Text: Luke 10:1-12, 16-20
Date: July 3, 2022
Event: Proper 9, Year C
Luke 10:1-12, 16-20 (EHV)
After this, the Lord appointed seventy-two others and sent them out two by two ahead of him to every town and place where he was about to go.
2He told them, “The harvest is plentiful, but the workers are few. So ask the Lord of the harvest to send out workers into his harvest field. 3Go your way. Look, I am sending you out as lambs among wolves. 4Do not carry a money bag or traveler’s bag or sandals. Do not greet anyone along the way. 5Whenever you enter a house, first say, ‘Peace be to this house.’ 6And if a peaceful person is there, your peace will rest on him, but if not, it will return to you. 7Remain in that same house, eating and drinking what they give you, because the worker is worthy of his pay. Do not keep moving from house to house. 8Whenever you enter a town and they welcome you, eat what is set before you. 9Heal the sick who are in the town and tell them, ‘The kingdom of God has come near you.’
10“But whenever you enter a town and they do not welcome you, go out into its streets and say, 11‘Even the dust from your town that clings to our feet, we wipe off against you. Nevertheless know this: The kingdom of God has come near.’ 12I tell you, it will be more bearable for Sodom on that day than for that town.
16Whoever listens to you listens to me. Whoever rejects you rejects me. And whoever rejects me rejects the one who sent me.”
17The seventy-two returned with joy, saying, “Lord, even the demons submit to us in your name!”
18He told them, “I was watching Satan fall like lightning from heaven. 19Look, I have given you authority to trample on snakes and scorpions and over all the power of the enemy. And nothing will ever harm you. 20Nevertheless, do not rejoice that the spirits submit to you, but rejoice that your names have been written in heaven.”
Harvest Workers Labor in God’s Fields
How do you feel when working on someone else’s project, or with someone else’s tools, or in someone else’s space? Depending on who you are and the situation, there could be a few different ways to view it, I suppose. If you’re working on a friend’s car, and doing something you hadn’t done before, you might view it as a relief to be learning on a vehicle that isn’t yours. Or maybe it’s nerve-racking to have the responsibility of someone else’s vehicle in your hands.
If you’re cooking in someone else’s kitchen (or the new kitchen downstairs when it’s done!), perhaps you feel invigorated by being in a different space with different tools at your disposal to try some new things. Or, perhaps, you’re on edge and feeling discombobulated because you don’t know where anything is and you’re not as comfortable as what you’ve known in your own home.
Doing work that is not completely your own or in a setting that is not yours can have its pluses and minuses. But regardless of how you would feel in those situations, Jesus this morning tells us that the work of the church is work done not in our own spaces, but in God’s. That as we are sent or send out workers into the harvest field, we’re laboring in God’s fields, not our own. The work is his, the glory is his, and the challenges are his too.
As Jesus was making a final tour through the area at the end his earthly ministry, he commissioned 72 of his followers to go ahead of him and be his messengers. They had a specific job to do: Jesus sent them out two by two ahead of him to every town and place where he was about to go. They were to go and serve kind of a similar roll that John the Baptist served at the very beginning of Jesus’ ministry. They were to go, preach the good news in these various places, and get the people ready for Jesus to come and continue his work directly among them. These messengers were also given the ability to perform miracles like Jesus did as a way to draw attention to the message they were proclaiming.
Jesus gives them a commissioning speech of sorts before they go, but it doesn’t feel like it’s heavily in the “motivational” category: Look, I am sending you out as lambs among wolves. In other words, this work was going to be rough. And Jesus prepares them for that. Just like not everyone would listen to Jesus, not everyone was going to listen to them as they went out. If a town did listen to them, they were to stay there and continue to share with them and live among them. Jesus says: Heal the sick who are in the town and tell them, ‘The kingdom of God has come near you.’ The kingdom of God, faith in the heart that God creates, would be there among the people of that place. Jesus himself would soon be passing through. What a message of comfort and hope!
But, in places where they were not welcomed, where the message was rejected, they were still to announce something similar, but paired with warnings: ‘Even the dust from your town that clings to our feet, we wipe off against you. Nevertheless know this: The kingdom of God has come near.’ The same phrase, but a wildly different meaning. In other words, “The kingdom of God, faith in the heart that God creates, was available here, but you rejected it. This will end badly for you eternally.”
