The Power of Vision, Part VI

Creative Mission. A Sermon preached on September 26, 2004

by The Rev. David Harper

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Creative Mission

The Lessons: Isaiah 44:1-5; Acts 8:26-38; Luke 10:1-9

Father, we lift up your name and we worship you and we glorify you. We praise you for giving us the Lord Jesus, the word become flesh. Lord Jesus, dwell richly among us now in the preaching of the word—the word which, by your Spirit you have given to us, the word which brings life, the word which when lived and obeyed will cause this world to come before you and bow at your throne. Lord, come now and give me the grace and the power faithfully to preach that word. And open our hearts and minds to receive it. Make us hungry for every word that proceeds from your mouth. We pray in Jesus’ name. Amen.

One of my all time favorite Biblical stories is the one that I just read to you in the gospel this morning from Luke 10—the mission of the seventy-two. I want to give you a little bit of background, so you will understand what was going on.

Jesus and his twelve followers had been somewhere in the northern part of the country. That was where the Transfiguration took place—where Jesus was seen by Peter, James and John, and filled with the light of the glory of God. When they came down from that mountain, Luke says that Jesus now “set his face towards Jerusalem.” He understood that the Father was calling him to lay down his life in a sacrificial death. So everything now in his life was directed towards Jerusalem, and what lay ahead of him there.

As they began to make their way to Jerusalem, they tried to go the conventional way, down the west side of the Jordan. Today we call it the West Bank. There was a Samaritan border town that they needed to go through in order to get down through that region and up to Jerusalem. However, the Samaritans, as you may recall from the biblical narrative, refused to allow these Jewish travelers to go through their territory, so they were forced to go down the east side of the Jordan river. That took them through gentile territory, known as the Decapolis. That is a Greek word which means “ten cities.”

You need to understand something about the Decapolis region. It was not a place where Jews would normally want to travel. It was heavily influenced by the Greco-Roman culture, and it was intensely pagan. The prevailing object of worship was Baal, and the sacrificial animal that Baal preferred was a pig. For a Jewish person to think of a pig as something that you could offer in sacrifice to a god was profoundly offensive, quite apart from the fact that they were worshipping an idol and not the living God. To make matters even worse, their sexual preferences were flagrantly immoral and wild.

So, even the thought of going into the Decapolis would turn the stomach of any faithful Jew. Yet it was in this place of sexual perversion, of Baal worship, that Jesus deployed seventy-two of his closest followers. The number 72 is significant because that was the conventional Jewish understanding of the number of world nations.

In the previous chapter, Luke 9, Jesus had sent out the mission of the twelve, symbolic of the tribes of Israel. But now in the Decapolis, Jesus decides, “I need to send out a mission symbolic of an outreach to all the nations of the world. What better place to do it than here in the Decapolis?”

So Jesus assembled seventy-two of his closest followers, and says, “Let’s go out on mission. I know that we’re going to Jerusalem, but let’s delay that a little bit, because what we’re about to do now is part of my journey to Jerusalem. Let’s go on mission together.”

I need to say to you, church, that mission is Christ’s primary purpose for his church. It’s not incidental. It’s not something we do when we have enough time, when the life of the church has reached a certain point of stability or size or financial capability, or finally has the right kinds of people, and so we say, “Well, finally we can do mission.” It’s not something we postpone until some ideal time. Mission is Christ’s primary purpose for his church.

I love the quote from Luis Palau, who says “The church is like manure. Pile it together and it stinks up the neighborhood; spread it out, and it enriches the world.” Jesus says, Hey, we’re in the Decapolis. Let’s spread some manure here!

There’s something else you need to notice about this passage. He commissioned the seventy-two. They did not volunteer.Do you see what it says? “The Lord appointed seventy-two others...”

Frankly, if he had asked for volunteers, I don’t imagine that more than a small handful would have stepped forward. Few would have wanted to do mission, period; but especially in the Decapolis, of all places! I imagine that some of them would have been like Jonah who, when God said “I want you to go to Nineveh and preach the gospel,” said “Lord, I know all about those people. I don’t want to take the gospel to them. I don’t want to preach to them. I don’t even want to be contaminated by going into Nineveh. God, you’ve knocked on the wrong door when you knocked on mine.”

We’re not much different from Jonah, or probably the seventy-two. I’ve been preaching about the calling and mission of our church over the last several weeks. I’ve preached about dynamic worship—but I suspect many of us would much rather keep our worship to ourselves. We don’t want to share it. We would prefer not to change our worship, even if that was what God wanted us to do so that we could reach out to people. I’m not suggesting he’s asking that—but if he did, we would struggle, and scream, and say “God, that can’t really be from you.”

