The story of Jesus sending out the disciples two by two holds a special place in my faith journey for a couple of different reasons. The first is a bit of a snarky one from seminary. When my best friend and I were assigned to internship sites on opposite ends of the country, me in upstate New York and her in southern Arizona, we used to refer to this story to jokingly complain about the ELCA internship assignment process. How come Jesus sent the disciples out two by two, and ELCA interns get sent out alone?
The second, more serious reason, this story holds deep meaning for me is from a few years ago, when you all offered me a call here, and I was trying to decide if I should take it, or stay at the place I was. In the middle of my discerning this story came up in the lectionary, and I stumbled across a poem by Jan Richardson called “A Blessing in the Dust.” The introduction to the poem reads, “Knowing when to stay, knowing when to leave; this is one of the most challenging invitations for discernment that we will ever encounter. There are times… for leaning into the resistance that meets us; times when God calls us to engage the difficulty and struggle that will shape and form us in a way that ease and comfort never can… And then there are times for leaving; times when—as Jesus counsels his disciples—the holy thing to do is shake the dust from our feet and leave behind a place that is not meant for us. This blessing is for those times.” That poem got me through the hard decision of leaving people that I loved, but whom I could really serve best by moving on. And while let me first assure you that I share this story having no intention of moving anytime soon—I like it here, I feel like we’re doing good work together, and that the Spirit still has plans for us—that poem still hangs in my office as a reminder that not every struggle is worth pushing through. Sometimes when places or things are not working out, the most holy thing we can do is let that thing go so we can try something else.
Friends, I hate this piece of wisdom from Jesus. I, you may have noticed, am maybe a little bit stubborn. To a fault even, as evidenced by my gimping around the last few weeks on a hip injury I totally caused myself by trying to run through soreness. When I meet resistance my go-to response is to push harder, totally convinced of my own ability to muscle through whatever has held up the process. If I set out to reach a goal, stopping anywhere short of success feels like quitting, and I don’t like to feel like a quitter.
This is true in my own personal life, but I think it is even more true as the church, both as a local congregation and a wider community. The stakes feel so high these days, as a congregation can we continue to survive in this place, and as the church will we have the courage to speak out against injustice? And when things don’t work, when the law passes despite our lobbying efforts, or we have to call the roofer for the fourth straight time because he will not fix the leak over the walkway, or no one comes to the event we planned, it can feel like we’ve fallen short, like we haven’t leaned in hard enough to whatever the Spirit was calling us to.
But if that’s how we sometimes feel when we can’t get things to work, imagine how much more pressure the disciples must have felt when Jesus sent them out with authority over unclean spirits. They had just seen Jesus calm a storm at sea, cast a demon out of a man, heal a woman with a touch, and bring a child back to life. And now Jesus is all, ok guys, your turn. Wait, what? And the disciples may have been uneducated fishermen, but they were not layabouts. Just take the example of the three Jesus took with him when he healed Jairus’s daughter, Peter, James, and John. Peter was definitely a jump first, think later guy. And in chapter ten, James and John will try to convince Jesus they should sit on his right and left on the throne of glory, these guys were ambitious! So when Jesus sent them out with authority over unclean spirits, you better believe these guys were ready to rush headfirst into any unclean spirit they came across, success at any cost. This works until it doesn’t. If they were to come across an unclean spirit more powerful than them, or a town that didn’t welcome them, this single-minded persistence could bog them down for the entire rest of the mission. So what Jesus did with this wisdom to shake the dust off their feet and move on is he reshaped for them what success looks like. Success, perseverance, said Jesus, is not accomplishing one-hundred percent of every single task all of the time. Rather success is the ability to persist in the face of failure. To lean in when it is the time for leaning in, but also to move on when it is the time for moving on. And with this wisdom the text tells us the disciples “cast out many demons, and anointed with oil many who were sick and cured them.” They didn’t cast out all the demons, but they did cast out many. They didn’t cure all the sick, but they cured many. And the mission of the twelve in Mark’s Gospel was an unmitigated success, for many were healed and many were set free, and many is not all, but it is a lot more than some or none.
Ezekiel received a similar reframing of what success meant in the Old Testament reading for this morning. In this account of Ezekiel’s call to be a prophet, the voice of the Lord told him that the success of his prophetic mission lay not in how his message was received, but whether it was delivered, for “whether they hear or refuse to hear… they shall know there has been a prophet among them.” Jesus also modeled this different measure of success immediately before he sent the disciples out, when he traveled to Nazareth and the people didn’t respond to him, and “he could do no need of power there, except that he laid his hands on a few sick people and cured them.” Because, yeah, still Jesus. But still, even in shaking the dust from his feet and moving on, Jesus went first. He didn’t push the people of Nazareth to recognize him, refuse to leave until they bowed at his feet, or give up the whole mission in frustration. He demonstrated for the disciples how to move on. And guess what friends, that the people of Nazareth didn’t follow Jesus that day does not mean that they did not eventually become followers. There is a thriving Christian community in Nazareth to this day, I know this to be a fact because I have been to Nazareth and seen it. Trying again does not mean the thing you’re trying to do will not happen, it just means it may not happen at the time, or in the way, that you might have liked or planned.
Jesus gave the disciples authority to cast out demons. What can be missed in this is Jesus didn’t give the disciples their own authority, he like co-signed them under his own. Like if you take out a rider on your insurance for someone else, if they get hurt, you’re the one who’s responsible, Jesus was still holding the liability insurance on the disciples. Last week I talked about how the work of salvation is our work, and that’s true, but this passage reminds us that while we get to do the work of salvation, we ourselves are not the savior. We get to help, because Jesus is awesome and knows we need to feel busy and important, but at the end of the day it’s really not on us. So just because we can’t get something done, doesn’t mean it won’t happen, it may just mean it’s not our job or the right time. This for me feels like freedom. It is space to begin before we are ready, to take the first step though we don’t know where the journey is headed, to try and fail a thousand times, and still get up and try again. Because what we know about resurrection is death is never the end, and if it looks like the end, it’s really only the next beginning.
Dear friends in Christ, what the mission of the twelve tells us is that to be a disciple means to get to try stuff, and fail, and try again the next day. It means to head out without luggage, because who likes to drag a heavy suitcase with all your baggage behind you anyway, and chase the open road, knowing that whether you are welcomed or not, whether the message is received or not, “they shall know there has been a prophet among them.” Thanks be to God. Amen.
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