Sent From The Mountain
Sermon
Water Won't Quench the Fire
Cycle B Sermons for Sundays after Pentecost (First Third)
Object:
There is nothing like taking part in a worship service with 17,000 people. If you are surrounded by a choir that large, all of the hymns sound in tune. With that many people gathered to pray in the same place at the same time, you have no doubt God will hear somebody in the crowd. And when a super-charged speaker stands up to challenge people to follow the commandments of Christ, the group dynamics of such a huge crowd ensure that someone, somewhere, is ready to answer the challenge.
That was the case in December 1979, at a mission conference in Urbana, Illinois. Mobs of college students descended upon the campus of the University of Illinois during Christmas break. They came in chartered buses and Volkswagen vans. Every morning was filled with Bible study, prayer, and singing. Each night featured inspirational speeches about what God was doing in our world. And every afternoon, there were opportunities to meet church workers from many different countries. The whole Urbana experience challenged Christian college students to go out into the world and make disciples of all nations.
On the final night of the convention, a famous evangelist stood to speak. He had been informed that he was preaching to the converted, a fact that he took with a grain of salt. Maybe that's why he couldn't help but invite us to stand to prove we were Christians. After that, he invited all who were standing to consider serving as missionaries. "Will you follow Jesus Christ anywhere?" he asked. "Yes!" came the roar of the crowd.
"Will you do anything he wants you to do?" A second time, the crowd roared, "Yes!"
"Will you go anywhere he asks?" Again the crowd roared, "Yes!"
"If that's true," he said, "then I want you all to obey the Great Commission of Jesus Christ. Go into all nations and seek out the unbelievers. Go and tell them that they're going to perish without Jesus. The time is short. Go into the world and serve God as missionaries."
As I remember back, that five-day convention was a mountaintop experience in my life. It happened at a time when I felt the first stirring of a call to ministry. The pastor of my church had sensed my interest, and encouraged me to go to the convention. I returned home exhausted from the trip and enlivened by the emotional experience. I tried to explain to my very patient parents that I was thinking about becoming a missionary. I was going to go out and conquer the world for Christ. By a week later, however, my enthusiasm had faded. The convention was a memory. There was no huge choir to support my feeble voice, no emotional props to boost my morale, and no baritone preacher telling me what I should do with my life. As I look back on that moment of lost enthusiasm, I now realize how deeply I misunderstood the Great Commission.
The church has often turned to these final words in the Gospel of Matthew to bolster the missionary effort. Jesus sends his followers "to the nations." That's a striking change, since he has spent most of his time tending only to the lost sheep of Israel (Matthew 15:24). But the Great Commission was given on Easter day. The risen Christ gathered his disciples together with the authority of his resurrection, and then he sent them into the world.
Ever since, the church has assumed that we have something the world doesn't have. We have a Word to speak, a message to proclaim, a story to tell to the nations. In the late 1700s, a man named Samson Occum was ordained as a Presbyterian minister. He was Native American, and he was sent as a missionary to the Oneida Indians. On the day of his ordination and commissioning, the preacher based his sermon on the Great Commission.1 The point was clear: "White people like us have given an Indian like you something you did not have, and we want you to give it away to as many Indian people as you can."
In the late 1700s, that may or may not have been a good idea. History tells many sad stories of European Christians who spoke to people who were neither European nor Christian. They tried to make these people Christians, but inevitably tainted them as Europeans. Frequently it was conversion by coercion. Let's confess, some people were better off before the Christian missionaries got to them. Progress and firepower have not been universally positive influences among innocent civilizations.
These days, it is even more difficult for thoughtful Christians to play the old missionary game of "we've got it and you need it." For one thing, we can no longer assume that people of other cultures haven't heard the gospel. There are untouched areas of the globe, to be sure. But in most cases, the good news has been published, broadcast, and spoken in hundreds of tongues. For another thing, we cannot affirm that we have whatever we think others do not have. People of all nations may have heard the gospel of Jesus Christ and ignored it. The question is: have those of us in this nation done much better? Do we really bear the very News that we so proudly want to give to the nations? That is the challenge of our commission.
