July 8, 2007

By Harry T. Cook

Luke 10: 1-12, 16-20

On a trip to my hometown last month, I encountered my high school football coach, now pushing 80 years old. He was 27 when he put our team through its paces in 1955 and 1956, but he’s still under a head of steam all these years on. He still speaks with an intensity that makes you tired; he walks with as sprite a step as ever. And he still calls me “Cook.” When he spoke my name on that recent occasion, I felt myself stand straighter and under pressure to perform. That’s how it was on the gridiron of Bellaire Rural Agricultural High School 50 and more years ago. You moved it or you lost it.

One seldom feels that kind of intense pressure as a member of a church. Church is generally thought to be for comfort and relief from the nutsy-ness of life. It’s a place in which one tries to find sanity in a crazy world. Or not. If you gave yourself wholly to the gospel reading from Luke’s narrative proper to this Sunday, you were stirred to action. The text is full of imperatives. Go here. Do that. Carry this. Remain there. Eat this. And so on.

According to Luke, as the third gospel is properly called, depicts Jesus on a journey – a purposeful journey beginning with significant pre-natal events all the way to a deus ex machina ascent into the celestial ether. Now the same gospel turns to the journey of his followers, numbered at 70 in the text at hand, sent by pairs apparently to lay the groundwork for Jesus’ own appearance in city and town. It was not a trip by airplane, not by Pullman car, nor yet even by stage or on horseback. It was a journey of one foot in front of the other, world without end.

It was not even a direct, nonstop trip from Point A to Point B, with the point being not necessarily even to reach Point B, but rather to make a difference in every place between. It is also a journey on which one travels light. No steamer trunk being conveyed by others. Neither checked baggage nor carry-ons. The text reads: no purse (read “wallet,” and hence no cash), no bag (read “no provisions for the road”), no sandals (that is, nothing extra).

Why such rigor? Because “baggage” is extra burdens that you have to lug, that slow you down, that distract you from the journey itself. The point is to be totally invested in the people and places to which you are going. If you bring your poverty to theirs, they’ll share what little they have with you and thus make you not only a face at the table but a member of the family.

The point is, again, that kingdom of God thing — the rule and governance of a humanist ethic that draws people into a community of interdependence and provides a nondefensive security. What’s urgent about that?

Is there anyone who thinks the human experiment on this planet is not getting out of hand? Start with what has happened in Iraq over the past four years. Move on to the Sudan, to the inner core of any city in America, to the despoiling of the air and water of this fragile earth, our island home. We are being consumed by our own fears and selfishness. There is an urgency about the mission to make amends and to get undone what can be undone for the sake of the planet’s present residents and of generations yet to come.

That’s why by virtue of our baptism we are a “sent people,” a people supposedly on a journey rather than hunkered down in a comfortable pew seeking retreat rather than sounding an advance. Thinking now of my old football coach, I liken the liturgy and the venue in which it is done to the coach’s entreaties and the locker room out from which a team shall emerge unencumbered and in full run so to fulfill its purpose.

As aspiring Christians, our purpose is not to win anything but to advocate for and model a way of living and moving and having being that is characterized by that old Greek word for “love”: agape, which means giving of self fully, with no thought of or hope for getting anything in return.

Sometimes in order to maintain the necessary balance in our individual lives, we have to act out that mandate in surrogate ways. For example, not all members of our congregation are able to participate in the actual preparation and serving of food for our turn at the city soup kitchen. Such folk can and sometimes do contribute money to help us buy the supplies. Others make annual pledges to the soup kitchen’s parent organization. And whenever the time of getting ready for the mission to the soup kitchen and the actual doing of it comes around, that’s when I can tell that we’re in that “sent” people mode. As challenging as it is, it’s how we’re supposed to be functioning. It is supposed to be the rule, not the exception.

© Copyright 2007, Harry T. Cook. All rights reserved. This article may not be used or reproduced without proper credit.