Mark 6:6b-13: Then he went about among the villages teaching. He called the twelve and began to send them out two by two and gave them authority over the unclean spirits. He ordered them to take nothing for their journey except a staff: no bread, no bag, no money in their belts, but to wear sandals and not to put on two tunics. He said to them, “Wherever you enter a house, stay there until you leave the place. 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.” So they went out and proclaimed that all should repent. They cast out many demons and anointed with oil many who were sick and cured them.
For the past two seasons, I have been an assistant coach for Greeneview’s middle school track team, and while that was the plan again this year, in February, I found myself unexpectedly promoted to the high school team as a co-head coach. In a lot of ways, this was very exciting. I love track, and I have become extremely fond of all of the kids who I have had the opportunity to work with. The chance to get to coach my former middle schoolers again—on a more competitive level—felt like a best-case scenario that was almost too good to be true. I couldn’t have gotten a better head coaching deal if I had tried.
But at the same time, I was a little nervous. There aren’t a lot of female coaches coaching male athletes at Greeneview, and there is a pretty big difference between a middle school-aged boy and a high school-aged boy. I was afraid that the ones who I had not previously coached wouldn’t respect me—that they would write me off as some dumb woman—and that the ones who I had previously coached would just go along with them. And a team that doesn’t respect their coach is not a successful team. So, I decided to go into this track season with a different attitude than I have in the past. I decided that I was going to be tough and hard and strong, and that in doing so, that I would avoid any possible problems with the boys, and that we would have a good season. It’s hard to walk all over a coach who is wearing armor, even if she is six inches shorter and seventy pounds lighter than most of the athletes, right?
Well, unfortunately, this turned out to be wrong. Horribly wrong. Kids do respond well to boundaries and to discipline, and there is certainly a time and a place to call kids to account and to hold them to higher standards, but that time and place is not all the time. I was dressed in chain mail and equipped with a sword—ready to slay a dragon—while these children were just standing in front of me in their gym shorts being teenagers. It’s ridiculous now that I think about it.
I wasn’t building relationships with the kids who I didn’t already have relationships with. I wasn’t having positive interactions with hardly any of them. I was coming home from practice every day frustrated. And a bunch of them were acting afraid to come and to talk to me about stuff. In many ways, my coaching was more ineffective than it would have been had a few boys not been crazy about having a female coach. I came into the situation with fire and smoke when all that was actually needed was a little bit of gentleness and vulnerability. Kids are just people like you and me—people who want to be loved and cared for and seen—even sixteen-year-old boys. And thankfully, since realizing this and changing my posture, things have gotten better.
The lesson at the heart of this little example—the importance of walking into life gently—is what I think that Jesus was getting at in today’s text. Ordinarily, I am not a fan of spiritualizing the words of Jesus when we aren’t sure what to do with a teaching, or we maybe just don’t like a teaching, but here, to spiritualize Jesus’s words only makes sense. Jesus lived in a time and in a culture where hospitality was a big deal. It was a big deal to those who found themselves in need of it, and it was a big deal to those who offered it. There was perhaps no bigger social faux paus than to see a traveler in need of a meal and of a place to stay and to not open your home to them. Depending on the circumstances, hospitality could be a matter or life or death.
But hospitality wasn’t just a one-sided deal for the benefit of the receiver. It went both ways. It helped the giver, too. Being a good host was a way to both earn social capital and to become more involved in the community. Hospitality provided the giver with a sense of purpose, and with a sense of belonging.
So, when Jesus told His disciples to go out into the villages and to proclaim the Good News, but not to bring food or money or a change of clothes, Jesus was not demanding from His disciples an extreme act of faith. He wasn’t trying to teach them about simplicity. He wasn’t trying to get them to categorize different needs, and to rank them in terms of spiritual importance, nor was He instituting some sort of rule where it was okay for people who were doing ministry work to become completely dependent upon the people who they were ministering to. In fact, it really wasn’t about the disciples at all.
Instead, the command was about the people in the villages with whom the disciples would be interacting. As much as the Gospel is Good News, it is also a challenging message. There are bits of the Gospel that are hard to understand or hard to put into practice, or straight-up just asking for a lot. The people in the villages were going to be having their lives changed and their limits stretched, and the disciples were going to be the catalysts. They were going to be the authority figures. And while it is always important to treat people well, authority figures have to be doubly conscious of how they are interacting with others. They have to treat people well if they want to do their job.
For the disciples, then, for them to show up in someone’s house with extra food and extra clothes and to not really need their host’s hospitality would be a slap in the face. It would be an act of dehumanization. It would strip the host of their dignity and disallow the host the opportunity to serve and to love their neighbors. In turn, this would pollute the disciples’ message. It would impact how the people in the villages responded to them, and ultimately, to how they responded to Jesus. One simple act of coming in “prepared” could derail the entire thing.
