Fourth Sunday after Pentecost
July 6, 2025

Sermon

Rocky Supinger
Senior Associate Pastor

Psalm 30
Luke 10:1–11

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This is the Fourth of July weekend, so allow me to enter into this story of Jesus sending seventy-two (or seventy — it depends on which manuscripts you favor) disciples ahead of him to places he intended to go by way of an illustration from an episode of American political history that has a direct connection to Fourth Church.

Regan Burke, a member of this church many of you will know, served on the staff of Bill Clinton’s 1992 primary campaign as he was seeking the Democratic nomination for president. I know this because she’s written about it in her memoir, In That Number. 

Regan was the campaign scheduler, which meant that she was in charge of the Scheduling and Advance team, that is the people who are sent ahead of the candidate to wherever the next campaign event is. 

She describes the experience like this: 

“Experienced campaign advance people moved from all over the country to New Hampshire for weeks at a time to volunteer for Bill Clinton before the February 18 election. Anywhere else Clinton campaigned that January, I’d call untrained friends and family and beg them to help — not easy when some barely had heard of him and (traveling expenses aside) they’d be working for free.”

Regan’s book is full of anecdotes from this chapter of American presidential history (including once being mistaken for Hillary Clinton’s bodyguard). You should ask her about it (or read her book). 

I thought of Regan’s experience in connection to the story we just heard, because Jesus sent disciples “on ahead of him in pairs to every town and place where he himself intended to go.” It seems like Jesus’ disciples are a kind of advance team. 

That’s no small thing, because it means that their actions will be taken for his actions. The things they say will be taken to be his views. The way they treat people is the way people will experience themselves to have been treated by Jesus himself. 

Being sent is no light thing. And being sent is the core of what it means to be a Christian and to be part of Jesus’ community, the church. Jesus sends a community into the world with a calling and a purpose. 

This is actually the second episode in Luke’s Gospel where Jesus sends out disciples, and oddly Luke’s Gospel is the only one to include it.

We’re in chapter 10 this morning, and at the beginning of chapter 9 Jesus sends out the twelve, the kind of inner circle of his disciples who constantly accompany him through Galilee and on the way to Jerusalem. 

And Jesus’ instructions there largely mirror the ones he gave the seventy-two: “Take nothing for your journey, no staff, nor bag, nor bread, nor money — not even an extra tunic. Whatever house you enter, stay there, and leave from there. Wherever they do not welcome you, as you are leaving that town shake the dust off your feet as a testimony against them.”

Jesus does more sending still. When they arrive in Jerusalem, he will send the disciples Peter and John ahead to prepare their Passover meal. 

And then even after his arrest, after all those disciples abandoned him and fled, even after he is tried and crucified, when the risen Jesus appears to his disciples, what else does he tell them than that he is sending them out as his “witnesses in Jerusalem, in all Judea and Samaria, and to the ends of the earth.”

Jesus calls disciples, and Jesus sends disciples. Or rather, Jesus calls disciples in order to send them. 

Being a follower of Jesus means being sent — sent to the sick and those in need, sent to those oppressed by systems of violence and inequality, sent to our neighbors, sent to our city, sent to our nation, sent to the ends of the earth. 

The church is Jesus’ Advance Team. Our mission (if I can call it that) as the church and individuals within it is to represent Jesus’ presence and his message in the world that God’s reign of peace — despite all evidence — is at hand. 

In 2008 I helped the senior high youth group from the Claremont Presbyterian Church in Claremont, California, to prepare for their spring break mission trip to Belize. Now, I’d never been to Belize and wasn’t about to go on this trip, because, see, I started as the Associate Pastor for Youth there in February, and this trip was scheduled for April. My wife, Meredith, was going to be eight months pregnant at that time.

So I led the Bible studies beforehand, and this was the story we studied. 

I didn’t design the T-shirt (you have to have matching T-shirts for a mission trip, right?). That was Scott, one of the adult leaders, and when those T-shirts arrived they were fluorescent green. Like highlighter green. And not only that, but they depicted a kind of jungle scene on the back, with tangled vines and tigers ... 

Students didn’t love those shirts. They especially didn’t love that they were going to all wear them through LAX. 

But I loved them. Because underneath that jungle scene on the back were four words: “Peace to this house.” 

Peace is the first word of our commission and our calling as Christians in the world. 

And peace is more than an absence of conflict. The Bible’s conception of peace goes much further than that. My Bible dictionary explains that the term peace includes health, prosperity, security, friendship, and salvation. 

For the Bible’s conception of it, peace is present because God is present. 

Peace is right relationships and all people having what they need for a life of dignity and nobody living under threat of poverty or violence or loneliness. Peace is faith’s vision for the life God desires for all people. 

Peace is the church’s mission program. 

And it starts in worship. We share in peace in here as we greet one another in worship. We don’t just say “good morning” or “how are you?” or even “welcome, we’re glad you’re here.” We say “Peace be with you.” It’s a sign of our participation in the peace that we share in Christ. 

But we are not just called to share in peace in here. We are sent to share peace when we leave here, wherever we may go and with whomever we may go. 

One way we share peace as a church in the summers is by taking part in the Friday night Walks for Peace organized by our friends and neighbors from St. Sabina in Auburn Gresham. The first one of those is this coming Friday, by the way; check your worship bulletin to learn how to participate. 

