Sunday, July 6, Fourth Sunday after Pentecost
“Like Lambs Among Wolves”
Psalm 66:1-12; Isaiah 66:10-14; Galatians 6:1-18; Luke 10:1-11
Divine Service III with Holy Communion
Hymns: #633 “Rise, My Soul, to Watch and Pray”; #711 “Savior, Like a Shepherd Lead Us”; #655 “Lord, Keep Us Steadfast in Your Word”
Dear Friends in Christ,
Grace, mercy, and peace to you, from God our Father and from our Lord and Savior Jesus. Amen.
Jesus tells His disciples in today’s Gospel reading, “I am sending you out like lambs among wolves.” That’s a scary proposition. Lambs are helpless. Wolves are all muscles, claws, and sharp teeth. In a contest between a lamb and a wolf, we all know who’d be having who for dinner. And yet, along with the sending, Jesus gives His “I am with you always” promise. On our own, we are helpless – but we’re not without help!
I went to see Mr. Durwin Smith at the Oak Park Place down in Madison last week. Durwin is a veteran of WWII – he was a deep-sea diver, no less - and there aren’t very many of those good men left; he’s 102 years old this year. As I walked into his room, there was a new doctor there introducing himself. I said to the doctor, “Did you know you’re talking to a national treasure?” The doctor, after he was done with his examination, asked Mr. Smith the secret to living such a long life; and Durwin answered, “Hard work and a good wife.” God, I love that man; it’s been the privilege of my life to know him.
Like so many men of his generation who lived through that awful war and were blessed to come home again, Durwin came home and went back to the farm and went right back to work. I asked him once if he ever though about diving again, and he said, “I’ve stayed as far away from the ocean as I possibly could.” The country group Montgomery/Gentry had a song a few years ago called “Something to Be Proud Of.” The chorus goes, “If all you ever do is the best you can – you did it, man.”
St. Paul wrote, “Make it your ambition to live a peaceful and quiet life,” and “As much as it is possible for you, live at peace with everyone.” That, I believe, is part of the genius of America. The greatest blessing we’ve been given is the right to be left alone. That right to “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” means that we’re free to live as we wish, and to believe as we wish, and to worship as we wish, so far as God and the dictates of our conscience will allow. And most of us just want to live our lives in peace.
That won’t always be possible, unfortunately, because there will always be some folks who just don’t want to be peaceable. The paradox is that if you want to be free to live in peace, sometimes you have to be willing to stand up and fight for it. Ben Franklin said once; “Democracy is like two wolves and a lamb deciding what to have for dinner – and a well-armed lamb protesting the decision.” God bless Durwin Smith and all his fellow soldiers, who have given of their time, their youth, their health, and even their lives over the years, so all of us could be free to celebrate another Independence Day. I make it a point to tell all those good men when I meet them, “I’m free to do what I do, because of what you did. Thank you!”
Our enemy, the devil, doesn’t want us to be free. He wants us to be always caught up in drudgery and oppression and sadness and sin. He wants us to be wasting our whole lives in doing things because we have to do them, instead of living for the things we love and the things that bring us real joy. He wants us to be “fighting and envying one another,” so we’ll always be fighting each other instead of him. He wants us to be so preoccupied with our resentments, our fights, and our snits, that we’ll have no time left to be still and let God be God. Sometimes we have to fight for our freedom, and for what’s right, and for what we believe in - but for goodness sake, Lord, we’re only lambs, and it’s a scary world to be a lamb in.
Oh, thank God we lambs have a Good Shepherd! And there He is in our Gospel reading – the Good Shepherd Jesus, come to walk in a broken world. St. Luke says here: “After this the Lord appointed seventy-two others and sent them two by two ahead of Him to every town and place where He was about to go.” Most of the early manuscripts say “seventy others”, by the way; only the later ones say seventy-two. But what does it matter? The more the better, I say; there’s always room for more!And every soldier knows that the buddy system is a good idea. No one should have to fight this fight all alone.
“Jesus sent them to every town and city and village He was about to pass through,” says our Gospel - to let the people know He was coming, and to get them ready to meet Him. Some would welcome the good news, but many would not. There would be those who would welcome God’s messengers in peace – but also some who would be, well… downright unpeaceable. That’s just the sinful world being the way it is.
