4 Pentecost

July 6, 2025

Luke 10.1-11, 16-20

+ This past week, as you may have heard, Jimmy Swaggart died.

 

Swaggart, for those of you who don’t know, was one of those notorious televangelists from the 1980s who spewed some pretty terrible things, and then had a very public fall from grace.

 

If you ever doubted my “the chickens always come home to roost” analogy, look no further than Jimmy Swaggart.

 

Personally, however, my father was a huge fan of Swaggart.

 

Swaggart spoke for men (and probably some women too) of my father’s generation.

 

He was macho.

 

He was tough.

 

He could sing a kind of countrified Gospel music.

 

He could be funny.

 

And, before his scandal toppled him, he was knew how to use his winning personality to rake in a LOT of money.

 

This is nothing new in the church, after all.

 

Church history is filled with people like Swaggart—bigger than life personalities who made it all about them.

 

I have known too many church leaders who have  made it clear to me that it was because of them—because their winning personality, or their knowledge of church growth, or their years of expertise—that a particular parish or diocese flourished.

 

 

It’s an unfortunate trap leaders in the Church fall into when they believe that a congregation’s success depends on them as individuals and their own abilities of ministry—and, mind you, I am not just talking about priests here. Lay leaders in the Church have fallen into this trap as well. I have known some of those lay leaders as well, trust me.  

Maybe to some extent it’s true.

 

Maybe some people do have the personality and the winning combination in themselves to do it.  

 

But for those who may have that kind of natural personality, I still have to admit: it all  makes me wary.

 

It’s just too slippery of a slope.

 

We are dealing with similar personalities in today’s Gospel.

 

In our Gospel reading for today, those seventy that Jesus chose and sent out come back amazed by the gift of blessing God had granted to them and their personalities.

 

They exclaim, “Lord, in your name even the demons submit to us!”

 

In and of its self, that’s certainly not a bad thing to say.

 

It’s a simple expression of amazement.   

 

But Jesus—in that way that Jesus does—puts them very quickly in their place.  

 

He tells them, “do not rejoice in these gifts, but rejoice rather that your names are written in heaven.”

 

Or to be more blunt, he is saying rejoice not in yourselves and the things you can do with God’s help, but rejoice rather in God.

 

The burden of bringing about the Kingdom of God shouldn’t be solely the individual responsibly of any one of us.  

 

Even Jesus made that clear for himself.

 

Just imagine that stress in having to bring that about.  

 

Bringing the Kingdom of God into our midst is the responsibility of all of us together.  

 

It is the responsibility of those who have the personality to bring people on board and it is the responsibility of those of us who do not have that winning personality.

For those of us who do not have that kind of personality, it is our responsibility to bring the Kingdom about in our own ways.

 

We do so simply by living out our Christian commitment.

 

As baptized followers of Jesus, we bring the Kingdom into our midst simply:

 

By Love.

 

We do it by loving God and loving each other as God loves us in whatever ways we can in our lives.

 Bringing the Kingdom of God about in our midst involves more than just preaching from a pulpit or attending church on Sunday.

 

Spreading the Kingdom of God is more than just preaching on street corners or knocking on the doors. 

 

It means living it out in our actions as well.

 

It means living out our faith in our every day life.

 

It means loving God and each other as completely and fully as we can.

 

But it does not mean loving ourselves to the exclusion of everything else.

 

It means using whatever gifts we have received from God to bring the Kingdom a bit closer.  

 

These gifts—of our personality, of our vision of the world around us, of our convictions and beliefs on certain issues—are what we can use.

 

It means not letting our personalities—no matter how magnetic and appealing they might be—to get in the way of following Jesus.

 

Our eyes need to be on God.

 

We can’t be doing that when we’re busy preening in the mirror, praising ourselves for all God does to us and through us.   

 

The Church does not exist for own our personal use.  

 

I, for example, am not your free therapist.

 

And the Church is not you group therapy.

 

If we think the Church is there so we can get some nice little pat on the back for all  the good we’re doing, or as an easy way to get us into heaven when we diem I hate to tell you but we’re in the wrong place.

 

And we’re doing good for the wrong intention.

 

The Church is ideally the conduit through which the Kingdom of God comes into our midst.

 

And it will come into our midst, with or without me as individual.

 

But it will come into our midst through us.

 

All of us.

 

Together.  

 

The Church is our way of coming alongside Jesus in his ministry to the world.

 

In a very real sense, the Church is our way to be the hands, the feet, the voice, the compassion, the love of God to this world and to each other.

 

But it’s all of us.

 

Not just me.

 

Not just you as an individual.

 

It’s all of us.

 

Together.

 

Working together.

 

Loving together.

 

Serving together.

 

And giving God the ultimate credit again and again.

 

Hopefully, in doing that, we do receive some consolation ourselves.  

 

Hopefully in doing that, we in turn receive the compassion and love of God in our own lives as well.

 

But if we are here purely for our own well-being and not for the well-being of others, than it is does become only about us and not about God.  

 

And in those moments, we are sounding very much like those 70 who come back to Jesus exclaiming, “look at what we have done!”

The message of today’s Gospel is that it must always be about God.

 

It must always be about helping that Kingdom of God break through into this selfish world of huge egos. It means realizing that when we are not doing it for God, we have lost track of what we’re doing. We have lost sight of who we are following.

 

So, let us—together—be the hands, the feet, the voice, the compassion and the love of God in the world around us. Like those 70, let us be amazed at what we can do in Jesus’ name.

 

But more importantly let us rejoice!

 

Rejoice!

 

Rejoice this morning!

 

Rejoice in the fact that your name, that my name—that our names are written at this moment in heaven.

 

Amen.