And then I preached about authentic community. We would mostly prefer our community to be a gathered community where we know everyone. If new people come in, it messes up the trust relationships we have built, and it destabilizes things. Forming new relationships with people that we don’t know requires effort!

Then I talked about life-changing teaching. Our desire is to be built up in our own lives. We don’t really see the need for that teaching to influence and transform other people.

And then I addressed servant ministry. We are most comfortable doing that for one another. I think we would prefer to worship, gather, be taught, and serve—what our church’s calling is all about—but keep it within these walls, or at most circumscribe a very closely defined area outside that doesn’t stretch us too far.

Do you understand that the only thing that Jesus actually commissions us to do is to go out on mission? He’s given us commandments, he’s given us all sorts of other things to do; but we are commissioned only for this one thing. That’s because, frankly, the body of Christ is not very good at signing up for this, at volunteering. He needs to commission us because otherwise we would sit on our hands and just play church, play little parlor games which are very entertaining for us, and pleasant, yet totally irrelevant to what God is all about—to bring the world to himself.

How he sent out the seventy-two is key to our understanding about our own mission. I want to say just a few things about how he sent them out.

Here’s the first one. He sent them feeling vulnerable. “Go!” he said in Luke 10, verse 3, “I am sending you out like lambs among wolves.” I can imagine them muttering sarcastically, “Thank you Jesus. What a blessing! You’ve commissioned me to do something I’m not sure about, and now you tell me that I’m going to go out and be torn apart when I do it. Lord that confirms why people will never volunteer for this stuff. We are not suicide terrorists. We don’t want to go out and be blown up for what you are telling us to do.”

We are terrified of vulnerability. We are afraid that when we go out we’ll be embarrassed, because we won’t know what to say. People will reject us because when we begin to share the gospel with them, they will look at us and categorize us in a way that won’t be very flattering. We’re afraid of being rejected. We’re afraid of all manner of things.

The idea of vulnerability, which comes from the Latin word “to be wounded,” is something that we don’t exactly relish. But you’ll find, if you read on through the story, that when these defenseless lambs return, Jesus says to them: “I’ve given you the authority to tread on snakes and scorpions. Nothing will harm you.” Lambs have got enormous strength and power!

There’s something else we need to understand: going out as defenseless lambs is part of how we commend the gospel to people. We don’t go out bristling with spiritual fire power. We don’t go out with a one-way message which we can control. The way in which we commend ourselves to those who are seeking Christ is by being defenseless—like Jesus sitting at a well with a Samaritan woman, and saying “Will you give me something to drink?” That’s vulnerability. She was offended by his asking her to do that. “What you, a Jewish man, ask that of me, a Samaritan woman?

What’s going on here?” It was Jesus’ ability to be vulnerable in front of that woman which opened her heart to think, “Wow, this guy isn’t a predator. He’s not some kind of nutcase who’s going to take advantage of me. He’s vulnerable, he’s genuine. I think I can deal with that.” Frankly, a lot of people are scared of Christians because we can be so aggressive. We need to be vulnerable. We need to go out like lambs.

Here’s the second thing: he sent them out with just three guidelines. You’d think he might have given them a list of very specific instructions, but instead he only gave them a few very simple guidelines. In his book Transforming Leadership, Leighton Ford says,

“Jesus knew the importance of giving direction rather than details. He set the guidelines—the truth of his teaching, the good news of the gospel, the power of the kingdom, the mission into the world. Then he allowed them creative space to operate.”

Today I’m talking about creative mission because that’s how our strategic plan describes it. What Leighton Ford says is that Jesus deliberately gives us guidelines rather than details because he wants to give us creative space.

You will not find any two stories anywhere in the Bible, which describe how people reached out to others, which are identical. Think of Philip and the Ethiopian eunuch: how many of you have experienced seeing somebody riding along the road in his chariot, running up to him, being invited aboard and then, after sharing the gospel, baptizing him? That’s a unique story! What was unique about it was its creativity. God had Philip in the right place at the right time, and had Philip do something that he’d never done before in his life and as far as we know never did again.

God will take your gifts, your life, your experience, your opportunities, the context of your life, your educational experience, your social context—he will take all of that, and through the few brief guidelines, which provide his parameters for mission, give you enormous space to be creative. Mission does not force us into being who we are not. It’s an invitation to become who we are, and he will show us how to do that.

So, what are the guidelines? Let’s look at the three principal ones, all of them single-syllable words of no more than four letters.