It was important for the disciples to come in humble and vulnerable for the same reason that it was important for me to change what I was doing with my team. And it was important for the disciples and for me for the same reason that it is important for all of us. Our call is to love God and to love our neighbors. It is our call to do this publicly—out loud. And nine times out of ten, power and control and self-sufficiency and posturing and anxiety don’t lead to that happening. There is a reason why strength is not a Fruit of the Spirit, but gentleness is. Gentleness is part of who we were created to be, and gentleness is what the world around us and all of the people in it—ourselves included—need.
Gentleness opens up possibilities that control and strength shut down. It makes room for the Holy Spirit. It allows for flexibility. It gives God the space to be God, and it gives us the space to be us. It offers up the opportunity to listen, to be still, and to change one’s mind. Gentleness teaches us how to love. It strikes us in the most tender parts of our hearts. Gentleness makes the way for grace and for love to flow more abundantly. It permits generosity.
Gentleness reminds us of who we are and of whose we are. It lifts us up out of the muck that is trying to keep us down. It whispers to the lies that we believe that tell us that we are not beloved children of God that nothing could be further from the truth. Gentleness brings us back into the loving arms of our loving God. Gentleness holds us tight and safe while Jesus goes about the hard work of loving us back to life. Gentleness paves the path to dignity for us all.
Gentleness creates peace. This is true not because gentleness is a cop out, or because gentleness might encourage people to keep the peace rather than making it, but because gentleness fosters belonging. Gentleness provides a seat at the table for everyone. It reminds people that they matter. Gentleness makes room, and when there is room, people stop fighting. There is no need for violence if everyone is getting what they need. Gentleness makes chaos and striving and survival mechanisms and defense measures null and void.
Gentleness brings us closer to one another. While now is not the time to go off on a tangent about how God created us to need each other, it’s true. We were built for community. We were built for social interaction. We were built for harmony and for love and for care and for living and working together. Gentleness melts off the armor and allows it to happen. Gentleness forms the bonds. Gentleness wakes us up and enables us to bear God’s image into the world.
Similarly, gentleness brings us closer to God. God is gentle. That is maybe not how you have been taught to think about God, but the Fruits of the Spirit are descriptors of God. That’s why they are called fruits. As we are transformed, we act more like God. So, gentleness helps us to get to know our gentle God. It brings our guard down. It allows us to draw close in trust, and without fear. Gentleness opens us up to God’s goodness. It permits us to know and to be known.
Gentleness reconciles and resets. Just like how Jesus chose the path of death and refused to sin in the face of sin and changed the world in doing so, gentleness changes the world. It’s contagious. It encourages more gentleness. It encourages more love. It softens hearts. It binds up what is broken. It spurs us on toward forgiveness. It gives this whole wide world permission to be gentle. Gentleness tells a world that sets us up for pain and failure and violence that there is another option. Gentleness gives us a different way forward.
Gentleness is God’s desire for the world. It’s one of many desires, yes, but a desire all the same. It is God’s hope for all of us that we will put our weapons down. It is God’s hope for all of us that we will allow ourselves to really get to know one another. It is God’s hope for all of us that we will allow ourselves to really get to know Him. It is God’s hope for all of us to love Him and to love one another and to permit God and others to love us. It is God’s hope for all of us that we not become cynical. It is God’s hope for all of us that we never become desensitized to wonder. It is God’s hope for all of us that the pure and squishy parts of us stay intact. Wholeness, peace, restoration—it’s all what God wants for every single one of us.
And it begins with vulnerability. It begins with faith. It begins with deep, deep trust in God, and the courage to allow Him to transform us. It begins with imitating Jesus in our day-to-day lives. It begins with living our lives wholeheartedly. It begins with our good and loving God using gentleness to create more gentleness in the world. It begins with that soft, radical motion of grace and love.
Friends, I am not going to tell you to go out and to travel with no food or money. I am not going to tell you that you only need what you are wearing today. But the truth is that we all need all of the gentleness that Jesus has to give us. We all need to do as Paul suggested in his letter to the Colossians and clothe ourselves with gentleness. If we want a more loving world—and I’m pretty sure we do—then we need more gentleness. So, I am going to ask you the question: What does gentleness currently look like in your life?
How do you embody it? How might you need God to pull it up out of your heart and to replace the chain mail that you currently have on? How do you need God to show you how to be gentle? How do you need to practice gentleness? How have you experienced gentleness—from God, or from others?
Strength and toughness and efficiency and power and all of those other things that I talked about earlier are idols. They are idols and nothing more. Jesus lived a life of gentle vulnerability. Jesus commanded His disciples to live such lives. The Holy Spirit molds us and shapes us and turns us into people who wear gentleness directly onto our skin.
May we continue to be transformed. Holy Spirit, come, Jesus, equip, and God, deliver. Make us into gentle people. Make our lives the sorts of lives that are marked with the love of Jesus. May God’s gentle love be first in our lives, and first out before us.
Amen.
Ada Chapel Friends Meeting 