Going Somewhere With Nothing

Going Somewhere With Nothing

Luke 10:1-9
July 8, 2007

After this the Lord appointed seventy others and sent them on ahead of him in pairs to
every town and place where he himself intended to go. He said to them, “The harvest is
plentiful, but the laborers are few; therefore ask the Lord of the harvest to send out
laborers into his harvest. Go on your way. See, I am sending you out like lambs into the
midst of wolves. Carry no purse, no bag, no sandals; and greet no one on the road.
Whatever house you enter, first say, ‘Peace to this house!’ And if anyone is there who
shares in peace, your peace will rest on that person; but if not, it will return to you.
Remain in the same house, eating and drinking whatever they provide, for the laborer
deserves to be paid. Do not move about from house to 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.’

As I mentioned last week, I spent a lot of time traveling the past few weeks, between the
annual meeting of the United Church of Christ’s Michigan Conference, and then the
larger national gathering of the UCC in Hartford, CT. Usually on these type of trips, I
don’t pack enough stuff—I underestimate my own need for fresh underwear or
undershirts, or socks, or something, but this time, for some reason, both Douglas and I
over packed—two huge suitcases packed full of stuff, as if we were going on a three-
week journey, rather than a one-week trip to the east coast. And speaking of the east
coast, I just have to share this funny little story told by Anne Spivack about that
mysterious place, the East Coast. She writes: “While our friends from India traveled
around California on business, they left their 11-year-old daughter with us. Curious
about my going to church one Sunday morning, she decided to come along. When we
returned home, my husband asked her what she thought of the service. ‘I don’t
understand why the West Coast isn’t included too’ she replied. When we inquired what
she meant, she added, ‘You know, in the name of the Father, the Son and the whole
East Coast.’” Well, I just want you to know that, indeed, the East Coast is included, and
comes as close to the Holy Land as we UCC’ers have—someone mentioned that there
are only 3 towns in Connecticut that don’t have a congregation of the United Church of
Christ, something we just don’t find here in Michigan.

But back to the luggage: lugging those suitcases was a lot of hassle for us, a lot of
strain on our backs, and, of course, the word luggage actually derives from the word
lug as in “that which needs to be lugged about, (Oxford English Dictionary)”, so we
shouldn’t have expected anything different—traveling is never really convenient and
never really easy. But, of course, the worse thing that can happen around luggage is
when you lose it, or, more truthfully, when the airline you’re flying loses it for you. I
actually had that experience a couple of years when I was flying from Dallas to Toronto,
and found myself in Toronto without any t-shirts, underwear, and any toiletries, which
made my experience of the conference less than comfortable, and certainly less than
pleasant for those who were standing anywhere near me, at least for a couple of days.

But, of course, my uncomfortable experience of losing my luggage is exactly what Christ
would have wanted me to do, at least according to the passage from Luke that we
heard today. This story of the sending of the seventy disciples, almost as if Jesus was
sending them out like a Star Trek “away team” to check out the response of those
towns and villages that Christ hadn’t visited yet, to new places and to boldly go where
no one has gone before, or at least to places Jesus didn’t have time to go. This story
is an odd story, really, because Jesus asks them to leave their luggage at home, to not
lug anything around with them, to leave their baggage at home in the closest or in the
garage or wherever they stored that kind of stuff. Jesus says to that large group of
disciples, larger than the 12 disciples we’re used to hearing about in the rest of the
Gospels, he tells them not to bring purse, nor bag, nor sandals, with them, and to not
even greet people on the road.   And as we listen to this Christ talking about going
somewhere with nothing, about going into the “somewhere” God has for their future,
and maybe even our future as a church and as individuals, I think we need to pay
attention to Jesus when he tells us to not even bother packing our bags—we won’t
need them for the mission we’ve been called to go on. The future—your future, my
future, our future—is not about transporting our baggage, good and bad, that we have
always carried with us from our pasts, because the mission Jesus sends us on is not
about replicating the past, its not about going on a journey that we’ve been on a
thousands times before, to the same place, at the same time of the year. Rather, its all
about greeting God’s new future for you and me and this church. Jesus wants us to
leave our luggage behind—because we won’t need it in the “somewhere” that God is
calling us to as individuals and as a people of God.

