“You Can’t Win Them All”

Matthew 10:1-15

June 13, 2004

St. Paul United Methodist Church

Rev. John Andrew Fleming

The title of our sermon for this morning is You Can’t Win Them All and it sounds like something that Bobby Cox, the manager of my beloved Atlanta Braves might say in the locker room after another Braves loss. It is hard for me to believe that my favorite team, who has won their division every year since 1990, thirteen straight years, is having a hard time winning every other baseball game and is fighting for fourth place in the eastern division. I am not counting them out. Not yet. But still, it is hard for me to accept that they are not running away with their division’s lead like they do every year. But at least they are not as bad as the 1962 New York Mets. If you are a Mets fan, let me offer my apologies in more ways than one. In the baseball season that began in the spring of 1962, the Mets won forty games and lost one hundred and twenty. Their last game that year ended when one of their players grounded into a triple play.

Some said that such a thing was a perfect ending for a perfectly horrible season. Their manager was the great Casey Stengel. After the triple play, he gathered his players in the locker room and reportedly said this, “Fellers, don’t feel bad about this. It’s been a team effort all the way.”

So, the advice, You can’t Win Them All, sounds like good sports advice, whether it comes from someone like Casey Stengel or from your coach after the Little League game, the basketball game, or the soccer game. But I think that I should also point this out to you. The advice, You can’t Win Them All, is also what we might call biblical wisdom. It was Jesus’ advice to his disciples and these words make up our lesson from the tenth chapter of Matthew’s gospel. For ten chapters in this gospel, Jesus has been baptized by his cousin, John in the Jordan, tempted by the devil in the wilderness, called his disciples, cleansed lepers, calmed a storm, and healed one who was paralyzed. In the middle of all that, Jesus has taught. In this gospel, there are five long sections were Jesus instructs his disciples. The first one is his words that we have come to call the Sermon on the Mountain, a sermon that probably took him less than seven minutes to preach and covered everything from worry to adultery. The second of these five are words of instructions to the disciples as they prepare to go out on their first solo mission. It will be the first time for the twelve to be on their own without the presence of Jesus by their side. After Jesus says that the harvest is plentiful and the laborers are few and after he calls the names of the twelve as if to remind us who they are, He tells the disciples where they are to go, what they are to say, what they are to do, what they are to take with them, and what they are to do when they and their message is not received.

Church, there are several sermons in these words of Jesus. In our sermon for this morning, I could preach about the importance of discipleship, going out beyond these doors and bringing people in. In it, I could give you a more contemporary version of what you are to take with you, what you are to say, and how much you should get paid. I am wondering. After two years of being together, do I need to preach about the importance of making disciples for Jesus Christ? I probably do. But you also know how important I think that disciple making is! If this were our sermon, I would tell you how important it is to go to everyone with Jesus’ message. Matthew has Jesus telling his disciples not to go to the Gentiles or the Samaritans. Not at first, anyway. In Matthew, Jesus wants the lost sheep, the Israelites, to get the message first, and then to spread it to everyone else. But if I were preaching, I would tell you to skip that step and to go out into the world and save everyone immediately.

I do not think that that would be a bad sermon. But this morning, I would like to be more practical. I would like for us to think about what we should do when we find it difficult dealing with others. Listen to Jesus’ instructions again, “And whatever town or village you enter, find out who is worthy in it, and stay with him until you depart. As you enter the house, salute it. And if the house is worthy, let your peace come upon it; but if it is not worthy, let your peace return to you. And if any one will not receive you or listen to your words, shake the dust from your feet as you leave...”

That is an incredible teaching, friends. I do not know what it does for you, but for me it gives me permission to fail. Let me make a confession to you this morning. You may already know this about me, I am a recovering perfectionist. Some on the staff think that I should recover a little more. I once worked with a minister who told me that one of the best things that could happen to me was once, just once, on a Sunday morning to completely blow it. I never did. But he was right. It would have been a good lesson for me. Besides this tendency, I am also a peacemaker. That is my role in my family and it is my desire for every church that I pastor. I just want everyone to get along.

When I started out my life as a minister, down near Camden, I just imagined that with my experience in the church (I had been working in a church since I was sixteen) and with my education from Southern Methodist University and my first ordination, that success would be certain. I was sure that my first church would see all these things in me, understand what a great pastor they had, and follow along. My first appointment had two churches in it. The smaller one was Lakeside and the larger one was Harmony Grove. Things went really well at Harmony Grove. While I was there, the attendance went from an average of fifty-five to ninety-five. We built a new building and nearly paid it off before I left. The church was not perfect, but there was strong leadership in that church. The Lakeside Church was another story. It was a family church. On a good Sunday, fifteen people were in the pews. In four years, those numbers did not change. I might have received two new persons into the membership of the church, but no more than that. The church just sat there, not really moving. They did not have a Sunday School because of the preacher’s schedule, so I started a Bible study on Tuesday evenings. Some nights, there were only two of us at the study. I did everything that I thought that I was supposed to do, and after four years, I threw my name into the appointment barrel and came to Little Rock.

I did not pay attention to these words back then. It would have been helpful to me if I could have understood Jesus’ words sooner. It was only a year or two ago, that a friend of mine helped me see that these words are for those who try to be faithful disciples, who try to do their very best, but just cannot succeed. Jesus’ advice is this, “If no one will receive you or listen to your words, shake the dust off your feet and move on.”

