A Band of Brothers

September 2, 2007                                                                                                                                                           Rev. William “Buck” Day

It is a good thing to be together as God’s people in community and we will be talking about that today; but right now we are going to turn to our scripture and it is from Matthew, chapter 10 and it is Jesus beginning to send his disciples out.  So would you join with me as we read God’s word this morning?  From Matthew, chapter 10:1-7:

Then Jesus summoned his twelve disciples and gave them authority over unclean spirits to cast them out and cure every disease and every sickness.

These are the names of the twelve apostles:  first, Simon (also known as Peter) and his brother Andrew, James son of Zebedee, and his brother John; Phillip and Bartholomew; Thomas and Matthew the tax collector; James son of Alphaeus, and Thaddaeus; Simon the Cananean and Judas Iscariot, the one who betrayed.

These twelve Jesus sent out with the following instructions:   “Go nowhere among the Gentiles and enter no town of the Samaritans.  But go rather to the lost sheep of the house of Israel.  As you go, proclaim the good news:  ‘The kingdom of heaven is near.’”

Would you join me in prayer?

Lord we thank you for your word.  It is truly your word, our gift.  So Lord we ask that by your power of the Spirit that lives within us, quicken our hearts and minds to hear what you have to say to us today.  Lord we ask that you would be glorified and that we would be changed as a result of what happens here.  In your name.  Amen.

Well, today we are going to be talking about the big picture. As I was thinking about that I was reading yesterday’s paper, I came across an example I wanted to share with you of a group of people, in fact, a nation that has the big picture in mind.  Next year the summer Olympics are coming to Beijing, China and they are thinking about, not only the games and all that goes on with the games, but the government is also thinking about, how do we welcome all these people that are going to be coming?  One of the things that they have been thinking about is how do they better translate their Chinese language into English around food; because if you have ever seen any of the clumsy translations from Chinese to English, it might put you off wanting to eat that.  So what they are doing is working hard at trying to come up with better names and I have a couple of these names they are working on.  One translation they came up with for one of their dishes was called Virgin Chicken.  They are changing it, better I think, to a young chicken dish.  Another one you many not want to indulge in was translated to Burnt Lion’s Head.  It was actually Chinese style pork meatballs.  I think this one is my favorite – the temple explodes the chicken cube.  It is now being translated as Kung Pao Chicken.  One other one and I am entering this one with a little trepidation, it’s called Steamed Crap.  It’s actually Steamed Carp.  But China’s got it right.  China’s got the big picture in mind.  They’re not just thinking about the big games but they are also thinking about all the other stuff that goes on with that.  We don’t always do that.  In fact, one company that I want to tell you about didn’t do very well at all and that is the Rubbermaid Corporation.  The Rubbermaid Corporation was named by Fortune Magazine the number one company in America among its most admired companies during the late 1980’s.  When you look at the story of Rubbermaid, it is the study of a quick rise to the top of everything and just as quickly its crash down to the bottom to the point that it had to be bought out in order to be saved.  The person who brought this company, Rubbermaid, out of obscurity was its powerful leader Stanley Gault.  When you read through the articles about Rubbermaid during these days, you find that Gault was your typical A personality kind of leader.  He was hard driving, very self-centered; and, in fact, in one interview, the interviewer asked him, “Are you a tyrant?”  To which he said, “Yes, but a sincere tyrant.”  I’m not sure if I know exactly what that means.  When you read about it he typically spoke in the first person.  He said things like “I led the charge.”  “I explained the objectives.”  Rubbermaid with Gault at the helm generated forty consecutive quarters of earnings growth.  That was unprecedented, but most experts also point to Gault for the downfall of Rubbermaid.  They say he didn’t leave behind a company that would be great without him.  How often we get blinded to the bigger picture, maybe because our ego gets in our way; or maybe what happens is we find what Stephen Covey calls “the tyranny of the urgent” happens to us; so we lose sight of the big picture.   I think that is one of the reasons why I am so drawn to Jesus.  Jesus understood his part in God’s bigger plan. He understood clearly that he was the center point of God’s redemption for the human race.  During his three years of public ministry he knew that much was going to be needed to be accomplished before he got to heaven.  Jesus was beginning what William Easum who is a church expert for the new millennium said, “It is a movement that Jesus started rather than a religion.”  Jesus was starting a movement towards authentic faith opposed to the institutional rules and regulations of Judaism of that day.  This movement that Jesus started was driven by his mission and by his leadership; and Jesus, Easum goes on to say, was calling his disciples to go into their mission field, ancient Palestine, to go as an immigrant, as we talked about last week.  Easum also says then that we too must reclaim this idea – this idea, that following Jesus is a movement and we must follow him into our mission fields, to go out to our world, to become an immigrant even into our own back yards, like we talked about last week.  So Jesus had this big picture in mind during his time on earth.  He knew what Stanley Gault did not.  For his mission to continue, he would have to prepare others to carry on after he was gone.  He would have to create some momentum if this movement was to endure.  So he chose to spend his three years of public ministry living in the company of twelve handpicked men.  He could have chosen another way.  I mean, think about it.  He could have gone to the masses and he could have taught the masses or he could have gone to the religious leaders of the day; that would kind of make sense, wouldn’t it?  But Jesus didn’t do that, did he?  Part of that is I think he knew what he was before those who would be his followers – the suffering, the persecution, the hatred that would come with being associated with Jesus.  So to go to the masses, he knew that when the persecution came and the hatred came the masses would just follow the herd mentality and just all fall away.  Going to the religious leaders, he knew they were way, way too comfortable than to embrace the radical call of life that Jesus was laying on the disciples.  So Jesus took the other way.  He went for a personal touch, calling to himself a band of brothers, so that they could be next to him and see how Jesus lived; so that they would be bound together over that three year period they would be linked to a common mission.  Jesus also did it knowing that after he died they would be the ones who would be ready to carry on Jesus’ message.  They would live the same way Jesus lived and love with the same heart because that is what they saw in Jesus; then, to take it to the next step, expand it through the power of the Holy Spirit.

