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"Peace to This House!"
St. Mark’s Episcopal Church
Sunday, July 8, 2007
Sixth Sunday after Pentecost
The Rev. Gary Hall
I.
I do a fair amount of traveling in my work,
and much of it is on airplanes. Most of the other passengers
I see in airports have gotten their packing down to a neat rolling
suitcase and a slim shoulder bag. Me, I’m usually burdened
with a couple of fat checked suitcases, a bulging briefcase,
and often a canvas bag crammed with books. I seem to have bad
packing karma. You can imagine, then, how Jesus’s admonition
in today’s Gospel to travel light (“Carry no purse,
no bag, no sandals”) could put the fear of God into someone
like me. Yet, frightened as I am by my continued disregard of
his travel advice, I am going to steer my attention elsewhere
in this sermon.
Our Gospel for today is Luke’s account
of Jesus’s appointing seventy followers and sending them
out in pairs on a giant missionary journey. For all our contemporary
obsession with things (How could they get by with no purse,
no bag, no sandals?) the energy in this story is not focused
on how light the disciples are traveling. Rather, the energy
is on the purpose of the mission: “Whatever house you
enter, first say, `Peace to this house!' . . .Whenever you enter
a town and its people welcome you, eat what is set before you;
cure the sick who are there, and say to them, `The kingdom of
God has come near to you.'” [Luke 10] Jesus’s missionaries
are traveling light with a purpose: they have been sent out
to “cure the sick” and tell them that “The
kingdom of God has come near.”
So what has this got to do with you and me?
When you and I think about missionaries and their journeys,
we imagine 19th century people wearing pith helmets stalking
through third world jungles. For us these days, rightly or wrongly,
the idea of “mission” seems to equal cross-cultural
“conversion.” Just as we think of missionaries as
people sent out to convert other people from one religion to
another, so we read that assumption back onto Jesus’s
commissioning his missionaries and guess that he has appointed
seventy-two authorized representatives who will try to convince
Jewish people to become Christians. But it wasn’t like
that at all. And understanding why it wasn’t like that
will help us see what all this has to do with you and me.
II.
I have not yet seen Michael Moore’s
new movie, Sicko, but from all the publicity it has received
it is obvious that you and I as modern Americans are concerned
about the state of our health care and the system that delivers
it. Because we are modern (or postmodern) people, we tend to
think of disease and illness in modern, rational, western terms.
To you and me, people get sick because of what one sociologist
calls a “primary malfunctioning in biological and psychological
processes”: we get a tumor, a bacteria, a chemical imbalance
in our brains. To you and me there is a rational cause of disease,
and there are rational processes we can go through to attend
to it.
The world that Jesus inhabited, though, did
not share our modern concept of disease. To Jesus and his contemporaries,
it was probably truer to talk about illness or unhealth—terms
which a contemporary New Testament scholar defines as “the
secondary psychosocial and cultural responses to disease”—loss
of relationship, loss of self-respect, loss of status, loss
of livelihood. In Jesus’s place and time, then, illness
or unhealth was personal, familial, local, and psychosocial.
They did not know about diseases and their cures. But they knew
a lot about illness or unhealth and what their social and personal
consequences were. Lepers were isolated. Blind, deaf, and disabled
people begged. Folks with mental problems were thought to be
possessed by demons. To be ill or unhealthy in Jesus’s
day was to lose your social and personal standing. It meant
ostracism, alienation, and consignment to a life of meaningless
animal survival.
It’s with all that as background that
we need to listen again to what Jesus tells the seventy as he
sends them out. Forget, for a minute, the stuff about the purse,
the bag, the sandals. Forget for a minute, too, what you usually
think about missionaries and their conversion agenda. Listen
to what Jesus actually tells them: “Whatever house you
enter, first say, `Peace to this house!' . . .Whenever you enter
a town and its people welcome you, eat what is set before you;
cure the sick who are there, and say to them, `The kingdom of
God has come near to you.'” Jesus’s missionaries
are being sent out to do two things: first, they are being sent
out to cure the sick. Second, they are being sent out to broadcast
a declaration of peace. Health and peace do not normally go
together in our minds, but for Jesus and his followers they
do. And they should for us. Let’s follow the logic of
that out for a bit.
III.