Peace is the first word of faith, the first word of our calling as people of faith, and, to borrow a phrase quite like from the Buddhist monk Thich Nhat Hanh, “Peace is every step.”

And those steps need to be quick. There’s no time to stop and chit chat along the way; Jesus told the seventy-two not to greet anyone along the road, because the mission to share in Christ’s reign of peace with neighbors near and far is urgent. 

I’ve been influenced recently by an essay of Marilynne Robinson’s called “Value” in her 2016 essay collection The Givenness of Things (which, incidentally, was generously given to me by a member of this church a couple of months ago — I quote it here partly to prove that I’m reading it). 

Robinson writes in this essay of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the German pastor and theologian who came to New York in 1939 to avoid conscription into the army. Robinson observes that Bonhoeffer was born into a stratum of German society where the high cultural achievements of German music and theology and philosophy were deeply felt and appreciated. Bonhoeffer was himself a musician and highly educated; he finished his PhD at age twenty-three. 

And so as life in Germany devolved under Nazi rule into outright violence and subjugation, Robinson wonders if Bonhoeffer didn’t reassure himself by “weighing the crudest impulses of the society, the passions of the streets and the press, against the great strength of its humanist traditions.”

“Perhaps,” she writes, “at first he felt that in time there must be a correction, a return to equilibrium, and that he could wait out the interval in London or New York.”

He did not wait out the interval. He returned to Germany after only six weeks in New York. The correction didn’t come either, not for 6 million Jews and not for Bonhoeffer; he died in the Flossenburg concentration camp in 1945. 

The call to peace is urgent. It cannot wait. 

The people to whom Jesus’ first disciples announced peace of God’s kingdom lived under the subjugation of a different kingdom, that of the Roman Empire. And not all of them welcomed the announcement of the arrival of God’s kingdom of peace. 

See, some of their contemporaries did everything they could to collaborate with the ruling authorities to keep peace for themselves and their communities, but there is no peace in submitting to your own dehumanization; before long you find that this earthly kingdom has taken more of you than you intended to give and there’s no way back. 

Others took up arms in rebellion against the Romans. This group wanted what one biblical scholar describes as “an all-out war that would bring God’s justice to their aid and get rid of their enemies once and for all.” But empires excel at putting down rebellions and at creating horrifying conditions to deter future uprisings. 

In the case of Jewish rebellions, the empire decisively put them all down in the year 70 when its forces breached the walls of Jerusalem, leveled the temple, and killed, displaced, or enslaved a large portion of the population. 

Peace is an invitation to a different way. It’s also a warning that resisting violence with the tools of the same will surely lead to destruction; that going along to get along, hoping against all evidence that a correction, a return to equilibrium, is coming if we can just wait it out, is no peace at all but a slow and irreversible surrender. 

And here Jesus endorses protest. Protest against those forces that oppose peace, the wiping of our feet of the dust of those places that are committed not to the reign of God’s peace for all but to a reign of control of the many by the few.

Protest. Not calling down fire from heaven; not violent rebellion; not waiting it out. Protest. 

Because there will be opposition. Jesus told the seventy-two he sent out that they went as lambs into the midst of wolves, because Jesus’ peace is no Pax Romana, the peace of all opponents having been beaten down and having lost the ability to resist.

Jesus’ peace does not coerce, does not threaten, does not manipulate. Jesus’ peace is carried on the lips of the community of those whom Jesus sends as an expression of a reality in which the poor receive good news, captives are released, sight is recovered, and the oppressed are freed. 

Jesus’ peace will not be welcomed in every day. 

In our day when the news for those who are poor is that their food and medical benefits are being cut, Jesus’ peace is not welcomed. 

In our day when captives are multiplying, when the U.S. government allocates $45 billion for new immigrant detention facilities, Jesus’ peace is not welcomed. 

And in our day when the oppressed do not go free but get arrested as criminals as they await their asylum hearings, Jesus’ peace is not welcomed.

Jesus calls us to protest those forces that do not welcome peace and to do it by announcing to them the same thing we announce to those who do welcome it: the kingdom of God has come near. 

Jesus is teaching us there is a new way of life at hand and available to all of us rather than the one that builds prisons and manufactures bombs. In the new way of life the poor, the hungry, and the mourning are actually blessed. In that life we can love enemies and do to others as we would have them do to us. In that life — which Jesus calls the kingdom of God — kindness is a power, and power is made perfect in weakness. 

In that life the ultimate symbol of power is a table. 

When we celebrate Communion together, we share in the peace of a common table where all are invited, everyone has enough, and no one takes more than they need. 

We are sent to the table; Jesus called on those disciples he sent out to enter a household as guests and to eat what was provided, not to move around for better or more well-suited accommodation, but to remain in the same place, around a common table. 

Maybe the table is also the protest. 

Call it a protest of endurance: staying at the table together when the rumbling of the outside world might make us want to do something else — to rush out into the street or to hide in the basement. 

For the elements at this table, the Lord’s Table, are the produce of the earth. This bread and this cup ground us — our identity and our purpose — in community, the community that lives by peace. This meal nourishes us as people sent to labor for peace in a world badly in need of it. 

This table is all the symbol we need of the abundant harvest that sustains us in the face of all that we fear might tempt us or take us out. 

It won’t. It can’t. 

Peace to this house. 

Amen.

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Sermon © Fourth Presbyterian Church