You have noticed this, haven’t you, there is a great myth embedded deep inside all of us that says that if we will just work hard enough, success will happen. It might be appropriate to say that we worship success in our world. If these were biblical times, a prophet would rise up to tell us that success is an idol. And like all idols, it demands certain sacrifices, things like honesty, integrity, and a conscience. Things like relationships, marriages, and even families are sacrificed for success these days. Susie and I do not argue often, but when we do, our argument is about time. I want to be successful here. I want our church to be successful. Sometimes that means putting in long hours. A couple of weeks of that in a row means that Susie and I will talk about it. The other day we did and Susie said, “I just want to make sure that Annie Grace knows you.” It was a serious moment that needed a lighthearted turn. Annie Grace was in her room, so I called out to her. I asked her to come to where we are. She ran to the den. I asked her, “Annie Grace, do you know me?” She smiled and said, “You’re my Daddy.” Luckily Susie laughed. Susie is also right about this tendency of mine. Success is an idol and few people dare to criticize it. There are a few prophets out there who will even say that it is an idol that cannot deliver on it’s promises. And the myth, the belief is that anyone, in any given situation, if you simply work hard enough, you will find success in whatever you do. I went to a bookstore the other day and browsed through it. I came to the self help section of the store and I noticed that several of these books portray Jesus as someone who dispenses advice on how to make it big in this world. Which is quite a trick, it seems to me, because if I understand my Bible, what Jesus taught more than anything else was that we should give everything to the poor, take up a cross, and follow him. That is not the kind of thing that sells in bookstores. I do not think that Jesus promised success in this life. He promised that we would not be alone. He promised that we would be triumphant. He told his disciples that we should be in the world but not of the world. And what he meant by that was that those idols, like success, demand a lot from us. These idols also seduce us into thinking that happiness depends on something that does not last.

There is a great passage in John’s gospel. In the farewell discourse, just before Jesus is arrested and crucified, Jesus prays for his disciples. Which means that he is praying for us, too, This is his prayer, “I am not asking you to take them out of the world, but I ask you to protect them from the evil one.” What does he mean by that? I will admit that I am not a big fan of John’s gospel. It is hard to understand. But I think that I understand this. Jesus means that the world has become an idol, like success. The world promises to give us life, but it is not a real life. Jesus taught us not how to be successful, but how to be triumphant, especially with those things that want to take life from us.

One of those things is failure. Jesus advice is that if you have done your very best, and you have failed, if you have had the best of intentions and you keep trying and nothing becomes of it, do not keep hitting your head on the door, or beating yourselves up because of it. Instead, shake the dust off of your feet and move on. One of the hardest things in our lives is our relationships with other people. And yet sometimes we fail in our relationships. I believe that we are supposed to love one another and everyone. I believe that we are supposed to get along with one another, especially if we are Christians. I have preached this and tried to practice it in my own life. I have spent a lot of hours trying to bring people together, who are apart. Over the past few weeks, I’ve received a pamphlet about a workshop at least four times. The lettering at the top of the pamphlet simply reads, Dealing With Difficult People. I looked at it and then put it in Liz Wright’s box for her dealings with me. It came again and I put it on Kathy’s desk. The third time it came, I gave it to Stephanie, our newest employee. The reaction was always the same, a smile.

A preacher tells the story about a woman in his church who called him on the phone. She was in tears and asked if he could come over. He did that. She was a great member of his church, more sensitive than many. She confessed that she did not like her neighbors. She had a terrible guilt because of it. She felt as if she was not being a Christian. She had lived with this for some time. She said that she could not stand it any longer. She said that she had tried to like them. She said that when they moved in, she took them a loaf of bread and homemade jelly. The relationship was good at first, but then it got bad. Her neighbors played music well into the night and when she asked them to turn it down, they talked nasty to her. They rejected every attempt that she made to be friends with them. She felt as if she had failed. And she had. But she did not need to feel guilty because of it. She had done all that she was supposed to do, and then some. She followed Jesus’ teaching, to love her neighbor, to turn the other cheek, and now it was time for her to follow another teaching, “If anyone will not receive you or listen to your words, shake the dust off of your feet and move on.”

Serious Christians are supposed to be like that woman. If we are serious about being disciples, then we must try hard and be conscientious and love everyone. I am sure that this is why Jesus chose us. He knows that we are these kinds of persons. We are sensitive. We want to do the right things and we are willing even to make sacrifices to make sure that the right things are done. Jesus knows what kind of people the first disciples were and so he sent them out, for the first time just as he sends us out. He reminds us that we may fail, because what we are being asked to do is not easy. Jesus is telling us to be prepared to make mistakes, to say the wrong thing, even to fall back into patterns that we are not proud of, but to keep trying, no matter what.

Oh, back to Casey Stengel, the manager of the 1962 Mets. Most folks do not remember him for that season. Most folks remember him as the Yankees manager who won all those division titles and world championships. Fewer people know that he once lost 92 games when he managed the Boston Braves. In fact, Casey lost more than he won. And yet he is considered one of the best managers in the history of the game, instructing us that we cannot win them all, so we had better learn to lose some of them. Jesus gave us advice on how to do it. Shake off the dust from your feet and move on. It may be the best thing that we can do for ourselves. Let us pray.