The House of Peace (Luke 10:1-20)

The House of Peace

July 6, 2025

Luke 10:1-20

By: Pastor Mike Connor

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As a person who has traveled widely, if not exotically, in preparation for professional ministry and as a musician, I identify with these 72 disciples. I have received an abundance of hospitality throughout my life from people who have welcomed me into their homes and into their stories. Sometimes I just needed one meal or one night in a clean bed on my way from here to there. Sometimes I needed a week, a month, a season. If I tried to count all the couches, pull-out beds, floors, and that one lavish master bedroom in a Chicago high-rise overlooking lake Michigan that I’ve been offered over the years, I doubt I could recall them all. But I will tell you about one experience of hospitality that made a deep impression on me.

The summer of 2013, when I was 22, I moved from north-central Indiana where I had gone to college to a place called Walkertown, North Carolina, not far from the city of Winston-Salem. I would begin my studies at Duke Divinity School in the fall, but I went down for the summer to participate in something called a Pre-Enrollment Field Education placement. In order to graduate from Duke with an MDiv, I would need to do at least two summer internships at local churches around North Carolina. As an incoming student, I applied to do a special early placement. It wouldn’t count toward the “official” two, but it was a way to gain some experience and make a little money before the start of school. I was accepted and assigned to Morris Chapel United Methodist Church in Walkertown.

A church member named Don Whicker opened his home to me. Don was 83 years old, and what we call “a pillar” of the church. He had been a stalwart Sunday School teacher for over 40 years and an avid member of the choir before giving both up. His wife of 56 years, Betty, had recently passed away, so Don and I bonded over our shared loneliness. You see, he had three adult daughters and several grandchildren in the area, all of whom I got to know that summer, but at home he was alone. For my part, I had come down to North Carolina, to this land of heavy humidity and rolling tobacco fields, not knowing a soul.

Don had a screened porch where he liked to sit in the evenings, and I’d often join him there, sometimes idly fiddling with my guitar or banjo, which he appreciated. He took me out to eat several times at a southern chicken sandwich chain called Bojangles. When we drove around Walkertown, he could point to various places and share stories about his roots. Everything was “my people” this and “my people” that. I found that surprisingly compelling.

Down in his basement there was an extra shower; it was really just a shower head sticking out of the wall that ran water directly onto the concrete floor. No tub or curtain or four-walled bathroom. Just a shower head and a drain. Don told me how much he had loved taking his showers down in the dark, cool, quiet basement during the years when he was working full-time and parenting three teenage daughters. He couldn’t manage the steep wooden stairs anymore, but with a glint in his eye he insisted that I should make use of that basement shower as a refuge after each day. He was a man of simple pleasures and reminded me very much of my own grandfathers.

Don served in the Korean War. He was stationed right along the 38th parallel, the arbitrary border diving North and South. Many times an incoming shell from the North nearly took him. More than once, he told me a story about a time when he was back from the War and had started his family. He was down using his shower when a lightning strike hit the house and he was electrocuted. Though somehow unharmed, he was terrified, and he sprang up the stairs and crashed into the kitchen where he wife and daughters were doing homework wearing only his birthday suit. He always ended the story by saying how strange it would have been to come home safely from war only to be struck down in the shower. Like many veterans, life for him was both a profound gift and haunted by the possibilities of chaos.

            I lived in North Carolina for eight years from 2013 to 2021, but my on-ramp, my introduction, were those three months in Don Whicker’s house. He died in 2015 when I was halfway through seminary. One of his daughters got in touch and asked if I’d come speak at his funeral because of the impression I’d made on all of them. And I did. I wanted to honor this man who had given me so much at a time of profound transition and change in my life. And I wanted to honor the fact that I, just by being there, had also given something intangible to him.

            I’m telling you about Don because I think we need to let some air into this passage from Luke chapter 10. Its first 16 verses tell us about Jesus sending the 72 disciples out in pairs for missionary work, and they record the instructions Jesus had for them. And then by verse 17, just one verse later, they’re already back! But there needs to have been a significant amount of time between verses 16 and 17, don’t you think?

         These 36 pairs of men had to walk to the villages they were sent to, some obviously further away than others. Then they had to do some ministry with the people – building relationships, healing diseases, preaching the kingdom, and exorcising demons. Then they had to walk back to Jesus. This wasn’t over in a day. At minimum it took several days, though I think one or two weeks is even more likely.

            In his instructions, Jesus describes a temporary joining of the disciples to the people in these towns and villages. ‘Be with people, enter their homes, eat the food they set before you,’ he says. It’s risky, it’s scary, being at the mercy of others in that way: I am sending you out as lambs among wolves. But it’s not a dependence the disciples are allowed to shirk: Don’t take any money with you, nor a traveler’s bag, nor an extra pair of sandals. They really are walking in and by faith, which is to say walking in and by trust. They trust that they will be taken care of – by other people, let’s not over-spiritualize this – if not in this place, then in the next.

Doris read from the New Living Translation which puts verses 5 and 6 this way: “Whenever you enter someone’s home, first say, ‘May God’s peace be on this house.’ If those who live there are peaceful, the blessing will stand; if they are not, the blessing will return to you.” But a slightly more literal translation of the Greek text brings out a provocative phrase in verse 6: “Whenever you enter someone’s home, first say, ‘May God’s peace be on this house.’ And if there should be there a son of peace, your peace will rest upon it.”

