One of the many, many highlights of that time was two weeks in South Africa, spending time with Christians, theologians, and practitioners, churches, organisations and communities in and around Pretoria and Cape Town. I joined with two very different church communities for Sunday morning worship while I was there. One of them, in Pretoria, was the Uniting Reformed Church of South Africa congregation of Melodi ya Tshwane. The preacher there was also my host for the few days before, Revd Cobus van Wyngaard. With his permission, I'm sharing his sermon from that morning - with gratitude not just for his hospitality (and that of the congregation there), but for the many resonances it struck with my own experience, thinking and practice...
Scripture: Luke 10:1-12
Sermon (Revd Cobus van Wyngaard)
One strange thing about worshipping
together, is that part of our worship is to remind ourselves that worshipping
together really isn’t the point. We gather together in part to remind ourselves
that our purpose is not gathering together. While Christians are known for
gathering on Sundays, we gather to remind that faith is not about Sundays.
Faith is not about what happens in between these walls, what happens on Sunday,
but about what happens throughout life, Monday to Saturday.
When Luke writes his gospel the church is
no longer a small community in Jerusalem. Paul’s mission journeys lies decades
in the past. Peter and Paul have both died years ago. And small Christian
communities can be found all over the cities of the Roman empire. When Luke
writes, he is not simply trying to tell a story of 72 of Jesus’ followers
somewhere in Galilee, on their way to Jerusalem. Rather, he is trying to say
something to the hundreds of Christian communities all over the Roman empire,
40 years after the crucifixion, trying to work out what it means to engage
their communities in their day. And in the same way the story that Luke tells
of something that happened 40 years earlier have been speaking to Christian
communities decades and centuries after he wrote this. Forming the way in which
we work out what it means to engage our communities today.
There are two words that Luke use, that
cause me to think that it is important to note that he is writing to followers
of Jesus in little congregations all over the Roman Empire: “peace” and
“kingdom”. Now, these words are not unique to Luke 10, we find them all over
the gospel. When the angels announce Jesus’ birth in Luke 2, then it is with
the word “peace”. And when Jesus introduce his parables it is often with the
words “the kingdom of God is like...”. But why are these words so important?
The Roman Empire of Luke’s day have
occupied the area all around the Mediterranean Sea. Today we would think of
countries like Spain, Italy, Greece, Turkey, Israel, Egypt, and Libya. And this
empire will continue expanding for centuries after Luke was writing, before
eventually collapsing. This big empire, like all empires, were being maintained
by a big army. But the Roman empire was quite explicit that what it was
bringing through all these conquests was peace: the peace of Rome. Peace through
conquest. Peace through power. Peace through subordination to rulers in big
cities far away. This was the good news of the Roman rulers. The gospel of the
emperor.
And here comes Jesus, telling his
followers: go to all these small towns in the Roman empire, and tell people
“Peace to this house”. Here comes Luke, writing to Christians some decades
later, telling them: live in this Roman Empire in such a way that it brings
“peace”. But which peace? The peace of the Roman emperor? Is Jesus teaching
that they should do their part in making this empire work? Definitely not! It
is God’s peace that is being announced. A different kind of peace. We can
examine the reminder that the “kingdom of God has come near” in a similar way.
God’s kingdom. A reminder of a different rule that the rule of the emperor.
But there is another side to these
encounters of Luke 10 to which I want to draw our attention this morning. Yes,
the message that is being pronounced is about “peace to this house” and “the
kingdom of God has come near”, but just as important, perhaps even more
important, than what is being said is what is being done. Two things happen in
these encounters of peace. People are eating together, and the sick is being
cared for.
Perhaps the most interesting aspect of this
story, at least for me, is that Jesus is teaching his followers that they
should not only give, but also receive. They are sent out to these communities,
and they are to receive hospitality. And I have a suspicion that there is much
that the church today must hear in this. The message of peace are weaved
together not only with giving hospitality, but with receiving it.
What happens when we arrive at strangers
and receive their hospitality? A while ago I found myself in Kenya for work,
arriving a weekend before the project started. A Kenyan neighbour of mine told
her sister who was living close to Nairobi that she must receive me for a meal.
