07022022 – Luke 10. 1-11, 16-20
I tell you; this Jesus guy is not an easy guy to follow.
He expects a lot of you.
More than a lot…it’s like he expects everything…the world, even.
Doesn’t he get it? Doesn’t he understand? We are human. We are not God. We are not perfect. Far from it. Never gonna be. Never will be.
We sin, we err, we transgress, we miss the mark, regularly, routinely…
We mess up, time and time and time again.
We are known for it. We laugh about it.
We laugh at ourselves.
Wanting to…and making it happen, sometimes are two different things…
Remember what old Paul said…in his rather circular way of talking…about doing the things we don’t want to do, and we do them anyhow…
Loving the lambs is relatively easy. Sometimes.
It can be textbook. Easy stuff. Sometimes…
Loving the wolves is harder. Loving the wolves some days seems like it is impossible.
This is news of yesterday, being repeated again today and tomorrow.
In Indonesia Christian schoolgirls are dragged from a bus and beheaded.
In Egypt ancient Coptic communities have been all but obliterated.
In Sudan – Christian villages have been bombed and strafed routinely.
In Nigeria entire congregations are rounded-up, gunned down and left to rot on the ground.
In India Anglican churches are burned to the ground while the faithful are hacked to death.
In Palestine, Iraq and Syria, “ethnic cleansing” has reduced Christian communities to a pitiful few, elderly survivors…
And in this week’s gospel, Jesus warns his disciples that he is “sending them out like lambs among the wolves.”
Hello!
The wolves are everywhere and waiting to devour.
Two-thousand years later, the pack is still circling…and it seems like the pack is getting larger and larger.
Two thousand years later and Christians are still being harassed, persecuted, and slaughtered.
The lambs of the LAMB OF GOD are being slaughtered one by one. It happens all over the world.
In LAHORE, Pakistan, June 23, a week ago…hopes for freedom of two Christian brothers on death row (since 2014) under Pakistan’s “blasphemy laws” were dashed last month when a court in Pakistan upheld their death sentence despite the lack of ANY evidence against them.
A Christian factory worker in Scotland was fired from his job for refusing to remove his cross necklace.
In NAIROBI, Kenya, June 14, a little over two weeks ago, a woman in central Uganda who became a Christian on May 29 was killed later that day, by her very own father, who stabbed her repeatedly in the head for leaving Islam.
It is a different day and then again, not so different, just more of the same.
Loving the sheep is “relatively” easy, loving the wolves, is much harder.
And yet that is precisely what we are called to do.
Love them. Pray for them.
We are compelled by the word of God:
When hated, we love. When insulted, we love. When slandered, we love.
When people speak ill of us, we love. When they talk about us, behind our backs, we love. When we are despised, we love.
It is not easy being “a lamb of God.”
The wolves are everywhere, and they are circling.
And Jesus STILL sent out the seventy. He sent them out in spite of the wolves, in spite of the opposition.
We question whether or not he knew or realized the amount of resistance, the hostility, the enmity, the antagonism, and the disapproval that they might face.
But then, when you look at his life and what he endured, he knew all too well. And still, he sent them out.
No body ever said, it was going to be easy being a Christian.
Turning the other cheek. Going the extra mile. Praying for your enemies. Being a Christian is not a “walk in the park.” Nor was it ever meant to be.
If it were easy. If you had to do nothing. Believe nothing. Say nothing. Think nothing. All kinds of folks would jump on board…
But this Christian stuff…was never meant for sissies…or the faint of heart…the cowardly, the weaklings, the namby-pamby, the chickens…only LAMBS need apply!
Amen.