Sermon at St. Thomas by Lynn E. Cunningham. July 8, 2007. Pentecost 6. Isaiah 66:10-16; Gal. 6:1-18; Luke 10:1-12, 16-20.

1.         I tend to experience the Holy One in one of three ways. First, sometimes I experience the light of Christ just radiating through a person. Second, when I am going through a serious emotional crisis, and I feel as if I am going to die, then something happens, the crisis lifts, and I experience the Holy One with me, pulling me through to a new life. Third, when I am alone in the mountains or in a hauntingly beautiful setting, sometimes I will feel I am right on the borderland with profoundly sacred reality beyond what my eyes and ears are telling me. I am not alone in experiencing the Holy in these three ways. Indeed, today’s lessons express all three.

2.         Melinda Bobo asked the congregation in her sermon last Sunday to reflect on Jesus setting his face towards Jerusalem and the crucifixion. Jesus’ path to Jerusalem to death and resurrection provides the undercurrent for today’s lessons.

3.         The lessons refer repeatedly to a kind of peace, sacred peace, shalom, found in various communities. I suggest today that that peace expressed by Isaiah, by Paul, by the Seventy emissaries sent out by Jesus, which grows out of death to illusions of the world and resurrection to life in God, always gives hope. That peace gives me hope that the challenges facing St. Thomas and Dubois today are the work of the Holy Spirit in all that we are about here.

4.         Jerusalem in the Bible is usually a place at the borderland with the holy. Today’s lesson from Isaiah, presents a different image than that of the city where Jesus goes up to be crucified. Isaiah presents a vision of a sacred, transformed Jerusalem where the Lord has extended prosperity like a river. Jerusalem is the nurturing and playful mother city to its inhabitants. A heavenly city. A city, I would say, grounded entirely in God’s sacred peace.

5.         Paul in the passage from Galatians has had his life turned around by his experience of the holy person of Jesus. Paul refers to the peace that comes to those who are part of the new creation in the risen Christ. Their lives have been transformed by God, by Christ’s death and resurrection.

6.         The Lucan passage turns Jesus aside momentarily from his path to Jerusalem. He appoints seventy persons to go out to the surrounding towns and preach and heal among the people, sending hope and healing to these little towns.

7.         But not every town. Towns welcoming the emissaries from Jesus, towns which have a certain kind of sacred peace about them, receive the healing. Towns which fail to welcome the Seventy, are in for big trouble. Jesus says, “It will be more tolerable for Sodom than for that town.”

8.         What do you think would a pair from the Seventy find, if they were to come into the Town of Dubois today? A warm welcome? A sense of hope, and peace and well-being? I suspect they would find peace and hope here, as many, many people have done.

9.         Certainly the classic story about how one family after another people came to settle in Dubois carries an echo of that peace. You recall, the stories are of families driving across country, headed perhaps out to the West Coast. Their car broke down here. They found someone in town to fix the car, and then they felt deeply welcomed. They fell in love with our mountains and settled here.

10.       In the gospel story, even in the towns where the emissaries were welcomed, much healing was needed, as the Lukan passage reports the emissaries telling Jesus. The sacred peace found there needed strengthening. Hope needed nurturing.

11.       There are unsettling realities about this town. Dubois in effect makes its living by being a great place to get away to, particularly for summer residents. But there is precious little economic base for the town. The town has no economic taproot, as it used to. There is no longer a lumber mill and industrial logging. The ranching economy is much reduced. Not much manufacturing goes on here, although Dubois is lucky to be spared the kind of coal and natural gas boom development that is overwhelming some of our sister towns, such as Pinedale and Gillette.

12.       As a result, local businesses flirt with bankruptcy and despair all winter long. Very little of the things that the town depends on is found here. Almost everything is imported at great price, leaving an unstable base.

13.       A look at the local real estate listings is revealing of the hard times: most of the major, local, retail buildings are up for sale, including the Outlaw Saloon, the Merc, Absaroka Western Designs, Daylight Donuts, the Country Store, and others.

14.       Probably over half of the Dubois commercial properties are offered for sale at any one time, mainly because of the harshness of the winter economy.

15.       Dubois is heavily dependent on importing energy in the form of electricity and natural gas, transportation in the form of gasoline and motor vehicles, construction materials, and food. For advanced health care, Dubois people travel to Lander, Riverton, Jackson, and Casper. Much of the entertainment is brought in as movies and television. I enjoy the Dubois sense of self-reliance, but some folks here find it unnerving to be so deeply dependent on the global economy.

16.       When is the last time someone in Dubois built their own home out of local logs and stone?

17.       The Dubois community is saturated with people and necessities brought in from far away.

18.       How can the Dubois community maintain its spiritual balance, its sense of hope, when it has no economic taproot of its own? When it is continually flooded with necessities imported from far away?

19.       How can the Dubois community maintain its spiritual balance, when local people’s jobs, housing, and health care are constantly in jeopardy?

20.       The Opp Shop and liquor store, two operations that I have been following with anxious oversight this past winter supply decent jobs for people. But these businesses have already had one good worker resign and move out of town because she and her husband could not find housing here that they could afford. Some workers in these businesses have serious disabilities. These businesses are no different from the others in town. Almost no local retail business can afford to offer employees health and disability insurance or even pay a living wage, which is about $15 per hour.

21.       Two of Jesus’ emissaries would have found plenty of things needing healing, in a visit to modern Dubois.

22.       These lessons invite St. Thomas to consider where lies our hope and sense of peace with which we would greet emissaries from Jesus? How can St. Thomas offer such emissaries sacred peace based on spiritual balance, from such an unsettled base?

23.       Dubois is no different from many, many other similar towns. I suspect that if a visitor to one of those towns of long ago in Jesus’ time would have been told that there were not enough good jobs, that the local youth were not as well behaved as they used to be, that too many foreign things were being brought in to spoil the local culture!

24.       The stress and anxiety which are often a sub-plot for many Dubois folks today, are going to be similar to whatever has been experienced in other towns and cities.

25.       To identify the source of the peace and hope that the emissaries were both bringing and looking for, go back to the reason Jesus was headed for Jerusalem in the first place, the death and resurrection.

26.       The basis of sacred peace, the peace that passes all human understanding, lies in conversion from some illusions of the world, and living into resurrection into the life in God. Resurrection is a transformative process. Resurrection does not provide the answers to the economic questions in the Dubois community, answers to how Dubois is going to find its way out of its lack of an economic taproot.

27.       Instead, the Christ’s death and resurrection model for each of person here the path to courage and hope to work through the stressful times. Living into this hope helps avoid that hatred and violence afflicting other people and communities around the world today, as seen on the television news.

28.       St. Thomas and Dubois can and will find a way through our challenges.

29.       The playful joy which Isaiah envisions in the new Jerusalem, is but another way of giving expression to what happens when a community like Dubois, has learned to give up on what cannot be, and passes through resurrection to new life and hope in God.

30.       In Jesus name, Amen.