So in our scripture today we begin to see how Jesus takes this hodgepodge group of guys and builds it into a band of brothers that is ready to take on the world.  To do that, Jesus first gave this band of brothers a high calling.  If you notice in our text they were called disciples at first, and then they were called apostles.  The word disciple simply means a learner.  As a disciple they were to become like their teacher, Jesus, become like him in every way.  For in Jesus, there is complete congruency between thoughts and actions.  I can’t think of a better way to learn how to be like somebody else but to live with them night and day.  So they were disciples of Jesus, living with them; but Jesus now takes it up another notch and calls them apostles.  Apostles are those ones who are sent, who are commissioned to go out as an ambassador.  When we send mission trips out, what do we do?  We commission them.  We send them out in our name.  That is what Jesus is doing with his disciples.  He is saying, “You are now the sent ones, the apostles, to go out in my name.”  Then he lists the names of these people who have been sent.  As we look as those names we go, “O.K. we know their names, we understand them, we’ve read them, we have heard them;” but if you look at these names and their backgrounds and who they were, they were a group of men with great diversity.  I think that was on purpose because Jesus knew for every movement to grow, they needed people from different walks of life that would be able to carry the mission into every area of the world.  So in that list we find outspoken ones; we find ones who have a nasty temper; we have ones who worked for Rome, ones who hated the Romans, others who were skeptics, and others who quite frankly were just a little slow to learn.  But Jesus says to all of them, “You will learn from me and you will become like me.  You have a heart that is in tuned with the Father so that your actions reflect that.”  Theirs was a radical call to be with Jesus, to be that disciple; but then they are the apostles, the ones who were sent to create something bigger than themselves.  That’s the second part of that high calling.  Jesus is entrusting to this band of brothers the very heart and soul of what he came to do.  They are to go and to proclaim the kingdom of heaven is here.  And when the kingdom of heaven comes, hearts get changed; people get healed; people get raised from the dead; they get cleansed; they get released from things that held them captive.  Jesus comes to earth as an immigrant to come to his mission field, the earth, teaching his band of brothers to do the same thing, to proclaim the same message that Jesus proclaimed, that God is here among us in a new and powerful way.  It’s not just a future hope.  It is not just a nice thought.  It is real; it is here; and it is present.  That’s pretty heavy stuff for a group of guys that probably didn’t like each other very much when they first got together.  But Jesus always had that big picture in mind knowing what was ahead of them.  Jesus was preparing them for Pentecost when they would be the ones people would look to and say, “We want to be like you. We want to have our heart in tuned to the Father the same way that your heart is in tuned with the Father.”  Jesus was calling this band of brothers to be part of God’s redemption of the world, to invest in something beyond themselves.  So Jesus gave this band of brothers a high calling that would change them forever.  Just as he gives them this high calling with this big picture in mind, he also takes the next step and he gives them the authority to live it out.  This authority is the exact same authority that Jesus has.  This authority comes with the same power that Jesus had.  It is out of that power that comes the ability to cast out, to cure, to raise, to clean, all the things that Jesus told them to go and do.  They were to go and do that because they had been watching Jesus do it at the end of chapter 9, which is right before our text.  Jesus was doing those exact same things now he says, “Guys, you go out and do the same thing.”  Jesus is doing this to spread that good news, to advance the kingdom so the kingdom would spread, what you and I just prayed in the Lord’s prayer, “thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven;” that it would spread.  So they went out, curing, cleansing, raising the dead, all to reveal the power of God is now present in reality, present among them; and this power is being given to this band of brothers.  Jesus is training them for the bigger picture.