Some years ago, novelist Walker Percy spoke to a group of graduating seniors at a Catholic college. He saluted their dedication to study. In glowing terms, he affirmed their call to spread the gospel to people around the world. Yet he couldn't help but note the difficulty of the task. At one point, Percy looked them in the eye and said,
Here, surely, is the most difficult challenge of all: to proclaim the Good News in a world whose values seem increasingly indifferent to the very meaning of the Good News. It is a strange world indeed, a world which is, on the one hand, more eroticized than ancient Rome, and yet a world in which the Good News is proclaimed more loudly and frequently than ever before by TV evangelists and the new fundamentalists. There occurs a kind of devaluation of language, a cheapening of the very vocabulary of salvation, as a consequence of which the ever-fresh, ever-joyful meaning of the Gospel comes across as the dreariest TV commercial. How to proclaim the Good News in a society which never needed it more but in which language itself has been subverted. Salvation comes by hearing, according to Scripture, but what is the hearer of the Good News to do when the hearing becomes as overloaded as the circuits on an $89 TV set?2
We live in an age where the gospel has been proclaimed on bumper stickers in every industrialized nation. The strange irony is that it hasn't seemed to do much good. Perhaps the reason has little to do with the good news, and everything to do with the messengers. "Go and make disciples," Jesus said. But we cannot do that unless we ourselves are committed disciples. "Go and teach people all that I have commanded you," says the Teacher of the Sermon on the Mount. We cannot do that if our only study of the Bible is a little bit of verse-surfing before breakfast to keep us healthy, wealthy, and wise. Any church that takes the Great Commission seriously must move into deeper waters, and not merely throw a wider net into the shallows.
It is striking that Matthew seems to know this. He begins this triumphant story of Easter with a pathetic note. "The eleven disciples went to Galilee." That's an incomplete church, as you know. Once there were twelve disciples. No thanks to Judas, the church shrank from twelve to eleven. "And when they saw Jesus, they worshiped him; but some doubted." Even on Easter, with the risen Lord in plain view, the incomplete church has an incomplete faith. This is the kind of church that Jesus sends out from the mountaintop. It's a church that can no longer play, "We've got it and you need it." The only thing we can say is, "All of us need it." All of us need a Word that sets us free and sends us forth. Blessed are those who are poor enough in spirit to receive and obey a crucified Savior.
There is a powerful scene in the movie The Mission. Mendoza, a man of the sword, has killed his brother in a fit of anger. No one is surprised. Mendoza is well-known throughout colonial South America as a brutal slave trader who captures the natives and sells them to the Spaniards. But he is overcome by unexpected remorse at the death. He goes into seclusion. A Jesuit priest visits him and suggests a penance to purge his torment. The penance is to join the priest and other Jesuit missionaries as they return to the jungle to work among the natives. Mendoza agrees. They set out on their journey. Mendoza binds up his armor in a huge net. He ties this huge burden to his back and drags it along as a reminder of his violent life. It slows down the travelers, but they continue on.
At one point, the missionaries climb to the top of a great waterfall. Their friends among the natives have been anxiously waiting for their return. The two groups hug one another and shout for joy. Then a native spots Mendoza struggling behind with his bundle of armor. Recognizing him, he grabs a knife, runs to the weary slave trader, and poises to slit his throat in revenge. Mendoza prepares himself for certain death. What he doesn't count on is that the natives have begun to learn a new way from the Jesuits, whereby no one repays evil for evil, enemies are loved, and persecutors are prayed for. The native flashes the knife, then cuts away Mendoza's bundle of armor. His burden of violence falls away and dashes to the bottom of the waterfall. Now free for the first time in years, Mendoza cries like a baby fresh from the womb of God. Soon the priest says, "Welcome home, brother." Then his instruction begins.
Jesus commissions his church both to be disciples and to make disciples. Disciples are people who have the capacity to cut others free from their burdens, who act out of mercy rather than retaliation, who welcome fellow travelers home from their journeys. Simple converts will not do. "Discipleship," someone notes, "means the engagement of the whole life in following Jesus on the way of the kingdom."3 Jesus trained his disciples not only to believe the right doctrine, but also to live and die in the right way. He commended Peter for believing that he is "the Messiah, the Son of the living God" (Matthew 16:16). Yet he also rebuked Peter for denying the way of self-denial and the cross (Matthew 16:21-26). Disciples are formed, not merely informed. Jesus commissions us to teach the gospel, and to do so in a way that creates the kind of people who understand the gospel's claims and live as if those claims are true.
