Glynn Cardy on St Luke’s Day 15th October 2023 Luke 10:1-9
The precursor to the strengths-based movement in organizational and business theory was a method called Appreciative Inquiry. Developed by David Cooperrider, and later joined by Diana Whitney, it argued that organizations are created, maintained, and changed by conversations, and claimed that methods of organizing were only limited by people’s imaginations and the agreements among them. In the 1990s Cooperrider and Whitney used Appreciative Inquiry to help create the United Religions Initiative, a global organization dedicated to promoting grassroots interfaith cooperation for peace, justice, and healing.
So from early days it was recognized that here was a tool not only helpful for businesses but also for organizations like churches that wanted to change the world for the better. Appreciative Inquiry first appeared on the church scene in Aotearoa NZ in the 2000s.
Here are some of the key understandings:
- Language matters. Through day-to-day language people co-construct the organizations they inhabit. So how we talk about God, each other, the critical issues for our planet matters.
- Questions are never neutral. Organizations move in the direction of the questions they most persistently and passionately ask. So what are the questions of St Luke’s, for St Luke’s, shaping St Luke’s?
- Organizational life is expressed in the stories people tell each other every day, and the story of the organization is constantly being co-authored. So, what are the stories that shape us?
- Stories, the best stories, create an expectation of the future. They serve as a compass.
- Focus on what’s good and positive, and build from there. When we see the good, and strengthen the good, the good changes our reality. When the organization knows and celebrates its strengths, the parts that aren’t so strong find their rightful, proportional place.
Recently I heard an evangelical theologian describe how this last Appreciative Inquiry principle changed him. When he focused on the good – the love of God – all the strong messages about sin he’d grown up with fell away. Sin and failure were reframed within the overwhelming abundance and paramountcy of love. It wasn’t that failure didn’t exist, but it was like barnacles and fouling on the bottom of a boat. Whereas love was what powered the boat, gave it purpose, and guided it.
I’m of the opinion that we can discern in the New Testament texts, the early Jesus movement beset with much opposition, hardship, and failure, crafting and co-authoring stories to empower them and guide them. These stories pointed to their best, their good, their hopes. And as they told these stories they embodied these stories. Our text today from Luke 10:1-9 gives us a glimpse of such a story.
The tale of sending out disciples in pairs on some sort of missionary venture originates from the earliest days of the post-Easter Jesus movement. The numbers – Luke’s 70 (an obvious reference to Moses’ appointed elders in Exodus) and Mark’s 12 (an obvious reference to the tribes of Israel in the Torah) – are later embellishments. But the ‘pairs’ – with the likelihood of a male and female travelling together – has probably some historical veracity. For a male and female pair mitigated the threat of two men entering a small hamlet, or the vulnerability of two women doing the same. And note, the male and female probably weren’t married to each other, due to the responsibilities to children that marriage often brings.
For the early Jesus movement, what they called the Empire of God (deliberately mocking the Empire of Caesar) was not exclusively bound to the person of Jesus. Rather it began with the metaphor, the story, of being connected as a body, and then appearing, manifesting, as a sharing community of healing and eating. They shared spiritual and physical resources between and to each and all without distinction, discriminations, or hierarchies. It was for them a way of life.
This is what it means fundamentally to be a Christian. It means to be part of one body. Not a body alone, but a part of a communal body. In that body we share food, all belong, and none go hungry. This is what the Eucharist, Holy Communion, means. It is an outward and visible sign that we are one body in Christ. In the sharing of food we know who we are and we affirm who we are.
And equally, and not separate from eating and sharing is the healing. Healing is a word always in danger of either being ‘medicalized’ or ‘miracle-ized,’ rather than something that Christians just fundamentally do. To care is to heal. To listen is to heal. To inquire and affirm one another when seeking the wellbeing of the whole body is to heal. To make art, to cook food, to give employment, to sing, to cry and share grief, to help another catch fish or weave a kete… all these are a part of the healing arts.
