Over the past couple of years, I’ve tried to interest one or two people around the parish in the idea of becoming a deacon. I’m thinking ahead here, since down the road, the parish will really need this. But so far I haven’t been very successful, and maybe one reason is that not long into the conversation, it comes out that the preparation process to be a deacon adds up to about five years. It sounds especially long since unlike when I was in the program 25 years ago, those five years now involve much more actual work than they ever had us do.
Five years part-time to be a deacon, and I’ve heard that it can be six full-time years to be a priest, although I completely leave the recruitment for that department to Fr. Tim. I don’t know if he’s doing any better than I am. All these years create the idea that what we call ministry involves an enormous amount of study, things you need to know, or know how to do, in order to get sent out as an official person. And look, I don’t want to get started denigrating any of that system that’s been put into place to make sure that people who go out to preach the gospel know what they’re talking about and what the church teaches. But it’s really hard not to notice a contrast with the scene in today’s gospel.
We’re in chapter six this morning in the gospel of Mark, and looking back, the first disciples were recruited on board at the very beginning of chapter two. That’s not very long before today. Mark is a very short and fast-moving gospel, between those two points when they were chosen and now when they’re sent it might not even have been a year, and it clearly wasn’t five or six. And yet here Jesus thinks that these nobodies are ready to go off completely without supervision and start the process of telling people what Jesus is doing, and perhaps bringing actual healing to people in desperate need of it.
What does this mean? I think one thing it means is that being a disciple, being a church, depends on a succession of miracles, but not the miracles that the disciples perform on other people, the real miracles are the ones God performs on the people who do his work. These first disciples were people with no education or standing, and Jesus wants to make sure they understand that even with all their imperfections, they have what they need to start this work. No special clothing, no equipment, no luggage — it’s as if he wants to tell them that they are the equipment, just who they are, with all their gifts and flaws. What they needed is what they already had, the love they had already received from God, what they needed is the example of Christ, probably not understood perfectly, but already operating in them powerfully, that is what they needed to start. They were ready, even though I am very confident that when they headed off without Jesus they didn’t feel like it.
Listen to the way Jesus describes what they are going to encounter. What he wanted them to understand is that even for direct disciples of Jesus Christ himself, there’s a lot of failure in this discipleship business he was sending them into. This isn’t easy work and he knew it. If you head off into a strange town to start the work of Christ, apparently you will tell people things they don’t want to hear right now. You’ll try to work a miracle and it won’t happen. But in response to the disappointment they will encounter, Jesus suggests an amazing patience. You won’t be able to force people, Jesus says. Just be with the people you want to reach, live with them as one of them, help them if you can, some of them will respond and some of them won’t. If they don’t, remember it’s not all about you. Just move on and keep going.
These very practical directions from Jesus today, along with that confidence he showed sending out these disciples, are a lesson for all of us. The miracle here is that God calls people to something they may not be entirely ready for. And yet, ready or not, the work begins. Ordinary people sit with the sick and reach out to the depressed, over and over. Ordinary people offer to pray with other people because sometimes that’s all you can do, or need to do. Ordinary people preach a God of forgiveness by extending forgiveness everywhere. Ordinary people go places and speak up for the powerless, for people without rights, for the poor that Jesus sent his first disciples to be with. And ordinary people do this not because of any special skills or powers they have, but because they, and that means we, we allow God to take away that barrier we all have that says, I’m not ready, I won’t do it right, it won’t work. God wants to take that barrier away, and send us out two by two, feeling like even if we fail, we are on the path headed somewhere God needs us.
So if you have ever thought you might want to be a deacon, and you haven’t already told me no, see me out in the gathering area after mass. But if there’s something in you that wants to start being a disciple, you don’t need to see me at all. Just walk straight out the door, and ask God for whatever it is you need to get started.