Travel Light

June 18, 2017

Second Sunday After Pentecost

This week, my husband, Alan, and I are moving. We are relocating from one of Chicago’s more remote northern suburbs and moving into Rogers Park, where we look forward to being closer both to my adult children, to my work at here at the cathedral, and to Alan’s work on the South Side.

As we are moving from a rambling old house to a classic Chicago town home, we are, at the same time, undertaking the great mid-life down-sizing, casting a brutal eye on once-cherished books and tchotchkes, children’s pottery projects, and coming to terms with the fact that, no, I’m not really ever going to get around to removing the shoulder pads from that sensible but outdated jacket from the Reagan years.

We have been divesting of items like mad for weeks now and are in the home stretch. But as is the case in every move I’ve made, there comes a point where you look around and you could swear that someone is sneaking in and adding to the stacks of boxes while you are not looking, and you quietly calculate the financial and legal consequences of simply closing the door behind you and leaving it all from someone else to sort out!

And so, the irony was not lost on me this past week that, as I was engaging in the height of the battle to pack all of my worldly possessions into cardboards boxes, Jesus’ words as he sends forth the apostles were ringing in my ears: “Take no gold or silver or copper in your belts. Take no bag for your journey… or two tunics… or sandals…. or a staff.” The very week that I am endeavoring to “take it all with me” (of course in an admirably organized and well-edited way), is the week that Jesus is whispering in my ear, “Travel light.”

Well, confronted by the dissonance of scriptural advice at odds with my actions, I did what most of us do: I rationalized and ignored. Jesus couldn’t really have hadmein mind when he said that anyway… right?   And so “the great sort” continued apace, even with Jesus’ words of radical relinquishment knocking about in my head.

And so late last night I was upstairs taking a break from sorting through another round of basement boxes, and enjoying the beautiful sound of the summer thunderstorm, when a tremendous commotion rose up from the basement. Family members were shouting and calling for help.  I sprinted down to see, much to my amazement and horror, at the far end of the basement, in a scene straight out of Titanic, one of the windows was spewing forth gallons and gallons of water!

Still struggling to even understand what was happening, we grabbed any containers we could to catch the gushing water.  My husband braved the crashing storm in order to work from the outside. There he discovered that the retaining wall around the window well had collapsed. He and my daughter’s boyfriend pushed back the walls and bailed.  But we were no match for it and, even as we fought the flood, we watched helplessly as a small lake progressed implacably across the basement floor, embracing the piles of books carefully sorted into “donate” and “move.”

Everything in the path of the water was now either ruined or would take time and energy that we do not have in order to salvage. And so our final act of last night’s midnight moving adventure was dragging half of the basement out to the trash. All of the carefully calibrated decisions about the disposition of our “stuff” that had seemed so agonizing, and so necessary had been swept away in the current of a freak flash flood. It turns out that we will, in fact, be travelling light – or at least lighter. And, in fact, we are fine with that.

It’s just that now I am left to wonder why it is that Jesus’ words had less sway over my actions than a few bathtubs full of water?

This is the question before us this morning and over the next few weeks as our lectionary takes us back into the Gospel of Matthew, and we hear the Matthean vision of the church’s mission.  In it, Jesus, having begun his ministry of teaching and healing, now calls his disciples into the work along with him. Seeing the heartache of the people around him, Jesus says the work of redemption is plentiful but the laborers are few. And so, he send his disciples out to do as he has done.

He sends them out with instructions that they are to heal the sick, cast out demons, and bring the dead back to life. And in all things, they are to proclaim the Good News – that, in them,the Kingdom of Heaven has drawn near.

There is something about the nature of this work that, in Jesus’ mind, requires them to travel light — to be unencumbered, to be radically available and vulnerable.

Were Jesus to walk the streets of the cities or towns where we live, what would he see? Do you imagine that he would see the same thing he saw walking the towns of his day: crowds of people harassed and helpless – like sheep without at shepherd?

The mission of the church is no less urgent today than it was in Jesus’ day.  And now the disciples whom Jesus calls, have different names — yours and mine.

As he did with his first disciples, Jesus calls us to travel light, because there is something about this work of proclamation, healing, and redemption, that requires more ofus—and less of our “stuff”. It is up to you and me to identify what it is that we need to leave behind in order to do the work that God is giving us to do.

Pray with me that God will send a flash-flood of Grace to burst through the retaining walls of our hearts — to wipe away all that we cling to that we do not need.  And give us grace and courage to be God’s church in the world, to love God with all our hearts, and to travel light.

Amen.