JESUS THE PIONEER

“After this, the Lord appointed seventy others and sent them on ahead of him in pairs to every town and place he himself intended to go… see I am sending you out like lambs in the midst of wolves…carry no purse, no bag, no sandals…”  Luke 10:1,3,4

Most of us reference this day the fourth of July.  Far more appropriately we should say, “It is Independence Day.” Today we give thanks for the freedoms which we enjoy and within which we live our lives.  One of those cherished freedoms is to be able to gather in an open forum such as this and worship God in the faith expression of our choice without fear of government reprisal.

On this we day must never forget that freedom did not come cheap, but came at great cost and sacrifice.  Our ancestors believed so passionately about the dream and possibility of this nation they were willing to put it above and ahead of everything else, even their lives. 

It occurred to me this week that we could say there are two kinds of people that constituted the earliest days of this nation and perhaps two kinds of people who constitute it today: pioneers and setters.  That’s what I want to talk about today: pioneers and settlers. 

The early generations that populated this nation; those who declared the first colonies an independent nation; those who later pushed across the Appalachians into the Mississippi Valley and beyond were most certainly pioneers.

For better or worse the attitude and spirit that shaped the history of this nation was a pioneer attitude: a thirst for adventure; a willingness to put oneself at great risk; a need to push beyond the next horizon; a disregard for the conventions of comfort and security.

But sooner or later the pioneers became settlers. The pioneers finally had to settle in, or at least their descendants finally had to.  Sooner or later the hard won gains of pioneer-ism had to be protected and defended by settler-ism; visible and invisible walls of security had to be built to preserve what the pioneers had gained; enemies had to be kept at bay. 

I remember the first time I saw the front range of the Rocky Mountains.  It was June of 1963.  I was with a group of youth on the way to camp riding the train across the boring flatness of Illinois, Iowa, Nebraska and finally eastern Colorado; hundreds and hundreds of miles of relative flatness - cornfields, then wheat, then sage.  Suddenly someone yelled, arousing us out of our dozing stupors, “Look - the mountains!”   We all scrambled to the windows and sure enough there they were in all their glory.  It was that week I fell in love with mountains and have spent most of my adult life near some of the great mountain ranges of North America in Colorado and Alaska.

I wonder what those first pioneers thought and felt when they came across the great plains and before them loomed the great physical barrier of the Rocky Mountains.  The barrier was so formidable to some that it converted them into settlers and places like Denver were established, and here we are today.  For others, the lure of gold, silver and adventure were intoxicating and overwhelming and not even the prospect of 14,000 foot peaks, severe winters and a myriad of other life –threatening dangers could discourage them from pressing onward.

Living along the front range of the Rockies, even to this day, can give one a sense of being caught between two worlds: the pioneer world of mountainous mystery, power, and risk, and the settler world of level, flat understanding, sight, and safety. We who live along the front range of the Rockies are stretched between those worlds, attracted to certain elements of both, searching for our place in the picture.

I believe Jesus was very much a pioneer.   Last week in the Gospel from Luke 9 we heard Jesus say,    "Foxes have holes, birds have nests, but the Son of Man has no where to lay his head." (Luke 9:58)  That’s how he described himself.   He lived on the road, had no permanent address.   That's exactly what Jesus was first and foremost - a pioneer. The image of Jesus and his disciples traveling on the road in the Gospels is so familiar to us that we seldom stop to even think about it - or more importantly stop to think about its implications for our faith.

Actually Jesus was an exception to the rule of his time.  At the time of Jesus, Jewish teachers and preachers were usually settled and situated. People came to them for instruction and inspiration rather than they go out to the people. But not so with Jesus! He was an exception to the rule.

To be a pioneer is to live on the edge, to travel light and not bring everything but the kitchen sink with you; to be open to the challenges of each day; the unknown turns in the road; the sudden unexpected circumstances that arise; the unknown people you will encounter; the surprising vistas and resting places; the difficult obstacles; the joyful welcomes; the sour rejections.

To be a pioneer is to live in a vulnerable way that you let go of the need to always be in control of every situation and to be open to what might intersect with your path along the way.

