Checking Our Baggage - July 8, 2007

Luke 10: 1-11, 16-20

Last August a friend of mine was preparing for a transatlantic flight with her husband and two of her children when the day before her planed departure for Heathrow, some people were caught trying to carry out a terrorist plot to blow up British commercial airliners using carried-on liquids. Suddenly, nothing could be carried on a plane except necessary travel documents, wallets, diapers, and baby bottles—if the parents demonstrated that they were in fact filled with formula by tasting the contents of the bottle in the presence of airport security personnel.  The big refillable water bottles we were used to bringing from home? Forbidden.  A little snack to tide us over between flights?  Not any more.

Eventually the rules were relaxed slightly to the now almost familiar 3-1-1 rule:  3 ounce containers of liquids or gels, that fit inside a 1 quart plastic bag, 1 bag per passenger.  Last December I saved the day for one lucky San Francisco passenger when he tried to carry through a lip balm—offered to put it in a separate x-ray bin, offered to let the TSA employee open it up and look at it, but was told that unless it was in a 1-quart plastic re-sealable bag, he would have to dump it in the trash bin.  I happened to have an extra TSA approved 1-quart zip-top bag in my carry on, and I handed it to the frustrated passenger.  (I could not let good lip balm go to waste, you see.)

Travel is just not what it used to be.  The old days of throwing something in a bag, and heading off to the airport—those days are gone.  Packing for air travel is an exercise in strategy.  For awhile after the terrorist scare last summer it was… kind of nice.  People were just checking baggage through to their destination, there seemed to be less pushing and scrambling for the overhead bins.  Planes boarded and de-boarded faster, since everybody was not having to take care of three pieces of luggage on the plane.

I’m leaving for a very short trip early Tuesday morning.  I’m going to Atlanta to see some friends who will be gathered there.  Some of us are on vacation, some are there for study time, and some of us just hastily rearranged our schedules so we could do this.  It’s a long way to go for a relatively short time, and I don’t want to be weighed down with stuff, so I’ve had to think very strategically about what to take.  I used to try to plan for every contingency when packing for a trip.  When people would see everything I would lug along behind me, I would joke that for women, it doesn’t matter if we’re going to be gone for a day or two months, some things we just have to take with us in either case.   But things have changed.  The way we travel is different now.

So I’ve been thinking strategically about what I want to take with me on Tuesday.  I’m feeling the need to travel light, to be relatively unencumbered as I get to spend such a short time with people I love and care about.

It seems, at first glance to be a peculiar list of instructions Jesus gives the 70.  He sends them out on a mission to prepare a way for his journey into the town and villages he will visit on his way to Jerusalem.  They are to travel light—really light—no baggage, no extras, no food.  They are to rely on the hospitality of strangers the whole time.  Can you imagine setting out for such an important journey with no baggage, carrying nothing, just trusting that somebody will feed you and make a place for you to stay?  And the rest of the instructions—not greeting anyone along the way, staying in one place, not moving around, getting out of town if the missionaries are not accepted by the villagers, literally shaking the dust off of the feet so as to take nothing of the town with them.  What a peculiar way to spread the good news of Jesus’ coming arrival!

It got me to thinking…what kinds of baggage would I be willing to do without in order to spread the gospel?  What things are weighing me down, what things could I completely jettison out of my life to be more portable, more flexible, more able to move at a moment’s notice?

There is a way I have of traveling lightly already.  Sometimes I travel light when it comes to relationships.  Maybe some of you do, too.  The hard work of connecting, of really relying on somebody else to be there for us, to be a soft place for us to fall, to be a beacon when things are the darkest—and being that for the other person— well, sometimes that hard work hardly seems worth it when I feel as though the other person might just be traveling through my life or when I suspect that I am doing the same in that person’s life, too.   So sometimes it just seems easier to have friendly acquaintances than deep relationships.  Besides, I’ve been burned in friendship—haven’t we all?  That moment when we realize that the other person meant much more to us that the other way around?  It stings, badly enough to convince us to keep our distance next time we are tempted to get close.  Some distractions, some excess baggage, sure would come in handy when we are trying to stay disconnected, trying to keep our relationships distanced and casual.

What then, are we to make of Jesus’ instructions to the 70 missionaries to travel without worldly burdens and to stay put in one place?

This Tuesday when I travel to Atlanta, I’m going to meet up with some friends of mine that I have known for about two years.  The relationships we have formed are deep and wide, and yet some of them do not even know what I look like.  They have heard my stories of my faith journey, they know of the main characters in my life drama, and they are ones I tell about my struggles and milestones in ministry, but I have never met a few of them face to face. 

We know each other through an online network of women clergy and lay persons who support the ordination of women into full-time ministry.  But they are more than script on a screen for me.  They are real people, real friends.  We are Methodist, United Church of Christ, Episcopal, and Presbyterian.  Together we have weathered changes in call, betrayal by friends and family, transitions in our respective denominations, and quite literally, hurricanes.  Last year when I faced the most gut-wrenching and tragic time in my ministry so far, they prayed hard and long for this congregation and for me.  One of them opened up her home to me as a retreat space so I could grieve Jean’s death in the beauty of New England Autumn.

Since I have known this network of friends, I have become convinced that Jesus sent the 70 out unburdened with earthly baggage so they might engage fully with those whom they were to serve.  This life—this Christian life—is not meant to be spent in solitary study, with our heads bent low, trying to follow the rules but in joyfully engaged relationship.  The call to look outside ourselves, to peel away the surface cares of this life and depend fully and deeply on the other is the risky call to love as we have been loved.

And so Jesus leads us outward, asking of us that we declare peace to one another, that we stay in one place long enough develop deep bonds of trust and reliance on each other, and that we love as we have been loved—freely, fully, and without excess baggage, depending not only on each other, but on the source of all love.

Thanks be to God!