Sermon for Year C, Proper 9

Sermon for Year C, Proper 9

By The Rev. Torey Lightcap

July 9, 2019

St. Aidan’s Episcopal Church, Olathe, Kansas

Jesus gathers a crowd up and he says, Got a job for you.

He says, I’d like to get out to a lot of different places, but time’s running short.

So I’m asking God to help me find some people to go in my stead,

    Spread the word that the Kingdom of Heaven is close by,

  And folks, I think I’ve found those people. It’s you all!

Let the reader understand. This message is for us. It’s about us.

You’ll notice, first, that he doesn’t give them an opportunity to back out.

And he says, Pack light, everybody. No suitcase, no extra clothes, and move fast.

Don’t stop by the ATM on your way out of town.

He says, Hurry on your way. Don’t yak with people. Be about your business.

He says, Be nice. Bless the house you enter. But if they’re not interested, move on.

And in the same breath, he says, Stay on if you can. Stay put if it’s possible.

Take advantage of whatever situation you find yourself in.

And what are they to do while they’re out?

He says, Cure the sick ones you find, and tell them that the Kingdom of God

  Has come so close they can touch it.

If you can’t do any work in those towns or if you get rejected,

  Well, that’s not on you: just shake off the dust and keep moving.

And then the kicker: “Whoever listens to you listens to me,

  And whoever rejects you rejects me,

    And whoever rejects me rejects the one who sent me.”

So they go, as he tells them; and they do just fine.

In fact, more than fine: they come back busting their buttons.

They report getting into scrapes with demons and living to tell the tale.

And this is what Jesus says when he hears the reports of their success:

  He says, Satan himself has been torn from his throne this very day.

Wouldn’t you love for that to be the performance review of your life by Jesus?

“Satan himself cannot stand to be near you.”

The Gospel of Luke and The Acts of the Apostles were written together:

  Same time, same place, same author, same intent: same book.

Chapter One and Chapter Two of the same saga:

  People trying to figure out what this Jesus Event was,

    Make sense of it for the lives they were living, when and where they were living them.

So when you read these books of the Bible, know that Luke has designs on Acts.

The Acts of the Apostles, of course, is the Acts of the Apostles:

  Stories of what they did, where they went, who they talked with –

  In other words, how God acted through people to accomplish God’s good ends.

It’s about how the early Jesus Movement turned the world upside-down

  Wherever it happened to be, wherever it was blown by the Spirit.

And any successes we see here by those in the camp of Jesus in the Gospel of Luke,

  We are meant to read forward as a foreshadowing for the church as reported in Acts.

It brings to mind what Jesus said to his disciples in John:

  “Very truly I tell you,

    The one who believes in me will also do the works that I do,

      And in fact will do greater works than these.”

Acts has some memorable stories of numeric success, adding people to the church:

  Chapter two: “Those who believed what Peter said were baptized

    And added to the church that day—about 3,000 in all ....

      And the Lord added to their number daily those who were being saved.”

Or again, in chapter four: “Many of those who heard the word believed;

  And they numbered about five thousand.”

And so I wonder about something.

In an age in which church attendance is siphoning itself off to other things –

  (And it would be easy to despair, but we aren’t going to; we aren’t going to submit to despair) –

  But in our time and place, what does it mean to be successful today for Christ?

What does it mean, now, to “win souls for Christ” as people commonly say?

What if we took the success of the disciples seriously

  Without getting fixated on the numeric outcome?

This is a harder task than it sounds because we are so used to measuring everything,

  And for a long time now the church has only been thought to have been successful

    When it was increasing in attendance and giving. We don’t live in that world anymore.

The earth has turned under our feet,

  And as powerful a force in society as the church has been in years past,

    I can’t keep soccer from being played on Sundays.

We can’t shut down the farmer’s markets or Starbucks.

Yet I can assure you that wherever I go, people’s number one goal is always the same:

  “Bring in young families and grow the church.”

There’s a strong, and may I say far too literal shadow being cast from the Acts of the Apostles

  Right up on to the church today.

(I would only add that when I point out what might be happening inside the organization

  That could keep that growth from happening, people tend to get cold

    And don’t want to talk about it anymore. We can save that for another time.)

For now, it’s enough to say this:

  That it is time to redefine success as we have imagined it up to this point.

Every organization has to have a gut-check moment every five hundred years or so,

  And this is the time for that moment in the life of the church.

Why in the world would we believe that St. Aidan’s is any kind of exception to that need?

It’s going to involve a certain amount of discomfort, risk, loss, and failure;

  It’s going to require people willing to think and act experimentally;

    And it’s going to force us to be very clear about our purpose.

It may not always feel like it in the moment, but such change is for the good.

When Christians need to see the world afresh, they go to prayer, and they go back to Scripture.

If you read those stories of early Christian success again,

  And really pray over them,

  You’ll start to see something interesting:

    The big numbers of people joining the Jesus Movement are not the point of the exercise.

I know that’s hard to say, because counting more noses on Sunday is such a wonderful thing.

Everyone wants a bigger number on the Parochial Report, or more baptisms, or more giving.

But truthfully, the big numbers seem to be a side effect of something much more important,

  Which is the ability to clearly speak and to clearly act

  In public witness as to how God is moving in our life right now.

That’s what people are responding to in these readings.

And that doesn’t come out of a can or a bottle or a box. It’s always home-grown.

It requires a certain kind of vulnerability, and trust in Jesus, and closeness with God.

Friendship and union with God. Trust in the Spirit. “Leaning not on our own understanding.”

It is public and it is powerful, and it can’t be faked or bought.

Not even a new Rector is the cure-all.

It simply starts right here, in the heart, us and God,

  With the saints assembled to support and lift up each other.

I believe God is about to do something new and powerful at St. Aidan’s,

  And I wouldn’t want you to miss it.

From that thing, whatever it is, God will bring the harvest.

It’s rarely what we expect, but it’s what God needs.

Thank you for having John and me here these months.

We are both thrilled to be here,

  But more than this we are grateful to God

    That we might get to see something extraordinary and new start to unfold here,

      From the close-up perch we will have over the next several months together.

Amen!