The place to begin is on the mountain, the same "mountain to which Jesus had directed them." The church has stood with Jesus on that mountain before. The devil once took Jesus to a very high mountain and showed him all the world's kingdoms and their splendor. Then the tempter said, "All these I will give to you, if you will fall down and worship me" (Matthew 4:8-9). But rather than accept the splendor, Jesus took up the cross. And only the Christ who gave his life in sacrifice can say, "All authority in heaven and earth has been given to me."
The place to mature is on the mountain, the same mountain where the church has stood with Jesus before. That was the day Jesus took Peter, James, and John, and led them up a high mountain. He was transfigured before them, his face shone like the sun, and the Eternal Word began to talk with Moses the lawgiver and Elijah the prophet. Peter stammered out, "Lord, this is a Kodak moment; can't we capture it and institutionalize it somehow?" Suddenly a bright cloud overshadowed them on the mountain, and a voice said, "This is my Beloved Son; with him I am well pleased" (Matthew 17:1-6). That day the promise of Christmas was confirmed; this Jesus is Emmanuel, God-with-us always, even to the end of the age.
The place to grow up as disciples is on the mountain. Matthew says we have been on the mountain before with Jesus. For Jesus went up the mountain, gathered us together, sat down, and began to teach, saying, "Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven. You are the salt of the earth. Love your enemies. Be complete as your heavenly Father is complete. Do not store up treasures on earth. Seek first the kingdom of God. Enter through the narrow gate. The good person brings good things out of a good treasure. Whoever gives a cup of cold water to these little ones will not lose their reward. Humble yourself like a little child. Pick up your cross and follow me. Forgive one another seventy times seven. Just as you did it to the least of these, you did it to me." We have been on the mountain to sit as those who are taught. The Risen Lord calls us to obey every teaching he has commanded us.
Lesslie Newbigin once noted that every organization or entity can be defined either by its boundaries or its center. The church, he notes, is sent to every nation, so it can never be bounded by local limits or national interests. But the church is defined by its center. As he puts it,
It is impossible to define exactly the boundaries of the church, and the attempt to do so always ends in an unevangelical legalism. But it is always possible and necessary to define the centre. The church is its proper self, and is a sign of the kingdom, only insofar as it continually points men and women beyond itself to Jesus and invites them to conversion and commitment to him.4
Sisters and brothers, we have a Word to speak, a message to proclaim, and a story to tell the nations. Jesus Christ is risen, with authority from beyond heaven and earth. He has claimed us with the love and justice of a Holy God. Jesus promises to be present with us, always meddling in our lives, until we become the kind of people who share God's justice and love with every person under heaven.
That, if you ask me, is the meaning, and the promise, of the Great Commission.
____________
1. James H. Smylie, Dean K. Thompson, and Cary Patrick, Go Therefore: 150 Years of Presbyterians in Global Mission, ed. Cary Patrick (Atlanta: Presbyterian Publishing House, 1987), p. v.
2. Walker Percy, "A Cranky Novelist Reflects on the Church," Signposts in a Strange Land (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1991), p. 322.
3. Mortimer Arias, "Rethinking the Great Commission," Theology Today 47/4 (January 1991), p. 412.
4. Lesslie Newbigin, Sign of the Kingdom (Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Co., 1980), p. 68.
That was the case in December 1979, at a mission conference in Urbana, Illinois. Mobs of college students descended upon the campus of the University of Illinois during Christmas break. They came in chartered buses and Volkswagen vans. Every morning was filled with Bible study, prayer, and singing. Each night featured inspirational speeches about what God was doing in our world. And every afternoon, there were opportunities to meet church workers from many different countries. The whole Urbana experience challenged Christian college students to go out into the world and make disciples of all nations.
On the final night of the convention, a famous evangelist stood to speak. He had been informed that he was preaching to the converted, a fact that he took with a grain of salt. Maybe that's why he couldn't help but invite us to stand to prove we were Christians. After that, he invited all who were standing to consider serving as missionaries. "Will you follow Jesus Christ anywhere?" he asked. "Yes!" came the roar of the crowd.
"Will you do anything he wants you to do?" A second time, the crowd roared, "Yes!"
"Will you go anywhere he asks?" Again the crowd roared, "Yes!"
"If that's true," he said, "then I want you all to obey the Great Commission of Jesus Christ. Go into all nations and seek out the unbelievers. Go and tell them that they're going to perish without Jesus. The time is short. Go into the world and serve God as missionaries."
