Going Home

"Going Home"

Matthew 10:1-15

Then Jesus summoned his twelve disciples and gave them authority over unclean
spirits, to cast them out, and to cure every disease and every sickness. These are the
names of the twelve apostles: first, Simon, also known as Peter, and his brother
Andrew; James son of Zebedee, and his brother John; Philip and Bartholomew;
Thomas and Matthew the tax collector; James son of Alphaeus, and Thaddaeus; Simon
the Cananaean, and Judas Iscariot, the one who betrayed him.
These twelve Jesus sent out with the following instructions: “Go nowhere among the
Gentiles, and enter no town of the Samaritans, but go rather to the lost sheep of the
house of Israel. As you go, proclaim the good news, ‘The kingdom of heaven has come
near.’ Cure the sick, raise the dead, cleanse the lepers, cast out demons. You received
without payment; give without payment. Take no gold, or silver, or copper in your belts,
no bag for your journey, or two tunics, or sandals, or a staff; for laborers deserve their
food. Whatever town or village you enter, find out who in it is worthy, and stay there
until you leave. As you enter the house, greet it. If the house is worthy, let your peace
come upon it; but if it is not worthy, let your peace return to you. If anyone will not
welcome you or listen to your words, shake off the dust from your feet as you leave that
house or town. Truly I tell you, it will be more tolerable for the land of Sodom and
Gomorrah on the day of judgment than for that town.

A couple of weeks ago I received a surprising email from an old friend of mine from
years ago, Asim Khan, who was a classmate of mine when I was a kid in Indonesia at
the American school run by the oil company my father’s company did contract work for,
mostly seismic blasting stuff. That school really was a heady mix of different
nationalities, despite the designation of it as “American”—Australians, Brits, New
Zealanders, and even Iranians such Asim and his brother. I honestly hadn’t thought of
him in years, but I got an email from him the other day, and for some reason he had
decided to try to find me on the internet, which is easy enough. He now works as a
director of a Canadian school in Seoul, South Korea—he said that he never quite got
rid of that travel bug he acquired early on his life. He also told me that he and his wife
had gone back to Rumbai, Indonesia, the place where we grew up together, to visit,
and that, amongst the places they visited, he actually showed his wife where I once
lived with my parents and sister, some 29 or more years ago.

I have to admit that thinking of Asim and his wife visiting the house I once lived in years
ago has me thinking a lot about home lately, about going back home.   You know, there
are some great things about growing up overseas, and one of those things is getting to
know people like Asim who come from all over the world, but the hard part of it is that its
really, really hard to go home again. Dropping into Rumbai, Indonesia would probably
also mean dropping thousands of dollars just to walk the streets of my childhood, and,
to be frank, I don’t have the kind of money to spend on my personal nostalgia. Still, I
wish I could go home again, and though Meridian, MS is my family’s hometown, it is
never quite home, though we would spend our time there when we would come back to
the States for our summer vacation. That ability to go home again, that is something I
really do envy those of you who have lived here in Coloma all your lives—you’ve got
deep roots here, and you can go back to the places and spaces that formed you,
though I know that they have, of course, changed tremendously. Going back home
again for many of you is possible, in a small way, and that is something to be thankful
for, I think.

Well, in our passage today, Jesus asks his disciples to do something similar, to go back
home again, to those spaces and places that had formed them, had shaped them, and
share with them the good news he has already shared with those 12 persons listed in
our texts today, the ones he is sending out. The interesting thing is that other Gospels
have slightly different lists of disciples, with a few names added or subtracted, or you
have the Gospel of John, were the number of the apostles is not as neatly laid out as
our text here. Paul himself has a slightly more generous list of apostles as seen in the
book of Romans, but for the writer of Matthew, the number 12 meant a lot, because it
symbolized the 12 tribes of Israel, and so much of this particular Gospel is geared
towards convincing his fellow Jews that Jesus is indeed the Jewish Messiah.