First, he said to the seventy-two: “Eat what is set before you.” (Luke 10:8). It doesn’t get much simpler than that. You go into the Decapolis. People invite you into their homes. Because they’re hospitable they put a meal in front of you. Eat it. Don’t be disdainful. Don’t, as a Jewish person, refuse to enter a gentile home. “Oops. Hang on,” some of the 72 might have protested. “I didn’t think we were allowed to do that.” His response to such protests is: “Do it! I want you not only to go into their house; I want you to sit down with them, and I want you to eat what they put in front of you.”

It is in eating with people, it is in sitting down with them, in receiving from them, in socializing with them, that we build relationships that are genuine—relationships that are not contrived, not manipulative so we can sell them a bag of what we want to give them. People immediately smell that as being fake. They think, “David doesn’t really care about me; all he wants to do is soften me up and be nice to me because he wants to convert me. He doesn’t genuinely love or care about me; he just wants me because he wants something from me.” So that person will build walls of resistance.

Margie and I will be doing this a week from today, at two o’clock next Sunday afternoon. We will be doing something that was offered to us, and will be new for us. About three weeks ago we received a request from our local Community Association. The Association’s chair told us they were planning a tour of homes for the people who live in our neighborhood, and were selecting houses where people have improved their homes or gardens, to give others ideas for themselves. “Would you be willing,” she asked, “to make yours one of those homes?”

Our first reaction was, “That’s going to take a lot of work. It’s right after church and will go on all afternoon.” Then we thought, “What a mission opportunity! People will be coming into our home. We will serve drinks, and we’ll offer food so they can eat.”

We’re getting prepared. We’re going to display literature about this church— and we’ll see what happens with that. We’re not going to force conversations with them, just be good hosts. Eat with people. That’s quite creative. We’ve had our neighbors in our home before, of course. We’ve invited them to eat with us around our meal table. It’s amazing the conversations that have grown around that.

Here’s something I want to say: don’t be afraid of eating with unbelievers. They are hungry for what we’ve got. Eating with people can be pretty challenging. Here you are, a Jewish person in the Decapolis. Even entering a gentile home is challenging—but then you’ve got to eat what they put in front of you. I told you they offered pigs to Baal—so guess what they’re going to give you for breakfast? Bacon and eggs! That has been a breakfast dish for millennia. Everyone eats bacon and eggs, except Jewish people! The eggs are ok ... but the bacon? “Eat what is set before you.”

You can count on the fact that what they are going to offer you is something that you’re not going to find easy. “Don’t be disdainful,” says Jesus, “don’t be picky. Just receive. They know that you are struggling to receive, but you’re not offending your morals by doing this. I’m not asking you not to live a holy life; I’m not asking you to compromise your faith; I’m just asking you to love people, and to do whatever it takes to love them.”

I think the genius of Alpha is that it always begins around food. That’s not accidental. It’s not just something they thought up because they had no better way of thinking of how to begin an Alpha session. The food is integral in what happens. I’m going to talk about that in a little bit, but it’s through that eating that all kinds of things begin to happen in people’s lives.

Here’s the second direction Jesus gave them: heal the sick that are there.

Never underestimate how God can use you.

Now some of you saying, “I’m not a healer. I don’t have a healing gift. I mean, give us a break. If eating with people means I have to become a healer, I’m getting in way over my head.” A lot of healing comes just by listening, simply by accepting people. A lot of healing comes when somebody begins to open up to you, which is what happens when we eat with people.

When we eat with people we find that barriers begin to come down. They begin to say, “Maybe this person is ok. Maybe this person is safe, maybe this person genuinely cares about me.” They are going to begin talking about their life, their marriage, their children, their job, their health. You can pick up on that, and find a way to reflect and respond. In certain situations, you might say, “Would it be alright if I prayed for you?” I’ve done that in settings with unbelievers. When they begin to share, they are sharing vulnerability, they want something, and many times I’ve asked, “Would it be alright if I prayed for you?” They invariably say “Yes.” Heal. You are not the healer, you are simply praying in a way that allows God to do his miraculous work.

Here’s another thing we can do. Like the young girl in 2 Kings 5:2-3, we can point people to where others can find healing. It’s an amazing story. “Now bands from Aram had gone out and had taken captive a young girl from Israel, and she served Naaman ‘s wife. She said to her mistress, “if only my master [who was leprous] would see the prophet who is in Samaria! He would cure him of his leprosy.” Here was a girl who had been stolen from her Jewish family—kidnapped and forcibly taken into slavery. She had every right to be angry. Maybe she was even secretly pleased that her master had leprosy. She had every right to see it as God’s judgment over an unrighteous person. She had every right to be quietly rejoicing that he was so sick and would certainly die. You see how God has to work in our hearts?