As I remember back, that five-day convention was a mountaintop experience in my life. It happened at a time when I felt the first stirring of a call to ministry. The pastor of my church had sensed my interest, and encouraged me to go to the convention. I returned home exhausted from the trip and enlivened by the emotional experience. I tried to explain to my very patient parents that I was thinking about becoming a missionary. I was going to go out and conquer the world for Christ. By a week later, however, my enthusiasm had faded. The convention was a memory. There was no huge choir to support my feeble voice, no emotional props to boost my morale, and no baritone preacher telling me what I should do with my life. As I look back on that moment of lost enthusiasm, I now realize how deeply I misunderstood the Great Commission.
The church has often turned to these final words in the Gospel of Matthew to bolster the missionary effort. Jesus sends his followers "to the nations." That's a striking change, since he has spent most of his time tending only to the lost sheep of Israel (Matthew 15:24). But the Great Commission was given on Easter day. The risen Christ gathered his disciples together with the authority of his resurrection, and then he sent them into the world.
Ever since, the church has assumed that we have something the world doesn't have. We have a Word to speak, a message to proclaim, a story to tell to the nations. In the late 1700s, a man named Samson Occum was ordained as a Presbyterian minister. He was Native American, and he was sent as a missionary to the Oneida Indians. On the day of his ordination and commissioning, the preacher based his sermon on the Great Commission.1 The point was clear: "White people like us have given an Indian like you something you did not have, and we want you to give it away to as many Indian people as you can."
In the late 1700s, that may or may not have been a good idea. History tells many sad stories of European Christians who spoke to people who were neither European nor Christian. They tried to make these people Christians, but inevitably tainted them as Europeans. Frequently it was conversion by coercion. Let's confess, some people were better off before the Christian missionaries got to them. Progress and firepower have not been universally positive influences among innocent civilizations.
These days, it is even more difficult for thoughtful Christians to play the old missionary game of "we've got it and you need it." For one thing, we can no longer assume that people of other cultures haven't heard the gospel. There are untouched areas of the globe, to be sure. But in most cases, the good news has been published, broadcast, and spoken in hundreds of tongues. For another thing, we cannot affirm that we have whatever we think others do not have. People of all nations may have heard the gospel of Jesus Christ and ignored it. The question is: have those of us in this nation done much better? Do we really bear the very News that we so proudly want to give to the nations? That is the challenge of our commission.
Some years ago, novelist Walker Percy spoke to a group of graduating seniors at a Catholic college. He saluted their dedication to study. In glowing terms, he affirmed their call to spread the gospel to people around the world. Yet he couldn't help but note the difficulty of the task. At one point, Percy looked them in the eye and said,
Here, surely, is the most difficult challenge of all: to proclaim the Good News in a world whose values seem increasingly indifferent to the very meaning of the Good News. It is a strange world indeed, a world which is, on the one hand, more eroticized than ancient Rome, and yet a world in which the Good News is proclaimed more loudly and frequently than ever before by TV evangelists and the new fundamentalists. There occurs a kind of devaluation of language, a cheapening of the very vocabulary of salvation, as a consequence of which the ever-fresh, ever-joyful meaning of the Gospel comes across as the dreariest TV commercial. How to proclaim the Good News in a society which never needed it more but in which language itself has been subverted. Salvation comes by hearing, according to Scripture, but what is the hearer of the Good News to do when the hearing becomes as overloaded as the circuits on an $89 TV set?2
We live in an age where the gospel has been proclaimed on bumper stickers in every industrialized nation. The strange irony is that it hasn't seemed to do much good. Perhaps the reason has little to do with the good news, and everything to do with the messengers. "Go and make disciples," Jesus said. But we cannot do that unless we ourselves are committed disciples. "Go and teach people all that I have commanded you," says the Teacher of the Sermon on the Mount. We cannot do that if our only study of the Bible is a little bit of verse-surfing before breakfast to keep us healthy, wealthy, and wise. Any church that takes the Great Commission seriously must move into deeper waters, and not merely throw a wider net into the shallows.