Now, before I get too lost in the metaphor, I want to share with you why I think Christ
wants us to leave our baggage behind when he sends us out on this new mission, this
new phase of our life together, this new journey towards being the church of the future,
and not the church of the past or even the present, so that we can reap, as Christ
says, a harvest we did not plant. You know, all of us, in our present state of beings, all
of us are a sums of our pasts, the chapters that have been written in us and on us and
through us, by our families of blood and choice, and through the experiences we’ve
embraced and resisted on this side of eternity. Some of the emotional and spiritual
baggage we’ve been toting around for years has been good—it was useful for where
we thought we were going—in fact, some of that baggage determined where we were
going. Ironically, instead of the luggage following us on our journey, it was more as if
we followed our baggage, the gifts we were given, the scars we carried, into the
future.   Sometimes that was good, but sometimes it can be pretty bad—letting our
emotional and spiritual baggage be our travel agent is no way to plan a trip, to be
honest. My history, all the experiences of my past, all the good of those moments,
shouldn’t automatically dictate where I am going—I shouldn’t let my baggage be my
travel agent, the past should not automatically dictate my future.   And sometimes the
baggage, the luggage, its so heavy, because, you know, sometimes you over pack it,
and so every time you have to stop and rest, you can’t because you’re spending a lot
of time lugging and pulling a way too heavy piece of luggage—both Douglas and I can
attest to this fact, especially from our experience of the past few weeks.

You know, most the stuff in your life and in my life, the stuff in our spiritual and
emotional bags, we packed it ourselves, we placed it there because we thought we
might need it for the journey we were about to take. But other times, to be frank, our
luggage was packed by others for us, others who thought they knew what was best for
us to carry on our own journey into life. Do you remember those questions they always
ask you at the airport when you check in? “Have your bags always been in your
possession?” or the one I heard coming back from Canada a few years ago—“Did you
pack your own bags?” In our emotional and spiritual lives, those questions are little
harder to answer, to be honest. Some of the bags we’ve packed or that have been
packed for us are pretty heavy with stuff that isn’t helpful in our trip through life—
lugging the burden of always being suspicious and cynical about others because that is
what our parents taught us to do; or carrying the heavy burden of anger with you about
what cards life or God has dealt you and me, because we think life should be fair; even
or perhaps being loaded down with a judgmental spirit about ourselves or the church or
other people, because we once had that experience and we think we need to carry that
with us into the next place we land. I know the bags, the luggage, the emotional and
spiritual luggage, I carry them around with me all the time and I suspect you know your
own luggage, your own emotional and spiritual baggage. But don’t worry, we won’t be
doing any unpacking during this part of the service!

But I do want to point out something here and that is this truth: baggage is not good or
bad in and of itself—it’s just what we normally take on our trips, on our life journeys. To
be perfectly honest, baggage is awfully useful when you’re in a strange land, as we
usually find out when we finish lugging the luggage around with us, and we want a new
pair of clean clothes. But Jesus in this passage from Luke really does want us to leave
ALL of our baggage at home, in the closest, in the garage, wherever we keep that sort
of stuff, at least for this particular trip. This trip, this divine journey Christ is calling
these seventy disciples is special for a lot of reasons, but one of those reasons its
unique is that the baggage that these folks have been carrying for years that they
thought would make their particular journeys in life easier just simply won’t do on the
journey Christ is calling them on in that particular moment. There is something different
about this journey—this is not about going on the trips we’ve always gone on—to
Florida, or California, or even the Upper Peninsula, for that matter. These seventy are
to tell the good news that this Jesus has shared with them, this story of divine welcome
and transformation instituted by God in this Jesus of Nazareth—“the kingdom of God
has come near,” as near as the voice that proclaims this message, embodied in this
man person who is naming the obvious, that God’s presence is coming and, yet
paradoxically, that this presence is here already, already right here in our midst.

I think there is a powerful lesson here for us, for us personally, but also for us as a
congregation, as a congregation beginning a new phase in our life and history
together, with a new pastor and with a new governing structure. You and I, we don’t
need to be the people we once were, for better or worse—we can leave that behind us,
we can put it down, though its hard work, putting that kind of baggage down for good.
We don’t have to be or need to be the people we once were, or even are right now—we
need only to be the persons God is calling us to be in the next moment, the next
second, the next day, the next month or year, or decade. We can decide to pack or
unpack as we need for the future—or, or, if we want to, we can take Christ really
seriously here, we can just leave the emotional and spiritual baggage, the bad stuff,
and even some of the good stuff, behind us. And yes, even the good stuff can be a
burden because we assume that God or life, or whatever, will always meet us in that
same good and graceful way, and thus we sometimes can’t see the new good and
graceful ways God is meeting us in the present or in the near future. Wouldn’t it be
great to travel as light as possible? No more lugging, nor more hands filled with
handles and shoulders burdened with luggage straps, carrying stuff with us we swear
we can’t live without? Sometimes in this life we’ve got to learn to do what the seventy
did, which is to put it all down and go on—because, you know, we got keep our hands
free for the future, because you never know what God will be handing off to you and
me to carry in this life, good stuff and maybe even some difficult stuff, and it sure would
be sad not to be able embrace the future because we were too busy carrying so much
of the past, good and bad, with us into that future God has for us. Its been done
before, with those seventy, because they came back to Jesus, raving about what God
had done with those empty hands, those free shoulders, those freer selves that
roamed the countryside of their day, telling the good news that God is love, and they
are loved, and that powerful truth, that truth, will make all the difference in their lives,
and our lives, and in the life of the world. Amen.