5th Sunday of Pentecost
July 8, 2001
Year C
Title: Going Somewhere With Nothing
Theme: Jesus wants us to leave behind our emotional and spiritual
luggage so that our hearts and hands will be ready to receive the future
that God has destined for us.
If you were here last week, you probably noticed that I wasn’t here—or at
least I hope you noticed I wasn’t here—if you were here and didn’t notice
I was gone, we probably need to talk. If you were here, you had the gift
of hearing Rev. Kathy McCallie preach—but the reason I wasn’t here was
because of a church conference in Toronto, Canada. Now, over the
years, I’ve been pretty lucky in avoiding the lost luggage curse—but that
luck ran out this trip and somehow my airlines lost one piece of my
luggage and I found myself without toothbrush and toothpaste,
underwear and t-shirts. And because God has a deep and sometimes
mysterious sense of timing, this little lost luggage fiasco fit perfectly with
my title of my sermon for this week—“Going Somewhere With Nothing.”
Now, keep in mind that I came up with this title a couple of weeks ago
and I actually got to live that truth for a good 24 hours in a strange and
different country.
But, of course, my experience of losing my luggage is exactly what Christ
wants us to do, at least according to the passage from Luke that we
heard today. This story of the sending of the seventy disciples, almost
like a Star Trek “away team” to check out the response of those towns
and villages that Christ hadn’t visited yet, this story is an odd story,
really, because Jesus ask them to leave their luggage at home, to leave
their baggage at home in the closest in the garage or wherever we story
that kind of stuff. Jesus says to that large group of disciples, larger than
the 12 disciples we’re used to hearing about in the rest of the Gospels,
he tells them not to bring purse, nor bag, nor sandals, and to not even
greet people on the road.” And as we listen to Christ talking about going
somewhere with nothing, about going into the “somewhere” God has for
our future, our future as a church and as individuals, I think we need to
pay attention to Jesus when he us tells not even bother packing our
bags—we won’t need them for the mission we’ve been called to go on.
The future—your future, my future, our future—is not about bringing the
baggage, good and bad, that we have always carried with us from our
pasts, because the mission Jesus sends us on is not about replicating
the past, but rather, its all about greeting God’s new future for you and
me and this church. Jesus wants us to leave our luggage behind—
because we won’t need it in the “somewhere” that God is calling us to as
individuals and as a people of God.
Now, before I get too lost in the abstractions, I want to remind us why
Jesus wants us to leave our baggage behind when he sends it us out on
this new mission of telling the good news, this new journey towards being
the church of the future, not the church of the past or even the present,
when he sends us out to reap a harvest we did not plant. You know, all
of us, in our present form, all of us are a sum of the past, the chapters
that have been written in and on us by our families of blood and choice,
and have been written through us by our various worship traditions,
traditions that we have been blessed by and traditions that we have
struggled with. Some of the emotional and spiritual baggage we’ve been
toting for years has been good—it was useful for where we thought we
were going—in fact, some of that baggage determined where we were
going—instead of the luggage following us on our journey, it was more
as if we followed our baggage into the future. Sometimes that was
good, but usually it was pretty bad—letting your emotional and spiritual
baggage be your travel agent is no way to plan a trip, to be honest. And
often times when we opened the baggage that wrote our travel plans, we
found the stuff inside to be heavy and death dealing and mostly
composed of shadows and demons that never seem to let us go to
anywhere where we wanted to go.
You know, sometimes the stuff in your life and in my life, the stuff in your
bags and my bags, were packed by you and I, but a lot of times those
emotional and spiritual bags were packed by others for us, others who
thought they knew best on how to pack our bags and send us out on life’
s journey. Do you remember those questions they always ask you at the
airport when you check in? “Have your bags always been in your
possession?” or the one I heard coming back from Canada—“Did you
pack your own bags?” In emotional and spiritual lives, those questions
are little harder to answer, to be honest. Some of the bags we’ve
packed or that have been packed for us are pretty heavy with self-
loathing, full with bitterness about what life cards have been dealt to us,
loaded with our cynicism about ourselves or the church. I know the
bags, the luggage, the emotional and spiritual luggage, I carry around
with me and I suspect you know your own luggage, your own emotional
and spiritual baggage.