Because the idea of the “faith healer”
seems so antithetical to you and me polite rational Episcopalians,
we tend not to notice that most of what Jesus did when he encountered
people was to heal them. By healing them I mean not so much
curing their diseases (though that certainly is there in the
Gospels) as I mean restoring them to health—removing the
psychosocial and cultural responses to illness. When Jesus touches
blind people, deaf people, lepers, and the insane not only are
they made well; they are restored to themselves and to their
community. Because we are “word people” when we
read the Bible we tend to concentrate on the image of Jesus
as a teacher. But for Luke and the other Gospel writers, Jesus
was primarily a healer. He cured the sick—both their actual
diseases and the social consequences of their illnesses. Something
about being in Jesus’s presence made people well. For
his earliest followers, the experience of following Jesus was
not so much that of being groupies of a guru as it was of being
a community of the healed.
Now if that is true—and I think it
is—then it is best to think of the earliest form of the
Jesus movement as a community of the healed. People followed
Jesus not only because he had important insights about how to
live life. They followed him because his very presence made
them well. They were healed physically, and because they were
healed physically they were healed psychologically and socially.
In Jesus’s day, sick people were ostracized. But now in
his presence they were not only healthy. More importantly, they
belonged. They had family, community, love, support, connection.
The earliest church was not an intellectual or an ideological
movement. The earliest church was the community of those who
had experienced themselves as healed.
So what Jesus’s sending of the seventy
on their first missionary journey turns out to be is what Bible
scholar John Dominic Crossan calls an expedition of “healed
healers” [The Historical Jesus, p. 334] According to Crossan,
what “Jesus did with those whom he himself healed and
who wanted to join his movement” is this: “He sent
them out to do likewise.” So here is what that initial
missionary journey looks like: the people who followed Jesus
did so because they were healed themselves. What they called
others into was not a community of like-minded belief but a
gathering of those who had experienced delivery from illness
into personal and social health. And that is why Jesus tells
them not only to “cure the sick”; he also directs
them to pronounce this blessing on each dwelling they enter:
“Peace to this house!” What is peace but wholeness,
in Hebrew shalom? By pronouncing “Peace” to each
house, Jesus’s disciples would be curing the sick, extending
the blessing of life and wholeness and community and health
to every welcoming person they encountered.
So, once again, what does this have to do
with you and with me?
IV.
What all this has to do with us is simply
this: you and I, like Jesus’s earliest followers, are
the community of those who have stepped into Jesus’s presence
and been healed. The people who followed Jesus knew themselves
to have been at a very low point indeed when their lives were
touched by Jesus. They were nearly dead—if not physically,
at least spiritually and emotionally—and now they were
alive. They gathered together and reached out to others because
they knew that something in the healing, life-giving touch of
Jesus had made them whole. And they wanted to share that blessing
with others.
In Crossan’s phrase, these missionaries
were healed healers, and that is what you and I are called to
be, too. Our modern, Western, rational way of understanding
disease isolates us from the experience of our own fragility,
our frailty, our dependence on God and each other for life and
love and meaning and purpose. We are not autonomous, independent,
self-sufficient self-made beings. We are fragile, finite, limited,
dependent creatures who need each other and God. Those who have
been healed know this about themselves, and in the grace of
that self-knowledge they also know that they can reach out in
love by offering that healing to others. What Jesus calls us
to be is not necessarily smarter or better or more successful.
What Jesus calls us to be is first of all healed and then after
that to be healers. Only when we are open to God’s embrace
can we call ourselves healed. And only when we extend that embrace
to others can we be called healers.
You can’t be a healer unless you’ve
been healed. And you can’t be healed until you’re
willing to open yourself up to the truths that you are not self-dependent
and you cannot make it alone. All of us are in this together
with each other and with God. In our terms we need family, community,
status, meaning, purpose. In Jesus’s terms we need healing
and peace. All that Jesus asks is that we be open to our need
for that healing, that we step into that peace. And that we
become, in our own various unique ways, agents of healing and
peace for others.
That is what it means to be a church, and
that is what it means to be a Christian human being. Together,
as a group, we are church, a community of healers who have been
healed. Individually we are women and children and men who are
open to the blessings of God’s compassionate love for
us as precious creatures made in God’s image and redeemed
in the life and death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. We come
together now to gather at God’s table, to be fed with
the bread and wine of communion as signs of our oneness with
each other and God. As you make your way forward to this table,
leave your bag, your purse, your sandals in your pew and open
yourself to God’s healing, forgiving, embracing love.
And as we know ourselves to be healed, may we move out from
this table to be agents of healing and peace in God’s
broken yet beloved world. Amen.
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