The Sixth Sunday After Pentecost: Sunday, July 8, 2007

As we watch Jesus send people out on what is essentially a healing mission, we realize that healing may be the primary Christian vocation in a world of great dis-ease.

Our Lord had begun by drawing around him a small circle of twelve. It was the number of Israel's tribes and was very significant for Jesus, who sees his task as bringing into being a renewed people of God.

He now takes the the next step in his mission. He selects seventy people and sends them into the surrounding countryside two by two. One thing we can't help noticing is that he gives very few directions. They are "to greet no one on the road". They are to say "Peace be to this house". They are to accept hospitality where it is offered. If they are not received with hospitality they are to leave. In addition they are told to heal the sick, and to say to them, "The kingdom of God has come near to you".

As with any scripture, there is something for us as we seek to be Christian in today's world. By telling them not to greet anyone on the road - eastern salutations tended to be long and elaborate - Jesus seems to be giving their task a sense of urgency. We need to have this sense in the tasks we take on as Christians. Very often in church life we can lack a sense of urgency about what we are attempting to achieve. We can regard our church commitments as casual and of rather low priority.

It should be significant for us that the only specific action Jesus commands those whom he is sending out is to heal the sick. Increasingly for Christians today the healing ministry is becoming strong and widespread. Furthermore there is a realization that in a frantic, tense and fearful world Christian faith can bring healing to the lives of individuals, healing fears, anxieties, angers.

Perhaps just as valuable is the ability of Christian faith to offer a renewed sense of meaning and purpose in people's lives. The faith can also be immensely healing where its truths are expressed in the insights of psychology. To do so is not to diminish Christian faith in the least. When both of these gifts of God, Christian faith and psychological insight, are used together, there can be deep healing.

Our generation of Christians may well be called to a ministry whose primary task is that of healing, both in individual lives as well as in the wounds and divisions of our society.

That is the Good News for this Week.

The Fifth Sunday After Pentecost: Sunday, July 1, 2007

The Gospel according to Luke
Chapter 9:51-62

Our Lord warns us that we can become so locked into our patterns of life that we cannot break free and grow.

“He set his face to go to Jerusalem” Anyone who thinks of Jesus as being dragged unwillingly to his fate has only to look at this statement. His decisions are being made with complete awareness of the possible consequences. Jesus is never the helpless victim of events, the well meaning but unlucky character in the drama. He is in charge, not in any overbearing sense but in the sense of his being a free person, one who knows the situation and its cost. At this point he sets out.

“He entered a village of the Samaritans." As a rule Jewish travelers did not go through Samaria. While it was not regarded as exactly enemy country, it was an area to be despised and avoided if at all possible. However Jesus is not prepared to write off a whole community in that facile way. We might ask where our own “Samaria” is, those areas of our lives, whether they be races, communities, or individuals, whom we despise for reasons we could not justify if challenged.

We now see Jesus in three different situations. His reactions are interesting. The first situation is one of rejection. The Samaritan village is not prepared to accept him and his group. The disciples are enraged. Here they are, being generously “liberal” to these people and they don’t appreciate it! How dare they! Notice how a latent hatred and violence flash out in James and John. Jesus “rebuked them”.

The second incident is one of seeming acceptance. Someone comes to Jesus and offers to follow him unconditionally – “wherever you go”. We all feel wary of over expansive gestures made in an enthusiastic mood. They have often not been thought through, and the chances of the person following through are slim. Jesus issues a warning about the cost of this kind of emotional offer and the person seems to fade away.

Now we see Jesus actually inviting a person to follow him. Taken aback by the offer, the man asks for time to go and bury his father. Jesus says what in that culture would have been a shocking thing. “Let the dead bury their own dead”.

As with many of his statements Jesus is resorting to extreme language to make a point. He seems to be telling us that we can allow the past to capture us in such a way that we can never get free of it. We find that we cannot change or grow. However, implicit in that statement is the offer that with grace we can break free of past things that tie us down.

This is the Good News for this week.

The Fourth Sunday After Pentecost -- The Nativity of Saint John The Baptist

The Gospel according to Luke
Chapter 1:57-80

Once again we meet John, this man nicknamed “the Baptist” because of something he invited people to do if they wished to associate themselves with his movement.

John is convinced that the world as he knows it is on the verge of massive change. He can only gropingly describe the terms in which he sees this change coming, but he reaches for an ancient image in his culture that he knows will be familiar to everyone.

Change, John declares, will come through a person, someone who will be known as the Messiah. Some of John’s contemporaries thought the change would be political. Others thought it would be in radical social reforms. John seems to have been in this latter camp.

Significantly John does not go to Jerusalem. He would have had a large audience, but I suspect he did not wish to work within the existing structures. Instead he decides to get the urbanites of Jerusalem to come to him. He begins with those few people who happen to be in the southern reaches of the country, trusting that word of mouth will reach the city. Eventually he succeeds in luring people into a desert environment so that they may look at their society from the outside and realize what a moral wasteland it has become.

If we listen to John we realize he is not merely shouting out condemnation of his generation. There is an element of that, but he is also offering a blueprint for a better society. We see this in the very precise and focused responses he makes to different people.

John realizes that something more than the nodding of heads in agreement is needed. If there is any truth in his intuition that a different kind of future is ahead, then it follows that a different kind of human being is needed for that future. That’s why John calls for a gesture of radical trust and commitment to his vision for the future.

First, one has to step out from among others, itself a commitment. To remove one’s outer garments was itself a gesture of self-revelation and renunciation. This response, that we know as baptism, was powerful on many levels.

John’s greatness shows in his refusal to make himself the centre of his own movement. Always he points beyond himself. And one day his cousin from Galilee steps from the crowd, slips off his outer robe, and asks John for baptism.

Much more happens in the following months as Jesus’ movement grows. John does not forsake his ministry. He may even have intensified his efforts and accepted a higher degree of risk. Certainly he must have realized what he was risking when he challenged Herod’s marriage to Herodias, his brother Philip’s wife.

There follow months in the dungeons of Herod’s Dead Sea fortress at Machaerus. From there one more echo of John’s voice comes to us before it is silenced by the executioner’s axe.