Mark 6:6-13
In this short scripture, we find a discipleship precis, a pocket-sized
guide, a pointing of the way, for how to spread the Good News of spiritual
healing to the world. How to spread it by loving with detachment.
Loving with detachment. What does this really mean? It is a core
spiritual principle of many major faith traditions – from Buddhism to
Christianity. Loving with detachment does not mean freedom from desire; rather, it signifies freedom
of desire. Loving with detachment
means correcting our own anxious grasping in order to free ourselves for
committed relationship with God and with one another. In the words of the great
medieval mystic Meister Eckhart, loving with detachment “enkindles the heart,
awakens the spirit, stimulates our longings, and shows us where God is …” (Gerald
May, Addiction & Grace, Harper Collins 1998, 14-15)
Loving with detachment.
It stewards our desires rather than possesses us out of them. It delights us in
relational awareness versus numbs us through a headlong rush into compulsive
oblivion. Love involves detachment from our fears and its anxious offspring,
that we may be – to paraphrase our guest preacher last Sunday – freed from our
consumptive and presumptive ways in order to be free for the healing surprises of
God’s Spirit in God’s world.
Loving with detachment. Jesus spreads this commissioning table before
us today in plain yet poetic language today, for us all. And he does so with three simple instructions to follow him.
Jesus' Instruction #1: Travel Light! Steward your desire to live … don’t possess it and hence choke the life out of it. No bread, no bag, no money. One pair of everything and a walking stick. Hitchhike your way through life. Be beholden to nothing and – in due course – to no one.
Now that’s detachment. And all for the loving purpose of healing God’s world. First century faith: Meet twentieth century frenzy. We obviously have a lot to learn! And we can begin to take a few simple steps with our lives today. Travel light!
Jesus' Instruction #2: Stay Present! Jesus’ spare instructions lie before us: “Whenever you enter a house,
stay there until you leave the place.” What a head-scratcher! For how can you not stay there until you leave?
Well, witness all the absentee landowners and land holders in our world today. Witness every government that would use its will to practice nation-building of another government. Witness every self-entitled soul who would attach themselves to the less-entitled of the world by talking about them when they are not present, telling them how to love or who to love or how to consecrate and celebrate their commitment to love. Are these misguided sisters and brothers really present? Are they not staying while leaving at the same time?
“Whenever you enter a house, stay there until you leave the place.” The house where these disciples – where each of us – is not only welcomed, but makes our welcome known in return. Not that we might dominate a relationship, oppress or impress ourselves or our agendas upon someone else: entering their house and then taking leave with our presence, all the while making certain our influence continues to hover – to fester – to linger …
Jesus' Instruction #3: Don’t Take Anything Personally! “If any place will not welcome you and they refuse to hear you,” Jesus says, “as you leave, shake off the dust that is on your feet as a testimony against them.” Don’t let their inhospitality cling to you … in any way.
Ten years ago this week, I strapped myself in with 36 other co-defendants in a federal courtroom in Columbus, GA for one of the most Spirit-filled rides of my life. It was the beginning of a week-long show trial for a massive nonviolent demonstration related to Central American refugee justice – an experience civil disobedience at Ft. Benning the previous November. [More on this witness at http://www.soaw.org/about-us/pocs/157-2001-soa-43/323.]
Within a few hours of seeing how the federal magistrate
presiding was going to handle matters for the week to come – with the great
vigor only open hostility could muster – I took as my mantra three words of our
risen Lord. Words that the late Walter Wink once called “the acid test” of our
faith: “Love your enemy.”
By the end of the week – in order to preserve any shred of sanity I had remaining within me while facing this judge for sentencing – I had added Jesus’ discipleship coda shared with us today: “If any place will not welcome you and they refuse to hear you … as you leave, shake off the dust that is on your feet as a testimony against them.”
In his wildly popular book The Four Agreements: A Practical Guide to Personal Wisdom, Don Miguel Ruiz highlights “Don’t Take Anything Personally” as Agreement #2. He puts the matter rather baldly – and I believe true to the manner of Jesus:
Nothing
other people do is because of you. It is because of themselves. All people
live in their own dream, in their own mind; they are in a completely different
world from the one we live in. When we take something personally, we make
the assumption that they know what is in our world, and we try to impose our
world on their world.
Even when a
situation seems so personal, even if others insult you directly, it has nothing
to do with you. What they say, what they do, and the opinions they give
are according to the agreements they have in their own minds.
Don’t take anything personally. “If any place will not welcome you and they refuse to hear you … as you leave, shake off the dust that is on your feet as a testimony against them.” A friend of mine puts it this way: “Your perception of me is a reflection of you. My reaction to you is an awareness of me.”
And so, let us practice awareness – that we might respond, rather than react. To love means -- somewhere along the way -- to detach. To delight in God and others through uncluttered awareness -- rather than numb ourselves midst the swamps of obsession.
Through the Spirit-power of God's grace: To set ourselves free from in order to be free for.
