Seventh Sunday after Pentecost

Seventh Sunday after Pentecost

Doesn’t this sound all too familiar?
You make plans with your spouse or your kids or your best friend you haven’t seen in years. It’s great, you’re just settling in for good conversation or an afternoon of peaceful fun and---------isn’t it inevitable?!—something comes up.
Take, for example, my daughter the actress. Out of the last four auditions she’s had that have led to actual roles, three have occurred when she’s been out of New York, and two of them were when she and her fiancé were up here on vacation. No question: they had to drop everything to rush back to the city.
The last time it happened, her fiancé had a meltdown and accused the universe of conspiring against them. It’s lucky she got the job!

In the Gospel the apostles are aching for Jesus-time. They’ve just returned from their first mission trip out on their own, and they’re bursting with stories about how this healing went and what that demon yelled on his way out, what worked and what didn’t work?
And Jesus wants to hear all the details.
So he invites them to a time apart—a retreat: “Come away to a deserted place all by yourselves and rest a while.”
But—uh oh—people spot their boat and take a shortcut overland and a whole crowd of them is there to greet Jesus and the apostles when they come.
Remember Jesus is human—he’d wanted this time away with his friends as much as they had. Imagine now how his heart must have sunk when he saw the crowd on the shore, voracious for his care.

Yet he doesn’t order them to turn the boat around and head on out for another try farther on down the shore.
Because he’s realized that this is a great teaching moment. After all, these friends and students of his—Peter and Andrew, James and John, and the rest, are “apostles in training.” The word ‘apostle’ is from the Greek. Jesus was preparing his friends and students to be sent out into all the known world.
Jesus as a good teacher sees a way to be present with them and at the same time deepen their sense of what it means to be an apostle.

This may be interesting in a bible-study kind of way. But, you may be asking, what does this have to do with me?.
But consider the end of our Eucharist service. We’re not invited to stay here forever, until the next Eucharist, and so on and so on.
No. In the last prayer we say together, we pray, “Send us out into the world in peace.” And the very last liturgical words are mine: “Let us go forth into the world” and yours, “Thanks be to God.”
So we too are apostles in training. So we too need some basic lessons in apostleship, right along with Peter, James, John, Matthew, and the rest.

The first lesson of apostleship: We’re not living in a controlled environment. We’re living real lives in a real world. Circumstances can change on a dime, expectations get blown out of the water. And being an apostle means dealing with it, rather than yearning for something else. Means understand that this is where you and God have wound up. The places we’re sent are often surprising and often, alas, not at all what we ourselves would choose. And—and this is a wildly unfashionable thing to say—being an apostle often means sacrifice—including the sacrifice of one’s hopes and dreams in the long or short term to the circumstances God puts in front of us.
You may, for example, find yourself grappling with terrible health issues in your family. It is not what you expected, absolutely not what you wanted—but right now it is where you are called to be an apostle, to love and serve God and one another.

Second lesson of apostleship taught by Jesus as the boat heads into shore: Jesus looked at the rabble on the shore with compassion and saw not misfits and undesirables and people one would rather not know, but “sheep without a shepherd.” Being an apostle means getting your heart stretched. Pat L’Abbe and I learned that the first day we walked into the Offenders’ Program and felt our hearts tugged toward men who from the world’s point of view, were absolutely unlovable.

Finally, Jesus takes the apostles to another town, Gennesaret, for lesson #3.
Basically the same thing happens. More crowds, more sick, more “sheep without a shepherd.” So many that people beg just to touch the fringe of Jesus’ cloak.
The third lesson of apostleship lies here: our work is to make the “fringe of Jesus’ garment” available wherever we are.
You and I are called to be Christ-carriers, Christ-bearers. Wherever and whenever we are. It’s not we who console people, or give people new self-respect, or offer God’s care and concern through presence and prayer:
No. What happens is that people can look at us, talk to us, be with us, and through and in that relationship find access to Christ. We can become his healing presence for them, knowing all the time that it’s not we who are doing any of this.

Later, when we pray to be sent forth into the world after the Eucharist, let us say it with all the conviction and humility and trust in God we can muster, remembering the lessons of apostleship Jesus has taught us today:
--opportunities to carry Christ’s healing, loving presence occur in all of our lives, even in (or possibly especially in) those circumstances which surprise us, bushwack us, change all our carefully made plans;
--as apostles we are called to respond to these circumstances with hearts willing to be stretched by Christ’s compassion within us;
--we ask God’s mercy that we may live so that through us others can touch the “fringe of Jesus’ cloak.”