Travelling Light (Reflections on Pentecost 2, Year A)

I have to be honest with you: the Gospel lesson appointed for Pentecost 2 (Matthew 9:35 – 10:23) scares the living crap out of me. Jesus’ instructions to the twelve to go and proclaim the Kingdom of God without first figuring out any of the details about cost, lodging, or safety is pretty gonzo in my book. I want to say, “Hey, Jesus, haven’t you heard the old saying: If you fail to plan, you plan to fail?” Just what the freak does he mean telling these guys to start a mission without taking any money or provisions or even figuring out where they’re supposed to stay or what they’re supposed to say when they get arrested—which he seems pretty darn sure they will be.

Jesus is sending his disciples out knowing there’s going to be some upset. He seems to think that they have the capabilities to do the stuff he does: heal the world and bring folks back to a place of wholeness. He’s actually asking his disciples (that would be us, by the way) to free people from their demons of addiction and brokenness and poverty and to acknowledge their personhood. I don’t know about you, but that sounds like a tall order to me, and one which makes me feel pretty inadequate.

And yet, we’re being asked to believe that if we just get on with it, God will provide all that we need to accomplish it. I guess there’s something to be said for having a Christ-like purpose. It requires faith, which is a heck of a lot more than just “positive thinking.”

Stop me if I’ve told you this one before (which I know I have), but when I was just ten years old my dad lost his job. He was out of work for about fourteen months straight after his first lay-off, and he rarely had continuous employment after that time until the time he retired. It wasn’t his fault, it was just the slump in the industry in which he worked. Like Mr. Micawber in David Copperfield, however, he kept insisting during those lean times that “something will turn up.” He never lost faith that God would provide. And God did.

I realize now, more than forty years on, that my dad (And hey! Isn’t Father’s Day this weekend?) was doing what a dad should do—teaching faith and confidence to his children. You just can’t be a dad without faith. The scariest thing in the world to a child, I’m told, is fear in an adult. As a little kid, it would be too easy for me to imagine the devastation of financial ruin. What if the bank foreclosed on the house? What if they repossessed the car? What would become of us? More than the hardship, I feared the shame of it all. But my old man just kept on singing his gospel hymns and assuring his family that everything would be all right—eventually. And it was. It just isn’t logical that God would give us a commission and not see that we had what we needed to carry it out.

I have to confess that, even though I’ve experienced God’s providence over and over in my life, my sphincter still quivers every Monday morning when I read the church financial report from the previous Sunday. Frequently I ask God how he expects my little parish to keep on functioning. We don’t seem to be taking along a bag for the journey!

We are, however, trying our darndest to do what we’ve been told to do. We’re casting out demons of addiction through our 12-step meeting and addiction support group. We’re welcoming the stranger through our partnership with a Haitian community and through sheltering homeless families via our ties to Interfaith Hospitality Network. We’re feeding the hungry through our links to various charities. We visit the sick and lonely. I don’t always know how we’re going to keep our doors open, but I do know in my heart that we have a mission, and that closing up shop is never going to be an option for us here in Northeast Philly. At least not on my watch.

Martin Luther called despair a great and serious sin. He was right. I can’t imagine a more powerful tool of the devil than filling our mind with the notion that God would let us down when we’re trying to proclaim his love and healing. Faith is living and moving forward in the certainty that God will always provide a way.

God’s way, I must say, may not always be the way we imagine it. There will be times when our “Plan A” just doesn’t work. If the door gets shut in our face, we’re told to believe that our peace will return to us. We just shake the dust of our disappointment off and go on to “Plan B.” The church and her mission may not look like we think it ought to look. God may be calling us to do a new thing in a new way for new people. So let’s not make up our minds ahead of time.

Just wait on the Spirit.

By the way, a Happy Fathers’ Day to you dads out there. I never mind it when people call me “Father.” I think it’s an honorable title for a man who is completely responsible for something over which he ultimately has no control. Pastors have that in common with dads.

This will be a gloomy Fathers' Day for me, my friends, as my little, furry,  four-legged "foster daughter" was called home to the Lord this week. I was told that Luther once said in Heaven all dogs have golden collars and silver fur. I'm sure he was right.