But here you have Jesus telling those twelve men that they were to begin their
proclamation of the Good News that the kingdom has come near, that God’s presence
as manifested in Jesus has skirted the edges of their very lives, by going back home
again, to the places and spaces that had formed them as people. They are to replicate
the miracles he had performed in their presence, to cure the sick, raise the dead, no
less, cleanse the lepers, and cast out demons. A tall order, huh? But maybe if you’re
that close to that kind of spiritual power, day in and day out, not such a big deal,
maybe. Still, they are not simply to go home with their bags packed, their wallets full—
no, in fact, they aren’t supposed to bring their wallets with them, their money bags with
them. They are to go home naked, in a way, stripped of any sign of material success—
and they are not to ask a dime from the home folks, the people of Israel. Earlier, in the
sermon on the mount, he told them not to worry about their lives, about what they were
to eat, or drink, or what they were to wear—look at the birds of the air, Jesus had said
to them, look at how God takes care of even them. And in this moment of going forth,
Jesus will ask them to put his words into practice, but not with the Gentiles, the non-
Jews all around them and within their country. Start the journey of telling and doing the
Good News by going to people back home and sharing that good news with them first.

And I suspect the reason why Christ wanted them to start at home first is because
sharing what you’ve found with the people at home is probably a lot harder than with
strangers, which seems to be a strange truth. Maybe being completely honest with
those that know us best, by sharing our spiritual journeys with them, is harder because
they do indeed know you and me best: they know we don’t always live up to our lofty
words, that we can sometimes be hypocritical about our faith, and that we often fail our
own words and the words of the one we seek to follow. And yet, Christ wants us to start
there for some reason, to do our sharing and curing and cleansing and healing and
casting out of demons right there in our homes. Again, if we can’t share our truth with
those that love us, then maybe we’re not ready to go anywhere else to do our curing
and healing and casting, etc.

But it’s the sharing that hard, isn’t it? We folks in the mainline church have a hard time
sharing our personal faith with others in ways that don’t have simply to do with actions,
with doing good works. We’re good at the good works, we really do try to live out
Gospel, we do try to heal and cleanse and cast out, in the ways that we help and speak
out for the poor and the supposed nobodies of this world, in the ways we seek to
include everyone, but we really do struggle with actually telling our own PERSONAL
faith journeys to each other, even within the context of our own churches. I think a lot
of that has to do with the ways that other Christians have often shared their faith with
us, and others, and how overbearing it can be for some of us. I think if someone asks
me again if I’ve found Jesus yet, I swear I’m going to say something like that old joke,
“No, but I didn’t even know he was missing!” We’ve all probably come into contact with
those fellow Christians who feel compelled to share their particular brand of faith with
others, and for many of us it was that kind of Christian faith that was repugnant to us,
because it felt so exclusive, so self-confident, so dogmatic, as to leave no room for
questions, or doubts, or even spiritual humility.   Many of us have encountered that
kind of Christianity, and some of us have decided that if we were going to be Christians,
then we weren’t going to be THAT kind of Christian, always trying to push our
Christianity off on others, demanding that others believe like us, or forever be excluded
from God’s embrace for eternity.

And so when Christ sends us out on this mission to share the good news, we balk—we
don’t do it, because we know we don’t want to be the kind of pushy, but well-meaning,
fellow Christians who insist on their understanding of Christianity to be the one we too
had to take on for ourselves, because, you see, it was THE truth, the ONLY truth. Well,
despite our hesitation, or maybe just my hesitation, I still do think there is a need for us
to share our faith with each other, with the people at home, so to speak, mostly
because it brings us strength for our own journeys if we know the journeys others have
gone on and survived and even flourished on. This truth telling about how God has
enriched our lives, challenged our lives, moved our lives, changed our lives, is so
important, that in the fall we’re going to do some work with this as a larger church,
something I’ll share with you later. But before then, I want us to think about how it might
be possible to actually share authentically with others about our faith in Christ,
especially the people we care about, without that sharing being pushy or exclusive, or
dogmatic. How do we share our journey of faith without demanding that it be someone’
s else journey of faith, that they too have to replicate our story of how God has worked
in our lives?