Healing is the fundamental description of what this body of Christ does. It heals. It repairs. It stays with the traumatized and strengthens them. It believes in people. It believes in children. It believes in those who have lost faith in themselves. Such belief, in itself, heals.
‘This is our story, this is our song.’ This is the story we participate in and co-author. It guides, encourages us, and transforms us.
And this sharing, eating, healing socio-political-therapeutic body doesn’t do violence. It doesn’t do bullying. It doesn’t do belittling. It doesn’t justify the destruction of others or environments. Faced with a choice between violence and vulnerability, it will choose vulnerability. Faced with a choice between responsibilities to the 99 who are safe and the 1 who is not, it will choose to side with the one. Faced with a choice between success and failure, it will choose faithfulness and go wherever that leads.
James K. Baxter’s Jerusalem Daybook and some of his poetry was influential in my teenage years. Now in my somewhat older years, and now more aware of Baxter’s failings, I still find wisdom in some of his writings. Like in our first reading today. When compared with the Lukan text this spells out what the practice of healing might look like. The verbs include feeding, giving, looking after, going, forgiving, putting up with, praying…
Remember that definition of praying I offered last week: ‘the regular exercise of opening our heart to take in life’s little pains and joys, noticing our weaknesses and our wisdom, giving thanks for all… and in so doing increase our capacity for love.’
In the text today from Luke, and also in Mark and the Didache, there are lists – some more lenient than others[i] – of what one should take on a missionary venture and what one shouldn’t. So it seems that originally a knapsack (in our text called purse and bag) and a staff were forbidden. A knapsack and staff were the equivalent of a hiker’s kit – the means to survive by yourself and away from others.
At this point it is helpful to recall Diogenes and his movement (Cynicism). He lived some 400 years before Jesus. In Greece. Kyon means dog, cynicism ‘dogism’. And it wasn’t a complimentary name, rather deliberately ‘de-dog-atory.’
For Diogenes purposefully flouted basic human codes of propriety and decency, custom and convention. To quote Farrand Sayre’s description of this movement:
“The Cynics sought happiness through freedom. The Cynic conception of freedom… included freedom from desires, from fear, anger… from religious or moral control… from the authority of the city or state… from regard for public opinion… freedom from the care of property… from confinement to any locality… from the care and support of wives and children.”
Their dress and equipment code were knapsack, staff, and cloak. Usually dishevelled and dirty.
The famous tale of the exchange between Alexander the Great and Diogenes – where the former asks him to name anything he wants, and the latter responds asking Alexander to move out of way of the sunlight that was warming him – was to underline the question of power. Is the more powerful the one who wants everything or the one who wants nothing? If kingship is freedom which of the two is really free, is really king?
The Cynicism movement had a first flowering in the time of Alexander, but also another in the time of Augustus (just before Jesus was born). It was largely an urban movement. It advocated a self-sufficiency modelled on that of nature rather than culture. In other words it was a counter-cultural movement, known in Jesus’s day and to his followers, though Jesus’s movement was largely rural.
The difference with the Jesus movement was that its missionaries were not to be self-sufficient with their own knapsack and staff, but to be communally dependent. They were itinerant and dependent: heal, stay, then move on.
A Cynic missionary was modelling a radical independence and nonchalance. They were free of all duty, all desire, and all commitment, save to their movement’s lifestyle. To the contrary a Jesus movement missionary was modelling a freedom that chose to be in relationship, that chose to be interdependent, that chose to care and be committed. It was a radical mutuality, a mutual relation, which was also the essence of their understanding of God.
Today is St Luke’s Day, a time we focus on our community here, to remember the stories that have shaped us, and affirm and celebrate our strengths. So we remember the times of eating together, sharing together, and together trying to bring healing to others and our world about. We celebrate the diversity of our community, and our willingness to side with those others exclude. We celebrate the projects and causes we have joined in order to bring more justice, love, and healing into our world. And we give thanks for the blessings of people, and resources, and the community ethos of kindness and belonging that we inherit, shape, and pass on.
[i] The more lenient being of a later dating.
