Sermon, Third Sunday After Trinity

‘Let us not grow weary in doing what is right, for we will reap at harvest time, if we do not give up’ (Galatians 6: 9)

The Sub Dean began his sermon last Sunday with a joke about St Peter at the pearly gates. Rather than recite a joke, let me ask you today to attempt a thought experiment. Imagine that you are at home, quietly minding your own business at the end of a long, hot, and rather sticky, summer’s day; you are just wondering what if anything you might be able to prepare for supper when there is a ring at your doorbell. Outside are two distinctly dusty and sweaty men, with bare feet, no phones, or wallets, nor a suitcase between them. As you stutter a puzzled greeting, one of them says: ‘Peace to this house.’ What would you do?

How good would we be at welcoming the messengers of our risen Lord into our homes and our hearts? Can we claim that our flats and houses are places where the peace of God is genuinely known and welcomed? Which of us would have the generosity of spirit to encourage strange preachers into our homes, to provide them with hospitality, food, and shelter and then abandon whatever plans we had for our evening (and the days come) to listen to their teaching and minister to their needs? This is a very different sort of call to Christian action from the more sanitised sort with which we are more usually accustomed, that which finds expression in charitable donations to the Winter Night Shelter or the local food bank, or volunteering as a Cathedral guide.

Most theological discussion of mission focuses on those who are charged with the task of preaching the gospel, those sent out to proclaim that the Kingdom of God is near. We pay less attention to the recipients of that evangelism. Yet the demands made of the inhabitants of the places to which the seventy were sent out in today’s gospel were considerable. It is not surprising that Jesus’ advice included not only instruction on what to do in those homes where his disciples were made welcome, but also recommendations about moving on from places where their physical presence, and the words that they spoke, were rejected.

Even so, what is most remarkable about this difficult gospel passage is the success of the seventy, who returned to Jesus with joy celebrating the success of their mission. Despite the fact that they arrived as strangers, and in self-imposed poverty, these disciples were often welcomed into strangers’ homes, their needs provided for just as they had been promised they would be. Jesus commended the seventy for their faithfulness and zeal and promised that their names would be written in heaven.

Translating this to a modern Anglican context – apart from the replacement of purse, bag and sandals with wallet, phone and suitcase – is not straightforward. Anglican clergy, unlike Jehovah’s witnesses, don’t tend to make cold calls around the houses of their parishes. We largely expect new inquirers into faith to come us in church, rather than going to seek them out wherever they may be in their own contexts. In this season in which we have just ordained deacons and priests across the diocese, perhaps this is something that we ought to reconsider. Let us look a little more closely at Luke’s gospel account.

This passage lies in Luke’s gospel immediately after the point at which Jesus had set himself to travel to Jerusalem, sending messengers before him. Had we not kept the feast of Peter and Paul last Sunday we would have heard the passage, in which James and John were rebuked for trying to persuade Jesus to bring fire down from heaven on a Samaritan village where he had not been made welcome. Then, as today, the emphasis lay on the need to announce the kingdom.

Manuscripts of Luke’s gospel are evenly split between those that number the disciples sent out in pairs at seventy and those who record that there were seventy-two of them. A case can be made to support either number. 72 (6 times the 12 who were Jesus’ disciples, numbered for the tribes of Israel) might denote the number of nations of the world mentioned in Genesis 10. If so, this number might point towards the sending out of God’s messengers to the ends of the earth about which Luke wrote at the end of his gospel and particularly in his Acts of the Apostles. To choose seventy is to reinforce the Lukan image of Jesus as a prophet like Moses. The book of Numbers reported that God told Moses to pick seventy elders to share his work with the people; these elders were also given the spirit of prophecy (Num 1: 16-17, 25) and in Exodus accompanied Moses on the mountain.

Whatever their number, Jesus’ followers were sent out in pairs; not only to preach and heal as had the twelve been earlier in Luke, nor merely to prepare hospitality for Jesus, as were the messengers sent in the previous chapter of the same gospel, but to do both things. They were to preach the kingdom and to heal the sick as a way of preparing for Jesus’ arrival. The means by which they sought to do so we might describe today as a form of relational ministry.

The seventy prioritised the making of relationships with the people in whose homes they found hospitality, becoming a part of their own domestic lives, sharing their concerns and preoccupations. Meeting these potential new believers on their own terms, the disciples fostered relationships based on the person of the incarnate Christ and on his teaching.

We should note that Jesus did not instruct the seventy to prepare a harvest; that was God’s responsibility. The plentiful harvest was there, ready to be gathered; all that was lacking was the labourers to gather it in. God remains responsible for the growth of our own Christian communities today. We are called to be open to the possibilities for growth that this would imply, to seek to proclaim the gospel afresh in ways that anticipate that we might thereby welcome more believers into the body of Christ.

Luke’s account of this mission set it in a clearly eschatological context, namely from the perspective of the imminence of the end times. In this light, the work of proclaiming the gospel was urgent. The seventy were charged to say both to those who were willing to open their hearts to such a message, and to those whose ears remained closed, that the kingdom of God was near. Paul articulated that same urgency in writing to the Galatians instructing them to persist and promising a harvest to be reaped by those who persevere: ‘Let us not grow weary in doing what is right, for we will reap at harvest time, if we do not give up.’

Does the church today feel that same urgency? Do you? After decades of declining church attendance, and a rapid acceleration of that decline in the aftermath of Covid, there are some recent signs of growth in many churches in this diocese and elsewhere, a growth driven in large part by young people turning to faith in face of the uncertainties of the present world.

Is this a harvest that we are ready to bring in? Or are the labourers still few? In this diocese it is always heart-lifting to see the strength of new vocations to ordained ministry come to fruition in the ordination services of Petertide. Some of us were privileged to be present at Canon Luke’s priesting in Kidlington last Sunday and there was great joy in this place yesterday when in two separate services twenty new Deacons were ordained to serve as heralds of Christ’s kingdom.

In the order of service for ordination of both priests and deacons, the bishop reminds the ordinands that they are not able to bear the weight of this calling in their own strength but only by the grace and power of God. Together the whole congregation then prays with the candidates for the gift of the Holy Spirit.

Those spirit-filled new Deacons are now sent out to proclaim the gospel, just like the seventy. Each of them is today beginning their ministry for the building up of the body of Christ in their own parishes. But today’s gospel reminds them, as it should do us, that this is not a task that they can perform alone. Just as when Moses protested that he could not carry the burden of caring for all the people in the wilderness alone and so God gave him seventy elders to bear the burden of the people with him, so we cannot expect our ordained clergy to take all the weight of sharing the good news of the kingdom.

The responsibility of spreading that gospel, of talking about our knowledge of the incarnate Christ and of the new creation is one that falls to all of us. We each have a responsibility to talk of the love of God in the places and contexts in which we find ourselves, not just with our fellow believers in church. Without turning up on our neighbours’ doorsteps demanding their hospitality, we have the potential, like the seventy, to proclaim the kingdom to prospective new disciples wherever we encounter them. Paul’s advice to the Galatians not to grow weary in doing what is right is advice for us, too.

Almighty God you make all things new in the wisdom of Jesus Christ. 
Make us agents of your transforming power 
and heralds of your reign of justice and peace, 
that all may know the good news of your kingdom and share in the gathering of your harvest. Amen