I.N.I.

A sermon to be preached on the 5th Sunday after Pentecost (9 July 2006) and the 8th Sunday after Pentecost (30 July 2006) and based on the Gospel for the day in both cases St. Mark 6:1-13 and St. Mark 6:7-13 because of the use of different lectionaries at Christ Lutheran Church, Elizabethtown, PA and Our Savior Lutheran Church, Arlington, VA, respectively.

Dear Friends in Christ,

Grace, mercy, and peace be yours in Christ Jesus, our Lord,

I. Today’s Gospel is clearly divided into two parts. Get a pencil out and draw a line across the lesson, as it’s printed in the bulletin, dividing between verses 6 and 7, between ‘then He went teaching’ and ‘He called the Twelve’. It’s kind of an interesting juxtaposition. In the first part Jesus is stonewalled or roadblocked in his own hometown. In the second half He sends the 12 off on a preaching mission. Why? To show them it isn’t so easy? To lay groundwork for His own future visits? To get them out of His hair so that He could spend time in prayerful retreat with His Father? Maybe all of these. Maybe none.

Here’s what we know: Jesus called his 12 disciples together and — after giving them detailed instructions on what they could and couldn’t take as baggage — sent them out in pairs where they preached and healed.

We immediately start wondering about these events. Like this: how long do you suppose they were gone on this trip? How long would you or I be able to travel with so little luggage? How did they know where to go and when to return? If Jesus kept preaching in the villages around there, how did the disciples know where to meet up with Him? How were they paired up? Who got to travel with Judas?

Most of these questions have to remain unanswered because the Bible doesn’t provide us with the answers. We are fortunate, however, that it does tell us what they did. The first thing they did was PR work, public relations work. Jesus had faced that frustrating lack of faith from the folks back in Nazareth, and then headed into the surrounding villages to continue his ministry. The twelve disciples were extending the reach of his ministry.

Now, back at that time, nobody was blogging Jesus’s ministry, nobody was posting minute by minute reports onto the Internet. There weren’t even television, radio, or newspapers. There was, however, good old reliable word-of-mouth. So Jesus’s disciples were out there spreading the word about Jesus in advance of his visits to the various villages, and countering any ‘negative press’ from the people in Nazareth. The twelve engaged in PR: public relations.

There was also another kind of “PR”: preaching and recalling. Their sermons were pretty simple, as recorded here in the Gospel. “Repent.” Repent, for the kingdom of heaven is near. It picks up on John the Baptist’s ministry. It echoes some of Jesus’s preaching. It was simple and straightforward. It was sure to get a reaction. And I imagine that the reaction was often, “What are you talking about?’ That’s where the recalling part came in. The twelve had to recall the things that Jesus had taught them in order to explain their own preaching to the people. Repent from what? Your sins. What sins? Every time you go against God’s will and break a commandment. Why? God’s kingdom is coming. What’s that? His rule of power and grace, of punishment and forgiveness. And on it went. They preached to the people, and recalled what Jesus had taught them. PR: preach and recall.

But their tour of the countryside wasn’t all just traveling lightly and talking. There was another kind of PR to engage in. This PR was “personal relationships.” We see this clearly in two places in our text. The disciples were directed to enter homes of people in the areas they visited, and to stay there, getting to know those people, their needs and their gifts. And, who knows, many of these host families may have ended up in later years being sponsors of house churches. The other kind of personal relating they did was engaging in a healing ministry wherein they had to get ‘up close and personal’ anointing the sick with oil and curing them. So these disciples were mirroring Jesus’s own ministry and foreshadowing the ministry of Christian pastors and all Christians to this very day.

II. We might like to follow suit, to be just like the original 12 disciples, and follow the directions of Jesus to spread his word. But we first follow them in aspects linked back to the fact that — like the 12 disciples — we don’t engage In our various Christian ministries on our own power. Perhaps we admire them or mentally imagine that their lives were praiseworthy and could be models for us. But there is nothing inside us that motivates us actually to do anything about it.

First of all, we are often too tied down to our own possessions to go off preaching like the disciples did. If we could only hear the word of Jesus as clearly as they did, we would not want to hold on to so many things as tightly as we do. Most of us just have too much stuff. Look around in your own basement, storage room or garage. Do you know that there are people who actually have room in their garage for their automobile? And that there are cultures around the world where the concept of an extra room or whole floor of a house devoted to storing extra things would be unthinkable? [your basement floods…]

Secondly, we’re often too tied to things to support others in ministry, The first way we could theoretically get past this would be to drop it all and to hit the road as the disciples did with only a walking stick, no bread, no bag, no money on our belts…. No suitcase? No change of clothes for every day of the week? That probably won’t happen for any of us. So we could divest ourselves of things in order to support someone else who can exercise lightweight mobility for the Lord. We could give sacrificially in support of God’s work around us and in other places. But, again, most of us don’t, do we?

Thirdly, we’re often too tongue-tied to share the Gospel where we are. We could tell the simple story of our own faith, describe why we attend church as often as we do, just talk about what is (without

feeling we have to be able to explain every detail of every theological dogma and doctrine). But something holds us back. Fear? Shame? Embarrassment? The fact that we haven’t really listened and absorbed what Jesus has been telling us over the years? (By the way, do you see how this preaching trip for the disciples was a kind of practice session for them before Jesus left them on their own to build his Church after the Ascension? They were able to try out the apostle job and then had the chance to meet back together with Jesus and dissect what had happened; then only later were they on their own.)