The truth is that probably 97% of the time we live just the opposite of a pioneer. We live as settlers.  We like to settle in and get comfortable and build visible and invisible walls of protection around all that which we call our own, that we've worked so hard to build!

We are settlers in that we have our agendas, schedules, and plans. We often  label a day, week or year bad because something, somebody, some power, or some event has intruded, and interrupted and changed our well established plans: death, loss, injury, disease, trouble in the family, a drop in the stock market and a million other things can throw us into emotional and spiritual turmoil because in our hearts we prefer to settlers, not pioneers. We like to stay in calculated control.

We're settlers who often choose to be insulated enough that we can avoid the pain in people around us, or undesirable people we do not like. We strive to position ourselves in such a way so that we can walk around a difficult situation or avoid being asked to do something that we don't want to do.

But it is not so with the pioneer.  Life looks a lot different from the vantage point of the pioneer. The pioneer expects change, complexity, and interruptions. The pioneer has accepted the reality that there will be intrusions, violent twists and turns in the road. The pioneer doesn't expect that answers are always so simple. And, since a pioneer often relies on others and must interact for survival, the pioneer gets to know others in a way the settler and the resident sometimes never do.

Look at Jesus. If you enter into the gospel story you will see that Jesus was repeatedly criticized by the religious settlers of his day because, as a pioneer, Jesus saw the potential, the humanity, and the dignity in each face he encountered, especially in the faces of the least desirable; in the faces those living out on the margins; in the faces of the rejected, the unclean, the sinful and the condemned; those whom the religious residents and settlers of his day had written off!   He crashed through conventional and accepted religious barriers. 

"And Jesus appointed 70 others and sent them ahead of him saying... I am sending you like sheep to the wolves... carry no purse, no bag, no sandals..."

I believe these words were not only meant for 70 appointed pioneer disciples whoever they were, but these words are also a challenge to you and to me. Jesus' words are an invitation for us to be pioneer disciples as well.  Jesus is saying that to follow him, to name yourself after him, to call yourself Christian means to be a pioneer Christian - at least part of the time!

But what might that look like for you and me? What could that invitation possibly mean for such well established, entrenched settlers like you and me? How can we, settlers that we are, become more pioneer-like in our Christian walk?   I make some two suggestions.

First, to be a pioneer is to expect that God comes outside the boundaries of your well-planned, well-ordered and well-scheduled days. A pioneer follower of Jesus adopts the attitude of seeing the next interruption that comes along not as an inconvenience, which it very well may be from a settler’s point-of-view, but a detour upon which you just may experience the awesome presence of God in a whole new way. When I look back I can see that the times I have grown the most in my faith, and experienced most profoundly God's presence have been on detours and twists in the road that came as interruptions and surprises.

In the Bible God's people frequently grew most in faith, not within the boundaries of their well-ordered plans, but when they found themselves, against their will, wandering in the wilderness, taking the unexpected fork in the road. It was out there living on the margin, walking along the edge, that they learned what it meant to trust and rely upon God.

Second, a pioneer risks living with fewer walls and boundaries.  For a long time now I have repeatedly insisted that one of the great sins of Christianity is that we have confined and bottled-up God’s incredible kingdom of grace given through Jesus Christ behind so many confining walls and constricting boundaries:  boundaries of denominationalism; walls of a specific personal piety; boundaries of biblical interpretation; walls of theological viewpoint; behind boundaries of this and walls of that.

Today is Independence Day for our nation, but in the kingdom of God every day is Independence Day.  Every Day God in Jesus Christ is calling us out from behind our walls and boundaries setting us free to bring God’s kingdom of grace and good news to the world. 

Jesus had vision, not of singular nation, but a vision of the kingdom of God of God’s grace, and he believed so passionately in it that he gave his life for it – and it is through his death and subsequent resurrection that that kingdom is continually reborn in the world. 

Let the Kingdom of God's grace be reborn in you every day.

The living out of and application of God’s grace as expressed in Jesus Christ is going to be complex and not always simple in our kind of world.   Fear and numerous formidable barriers will tempt us to abandon the pioneer spirit and convert to settlers.  But this I do believe.  God’s grace will continually invite us out from behind settler’s walls to the exciting life of pioneers, following the greatest pioneer of all, Jesus Christ our Lord and Savior.