A son of peace, Jesus says. That’s who you’re looking for. Not just people living calmly in their house, but a child of peace. Go into a house and see if like recognizes like, if you, the giver of peace who’s come to pronounce and enact the nearness of God, recognize the giver of peace who’s ready to open their home and pantry and heart. Those are the places where blessing will abide.

This is radical stuff, because remember, these disciples are being sent places where Jesus hasn’t been yet. There are children of peace, Jesus promises, servants of peace outside our group waiting for you, even if they don’t know it yet. Jesus speaks of a world brimming with kindred spirits, with peacemakers from different walks of life coming together around tables in homes. When his happens, peace gushes out to touch the sick and hurting of the whole place.

Jesus is teaching the 72 – and us – something about his own journey, his own way. The opening chapter of John’s Gospel says that Jesus “came into the very world he created, but the world didn’t recognize him. He came to his own people, and even they rejected him. But to all who believed him and accepted him, he gave the right to become children of God” (John 1:10-12). Jesus, too, was sent the world. As a human baby he entered a world in which the people in power would ignore, hunt, slander, and crucify him; he came into this world dependent on the Yes of the teenage girl Mary who would mother him, the Yes of the adoptive father Joseph who would protect him, the Yes of his Heavenly Father who would love and provide for him. In his letter to the Philippian church, Paul says that Jesus “emptied himself” (2:7) when he came to us and that this self-emptying should constitute our own “attitude” (2:5) toward one another. Self-emptying means giving up the masquerade of self-sufficiency, the safety of distance.

It seems like Jesus sent out the 72 disciples with nothing but the clothes on their backs so that they could be like him in experiencing the great sting of rejection and the greater joy of welcome. They needed to learn that salvation, healing, and liberation do not come by force; they are not imposed on others from the outside. They originate in welcome, in strangers who recognize each other as siblings in peace.

The unspoken joy in the scene of the 72’s return is the joy of having been welcomed. Jesus told them to immediately leave any place that did not welcome them but to stay put wherever they were welcomed. The joy they have on account of their ministry implies that there were indeed children of peace to receive them in all these strange places. And we all know that hospitality is a gift that blesses in both directions: The ones who come as strangers receive material comfort and the joy of sharing their gits. The ones who do the welcoming are sanctified by their sharing and experience the thrill of having their hearts and minds broadened by the arrival of a guest.

Let’s now turn this a few different ways for some application:

Sometimes, being a person of faith means setting off into the unknown trusting in hospitality. No matter how much we think we have to offer, no matter how much our journey and vocation have sprung from the words of Jesus himself, we also depend on the goodness of others in the places to which we go. When we allow the temptation of self-sufficiency to shape our journey, we don’t rub shoulders with the people who we are sent to bless, people waiting to bless us. We might literally go from here to there, but without any radical change in the heart.

So, ask yourself this: Throughout my life, who are the people who have welcomed me, and how did that welcome affect my journey or vocation? What did receiving hospitality teach me about God?

Let’s turn it another way:

Sometimes, being a person of faith means being a giver of hospitality. Which means we should be ready and willing to open up our homes and our resources to people who need them. Not just our time and not just our money. But also our space, our stuff.  This story from Luke suggests that the healing power of God is sometimes going to come to us from outside our sphere. We must assume, as Christians, that our experience of God is incomplete apart from the visitation and gifts of the stranger, who becomes a guest, who becomes a friend. That is how Jesus came to us in his incarnation; that is how he comes to us still.

So, ask yourself this: Throughout my life, who are the people I’ve welcomed into my sphere, and how did sharing with them in that way affect my journey? And how do I decide who to welcome or the extent to which I will welcome them? What does it mean for me to be a child of peace who is able to recognize a sibling in peace on my doorstep?

Let’s turn this one final time:

If God comes to us in the stranger, if welcome precedes ministry, if God judges us by our decision to welcome or reject – if these things are true, then we have a great responsibility to partner with God in creating a world of welcome. We are called to expect God’s presence in the faces of those who we don’t know but are called to care for. We are called to discipline ourselves in generous, costly sharing.

And if that’s the world God wants us to make, we should protest every act and word and policy that diminishes welcome, that slanders hospitality as something soft or naïve, or that criminalizes sanctuary.

The border wall that will now receive billions of dollars in new funding from our paychecks is a statement about welcome. The mass detention centers for migrants that have received billions of dollars in new funding from our wallets are a statement about welcome. The travel bans brandished against whole nationalities are a statement about welcome. Incentivizing neighbors to report one another for harboring an undocumented person or sheltering a woman who has had to end a pregnancy are statements about welcome.

Our policies and practices, from the heights of government to the depths of the heart, are a litmus test: Are we sons and daughters of peace? Are we creatures of welcome? How would a stranger be met on our doorstep?

And the great irony here is this: being welcomed is what we all so deeply long for. We crave being welcomed in our home and in our churches, by our communities and by our God. What we most deeply want is to live in God’s house, where God has set a table with plenty. Why would we, collectively and in our individual hearts, deny others what we ourselves so desperately desire.

I’ve told you about Don Whicker, my host in North Carolina, and I wonder who is coming to mind for you as you consider hospitality. Now, may the God whose arms are always open to us in a gesture of eternal welcome teach each of us how to welcome and be welcomed. And may we settle for nothing less than a world of welcome, where strangers are treated as angels in disguise, as the Book of Hebrews tells us, and children of peace join together in works of healing and freedom.

In the name of God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit. Amen.