We’re too tied to too many possessions; we’re too tied to things to support others; and we’re too tongue tied to talk about Jesus.

III. These knots can be untied. But we can’t do it ourselves. The disciples didn’t just up and decide to go out preaching and healing all on their own. They needed the power and direction of the Savior to engage in this activity. Jesus had to untie the knots that held them back. And he unties the knots holding us back in the same way. We can learn from their experience how our own might go.

The twelve disciples first came to Jesus. In verse 7 Jesus called them. Then they responded by coming to him. And hasn’t he called us, too? Sometimes repeatedly. Like a patient parent standing on the porch calling in children from their playtime, Jesus calls and calls until we come. It may have been as infants that our spirits were flooded with the Holy Spirit, and that he called us to faith before our brains even engaged and started to object to yielding control of our lives. It may have been later in life, when the Spirit had to battle down the sinful “old Adam” in us in order to gain a hearing, before we responded in faith. And it may have taken repeated callings and responses before we finally settled into the paths God had planned for us. The fact remains that the Scriptural pattern is always this: a call by God, and only then a response in faith.

The next step was not the disciples grabbing something and dashing back out the door to what they were doing before Jesus called. They stopped and listened to him. He had to give them last minute instruction before they headed out. As He was sending them out, as he was literally “apostling them,” Jesus gave the twelve the directions and the power they would need. And isn’t that our own second step? We have come to faith in response to the Lord’s call, and now we listen to his word, his life-giving and direction-giving word. Some of us don’t listen so well. Some of us don’t pay attention. Some of us try to pick up on someone else’s call, or we don’t respond when our own is explained. But the fact stands that for each and every Christian in the history of the Church there needs to be instruction at the feet of Jesus where we listen, take to heart, and make our own what the Lord tells us. Without this period of discipleship we won’t be the people God wants us to be.

Following that time of instruction none of Christ’s followers go back to their own ways. That is, neither do the twelve disciples nor do any of us go back to the ways we would have followed in our natural state without Jesus. Jesus’s disciples — both in the first century and today — follow the Lord’s directions. We perhaps tend to think to the great life changes that came over the 12 apostles who walked and ate with Jesus in the years of his earthly ministry. Matthew stopped collecting taxes. Peter and Andrew left their fishing nets. And so on. What a lot of us don’t think about is the ways our own lives have changed from what they would have been without Jesus. So few of us actually have dramatic life-changing conversion stories like St. Paul in the Bible, Sts. Augustine or Francis of Assisi centuries ago, or perhaps some present-day saints whose names you know. Most Christians’ lives are quieter. But we can all imagine how some life choices would have been different if we weren’t believers, how some periods of life would have been so much more difficult, and how — as bad as things might have gotten — they would have been even worse if we had not been believers. So it is a precious and holy thing that we do indeed follow the call and direction of our Lord and God. We live our lives according to his directions and instructions. We carry out and live out what we have learned at the Savior’s side.

Finally, the disciples returned to Jesus. In St Mark’s Gospel this doesn’t happen until verse 30 after the terrible and poignant story of Herod killing St John the Baptist. At that point they came back and told him all that they had done and taught, and Jesus told them to “come away to a deserted place and rest a while.” (Mark 6:31) In our own lives, this return happens repeatedly. It happens throughout our lives. We can sometimes observe it as an operation of the law of alternation between very busy times and quite restful times. We can see it, possibly, in periods of spiritual refreshment that come after spiritual battles. And it might just be either an open and obvious time of physically going on a real retreat some place; or it could be a time that nobody else could see, a retreat that takes place inside our own hearts and souls. Beyond all this, we Christians look forward to our final return when we, too, will have the chance to stand with our Lord, looking into his face, and telling him how our day went, how our lives went. We look forward to the time of continuing eternal rest, refreshment, and spiritual retreat that we will finally experience in Heaven. Then, as the 12 disciples did after their little preaching trip, we will stand with Jesus and tell him all that we have done and taught.

IV. This all leads us, here and now in this very place, to live our lives as the Lord’s disciples did.

We, too, can engage in God-directed PR work, doing the public relations work that is necessary to get his Word out to the people of our communities and those around us. Maybe it’s something formal and organized. Maybe it’s something that makes this place more inviting to those who live near us. Maybe it’s the simple thing of living lives that are attractive.

We, too, can engage in God-directed PR work, doing preaching and recalling. It won’t always be formal preaching such as I’m doing at this moment (maybe it never will be), but our lives are sermons in flesh and blood, and our tongues can ever recall for people what the power and grace and glory of God are. We each can take what we have learned from our Bible reading, our Sunday School classes, the sermons we have heard, the Christian conversation we’ve had where we discussed issues, problems, and joys with other believers — and use all those learning experiences to shape our words and actions from day to day. We preach and recall all day long.

We, too, can engage in God-directed PR work by personally relating to people in need of His forgiveness and direction. Personal relations are where the connections between God and people are sparked into being. How can they hear unless someone tells them? It is in the one-on-one of a relationship that a person can come to know the Lord Jesus and all the marvelous things God has in mind for his people. Our personal relationships are the gardens in which the seeds of the Gospel are planted and cared for, grown and nurtured.

CONCLUSION By God’s grace in our own lives, we have been called to his side to receive his instruction. By God’s grace we are sent out to do these various kinds of PR work in the world. And by God’s grace we return to him for refreshment, strengthening and ultimate rest.

May that grace of God, which passes all human understanding, keep you in true faith until life everlasting. Amen.

S.D.G.