But I want to point out something—baggage is good or bad in and of
itself—its just what we normally take on our trips, on our life journeys. To
be perfectly, honest, baggage is awfully useful when you’re in a strange
land, as I found out this past week. But Jesus in this passage from Luke
really wants us to leave ALL of our baggage at home, in the closest, in
the garage, wherever we keep that sort of stuff, at least for this trip. This
trip, this divine journey he is calling these disciples is special for a lot of
reasons, but one of those reasons is that the baggage that they’ve been
carrying for years to make them feel comfortable won’t do on the Christ
is calling them on. And to be honest, I was struck by how this story
intersects with our journey as a church, as a people of God here in OKC,
especially as begin the second year of our life together in the next few
weeks. I believe that this second year is going to be different and even
better than the first year of our common life together—and it won’t be like
any journey you and I have ever planned or mapped in our lives. You
and me—we’re not going to need the luggage of the past to make us feel
secure about going to that “somewhere” that God is sending us to.
I really do think we’ve done a good job with the baggage we’ve brought
on our trip this past year—my baggage and your baggage and our
baggage. We’ve spend this first year building our spiritual and emotional
health as a congregation—we’ve paid attention to the internal work that
any healthy congregation needs to pay attention to if they want to be
around for the long haul, and now I think God is calling us to move our
gaze from the inward to the outward, from ourselves to the world. We’re
getting beyond the point of bringing our baggage to this place, good and
bad, and presenting that baggage to check out, to realizing that we don’t
any of that baggage, good or bad, for the future God has for us. We
don’t need to be the church of our pasts, or our present—we only need
to be the church that God is calling us to be in the future. What the new
journey, the new calling, the new mission of our second year together
requires is that our hands and hearts be free from the burden of
baggage that was meant for trips taken in our past. I think God, in this
second year, is calling us away from the good work of we’ve done of
building the life an rhythms of our church body with all of the good and
bad baggage each of us have brought with us, to this new thing, this new
moment, where we leave all of the baggage we thought we needed for
the journey behind. What God is going to do in Coh-OKC is going to
extraordinary and new and so different than anything you and I have
experienced in our lives. We will not be the church of our pasts—we will
be the future church God is creating in us, even as we speak.
The reason Jesus tells those seventy disciples to leave their baggage
behind is so that they will be able to meet God in new and incredible
ways—ways that they had never experienced before. And they did, didn’
t they? They came back from their journey, amazed at what they had
seen—and the reason they could experience what they did was because
they didn’t have to worry, like me, about lost luggage. Sometimes our
spiritual and emotional baggage is good, sometimes its bad—but that
doesn’t really matter, does it? We’re just asked to leave it ALL behind—
good and bad alike, because the future, my future, our future with God
won’t be a replication of the past—it will be the hope and struggles and
miracles and joys of our future together. God has that amazing future
ready for us—we’ve just got to travel light, putting away the expectations
of the past, good and bad, so that we greet the new future God has for
us. The old stuff is to heavy—the new journey requires us to be able to
dance and its really hard to dance with baggage in your hands, isn’t it?
God has incredible things ready for us in our second year together—I do
know that. We’ve brought our good baggage with us to this community
of faith and we’ve brought our bad baggage with us to this community of
faith—but now we’re asked to leave it all behind because it won’t be
useful to the future trip God is calling us to take. The journey of our
future, where we move out into the world, into our own community,
means that we need bare feet, free hearts, and empty hands, and the
incredible willingness to meet God in new and strange places, new and
strange villages and towns. The coming year, I promise, will challenge
us, both you and I and us, and we will be challenged to leave the old
stuff, the old emotional and spiritual baggage behind. We have some
new untraveled roads we’ve never go on before, we’ve got new villages
to explore, new towns to celebrate and struggle with, new experiences
that will amaze us and challenge us. I know I am ready to travel light,
that I am tired of traveling with a lot of luggage, that its time to meet our
future, our incredible future, with our bare feet, our open hearts, our
empty hands, and our freed bodies. I’m looking forward to the trip
ahead—I hope you are as well. Amen.
