Keep Your Head in the Game
Luke 10, 1-12,16-20
Doing church in a secular world is tricky. We’ve all come across this feeling, especially in Marin county, when you tell someone you attend a church or that you’re a Christian or my own challenges of saying I’m a minister, and the conversation stopping, or someone explaining to you why they don't go to church, why they don’t believe in God, why they hate organized religion, why they left the church….It’s getting more difficult in the past few years.
Some evangelicals are pointing to the president as a savior, a messiah which is dangerous no matter how you feel about any president. It’s antithetical to everything the cross teaches us about power. And people who are not churched, lump all of the churched people together. So often they assume, that if you go to church you must be intolerant at best, or ignorant and hypocritical at worst.
When I was younger, I used to think I had a responsibility to try to convince people why I or my church was different than what they were thinking. In other words, I had convinced myself I could change their minds. And then over time, I realized that it was a waste of my time and theirs. Most people aren’t interested in having a conversation. Most have already made up their minds about what you believe.
Once I began not responding, I noticed a kind of calm that would come over me. The job I thought I had of convincing people had been resigned into a kind of prayer. A prayer of acceptance, a prayer that they find peace with whatever it is they believe or don’t believe.
Today, in Luke’s Gospel, Jesus is sending the disciples to prepare the way for all the places that Jesus will eventually come to, now and upon his return, as Luke was writing at a time when everyone was waiting for Christ’s return.
Jesus is specific in his instructions. First, he reminds them that the harvest plentiful. That’s the good news. But here’s the bad news. I’m sending you out like lambs to wolves. So don’t bring anything. There’s an urgency to this mission for Luke. Because the idea that Jesus is coming back any minute. Don’t take time to pack anything. I just packed for a trip to Portland and it took an hour just to decide whether I should bring a water bottle. The urgency for Luke is so great, he tells the disciples to talk to no one along the way. Sometimes when Eric and I are in a rush and about to leave, he says the same thing, “talk to no one,” because he knows I can strike up a conversation everywhere we go.
To not bring anything and to talk to no-one along the way, to eating what’s put in front of you…are all wonderful metaphors like keeping your head in the game, or your eyes on the road. And it can extend into all areas of our lives.
We are as disciples of Christ, as the church, we are called to spread this good news of Jesus into the world. And so we are all of us in ministry together.
There are times in ministry when we’re called to stand up and speak out in the name of Jesus Christ, in the name of love to stand up for what we believe to be wrong, believe to be right, and just. And that is when it can most feel like you’re standing in a field of wolves with no protection.
One would think, as long as we’re spreading love, nothing could go wrong. We can think we are doing and saying all the right things when it comes to loving God and others. But at the end of the day there will be those who disagree, who resent you, who fight with you and even accuse you of heresy.
That’s why I love this line….if someone does not share in your peace, it will return to you. (vs6) Which means not only is your intention still intact but so is the peace with which you came. We do that sometimes. We think that we’ve wasted our time, wasted our energy when we discover our intentions have been unwelcome at best, despised at worst. But according to Jesus, peace returns to you. Perhaps that’s because that “peace” that wholeness, doesn’t really belong to us. God’s peace, which we all have in us, is meant to be given away. It’s meant to change the world by being expressed in what we do, how we live. No one, no matter how vehemently they deny or disagree, can take that away.
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The Rev. Amy Allen is an adjunct professor of New Testament at Columbia Theological Seminary and an ordained minister in the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America.
In the first century of the Common Era, the Roman Peace, or Pax Romana, ushered in by the Roman Empire was the promise of peace through the subjugation of lands. Roman armies traveled from place to place conquering smaller powers and ushering in protection and hopes for prosperity in exchange for tribute and obedience. The spoils of their campaigns brought material and cultural wealth to the Roman center while leaving the townspeople in the subject lands to pay the price.
In contrast, in the Gospel text for this week Jesus instructs his followers to go from town to town to “share in peace” with whatever household they enter (10:6). What is this peace, then, that Jesus instructs his apostles to proclaim? It is not a peace won on the backs of commoners and soldiers, it is not a peace reserved for the wealthy at the expense of the elite, nor a peace through destruction or death. The peace that Jesus’ apostles bring to each town is a peace of life.
