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It is an interesting little book, but some of the advice doesn't seem all that "expert" to me. A lot of it's just common sense. For example, there's advice on "How to Escape from Killer Bees." Step one says, "If bees begin flying around and/or stinging you, do not freeze. Run away...." No problem! "Step two: Get indoors as fast as you can." Duh! Consider, also, step one of "How to Survive If Your Parachute Fails to Open": "...signal to a jumping companion whose chute has not yet opened that you are having a malfunction." For example, "Wave your arms and point to your chute." Yep. I could do that!
As the preface states, "The principle behind this book is a simple one: You just never know." Murphy's Law states, "Anything that can go wrong will." The Boy Scout motto is, "Be prepared."
In our reading today from the Gospel of Luke, we hear Jesus "preparing" a group of about seventy people to go out to heal others and talk about God in cities where He will soon be coming. What we hear is, in part, a kind of "ministry training session."
Jesus is empowering and equipping the people to do ministry. That's part of my job here in this church: to join with the other staff members in making sure that the people of this church are instructed to be the ministers of this church. You see, we know that its much better to have 300 ministers than 5 or 6. We're trying to follow the ministry model that Jesus established where every follower of Christ learns how to do ministry for Christ.
As Jesus sends those seventy or so folks out on their mission, He gives them some good instructions. First, he says, don't go it alone. Jesus sent them out in pairs. Everyone needs to have partners in faith. Christianity is a communal religion. We are given one another for encouragement, for collaboration and for accountability. We are not supposed to function as "Lone Rangers." (And, heck, even the Lone Ranger had Tonto!)
Second, Jesus tells them that the job is a big one. He said, "The harvest is plentiful, but the laborers are few...." Think about our presence at Pride this year. We had lots of members and attenders working at our information booth, but our presence was small in numbers compared to the quantity of people who were at the festival. There is always more work to be done than there are people to do it. That's the nature of ministry.
Third, Jesus says, it won't be easy. "I am sending you out like lambs among wolves." One thing about Jesus - he was honest. He offered no illusions that everyone was just going to fall in love with him...or with us. It's kind of funny. In one of the commentaries I read on today's Scripture reading, the author stated that, "In Judaism, wolves often represented those who consume their enemy." When I read that sentence, what I thought I saw was, "...wolves often represented those who consume their energy." I must have been tired that day, but it did make sense. Sometimes ministry feels like it should be called, "Dances with Wolves" - the ultimate in energy exertion.
Jesus also tells them, "travel light." "Carry no purse, no bag, no sandals...." That's not fashion advice; He's simply warning us not to accumulate so much stuff that it interferes with what God calls us to do. Every home-owner knows the snowball effect of materialism that can occur when we always seem to need more and more "stuff" which then has to be maintained which in turn leaves us with less and less time, money and energy to offer in service to God. It was not so much a warning as a simple statement of fact when Jesus said that none of us can serve two masters. Either we own things or things own us. As ministers, its best not to give too much control of our lives over to things.
And then, to the group of seventy He was sending out, He said, "...don't stop along the road to just chat." Jesus wasn't encouraging us to be unfriendly but, rather, he was trying to explain that the ministry we do is important work...so we shouldn't get distracted and fill our lives with trivial pursuits. Take a moment, right now, to think about the things that have dominated your thoughts this week. Will they really matter five years from now? Three years from now? One year from now? Some will. Most won't.
Next in this lesson today, Jesus says "mind your manners." Bless the homes you stay in and don't move around looking for a better deal. Notice, Jesus didn't tell them to evaluate whether or not their hosts deserved to be blessed. Jesus said, "...bless them; if they deserve to be blessed it will stick and, if not, it will come back to you." It's funny how modern Christianity spends so much time evaluating people and so little time blessing them. "Just bless them," Jesus says, "and leave the evaluation to God. Just go along and do good. Heal the sick and tell people the reign of God is near and is available to them." We should do what God has enabled each of us to do...and let God take care of the results.
Finally, it's the last bit of ministry advice Jesus gives to the group that should be of particular interest to us. "If you fail, get up, dust yourself off, and move on." Isn't it amazing that Jesus expected us to fail at times, even when we're simply trying to do good? What a freeing concept to realize that Jesus doesn't expect us to always succeed. God doesn't expect us to hit every ball out of the park...just to continue to step up to the plate, taking our turn at bat.
Jesus was saying that failing doesn't make you a failure and losing does not make you a loser...unless you let the failure or the loss infect your soul. As someone said, "If at first you don't succeed...you're about average."
Unfortunately, many of us have developed the "Wallenda Syndrome." The Wallenda family was the greatest high wire act of all time, but in 1978 Karl Wallenda, the father of the family, fell to his death for no apparent reason. Later his wife recalled that for months before the accident all Karl could think about was falling. Eventually his vision of failure determined his death.
If we focus on our losses, we can internalize the self-image of a loser. That's why Jesus said, "When you fail, dust yourself off and move on." As a leader, Jesus knew His disciples would make mistakes and some would fail...but he also knew that failure was no reason to discard someone or to give up on yourself.
To fail -- in our ministry and in our lives -- can seem like the worst-case scenario. But it isn't really. God is not disappointed with us when we fail. We can't allow set-backs to make us cautious, afraid and timid. We need to keep trying even if things don't always go exactly as we had hoped they would.
Theodore Roosevelt said, "It is far better to dare mighty things, even though checkered by failure, than to rank with those poor spirits who live in the gray twilight that knows neither victory nor defeat." The worst-case scenario of ministry - and of life - is not that we fail. The worst-case scenario is that we might not try because we fear the chance of failure. You've heard this before, but it's so true: "You miss 100% of the shots you never take."
Jesus sends people out to do, basically, two things: to give of themselves and to point to the presence of God. There are many ways to do those things and we're not all called upon to do them the same way. But we are called upon to do them. If we think that we're liable to mess things up sometimes, we're right. We may even encounter some opposition...some roadblocks...and some failures along the way.
The good news is that we are following in the footsteps of someone who didn't always win and who knew His share of failures. Jesus began his ministry wrestling with evil in the wilderness. There were times he couldn't work because of people's disbelief. The people in his hometown tried to throw him off a cliff. Religious leaders maligned and ridiculed him. He disciples never did really get what he was trying to teach them. And even Jesus struggled in Gethsemane with God's will.
They didn't crucify Jesus because he succeeded in persuading them to see things his way. He was rejected by family, betrayed by friends, abandoned by his disciples and, ultimately, executed as a criminal.
Yet, at the end of his life, Jesus held the bread and the cup in his hands. Bread...the bits of grain which had been ground to powder and wine, the product of grapes which were crushed. Nearing the moment of what the world might look upon as his greatest failure, Jesus took the broken and crushed elements, gave thanks, and shared from his pain with those he loved.
This church is not a body of those who never fail. Like grape and grain, we who have been broken and crushed at times are used to be instruments for God's redeeming grace. We serve a God of resurrection. Resurrection from our failures and defeats makes them a sacred, sacramental experience. God will use them for God's purposes. God will use each of us - with all our flaws and failures - as instruments of grace for the world.
In serving God we cannot ever truly fail. We fail only if we will not answer the call to follow and serve. That would be our spiritual worst-case scenario. Amen.
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