A Mutuality Interdependent Community of Sharing, Eating, and Healing
Luke 10:1-9
The precursor to the strengths-based movement in organizational and business theory was a method called Appreciative Inquiry. Developed by David Cooperrider, and later joined by Diana Whitney, it argued that organizations are created, maintained, and changed by conversations, and claimed that methods of organizing were only limited by people’s imaginations and the agreements among them. In the 1990s Cooperrider and Whitney used Appreciative Inquiry to help create the United Religions Initiative, a global organization dedicated to promoting grassroots interfaith cooperation for peace, justice, and healing.
So from early days it was recognized that here was a tool not only helpful for businesses but also for organizations like churches that wanted to change the world for the better. Appreciative Inquiry first appeared on the church scene in Aotearoa NZ in the 2000s.
Here are some of the key understandings:
- Language matters. Through day-to-day language people co-construct the organizations they inhabit. So how we talk about God, each other, the critical issues for our planet matters.
- Questions are never neutral. Organizations move in the direction of the questions they most persistently and passionately ask. So what are the questions of St Luke’s, for St Luke’s, shaping St Luke’s?
- Organizational life is expressed in the stories people tell each other every day, and the story of the organization is constantly being co-authored. So, what are the stories that shape us?
- Stories, the best stories, create an expectation of the future. They serve as a compass.
- Focus on what’s good and positive, and build from there. When we see the good, and strengthen the good, the good changes our reality. When the organization knows and celebrates its strengths, the parts that aren’t so strong find their rightful, proportional place.
Recently I heard an evangelical theologian describe how this last Appreciative Inquiry principle changed him. When he focused on the good – the love of God – all the strong messages about sin he’d grown up with fell away. Sin and failure were reframed within the overwhelming abundance and paramountcy of love. It wasn’t that failure didn’t exist, but it was like barnacles and fouling on the bottom of a boat. Whereas love was what powered the boat, gave it purpose, and guided it.
I’m of the opinion that we can discern in the New Testament texts, the early Jesus movement beset with much opposition, hardship, and failure, crafting and co-authoring stories to empower them and guide them. These stories pointed to their best, their good, their hopes. And as they told these stories they embodied these stories. Our text today from Luke 10:1-9 gives us a glimpse of such a story.
The tale of sending out disciples in pairs on some sort of missionary venture originates from the earliest days of the post-Easter Jesus movement. The numbers – Luke’s 70 (an obvious reference to Moses’ appointed elders in Exodus) and Mark’s 12 (an obvious reference to the tribes of Israel in the Torah) – are later embellishments. But the ‘pairs’ – with the likelihood of a male and female travelling together – has probably some historical veracity. For a male and female pair mitigated the threat of two men entering a small hamlet, or the vulnerability of two women doing the same. And note, the male and female probably weren’t married to each other, due to the responsibilities to children that marriage often brings.
For the early Jesus movement, what they called the Empire of God (deliberately mocking the Empire of Caesar) was not exclusively bound to the person of Jesus. Rather it began with the metaphor, the story, of being connected as a body, and then appearing, manifesting, as a sharing community of healing and eating. They shared spiritual and physical resources between and to each and all without distinction, discriminations, or hierarchies. It was for them a way of life.
This is what it means fundamentally to be a Christian. It means to be part of one body. Not a body alone, but a part of a communal body. In that body we share food, all belong, and none go hungry. This is what the Eucharist, Holy Communion, means. It is an outward and visible sign that we are one body in Christ. In the sharing of food we know who we are and we affirm who we are.
And equally, and not separate from eating and sharing is the healing. Healing is a word always in danger of either being ‘medicalized’ or ‘miracle-ized,’ rather than something that Christians just fundamentally do. To care is to heal. To listen is to heal. To inquire and affirm one another when seeking the wellbeing of the whole body is to heal. To make art, to cook food, to give employment, to sing, to cry and share grief, to help another catch fish or weave a kete… all these are a part of the healing arts.