Jesus told His messengers, before sending them out, “The harvest in plentiful, but the workers are few.” Amen, Lord, to that. The harvest Jesus is talking about is a harvest of souls. The “fields ripe for the harvest” are people who need to be saved and who need to know God, but they’re caught up in all the fussing, feuding, and fighting in the world, and in the struggle just to live and survive. The devil may have them discouraged, or hopeless, or angry, or in any of the other awful conditions that people get themselves in. “Harassed and helpless, like shepherdless sheep,” Jesus said of them. And we won’t have to look far to find them. Martin Luther once said if we only looked right outside our own doors, we’d find work enough to do for God to last us a lifetime.
But the workers are few. Time is short, and we have so much ground to cover. And for even one of God’s little ones to be lost would be a terrible tragedy; and we just can’t let that be without doing our best to do something about it. So, “Ask the Lord of the harvest, therefore, to send out workers into His harvest field.” Ask God for this, pray for it, intentionally, and on purpose, and every day – and don’t be surprised if the answer you get is that one of those workers God is calling is you.
O Lord, we do need more workers, more helpers, more willing volunteers for this work we’ve been given to do. And where, O Lord, are all these “workers for God” going to come from? They’ll come from those who’ve been saved and have come to believe. They’re created when we share the faith that someone once shared with us, and in so doing reproduce ourselves. That’s how the holy Christian Church was created to work – from my mouth to your ear to your heart, and then from your heart and your mouth to someone else’s ear.
The word for “send out” here is one of my favorite words in the Greek language.
The word is ekballe - from ek, meaning ‘outward’, and balle, meaning ‘to propel or cast or toss or throw.’ God isn’t just sending us out into His harvest field; He’s picking us up and heaving us out into the middle of the fight. “Dropkick me, Jesus, through the goalposts of life,” right? Because someone has to be there to lift up the cross in the middle of the mess. A life of prayer and personal witness and service to God is essential and indispensable for anyone who wants to a Christian disciple and a follower of Jesus. Those things are “I have-to’s”, commandments from “the Lord of the Harvest,” and the essence of who we are and what we do. And yet, they’re also “I get to’s”, if we choose to see them that way, and hopefully “I want to’s.” This country of ours needs we Christians to be here – not on the edges or on the margins or hiding out, but right in the middle of things, being who we are and doing what we do, if we’re going to have any hope at all of continuing to be free.
So Jesus says, “Go! I am sending you out like lambs among wolves.” The wolves and the haters may not admit it, or even believe it, but truly it’s “Jesus’ little lambs” who hold things together in this world. It’s in little churches like this one, scattered all over the land, where faith and hope and love are being kept alive. Most of our soldiers who’ve answered the call to service over the years were raised in faithful families, from the farms and the small towns, and taught the faith in little country churches. (75% of the churches in America still worship with less than a hundred people on an average Sunday morning.) Most of our pastors, if you ask around, come from the small churches and country towns. The devil is afraid of a faithful little church like this one more than anything else in this world.
So “Go!” Jesus says. Go and be one of those blessed peacemakers Jesus calls for. Go be the voice of faith and reason in this place. Go be the ones who help and heal and offer hope and life and grace. And go be the ones who are willing to stand up for what’s good and right and true. Our willingness as a nation to do that has always been the best thing about America. “America is great,” someone said, “because America is good.” Lord, may it always be so.
“The kingdom of God has drawn near,” Jesus says. “The time is nearer now than when we first believed,” St. Paul says. So the time we have is short, and we do have to work with a sense of urgency, knowing Jesus could come any day. So, says St. Paul, “Let us not become weary in doing good, for at the proper time we will reap a harvest if we do not give up.” Lambs among wolves we may be, and the wolves always seem to be having their way in the world. Left on our own we would be helpless – but again, we’re not without help. Sheep we may be, but we sheep still have a Shepherd.
“We bear on our bodies the marks of Jesus,” St. Paul says. We carry the marks of the wars and spiritual battles we’ve been through for the sake of Christ – the marks of every put-down, every insult, every wound we’ve ever taken for His sake. (Marks of honor those are, like old soldiers showing their battle scars). And we carry the name of Jesus -- J-E-S-U-S -- written on our foreheads when we were Baptized, to mark us as “redeemed by Christ the crucified.” There’s a lot of strength and courage to be found in that, and in knowing that the devil can’t touch us or do any lasting harm to a child of God.
Jesus has promised to be with us, through good times and bad, through times of peace and through the wars we sometimes have to fight. He’s with us today, here on His altar, in His own body and blood, to give us peace in our hearts and strength for the fight. “May I never boast,” says good St. Paul, “except in the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ, through which the world has been crucified to me, and I to the world.” The grace of our Lord Jesus Christ be with your spirit. Amen.