Take Nothing For Your Journey (Leave the Baggage Behind)

July 4, 2021 
Mark 6:1-13

 

So Jesus is doing the same things he’s done in other places

Same words, same acts of power, same parables.

Except it’s not working here.

Why? because it’s Jesus home town.

Jesus went home and the same stuff that worked other places

didn’t work at home.

It says:  

“And he could do no deed of power there, except that

he laid his hands on a few sick people and cured them.

⁶And he was amazed at their unbelief.”

 

Jesus Christ, son of God, savior of the world

is confined by the box that his friends

and family have put him in.

Jesus is being held back by his past.

 

Am I the only one in this room that resonates with this?

We get this.

This is the human side of Jesus coming through.

We could be the highest power executive

making a six figure salary supervising tons of employees,

but we’re still little Davie or Timmy  or Juney Moon in my case.

 

I’m a pastor, but I know my family still

thinks of me as a weird, moody 13 year old.

 

It’s nothing new or scandalous or embarrassing

It’s not even theological.

It’s hard to escape our pasts.

It’s hard to break out of those molds,

those  patterns, those preconceived notions – good or bad.

  

Maybe you were always known as the foolish one

or the lazy one, or maybe you were the smart one,

maybe you were always the organizer, or the interpreter or the cheer-leader.

Maybe God needs you to do something else.

 

The fact is that the past is a strong force in our lives.

It even prevented Jesus from doing what he was capable of.

 

But living the gospel of Jesus in our lives means change.

It means doing something different living out something new.

When we come into contact with Jesus

and with the community of Christ, we change.

Jesus is constantly renewing us, constantly challenging us

to think and behave and act and respond differently to the world around us.

New Life, resurrection, new beginnings. That’s what God is all about.

 

I think this story tells us that change isn’t easy.

There is resistance from every angle.

It is easy to snap back to old habits and

not even Jesus is immune to that reality.

 

So the first part of the Gospel today is about Jesus in his home town

and then the second part is about Jesus sending out his disciples

into the towns with nothing.

 

Jesus tells them “take nothing for your journey”

 

I was kind of stuck trying to figure out if there was any connection

between the two stories, or were they just

next to each other for no reason.

But now I think they’re related.

Sending the Disciples Out
James Tissot

  

I think they’re both about baggage.

Literal and figuratively.

They’re both about carrying around things

that weigh us down, that prevent us from

doing what God needs us to do

answering the call of the gospel

being the people that God made us to be.

 

Jesus said to the disciples,

“Just carry one staff, no bread,

one pair of sandals and one set

of clothes. No baggage.”

 

No bring your past, don’t bring your possessions,

don’t bring the things that make you feel

either powerful or powerless.

Go into God’s service free of those things.

 

When those disciples were sent out.

Without anything, they couldn’t rely on their

possessions, they couldn’t use them to

look better than anyone or impress anyone.

They couldn’t use them for security.

But neither could they be weighed down by any of it.

 

They had to go into each town as beggars.

Meaning when people approached them,

they didn’t have to worry about losing

their cloaks, their bread, or the money in their belts.

Every person they met was an opportunity, not a threat.

God can use us best when we’re

Not worried about losing anything.

 

In God’s eyes, we are not our wealth or our privilege,

or our possessions or our lack of possessions.

We are not our downfalls or our short comings.

We are not even our accomplishments.

We are washed clean of all that.

With God’s forgiveness, every day is

a new day and a new possibility and a new beginning.

Our baggage does not lift us up, or weigh us down.

 

In the earliest Christian Church, people were

drawn to the new religion by the  way they

treated each other as equals. They were not

divided by wealth or status, they were the same:

Men, women, Jews and Greek, slave and free.

And because it was a new thing, they didn’t

rely on the past, and they weren’t weighed down by it.

 

As we rebuild this church together,

we should keep all this in mind.

We come to this moment with our hands empty.

We should not be relying on our past privilege or accomplishments.

And we should not be weighed down by our past failures.

We should not worry about how we did it before,

or how we failed to do it before.

 

We come to each moment, with our hands out and accepting

not worried about losing anything,

Every moment, every new person, every ministry,

every encounter we have with each other,

is an opportunity to grow in love and service.

And if something doesn’t work,

We can just shake the dust off our feet

and move on again.

 

In our baptism, all the dust was shaken off us.

And every day, the water of our baptism

shakes the dust of our past off,

all our baggage gets washed away.

 

Each day God allows you and me the possibility

to start with a clean slate.

That is the forgiveness of God.

 

Our baggage does not govern us and it does not help us.

To God, we are not what we carry.

 

We are only a wonderful, possible future.