Naaman represented to this little girl someone who lived in the Decapolis, yet she loved him. She wasn’t a hero. She had no authority to heal him. So she did the very best thing she could do. It would like be your saying to someone: “Why don’t you go to The Father’s Blessing?” Or, “Why don’t you go to my home group? Or to the Forty Days of Community small group, where God can touch your life?” “Why don’t you come to Alpha?” You see, healing often means simply bringing people to where God can touch them. You don’t have to do it all. The church has the resources, and you can bring people there. Bring people to where God can touch them.

It’s amazing what happens when we do things like that. A couple of Tuesdays ago, the first Alpha night, Neal was sitting beside a man at the dinner, someone he had never met. This man was very nervous. He came in, not quite sure that this was really where he wanted to be. He kept glancing at his watch, waiting for the meal to be over so he could bolt out the door. The genius of eating was that Neal understood the significance of that, and just began talking with him, taking an interest in him. He found out some things about this man and his life, and just began to be nice to him. The man relaxed. The meal ended—and he added his name to those who signed up for Alpha. It was in the eating that he began to tell Neal about his life, and healing began. Neal didn’t lay his hands on him, saying “let me pray for you about these issues in your life.” No, that would have blown the guy away. That wouldn’t have been helpful. It was the listening, the responding, and the compassion that created enough healing for this man to get over his struggle.

The third guideline that Jesus gave was this: Tell them the kingdom of God is near you. Share what you know.

God said to Paul, and he recounts it in Acts 22:15, “You will be his witness to all people of what you have seen and heard.” Witnesses. Just sharing what we know of God, what we’ve seen, what we’ve discovered about him in our lives.

Here’s what I want to say to you church: update your testimony, not just your resume. Some of you may have testimonies that are way, way out of date. In fact you are embarrassed that your experience with God is fading. You believe in him, you’ve trusted him, but essentially you don’t have any immediate sense of what he’s doing in your life right now. Some of you may be fighting your life. Some of you may be unhappy with things that are going on in your life right now, and you need to deal with those things and see where God is at work in your circumstances. Even if your things are not ideal for you; even if there are areas in your life where you’re not very happy, and you’re longing to see a breakthrough, so that you’re suffering, in a certain way, God is still present in your life. Let him come into that place and bring you peace, bring you healing, and bring you to where you can rejoice in the Lord and be grateful for what he’s given to you. When you do that, you’ve just updated your testimony. You’re certainly going to be eating with people who are like you were, who are fighting their lives, who are struggling in certain areas. When they realize that you are like them in terms of having a life that’s not yet perfect, and yet they sense a peace about you, a stillness, a satisfaction in your life, a joy, an acceptance, they think, “I wouldn’t mind some of that.” As they tell you about their lives, which comes through your eating with them, and you begin reach out compassionately, they will find themselves thinking: “ What is it that’s led you to be the way you are?” That is where we begin to tell.

Here’s one more critical element in the story: Jesus sent them out two by two. He sent them out in pairs. “The Lord sent them two by two to every town and place where he was about to go.” Why didn’t he send them out as individuals? That way they could have gone to seventy-two cities instead of thirty-six. It’s because we do mission better together. It’s as simple as that.

The New Testament is full of names that are joined together by the conjunction “and.” Paul and Barnabas, James and John—you can go on and on. Jesus always sent his mission teams out in pairs, never on their own. The fact is that even when we eat with people individually and do what I’ve been preaching about, we are part of his body. You are never on your own. When we go out in mission together, and do things in pairs, there is something that people see in our relationships that is part of the proclamation. So ask God to give you a burden and a vision for mission.

Last Sunday night at the Concert of Prayer, Yvonne Phillips, one of the presenters, was telling about how, three-and-a-half or so years ago, the Sunday congregation sang the song, “Here I am, Lord, I will hold your people in my heart.” She realized that she didn’t have a burden and a love for unchurched people and unbelievers. She came forward, and committed that to the Lord. Since then, she has been reaching out to her neighbors by hosting a Bible study. She was telling us about how, through eating with people in her home, healings have taken place, and there have been opportunities to tell people about the gospel. Ask God to give you a burden and a vision for mission.

During the worship time now I’m going to invite all of you who choose to do this, those to whom God is speaking, to come up and kneel at the front. Say, “Lord I want a burden and a vision for mission. Lord I want you to break my heart for lost people, so that I can eat, heal and tell, so that I can be part of what you are calling us to do.”