Shalom in the City

I have been doing a lot of thinking about the message on Sunday. We had a visiting guest speaker, Mark Lau Branson (a professor from Fuller Theological Seminary in Pasadena, CA) give a message out of Luke 10:1-16. It is the passage where Jesus sends out the 70 (actually 72 is the better translation). Now I have had a 'head's up' on extended time in this passage because we spent an hour each morning as a class when I was at my cohort classes in January at Fuller in it. But it still challenges me and takes me to new levels of reflection!

Mark told an amazing story on Sunday... of an artist from his church who had been robbed at gun point and who used that as a 'door' into the brokenness of her community. She was fishing for the ones to who Jesus shalom could be made known. The same people who Jesus says that the Kingdom is inbreaking for through (in him) in Isa 61. And I have been reflecting on the powers of this world and how they subtly grab hold of us and take us captives to the thoughts and mindsets of this world, rather the the liberty and freedom that we can have through following Jesus.

Jesus sent these people out into a dangerous world and taught them how to incarnate naturally into local communities (ie. don't take a suitcase full of stuff which gives away the fact that you are a newcomer to that village). And he taught them how to offer shalom to those that took them in and how to avoid others. In short, Jesus was teaching them about the powers that were in operation of that day (ie, culture, the Roman Empire, Jewish selling out through Herod, etc). So I started thinking about the powers today that capture us/me and inhibit us from shalom and the offering of it to our city? Because, surely our presence here should announce that shalom (Acts 2:47).