Expecting Christian Virtues

Text: Luke 10:1-11, 16-20

Scripture only. Sola scriptura as Martin Luther put it in Latin, his motto for the authority on which Christians should base their faith. Our authoritative guide is the Bible, not the church or preachers or talk show hosts. In Luther’s day this freed people from the onerous power of the church. In our day, it gives Christians common ground for a faithful life.

A difficulty with “scripture only” is that the meaning of scripture is not self-evident. It is not as plain as the nose on your face. It is not as simple as pie. If you doubt that, come join the people who are now reading Acts after coffee hour or who just read the book of Job. The meaning of the Bible, like the meaning of any book, comes from a meeting of the words on the page with the feelings of your heart and the circumstances of the day. A match made, Luther would say, by the Holy Spirit. What makes the Bible so great is that is has proven to be a reliable place for such rich encounters.

I once worked with a guy named Joe Paul. We would sit in these long strategy meetings discussing some issue or problem, where everyone felt compelled to offer an opinion or a critique. Finally, Joe would speak up. He would always ask: “What does this mean for me, Joe Paul?” That is the question that scripture makes us ask. Having read about the disciples being sent out two by two, now what? What do I do with this? What does it mean for me, Joe Paul?

One way to think about this is to put yourself into the story. To imagine yourself being one of the characters. To sit where the disciples sit, to feel the air around them, and the dust on the road, the heat of the sun. Or to imagine what it would be like to hear a knock on the door from a stranger asking for food and shelter. To imagine what it would be like to be turned away. To heal someone as the disciples do. To come back to Jesus all excited.

And when you do that, to think: is this the person I am? Or could be? Or is called to be? Is this the action I am supposed to take now, or soon? If I were the only reader of this story in the whole world, and if the only purpose of the story were to tell me something, what would that something be?

You can, when you do this, even imagine yourself to be God or Jesus. It might be helpful, for example, to imagine how Jesus felt recruiting those seventy new disciples. How he dealt with the complaints, maybe, of the original twelve, or whether he looked at these agents of his with affection, amusement, or apprehension. In doing so, you might discover God’s expectations for those Jesus calls. I say this just so you don’t feel shy about imagining yourself as Jesus from time to time.

But today I’d like to think only about the thirty-five pairs of disciples, and about the people they meet, and about the people who observe from the sidelines. These three groups illustrate three Christian virtues, and are therefore likely candidates for models of action for us. Us as individuals and also us as a church and us as a nation. The virtues are humility, hospitality, and forbearance.

The disciples are recruited, commissioned, sent, and instructed directly by Jesus. There are seventy of them, which is a special Biblical number than usually means “everybody.” Not that they are everybody, but they are sent out to everybody.

Their situation seems to be a little iffy. They are sent as lambs among wolves, they are to leave their wallets and backpacks at home, they do not know whether they are going to be welcomed or not (they suspect not). They are to accept whatever they find, eating whatever is put in front of them. Which, as they are Jews, is a big deal.

These people are healers and preachers. They are given power (“in your name, Lord, even the demons submit,” they say when they return). But the power is not for their benefit but for those they serve. (Jesus tells them not to take joy in their power.) If we want to talk about this in terms of salvation (the word means healing), it is not the disciples who are saved but the people they meet.

The verbs that Jesus uses to instruct them—these imperative, directing verbs—are verbs of sending and verbs of accepting. Go, go out, enter, live with. Eat, speak, carry nothing. Chat with no one. This is not about the disciples. The disciples have no face. Self-effacing. They do not choose where to go, but go only where Jesus himself intends to go. They themselves are not the way. They go to prepare the way.

The disciples are models of humility. They are totally dependent on God and other people. They have shed themselves of all things that most of us depend on. Possessions, self-esteem, plans and preparation and self-purpose. They allow themselves to be vulnerable as most of us cannot. They have a freedom that most of us do not.

The people in the houses to which the disciples come welcome them. (Some do not, but never mind them, the passage says.) A stranger comes to their door. They hear a greeting. Peace to this house. Some of them are called “sons of peace”—a phrase that means more than “share the peace” as our Bible version calls it. These are people who are devoted to peace, to a life of peace. The children of peace are those who desire Godly contentment more than anything else. This is the peace that is the center of spiritual well-being, what we might now days call centering peace.

The children of peace welcome the disciples. They welcome these strange and foreign couples. They feed the disciples and give them shelter. They listen to them tell their stories of Jesus and the kingdom of God.

The children of peace are models of hospitality. There is no way to know whether they find the disciples strange and fearsome. No way to know whether these households are wealthy or poor, crowded or spacious. The people welcome the disciples because they are committed to welcoming those who come to their doors in peace.

There are others in the town, unmentioned in the Gospel and therefore about whom we can only speculate, which is often a bad idea when it comes to scripture. But maybe, when we think of ourselves in this story, we are not as humble as the disciples nor as hospitable as the children of peace. Maybe we, as the townspeople must do, watch these encounters between the disciples and their adoptive hosts with wonder.

I’m interested in these unnamed invisible people because that is who many are. People who watch Christians being humble in an age that mostly values arrogance, self-sufficiency, anger, and stuff. And who watch Christians being hospitable in an age that mostly values safety, caution, boundaries, and giving in to fears of strangers.

Some who see this perhaps wonder: what is it about Christ that lets people be vulnerable and generous? These wondering people are the people who make up the plentiful harvest. They combine a skepticism of doctrine and talk with a liberal willingness to be convinced by deed and action. They are models of forbearance, which is a kind of charitable open-mindedness. And which is the twin of forgiveness.

Three Christian virtues: humility, hospitality, and forbearance. Jesus teaches us that these are good and that they are essential to the kingdom of God. Together they make up a kind of three-dimensional grid on which Christian lives might be plotted. More in each direction is better. It is what we hope for. I think. Or perhaps they are like the gifts of the Spirit that the apostle Paul talks about so often. That some individuals might be better at one of these than the others. As long as we don’t take such comfort in the virtues that we ourselves possess that we feel safe to ignore the others. Being hospitable does not mean we can be prideful and greedy.

But of our institutions—the church in particular, and I would say the state too—of our institutions we can expect more. We are right to have Christian expectations of the institutions in which we participate and which purport to represent us. If we believe what Jesus taught—which in part is that the kingdom of God is characterized by humility, hospitality, and forbearance—we can hope that those should be the goals of our world.

The Gospels give us the instructions of Jesus in his teachings, sermons, prayers, and actions. In our quest for the good life and for a peaceful world, we have many guides. And if scripture is our guide, we can judge our actions as individuals and in groups by the criteria that Jesus gives us. When we think, what does this mean for me, Joe Paul, we can think: is this what Jesus taught us?