufficient, not to depend on anyone else, and to distrust strangers; I wonder if very many of us at all could truly accept this mission. I am certain I would find it very difficult.
One of my classmates last month stayed with a couple he had never met. He came to Tulsa from Georgia; he didn’t have a lot of funds to throw around, so he put the word out among his colleagues and church folks that he needed a place to stay, and this couple offered to put him up for the week.
They were perfectly nice people—I somehow got invited to their house for supper one night while I was there—but again, the notion of staying with total strangers like that would make me extremely uneasy. For one thing, unlike my classmate, I’m an introvert, and after being in class all day, I need time alone to recharge. And I am the sort of person who doesn’t even like to stop and ask for directions—the notion of asking for someone I didn’t know to put me up for a week would have caused me to drop the class!
But it gets worse.
Bad enough that we have to depend on others, face uncertainty, put our sustenance in the hands of strangers who may or may not have our best interests at heart. But now he says that, for all that, we may well not get any results? Some places aren’t going to welcome us, and many people aren’t going to be interested in hearing our message about repentance and the kingdom of God. Some people may be outright hostile toward us and our message.
We tend to prefer that a venture we’re part of is well-thought-out, with just about every possible problem and its solution identified beforehand.
Say, for instance, you want to start your own business. I can’t imagine that a bank is going to loan you money to rent or buy a space, remodel it, purchase equipment, and open a shop, unless you have prepared a business plan and demonstrated with some reasonable degree of certainty that you can make a go of it. Just to go out there and say, “Here I am,” well, that’s just now how we do things.
But that is pretty much what Jesus is asking of his disciples in our passage today: go out with this message and this mission, and don’t wake anything with you that might make your travels easier, and oh, by the way, there are going to be places where you completely fail to get anyone to buy what you’re selling. You have no guaranteed results; but yet Jesus sends you out into the unknown with a message and authority granted by him.
As it turns out, even Jesus never had a guarantee that he would be received positively. The first part of our reading describes how he pretty much failed to gain followers in his own hometown. All the people there could see was the local kid, the carpenter, coming back into town after reports had gotten to them about deeds of power he’d done in other places, and clearly having forgotten where he came from, stepping outside the perfectly good role he’d been raised and trained to fill in the community.
The people of Nazareth—including his own family—could not consider the possibility that indeed this local boy might have the power of God at his disposal, and so they were offended by him. So he had to leave that place, having only managed to cure a few sick people (I’m guessing that, to those sick people, this wasn’t quite as insignificant a thing as the way the text describes it), sadly amazed that his own ones, these folks he’d known and loved, and who’ve known and loved him, his entire life, couldn’t believe in the good news he had to offer them.
Our reading today brackets the sending of the Twelve with not just the story of Jesus’ rejection in Nazareth but with the story of the tragic ending of John the Baptist. John had dared to speak truth to power—something that is a major part of the prophet’s job description—and gotten himself arrested for it; then the scheming wife of the Roman puppet ruler of Galilee managed to make sure he was executed.
Jesus just had to leave town; John left this earth minus his head. And the disciples are sent out with the same message John and Jesus had both been proclaiming, and with the certain knowledge that they would not always find a positive reception.
Jesus even told them how to handle it when, not if, they were rejected: shake the dust off your feet as you leave, and move on.
It’s a hard thing to experience; I’m sure it was hard for Jesus, even, and there is no doubt it was hard for the Twelve. It may well be part of the reason why we aren’t terribly excited when someone starts talking to us about evangelism—we know quite a few people won’t want to hear what we have to say, may even be rude about it.
But that even happened to Jesus himself, so at least we’re in good company.
The issue is that we have to know when to move on, when to recognize we’re not getting anywhere and try something else. We also need to keep from taking the failures we have personally: it could be that the people who reject us and our message just aren’t ready to hear it yet, but we’ve planted seeds that might make them receptive when someone else comes along with the same message later.
If we were to read a bit farther in Mark 6 we would find that the Twelve did meet with some success, and so will we when we go out in Jesus’ name, with his power at our disposal and his good news on our lips. We won’t always have success, but sometimes we will.
And ultimately, God doesn’t measure success and failure like the world around us does—if we’ve gone out and faithfully done what we were sent out to do, then we haven’t failed as far as God is concerned. Just like in the parables Shawn preached about two weeks ago, our job is to plant the seeds, and trust that God will bring forth a harvest. What matters is that we answer the call to go out into the world, ministering and proclaiming good news in Jesus’ name, and not letting either our failures or our successes go to our heads.
What matters is that we do what we can, and leave the rest up to God.