St Luke’s, Havelock North – The 14^th Ordinary Sunday, July 8^th, 2007 - Sermon

Unlikely. Unearned. Unexpected.

I’ve talked a lot recently about our vision. Vision is all about the big picture of why we do what we do, our ultimate goal if you like, which in turn should lead us to our mission, which is all about what we do to take us to the vision. I’m convinced that finding and naming our vision is essential if we don’t want to get swept along from fad to fad with no real substance to who we are and what we do, so having offered some thoughts on how we might find it and the reaction it might engender, I want to begin to bring in some ideas about what our vision might include, and I want to start by suggesting that somewhere it might include those three concepts; unlikely, unearned, unexpected.

Where am I getting this from? A number of places actually, but for starters the two very different but ultimately similarly themed readings we’ve heard this morning from 2^nd Kings and Luke’s Gospel.

Naaman sits at the centre of our first reading. The Aramean general held in high regard by his king because – and hear this carefully – God has given him great victories, and over Israel no less. Naaman who then goes on to receive from God healing for his leprosy. Are we hearing this properly? Can we even begin to grasp how unlikely this all would sound to a pre-Christian Hebrew audience? God, their God, gives victory over them to a pagan general and heals that same pagan of an incurable disease! This is akin to me telling you that our God is handing victory to Al Quaeda and richly blessing paedophiles.

Then there’s the gospel. In one of several similar stories, Jesus sends out seventy people into the villages and towns. Luke uses this story to help kind of move on the journey to Jerusalem, so he says they’re going out to tell the people Jesus is coming. But in reality what Jesus tells them to do is actually what he does. Go and heal the sick and preach good news. Just go.

You know, I came to this parish with eight and a half years of intense theological and ministry training and several more years of practical experience behind me and I know some people still wondered whether I was adequately prepared. Perhaps they knew just what a difficult bunch you are? Or maybe they just had this crazy idea that people should be trained and display certain skills before they’re let loose on the general public? I know I went through several rigorous and demanding selection processes just to get to the point where I could get some training to stand up here today. Jesus though picks seventy untrained, unprepared, inexperienced nobodies to go out and do what he does. It’s not even just the special inner twelve – there are seventy of them, and off they go. The whole idea just flies in the face of any logical, sensible ministry planning, but there you have it.

Both these stories – Naaman’s healing and the sending out of the seventy – both pick up and continue a constant theme that runs right through the scriptures and beyond, whereby God insists on choosing the most unlikely people to do the most extraordinary things.

Naaman, the unlikely recipient of God’s blessing and favour. The young slave girl who become’s an unlikely messenger and the key to the rest of Naaman’s story. Elisha the prophet, an unlikely source of healing, at least as far as Naaman was concerned. The seventy, unlikely enough as disciples, let alone ministers entrusted with Christ’s work in the world. And then there’s us – how likely are we I wonder? Are we quite honestly the most likely people to do Christ’s work today?

And while we’re thinking about Christ’s work, we might ask what those who are benefiting from it have to deserve it in the first place? We’re never given any indication that Naaman deserved his special status. He wasn’t even Jewish! And Jesus never tells the seventy to only go to those who deserve it. There is this slightly tricky idea of shaking the dust from your feet if a town doesn’t welcome you, but that’s nothing to do with how deserving the town is, it’s about how much they want it. There’s an important message here about not trying to force what we’ve got down other people’s throats, they’re free to say no and we should respect that, which is really part of the whole point here – this work the seventy are sent to do, God’s healing, God’s love, it isn’t something that can be deserved or earned. That’s the meaning of grace – the giving and receiving of an undeserved and unearned gift, no strings attached.

One final point I’d like us to consider this morning is what I often describe as God’s mandate to expect the unexpected. Again, we find this over and over again in scripture – commonsense and logic leads us in one direction, God takes us in another. Naaman expected special treatment, and why shouldn’t he? He was a powerful man, an important leader, from a significant family, with a particular status, why shouldn’t he expect to get more than just the everyday, ordinary treatment all the normal people got? And he also expected something a bit more dramatic by way of a healing. How flashy is, ‘go and swim in the river seven times’? Surely it can’t be as real without the special effects?

The Gospel, when it comes to it, is even more radically unexpected. Jesus says to the seventy, ‘I’m sending you out like lambs among wolves.’ How fun does that sound? Usually, I guess, we hear that as a warning of danger, and yes, for the seventy there were certainly risks involved – maybe for us as well. But I want to suggest we can also hear those words in another way.

“See, I am sending you out like lambs among wolves.” Expect the unexpected. The wolves expect you to be like them, to meet them on their terms, to work in their ways, but that’s not how it’s going to be. You’re going to work and walk in very different ways, in ways that put people before principles and peace before profits.

This isn’t an easy concept for me to get my head around sometimes. I’ve grown up in the real world, the wolf’s world. I’ve got a background in commercial industry and I know what commonsense and logic demands, but God’s ways don’t always fit. God’s ways aren’t usually the ways of commerce or industry or even commonsense. God’s ways are God’s ways. Unexpected ways.

Unlikely. Unearned. Unexpected.

Unlikely people bringing unearned gifts in unexpected ways. I don’t know what our vision will finally be, I don’t know what the ultimate big picture will look like, but I do hope that somewhere, somehow, it can include a sense of that.

Thanks be to God.