Fourth Sunday after Pentecost
By the Rev. Elyse Nelson Winger
University Chaplain, Tufts University
(The following is a transcript of the service audio, July 6, 2025)
For months, they've thronged the shores and synagogues. Once, deserted places and mountain fields. They find him in packed houses and at bustling city gates. They press in and reach out, desperate to touch this healer to get within earshot of this teacher. With the scroll of Isaiah, he proclaims, "The spirit of the Lord is upon me to bring good news to the poor, to proclaim release to the captives, to set free those who are oppressed." his sermon on the plain, he declares, "Blessed are you who are poor. Yours is the kingdom of God. Of your enemies, do good, forgive, and you will be forgiven."
"The widows and sons, daughters and disciples," he says, "Do not cry. Rise up, go in peace. The least among you is the greatest." Day by day, Jesus is showing and telling us where there is compassion and healing, where there is justice and reconciliation - the kingdom of God is near. Not in the future, not only in heaven, but now. Now Jesus is sending 72 people from these Galilean crowds to labor and love with Him. Fishermen, tenant farmers, day laborers, and local artisans, men and women, are being given the power to cure the sick and proclaim God's kingdom. They, the poor, the dispossessed, are blessed. Luke's Jesus astounds me with his unbending commitment to the agency and dignity of people living under the thumb of an empire bent on breaking them. Where every time Jesus proclaims God's kingdom, he is confronting another one that He and those crowds know all too well.
The kingdom of Rome, that kingdom spelled endless debt and poverty, where only a very few lived above subsistence. That kingdom designed systems of patronage and piety that were all about exalting their rulers, minting coins featuring their faces, and proclamations like, "Tiberius Caesar, son of the divine Augustus." That kingdom reveled in opulent displays of military prowess and a sadistic penchant for violence. The kingdom that Jesus preached was and is non-violent, subversive resistance to that and all kingdoms of domination and control. It's the one that's always coming near, and we, too, in our own fraught and dangerous time, are called to receive and proclaim it. Still, Luke's Jesus compels me.
How can he send these 36 pairs out as peasant lambs amidst imperial wolves? Why the extreme instructions in this moment of peril? To live into these questions, I looked to my colleagues. Last Tuesday, I sat with several of them from the Tufts University Chaplaincy and Goddard Chapel, and together, using an interfaith practice called scriptural reasoning. We read aloud this Gospel text and shared the phrases and ideas that were resonating with us. And while I love a pericope study with my Lutheran clergy colleagues, it is a special gift of the Spirit. See your own scriptures through others' wise and storied eyes, and for them to give permission to share their insights. With and through them, perhaps for the first time. I saw how complicated and strange this text is, but three things in particular rose up for me. Three practices are necessary for discipleship: trust, solidarity, and right use of power.
Benita talked about his time as a forest monk in Sri Lanka when each early morning he'd take nothing but his begging bowl, and venture into town, eyes lowered, greeting no one because you are not to show favoritism. He'd go house to house, not even knocking, just waiting. Some would meet him at their threshold and offer food. Others wouldn't, yet he never went hungry. He trusted that what was needed would be provided. And so I wonder, does Jesus tell these disciples to take nothing, greet no one, so that there would be among them an abiding mutual trust? And some may have had good walking sandals, others a day's wages in their purses, still others small tools or a cloak in their bags, but there could be no distinction on the road. They had to be equally in need of others’ hospitality.
They would have to rely on and protect one another and know that their works of healing and teaching about the Kingdom of God are shared acts of liberation. Wynn immediately saw that communal solidarity. Two by two they'd venture out, and there will be times, Jesus knows, when they bring peace to a house and that peace is embraced. And here they will learn to receive the generosity of strangers and be in community with them through eating and drinking whatever is offered, sleeping wherever is needed to be in solidarity amidst their new neighbors’ struggles and joys. And when there is rejection, which there will be, solidarity with Jesus and the other disciples will sustain them. "Whoever rejects you, rejects me," Jesus says. We are in this liberation work together, and you are not alone.
