Agency
Pentecost 5, Proper 8
July 2, 2023
Fr. Tim Nunez
May my spoken word be true to God’s written word and bring us all closer to the living word, Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.
Jesus said, “Whoever welcomes you welcomes me. And whoever welcomes me welcomes the one who sent me.” This imparts the agency relationship Jesus has with his Father and which he extends to his disciples. Agency means you operate directly in line with your agency interests.
The most famous secret agent ever is, of course, James Bond. You may know that the author of the James Bond novels, Ian Fleming, was a real British Naval Intelligence officer and spy in World War II. Few will have heard of Bill Stephenson, one of the key spies who inspired Fleming.
Bill Stephenson was quite a guy, a Canadian soldier, then a pilot in World War I. He actually shot down the Red Baron’s brother. After that war, he founded the British Broadcasting Corporation or BBC. He patented the process of transmitting pictures electronically, technology that would make television possible. He made a lot of money from that and used it to develop other industries including manufacturing, broadcast media and film studios. He was very successful and wealthy, kind of an Elon Musk of his era.
Now imagine Elon Musk putting everything else second to serve his country. (At the time Canada was a colony of the United Kingdom.) But just a day or two before the Germans started the war by invading Poland, Stephenson stole an Enigma coding machine from the Germans in Warsaw. That’s a daring Bond sort of moment. That enabled the British to decipher intercepted German messages, a huge advantage when so much was against them.
After Europe fell very quickly to the Germans, Great Britain was in great peril. They were precariously preserved by the English Channel, but under constant bombardment from the German Air Force or Luftwaffe. They needed their greatest ally, the United States, to help – and not just with food, supplies and so on. They needed a safe place to organize their contingency plans and fight that ideological battle within the rest of the Western world. These were the darkest of days for Great Britain and our common way of life. Yet, they could not publicly make this case to Congress or President Roosevelt.
The United States was quite isolationist. We were in the Great Depression and had no interest in Europe’s wars. The President, all of the House of Representatives and much of the Senate faced reelection in the fall of 1940. Any hint of war could lose that election for any of them. Most Americans didn’t want any part of the war until the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor on December 7th, 1941.
So, Winston Churchill sent Bill Stephenson, with Roosevelt’s permission, to build an extensive intelligence network in North America, with headquarters in New York. That way, if England fell, they could coordinate resistance and help the United States. He also helped Roosevelt set up the OSS, which would later become the CIA. But everything had to be done in total secrecy.
Stephenson was a secret agent. When he sat in President Roosevelt’s living room discussing the future of England and the free world, he did not do so on his own authority. He alone represented his entire government. He could not assert or promise anything beyond the enormous authority they had placed in him. How faithful Stephenson had to be.
That’s what agency is. Whether in law, real estate or any other context, an agent bears the personal information and responsibility of another. They cannot go outside their mandate as an agent.
It is just this sort of agency relationship that Jesus has with the Father. God from God, light from light, true God from true God. He says repeatedly that everything he says and does comes directly from the Father. A key part of his ministry is calling, teaching and training his disciples to faithfully bear that agency forward on his behalf.
“Whoever welcomes you welcomes me, and whoever welcomes me welcomes the one who sent me.”
It works – and it continues to work to this day all around the world. The Gospel is spreading faster and more effectively today than at any time in history. But for agency to work, the agents must be true. They must be faithful to the mission, diligent in knowing it and diligent in accomplishing it.
Which brings us back to us. We are all called to that same mission – to be agents of Christ’s truth and love.
Be prepared. I don’t mean primarily studying and so on, although that is important. The main thing is: Be close to him. You don’t need to know everything – you need to know him. Be diligent in prayer. Be diligent in worship. Be faithful. Do your job.
You know how Jesus was always after the Pharisees about having the form of religion but not the heart? Don’t just go through the motions, right? Get your heart right with God. This is the flip side of that. The more our hearts connect with Jesus, he changes our perspective which changes our behavior. We let go of some things and take up others.
There are two cautions about that in our other two readings.
First, as we hear from Paul in his letter to the Romans, own your salvation. When you accepted Jesus Christ as your Lord and Savior, you were delivered from the power of sin and death. Why, then, do we struggle with sin? Why, seeing the gift of eternal life we have in Jesus, do we wander back to the greed, the lust, the pride, the gluttony and all the rest? Satan is certainly tempting us all the time, and we are wired for self-preservation. But as Paul urges us, don’t go there. Be free from it or else you’ll be a slave to it.
Second, don’t settle for a lie, either in the telling or in the receiving of it, no matter how sweet the lie may sound. As I shared with you last week, Jeremiah is warning God’s people that they are about to be conquered by Babylon and lose everything because of their unfaithfulness. Another prophet, Hananiah, is telling them not to worry, that in just two years Babylon will fall and they will have peace.
Jeremiah affirms that when such a prophecy of peace comes true, people will know the Lord sent that prophet. But it wasn’t Hananiah. That’s why the book is called Jeremiah.
Don’t tell people what they want to hear, tell them the truth. Among the freedoms we celebrate today is freedom of speech. God says tell the truth. It’s very tempting to say, “There, there, everything will be all right.” Well, no, it won’t be all right.
The reason we have a sure and certain hope that we will be all right, that the evil and the suffering of this world doesn’t get the last say, is Jesus. The reason we have salvation is because of Jesus. He will be with you. So you be with him and that will make it all right. Always. Forever. That’s freedom.
AMEN