What does this all say to us today? As a congregation, we are tasked with sharing the gospel message in the place where we’ve been planted. But remember, this work is ultimately God’s work, not ours. He is the one working through us (or in spite of us), and he brings about the results. So it’s tempting to get sucked into looking at the wrong things to measure success. Is it important how many members we have on the roles of our congregation? Is it important how many people love our campus or our congregational personality? All of those things have some value, but if we’re chasing after numbers or just being liked by others, we’re not really doing the work that God has for us.
If Jesus’s primary goal was that everyone they met were to like and get along with these messengers, he would have told them to tailor the message to meet what people wanted to hear. He wouldn’t have warned them about rejection but would have trained them in changing and tweaking things until everyone was happy. But that’s not what he told them to do. And it’s not what he’s told us to do, either.
We have God’s Word to share, and we do not have the authority to change what that Word says, even if it is deemed unpopular by the people we share it with. We can’t modify what we teach to make this person over here like us or to ensure that this family joins the congregation. No, as a congregation as we are workers in God’s fields, not our own. These are his people whom he bought with his own blood. Far be it from us to change the message he wants them to hear just to feel better about ourselves.
Instead of taking rejection personally, Jesus reminds us what’s really going on in those moments: Whoever listens to you listens to me. Whoever rejects you rejects me. And whoever rejects me rejects the one who sent me. Because they are rejecting the message that God wants to be shared, they’re not rejecting you and me, the messengers, but God, the one who brought this to them through us. While it can be difficult for us to remember, both success and failure, both acceptance and rejection, is not on us, but on our God who brings the good things about or on the people who are rejecting this message.
But this lesson also has something to say to us as people who hear God’s Word. Does the pastor always say the things we want him to say? Is the church run exactly the way we want it to be run? Notice where the focus is in those questions: my desires and opinions. Should those dictate what is done in the ministry of a congregation? God forbid it!
Instead, we should be asking: is the pastor saying the things God knows I need him to say, even if I don’t want to hear it? Is the church being run in a way that is consistent with God’s direction in Scripture? In those questions, the emphasis is on God’s will and Word, not our own subjective, emotional responses. And truly, there is room for variance. There are many things that God has not given clear black-and-white, right-and-wrong directions on. But for the places where he has, we do well not be those whose town would have the dust of the messenger’s feet wiped off against us. We do well to not be described as God described the people of Israel to Ezekiel in our First Reading: hard-headed and hard-hearted (Ezekiel 3:9).
As we consider these things, as we consider our roles as those carrying out this work and those benefiting from this work, we undoubtedly see weakness, failing, and sin on our part. And it is for that very reason that we need this message taught so purely and accurately. Because what is the gospel message but the assurance that God has forgiven every sin? While I may not be comfortable with or want to hear what God says is right and wrong, his Word also assures me that everything I’ve done wrong is gone. Jesus forgave my failings as a sharer or a receiver or his Word. If we water down God’s message of sin, we also water down God’s message of our Savior. But, if we labor in these fields in a faithful way, we also bring the comfort of complete restoration in Jesus’ death for us.
This work, even if approached in the best possible way, is absolutely overwhelming. Never mind the world, just thinking about our immediate context—sharing God’s Word with the 25,000 or so people in Belmont alone (never mind the 8 million+ in the Bay Area) seems impossible. It doesn’t take long for us to see that Jesus’ observation some 2000 years ago is the same today as it was then—The harvest is plentiful, but the workers are few. And the solution to that problem is the same as it was then—ask the Lord of the harvest to send out workers into his harvest field. As we think about both pastor and teacher vacancy rates being at troublingly high levels across our synod, we will pray and implore our Savior to send out more and more public servants of the gospel into his harvest fields.
But it’s also interesting that Jesus tells these disciples to pray for workers, and then send them out to serve in that very role. So this is not a fire-and-forget prayer. This is a pray-and-act situation. How can we send out workers? Are there people in your family or in our congregation who could serve in the public ministry as a teacher or pastor in our churches and schools? Talk to them about it, encourage them to seek it out, and then also pray for them. Might you have gifts or interests in these areas? This is not just for the young people. Those seeking a second, different career or a new role after retirement might also find encouragement in the needs that Jesus points out. Could you, either here or elsewhere, serve in a more public, active way in our Savior’s gospel ministry?
In the end, members and pastors, congregations and church bodies, all of us are united as Christian brothers and sisters. We all are, to one degree or another, fellow workers laboring in God’s harvest field. May our God preserve us from caving to public pressure to change our message. May he make us bold, loving, and patient as we reach out to a world that increasingly has no idea what Jesus has said or done. And may he bless that work—his work through us—to bring about the purposes that he desires. Amen.