Healing is the fundamental description of what this body of Christ does. It heals. It repairs. It stays with the traumatized and strengthens them. It believes in people. It believes in children. It believes in those who have lost faith in themselves. Such belief, in itself, heals.
‘This is our story, this is our song.’ This is the story we participate in and co-author. It guides, encourages us, and transforms us.
And this sharing, eating, healing socio-political-therapeutic body doesn’t do violence. It doesn’t do bullying. It doesn’t do belittling. It doesn’t justify the destruction of others or environments. Faced with a choice between violence and vulnerability, it will choose vulnerability. Faced with a choice between responsibilities to the 99 who are safe and the 1 who is not, it will choose to side with the one. Faced with a choice between success and failure, it will choose faithfulness and go wherever that leads.
James K. Baxter’s Jerusalem Daybook and some of his poetry was influential in my teenage years. Now in my somewhat older years, and now more aware of Baxter’s failings, I still find wisdom in some of his writings. Like in our first reading today. When compared with the Lukan text this spells out what the practice of healing might look like. The verbs include feeding, giving, looking after, going, forgiving, putting up with, praying…
Remember that definition of praying I offered last week: ‘the regular exercise of opening our heart to take in life’s little pains and joys, noticing our weaknesses and our wisdom, giving thanks for all… and in so doing increase our capacity for love.’
In the text today from Luke, and also in Mark and the Didache, there are lists – some more lenient than others[i] – of what one should take on a missionary venture and what one shouldn’t. So it seems that originally a knapsack (in our text called purse and bag) and a staff were forbidden. A knapsack and staff were the equivalent of a hiker’s kit – the means to survive by yourself and away from others.
At this point it is helpful to recall Diogenes and his movement (Cynicism). He lived some 400 years before Jesus. In Greece. Kyon means dog, cynicism ‘dogism’. And it wasn’t a complimentary name, rather deliberately ‘de-dog-atory.’
For Diogenes purposefully flouted basic human codes of propriety and decency, custom and convention. To quote Farrand Sayre’s description of this movement:
“The Cynics sought happiness through freedom. The Cynic conception of freedom… included freedom from desires, from fear, anger… from religious or moral control… from the authority of the city or state… from regard for public opinion… freedom from the care of property… from confinement to any locality… from the care and support of wives and children.”
Their dress and equipment code were knapsack, staff, and cloak. Usually dishevelled and dirty.
The famous tale of the exchange between Alexander the Great and Diogenes – where the former asks him to name anything he wants, and the latter responds asking Alexander to move out of way of the sunlight that was warming him – was to underline the question of power. Is the more powerful the one who wants everything or the one who wants nothing? If kingship is freedom which of the two is really free, is really king?
The Cynicism movement had a first flowering in the time of Alexander, but also another in the time of Augustus (just before Jesus was born). It was largely an urban movement. It advocated a self-sufficiency modelled on that of nature rather than culture. In other words it was a counter-cultural movement, known in Jesus’s day and to his followers, though Jesus’s movement was largely rural.
The difference with the Jesus movement was that its missionaries were not to be self-sufficient with their own knapsack and staff, but to be communally dependent. They were itinerant and dependent: heal, stay, then move on.
A Cynic missionary was modelling a radical independence and nonchalance. They were free of all duty, all desire, and all commitment, save to their movement’s lifestyle. To the contrary a Jesus movement missionary was modelling a freedom that chose to be in relationship, that chose to be interdependent, that chose to care and be committed. It was a radical mutuality, a mutual relation, which was also the essence of their understanding of God.
Today is St Luke’s Day, a time we focus on our community here, to remember the stories that have shaped us, and affirm and celebrate our strengths. So we remember the times of eating together, sharing together, and together trying to bring healing to others and our world about. We celebrate the diversity of our community, and our willingness to side with those others exclude. We celebrate the projects and causes we have joined in order to bring more justice, love, and healing into our world. And we give thanks for the blessings of people, and resources, and the community ethos of kindness and belonging that we inherit, shape, and pass on.
[i] The more lenient being of a later dating.