This power that Jesus gave them didn’t keep them in one place.  It caused them to be mobile.  When they were following with Jesus, they didn’t stay in one place, did they?  They were continually moving around.  That’s where Easum gets this idea of Jesus being a leader of a movement, of going out.  Jesus was always on the move with his disciples, with his band of brothers.  After Pentecost, the church is on the move, isn’t it?  First through the Middle East, then through the Mediterranean, as well.  That might be part of why the early followers were called “The Way”.  This band of brothers was given a high calling. They were given authority to live it out.  They were also given the support they needed to endure.  Think about it.  These guys were learning on the fly.  Every day was a new adventure for them.  They had no idea what to expect.  Each day they had to think about things in a new way, learn to live in new ways that maybe they weren’t accustomed to.  As a result this experience built a unique camaraderie.  It also built accountability first to Jesus, then later on to each other.  

Their shared life experiences for them became life lessons on how to bring the kingdom of God near, to preach that good news, to have a heart that is fully focused on God.  They learned the importance of obedience by watching Jesus and Jesus’ obedience to the Father, his desire to do the Father’s will. In the midst of that, community was being created.  This community would serve as a precursor for the larger community what we know now as the church.  This community was to be about the business of bringing the kingdom to this world, to bring God’s presence to this world.  This community would have a very unique nature to it because it has a uniqueness, because there is this individual nature of community but there is also very much a communal nature to this community as well.  Dietrich Bonhoeffer speaks to this in his book called Life Together.  He says “Let him who cannot be alone, beware of community.  For if you can’t be alone, you will only do harm to yourself and to the rest of the community.”  Then he takes it and he flips it over to the flip side of that and he says, “Let him who is not in community beware of being alone, for into community you were called.”  So Dietrich Bonhoeffer tells us that part of our high call into Christ is a call to Christ alone.  Christ issues his call to each one of us to come to him and it is our decision alone to make that decision of whether we will follow him or not.  It is our decision alone to determine whether we will surrender our heart to God, to allow God to transforms us, to begin to mold us, to chip away those rough edges so that we begin to reflect Christ in our actions and in our thoughts.  Some day, alone, we will stand before God.  When we come to the point of death, we make that transition alone as well.  But we are also called into Christ to be part of a larger community.  It is in that larger community where we share our joys as well our struggles of living out this high calling; because, Lord knows, this high calling that we are called to live out in our world is not easy, it is hard.  So we need each other to encourage, to strengthen that notion of iron sharpening iron, to stand along side each other when one of our members has taken a few too many arrows from this world. 

So we must be in community together but we also must have times when we are alone as a part of God’s people.  Bonhoeffer concludes that if we refuse to be alone, or if we refuse to take part of community, we are rejecting God’s high call upon us.  So I submit that to you this day because we are at the front end of a year long focus on connecting.  You will hear a lot about connecting.  We are talking about this idea of connecting with God, growing ourselves spiritually.  We are talking about connecting with each other; that is the notion of community.  That is what we have been talking about a little bit today.  Last week, if you were here, we were really talking about this notion of connecting with faith, this idea of helping others get connected into life here at
Faith.  That’s what we are going to be talking about over this next year.  Chris is going to bring it as we step into it full stride next Sunday.  I say that as we think about all the stuff that is going forward this year, all of it will have undertones of this connecting emphasis.  The classes that are offered for adults both Sunday and Wednesday nights, all will have this notion of connecting as a part of it, some more overtly than others; but it will always be an undercurrent in the classes we are talking about.  There are our gathering classes that we have been promoting.  One is for married couples with children in school that Ramon and Melissa Gonzalez are going to be point people for.  It is going to be one of those places to make those kind of connections to build community.  There is also one for the young adult community as we begin to get that going and building some community.  Those folks that enjoy going to the third service, you are welcome to be a part of that community.  We are going to try to grow that so that out of that would come another community that we could find connections and eventually find a worship service.  Many of you are in small groups.  That is a wonderful thing.  Some of you want to get into small groups and we need to help you do that.  In our small groups we are going to encourage you in some point over this next year to talk about connecting.  What does that mean?  What does that look like for us?

I invite you to begin to think about connecting, connecting with God, connecting with each other, building community and connecting with faith, the idea of bringing others into life here at Faith.  I invite you to pray about what that means for you individually, pray about what it means for us as a congregation.  Where do we need to make connections?  How might we connect with the world?  Amen.

Let me pray for us.

Lord God we thank you that you are here and that you have given us the same high calling you gave the disciples.  Lord, I will be the first to confess, lots of times I don’t feel up to it; but Lord help me to know that you have given us all the power we need to live it out and you have given us each other for support on this long road.  Help us to be your people that live faithfully before you and before this world, so that they might know that your kingdom has indeed come here by the changed hearts they see in us.  We ask that in your name.  Amen.