However, when I got picked up I was told in no uncertain terms that I cannot
just come for lunch, I’ll have to stay the night! And many things are happening
in such encounters. Yes, there are the relationships being built across many
borders. But there is also the deep sense that I can never repay them. I am
bound to receive. And I’m absolutely dependent on other people, I can sense
that I’m losing control, I’m in other people’s space where there are rules and
habits that I’m not familiar with, and which I do not control. So hear Luke’s
story: Go, and do not take a purse, or bag or sandals. Go, but in such a way
that you will be forced to be dependent on others. Because God’s peace imply,
among other things, that we learn to live inter-dependently. To follow Jesus,
to announce God’s peace, mean that I learn to lose control, to become dependent
on others. But also, that I have something to bring, a peace to announce, care
to give. I also bring something to this peace encounter.
The peace of Rome came with swords and a
big army. It came with clear control of some over others, with power for some,
and powerlessness for others. The peace it promised was a peace that would get
rid of the “bad elements” in society. It promised to keep the roads safe –
although ironically it is Luke 10 that will later tell the story of the good
Samaritan, of an attack on a road, reminding that the army really wasn’t even
able to keep this promise of peace. But the peace of God doesn’t come with
power. It isn’t being forced down. Friends, we cannot even claim to “bring” the
peace of God from one place to another. God’s peace doesn’t simply flow out of
the church towards our communities. It’s not something that we can claim to
own. Rather, God’s peace is discovered in these meetings where strangers become
dependent on each other. Receive a meal, heal the sick.
And if the kingdom of God has come near,
then it similarly isn’t something that arrives from outside. These meetings are
themselves sign of the kingdom coming near. These meetings are the cracks in
the kingdoms of the world which is being enforced with might, the kingdoms of
this world that separate, that sets up one group of people against another,
plays off one group of people against another. The kingdoms of this world that
tell us that there are some who give, and others that must just wait and
receive, some who control, and others that are just being dragged along. In
contrast, in these encounters where those without a purse or bag announce peace
and receive hospitality we see the sign: the kingdom of God is near.
But Luke 10 is so different from how we
usually think of the church’s mission to the world. We usually think of the
church as the one bringing, the one announcing, the one giving. We bring God,
we bring the gospel, we bring something to hand out. But what if we start to
note that to receive hospitality in the most expectant places is part of what
we are being sent into the world for?
What would it look like if we start to
think quite concretely about a faith which calls us into such an
inter-dependence? We usually gather in the CBD, where people from multiple
countries, languages, and cultural backgrounds live in close proximity. Gauteng
as a whole is a place where people are gathering from all over the country, and
from far beyond the borders of the country. What would it look like if we learn
to live truly inter-dependently? Not only giving, not only receiving, but
discovering God’s peace when we give and receive. Discovering moments of
hospitality in our encounters with one another.
This is a peace which neither the police
nor the army can bring. It’s not a peace that is maintained by stronger control
of borders of the movement of people. It’s not a peace dependent on deporting
people or hiding those that have become dependent on a life on the streets.
Rather, a peace which asks that we learn to live inter-dependently, learn to
give, but also to receive.
And both require learning. For some of us,
we have been told so many times that we have nothing to give, that it will
require learning that we have to give to discover God’s peace with others. For
some of us, we have been told to many times that we should do everything
ourselves, that we need nothing, that we must always be in control, that it
will require learning that we need to lose control, accept what others offer,
and join in a meeting of God’s peace.
Exploring our gifts, and exploring where we
need to let go of control, should be part of what we do as church, and what we
do together with the communities in which we live. What would it look like if
we build connections of giving and receiving between the old age homes in the
city – with whom I read Luke 10 last week – and our youth groups? Both reminded
that they have something to give, and something to receive. Perhaps our journey
towards unity can only have meaning if we discover that we are truly
inter-dependent. And perhaps our witness to our society and country will only
speak truly of peace when speak from within communities that are
inter-dependent, where those without a purse announce peace and receive a meal,
where those who receive a meal care for the sick in turn, where we discover
God’s peace which emerge when we bring our gifts and receive the gifts of
others.
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