Sunday, July 7, 2013
Seventh Sunday After Pentecost
Luke 10:1-11, 16-20
Rev. Edgar Palacios
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The text of Luke 10 expresses the mission of the church or of the disciples to the world. It is the beginning of the mission in the cities. Missionaries are needed to carry out the mission. And in Christ we are all missionaries. The Greek word that translates into mission is shipping, missionaries are sent. All are sent to communicate the gospel of the Kingdom of God. And performing the mission is an imperative. Jesus says “go”. But the mission is not easy in a hostile world. However, what the disciples needed was obedience to God’s will, and that obedience means to act with the heart, mind and body. That’s all it takes. Material things can be useful but are not essential to the mission.
The mission of the disciples was to preach the message of truth of the gospel of God’s kingdom. The kingdom of God was the alternative project that Jesus presented. This project was his passion. Jesus dedicated his life to the realization of this project and it was this project what led to his death. Jesus was killed by the political power elites who opposed the project. The kingdom of Rome offered peace and salvation but through violence, through war. The kingdom of God offered peace and salvation but through the power of the service, by healing the sick, by sharing free food, it was egalitarian not hierarchical. Jesus lived and preached the core of the prophetic message. He preached the Shalom (peace), the tsedaqah, (justice), the hesed (compassion) and the emunah, (true-fidelity).
But the message of the kingdom of God is not only given to be heard. That message demands a response: The response of the conversion of the people, the response of the transformation of the unjust and inhumane economic and political systems, the response of the liberation from situations of oppression, exploitation or slavery.
When the call of Jesus Christ through the message of the gospel of the kingdom of God, is rejected there is the condemnation which is self-destruction. “Human beings harvest what they planted.” When the rejection is made by the proud and arrogant State, or by the unjust economic system, there is the self-destruction from their laws of operation or from internal factors. These organisms and socio-political systems fall into moral decay and eventually collapse.
Do not forget that preaching the gospel of the kingdom of God is not only to give an oral message. There is a communication among God’s will for human coexistence, and people, organizations, and political and economic institutions. Communication must be comprehensive in order to be complete. So it is important to affirm that the gospel message will have particular contents depending on the reality to which the message is communicated. And if that reality rejects the oral message, the disciples, the church must communicate the love of God in other ways.
The reality of Martin Luther King was a society with unjust and inhumane laws due to racial discrimination. This society rejected the oral message, so MLK proceeded to boycott public transportation, even if that were rated by others as illegal. In my case, I became aware of the causes of the war in El Salvador, and I knew that we were killing among Salvadoran siblings. That is why I preached the gospel of peace with social justice, but this was accompanied by mobilization of the people, with fasting and vigils, with media communication, with calls from the international community to accompany the people in their aspiration to achieve peace with justice.
Jesus sends us today to communicate the gospel of the kingdom of God to this society in the United States of America. We must communicate the gospel to the persons, but we also have to communicate the gospel to the structures of economic power and political power elites. Why have thousands of families lost their homes? Why were the banks saved from bankruptcy with the money from the federal treasury, and insolvent families were not saved? Why the financial system deregulated and now the middle class was pays more taxes than big business with millions in profits? The nation states are building by the government and the people. The government is legitimate and justified in its service to the people.
Jesus taught and practiced a different meaning of power for social and global coexistence. The power to him was the service. He himself described himself as “server”. The true church is the church that serves the whole human being, in his personal and above personal dimension, the church that serves the individual or the community, the family or the state, the employer or the economic structure. But serving is to save, and saving an unjust structure is to transform it into a fair structure.
The church’s mission is to save the world. As a local church we must save by proclaiming the gospel of the kingdom of God, contextualized to the reality in Washington, DC and the United States of America. We must communicate the gospel with power of God, which is, serving for the personal conversion, serving to liberate human beings from all forms of slavery, serving for justice in the administration of the people’s wealth, serving to transform violence and war in permanent peace based on justice, respect and equality. We must serve by compassion to ourselves and our neighbors. Only in this way will be faithful to the mission, only in this way our message is a message of truth.