You will shake the dust from your bare calloused feet and keep keeping on, and the power to cure the sick will be with you, except where? But when they return from their travels, Luke reports, the 72 are ecstatic, not about the numbers of sick children they healed and restored to their families, not about the numbers of strangers who have become beloved friends, but about the fact that in their Lord's name, the demons submitted to them. Power like that, my colleague Khan shared, can feel really good, but it must be rejected because it's a slippery slope to power as domination instead of as liberation. "Do not rejoice of the spirit submit to you," Jesus warns. Joy in holding power over others is empire ethics. Kingdom of Rome practice rejoicing in power for others, healing and liberation. That's the kingdom.
Now in our day, demons no longer personify human illness. None of us has been given the power to be on the spot, miracle healers. Most of us are not called to literally hit the road with nothing to protect or sustain us. But the strange details of discipleship in the Gospel story do not negate the call to trust that the subversive kingdom of God is still coming near in every and any act of compassion, hospitality, of justice and healing we experience. Every one of us is called to stand in word and deed solidarity in with the ones to whom Jesus proclaimed the kingdom belongs. The poor, the oppressed, the captives, and every one of us is called to use whatever power we might have for the well-being and flourishing of our neighbors here.
Good news is that people from every religion, identity, and background across our campuses and communities are answering such calls. I think of the Harvard College students who, for years, have provided day and night leadership and friendship at the Harvard Square homeless shelter housed in my home congregation, University Lutheran. I have seen their compassion in action and their commitment to the dignity of the guests who stay there, connecting them with case managers and healthcare providers, accompanying them as they move toward permanent housing. That's the kingdom of God coming near. I think of beloved Tufts graduate student, Rümeysa Öztürk, who, in March, was walking to a Ramadan Iftar meal at our interfaith center and was abducted off of Somerville Street and then unjustly detained in Louisiana.
She was finally released in May and arrived at Logan Airport for a press conference, she used her power at that microphone to implore us all, "To not forget these wonderful women in the immigration detention system." She stood in solidarity with those with whom she had been held captive and implored us to widen our circle of compassion as the kingdom of God comes near. I think of Reverend William J. Barber, a leader of the poor people's campaign who brings nothing but praying hands to the Capitol Rotunda gets routinely arrested and yet trusts that the kingdom of God belongs to the poor and that our life and our liberty is bound up with theirs. Two springs ago, Reverend Barber spoke at Tufts and told each of us there that we needed a moral Pentecost.
He said, "We talk about it as liberation. My grandmama said, 'When the Lord comes and you get what's called the can't help it and you have to stand up against injustice.'" He said that we had to leave our silos and stand in solidarity and power across our many identities. "Never there's been fundamental change," Reverend Barber explained. Somehow you've got Harriet Tubman and William Lloyd Garrison in the same room. Whenever there's fundamental change, you've got Rabbi Heschel, and Dr. King and Viola Liuzzo, a woman from Michigan, and Fannie Lou Hamer in the same room.
Somehow that has to happen and in his words on that day, I felt the kingdom of God come near because in every age it takes the tenant, farmers and landowners, the day laborers and the tax collectors, the healers and teachers, priests and prophets to trust one another to stand in solidarity so fundamental change can happen. And we are in an age that is beckoning us to say no to the ways of our empire that divide and course in us and that is summoning us to say yes together to dignity and healing, not for some, but for all. Good news is that in every age, this kingdom doesn't just depend on us. It is always a gift. In Martin Luther's small catechism about the second petition of the Lord's prayer, he writes, "In fact, God's kingdom comes on its own without our prayer, but we ask in this prayer that it may also come to us."
Luther did believe that the kingdom had to do with heaven and eternal life, but he also believed, as I do, that Jesus is always bringing the kingdom to us in word, in sacrament, in community, in love, and witness of our neighbors. And that the kingdom actually doesn't depend on our actions or ability. Its kingdom comes on its own without our prayer, but we can ask to be a part of it. God gives us each the grace and the courage and the creativity to see this kingdom, to trust in one another, to stand in solidarity together, and have confidence that we will use our collective power of love and care for good. Amen.