God’s peace is a peace founded on life, rather than death. On relationship, rather than enmity. On engaging in and accepting mutual hospitality, rather than building walls of division.
End quote.
The peace that we are called to offer into the world house by house, person by person, is more than a greeting. Peace is representative of the kingdom of God, peace is wholeness, peace is salvation. But the harsh reality is that peace is controversial. It wakes up demonic forces. And good and evil are wrestling and some will reject what the disciples are doing and others will welcome it. But nothing can take away the peace of God which is born in all children of God.
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The Christian Century magazine last week had a great article that speaks to being a pastor in a secular culture.
Daniel Simons teaches at the University of Illinois, is a researcher in a field of psychology called visual cognition. His best-known experiment—which can be seen on YouTube—is popularly called “the invisible gorilla.”
The idea behind the experiment is simple. People tend to think—particularly in this secular age—that seeing is believing. For instance, you’d assume that if you were watching people walking in a circle passing a basketball, you’d notice if some dude in a gorilla suit randomly walked through the scene, waving his arms and jumping up and down. That can’t be missed. Yet half the participants in Simons’s experiment miss it. People assume at rates over 90 percent that they are not the kind of people to miss such an obvious, right-in-front-of-your-face event—and yet 50 percent do.
The experiment shows that if people are looking for a gorilla, they see a gorilla. But if your attention is elsewhere—for instance, on counting the number of times the basketball is passed—at least half will miss the gorilla.
That’s just how Simons’s experiment is set up. Two groups of people, some in white shirts and others in black, pass a basketball between them as they move. The observer is asked to count how many times people in the white shirts touch the ball. Seconds into the sequence, the gorilla comes walking through. Afterward, half the observers are shocked when asked if they saw a gorilla. Most assume there was no such thing and that those who say they saw a gorilla are either liars or crazy.
Simons’s point is clear: perceptions of reality are contingent on our mode of attention. What we are prepared to focus on determines what we see. And what we focus on- the article describes as an immanent frame.
The article continues to make the point is that we all live in an immanent frame. God is in the background, and our day-to-day, moment-to-moment attention is on material things.
Most people are unwilling to stop paying attention to what society deems most important. They can’t, as it were, stop counting the number of basketball passes—or focusing on their bank accounts, Twitter followers, product promotions, or consumer purchases—to attend to something different.
Pastors too live in the immanent frame, drawn to pay attention to measurable things like church budgets, membership rolls, programs, and the data on denominational decline. Pastors have observation blindness too.
And yet real experiences of divine action occur. The problem is not that God is not visible but that (to pursue the analogy) God is the gorilla to whose appearance we have been blinded.
There is, however, a way to avoid this observation blindness, a way even to encounter the event of God speaking. This is the way of prayer.
Prayer is the broadening of our attention on the world around us, looking for the arrival of God, who announces himself by speaking to us and calling us to pray for others in and through the actions of ministry.
That’s the beauty of this morning’s message. There is an immanence, that is an urgency, built into this scripture around the return of Christ. Keep your eyes and heart on what matters most, the kingdom, peace, the love of Christ and let that be what informs the choices you make in your life. And how you live that life, and what you stand up for in your convictions, which are not ruled by your pocketbook or your national pride, but by something much greater, like your conscience, which God lords over.
Our job as commissioned by Christ is to bring God’s peace with us into a world that is blind to it.
You have a job to do. Your life in Christ as reflected in your baptism made this so. You are made in the image of a God who loves all people, who cares for the least among us and understand all people to be children of Gods.
As beloved Disciples of Christ, the way you live your life, the choices you make, the patience and kindness you exude becomes the peace you bring with you into the world.
That’s a vulnerable place to live from. People may not like it or you. People may reject you.
“Whoever listens to you listens to me, and whoever rejects you rejects me, and whoever rejects me rejects the one who sent me.”
Don’t take it personally. Don’t over identify with the feelings of others or your own feelings. Because there’s a greater purpose here to your life. And it lives in the peace of God which is the game changer for all people. And that’s the gorilla we should all have our eye on, at all times.
Amen.