Well, I think there is wisdom here from our text today on how to do something like that,
how to share our faith with others, so as to not to shove it down someone else’s throat,
or demand that they take on our story as their story. When Jesus tells those early
disciples to leave behind all the bags, and tunics and sandals and staffs, and to take
no money with them, I think he is asking them to strip away all the pretenses, all the self-
assurances, all the stuff they’ve come to depend on to make themselves and maybe
even their message carry some false whiff of authority. If we have the stuff that marks
us as successful, surely our message is right. And yet, Jesus tells those earliest
disciples that all they deserve is the simple food needed to survive, as they go off on
this journey—nothing else, he says. To be so stripped of all the things that mark as
successful human beings, the signs of wealth or security we carry with us, or on us, and
to face our friends and family back home naked, in a sense, that is what is being asked
of these men, and even women, though they are not mentioned here, thousands of
years ago.   When your loved one comes back home a beggar who must be fed, yet
and they still share with you the good news that they found elsewhere, the good news
that has changed their lives, the people at home might just listen, right?

What does that mean for us nowadays? Emptying our wallets, or trading in our cars?
Well, not really, I think, or maybe that is wishful thinking on my part. I do think it means
this: when we go back home and there is a moment when we are asked to share our
faith, or we feel compelled to share our journey with God with others that we know and
love, we must go into that situation with incredible humility, and without the demand that
our truth become their truth, our story become their story—we too must be stripped of
our pretenses, our arrogance, the stuff that we carry with us to protect us, our demand
that others tell similar stories of faith as our own. And the reason we go back home
without all those things, those things Christ tells us to let go of, especially our
emotional needs for others to agree with us or affirm us or our faith, is because we
mustn’t go into any moment with those we love needing something from them, wanting
something from them, demanding something from them. All we are asked to do, I
believe, is to tell the good news as we have experienced it and to let it go at that. But
we do have to have the courage to share that experience with those we care about, if
invited, or if the opportunity come naturally to us, our own stories of how God has met
us in this world, of how we have come to experience God or even struggled with God in
our lives. And yet we just have to share those personal truths without any of the
pretenses that our experiences are the only true experiences of the living God. Jesus
sends his disciples out to share the truth they’ve experienced with and through him,
completely stripped of all their arrogance and pride, humbled by that experience of God
rather than self-righteously emboldened by it.

Believe it or not, I received another blast from the past last Saturday night, from
someone I went to high school with in Texas—you see, I spent my first three years at
Hemphill High School in Texas, and my senior year in a high school in Alabama, so I
didn’t graduate with those that I had come to know through most of high school. I
haven’t stayed in touch with any of them, but Clark called last Saturday night, someone
who’s name sounded familiar but I couldn’t place the name with a face, after all those
years, some 20 years. He and few others found my phone number and address
through means I can’t tell you without probably getting someone in trouble, but he
called to tell me that they were having a laid back 20th anniversary reunion of the class
I would have graduated from if I had stayed in Texas—a backyard barbeque—a very
Texan sort of thing to do. Obviously, I couldn’t make it, especially on that short notice,
but I really did appreciate the invitation. I keep thinking about what it would it mean to
go back there again, to Hemphill, after 21 years and see those people again. I would
be different, and they would be different, and our experiences of life and love and God
and all sorts of things would probably be different of course, as is natural. But if I could
have made it to that backyard barbeque, I hope I would have gone to it in the same way
that Jesus told his disciples to go home—with great humility and yet knowing what my
own story was, my own truth was, and yet also open to hearing how others might have
met life and love and God differently than I did. The rest is up to God, really, as the
last part of text shows us—if we are not hospitable to the good news carry we all carry
with us and within us, as different as that good news may be for each of us, then it
would be worst for us than for Sodom and Gomorrah, those cities who were so unkind
and inhospitable to the strangers in their midst. But that’s God business, and not mine
or yours—all we are asked to do is to tell our good news about God honestly and
openly and with great and deep humility. Amen.