It is striking that Matthew seems to know this. He begins this triumphant story of Easter with a pathetic note. "The eleven disciples went to Galilee." That's an incomplete church, as you know. Once there were twelve disciples. No thanks to Judas, the church shrank from twelve to eleven. "And when they saw Jesus, they worshiped him; but some doubted." Even on Easter, with the risen Lord in plain view, the incomplete church has an incomplete faith. This is the kind of church that Jesus sends out from the mountaintop. It's a church that can no longer play, "We've got it and you need it." The only thing we can say is, "All of us need it." All of us need a Word that sets us free and sends us forth. Blessed are those who are poor enough in spirit to receive and obey a crucified Savior.
There is a powerful scene in the movie The Mission. Mendoza, a man of the sword, has killed his brother in a fit of anger. No one is surprised. Mendoza is well-known throughout colonial South America as a brutal slave trader who captures the natives and sells them to the Spaniards. But he is overcome by unexpected remorse at the death. He goes into seclusion. A Jesuit priest visits him and suggests a penance to purge his torment. The penance is to join the priest and other Jesuit missionaries as they return to the jungle to work among the natives. Mendoza agrees. They set out on their journey. Mendoza binds up his armor in a huge net. He ties this huge burden to his back and drags it along as a reminder of his violent life. It slows down the travelers, but they continue on.
At one point, the missionaries climb to the top of a great waterfall. Their friends among the natives have been anxiously waiting for their return. The two groups hug one another and shout for joy. Then a native spots Mendoza struggling behind with his bundle of armor. Recognizing him, he grabs a knife, runs to the weary slave trader, and poises to slit his throat in revenge. Mendoza prepares himself for certain death. What he doesn't count on is that the natives have begun to learn a new way from the Jesuits, whereby no one repays evil for evil, enemies are loved, and persecutors are prayed for. The native flashes the knife, then cuts away Mendoza's bundle of armor. His burden of violence falls away and dashes to the bottom of the waterfall. Now free for the first time in years, Mendoza cries like a baby fresh from the womb of God. Soon the priest says, "Welcome home, brother." Then his instruction begins.
Jesus commissions his church both to be disciples and to make disciples. Disciples are people who have the capacity to cut others free from their burdens, who act out of mercy rather than retaliation, who welcome fellow travelers home from their journeys. Simple converts will not do. "Discipleship," someone notes, "means the engagement of the whole life in following Jesus on the way of the kingdom."3 Jesus trained his disciples not only to believe the right doctrine, but also to live and die in the right way. He commended Peter for believing that he is "the Messiah, the Son of the living God" (Matthew 16:16). Yet he also rebuked Peter for denying the way of self-denial and the cross (Matthew 16:21-26). Disciples are formed, not merely informed. Jesus commissions us to teach the gospel, and to do so in a way that creates the kind of people who understand the gospel's claims and live as if those claims are true.
The place to begin is on the mountain, the same "mountain to which Jesus had directed them." The church has stood with Jesus on that mountain before. The devil once took Jesus to a very high mountain and showed him all the world's kingdoms and their splendor. Then the tempter said, "All these I will give to you, if you will fall down and worship me" (Matthew 4:8-9). But rather than accept the splendor, Jesus took up the cross. And only the Christ who gave his life in sacrifice can say, "All authority in heaven and earth has been given to me."
The place to mature is on the mountain, the same mountain where the church has stood with Jesus before. That was the day Jesus took Peter, James, and John, and led them up a high mountain. He was transfigured before them, his face shone like the sun, and the Eternal Word began to talk with Moses the lawgiver and Elijah the prophet. Peter stammered out, "Lord, this is a Kodak moment; can't we capture it and institutionalize it somehow?" Suddenly a bright cloud overshadowed them on the mountain, and a voice said, "This is my Beloved Son; with him I am well pleased" (Matthew 17:1-6). That day the promise of Christmas was confirmed; this Jesus is Emmanuel, God-with-us always, even to the end of the age.
The place to grow up as disciples is on the mountain. Matthew says we have been on the mountain before with Jesus. For Jesus went up the mountain, gathered us together, sat down, and began to teach, saying, "Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven. You are the salt of the earth. Love your enemies. Be complete as your heavenly Father is complete. Do not store up treasures on earth. Seek first the kingdom of God. Enter through the narrow gate. The good person brings good things out of a good treasure. Whoever gives a cup of cold water to these little ones will not lose their reward. Humble yourself like a little child. Pick up your cross and follow me. Forgive one another seventy times seven. Just as you did it to the least of these, you did it to me." We have been on the mountain to sit as those who are taught. The Risen Lord calls us to obey every teaching he has commanded us.
Lesslie Newbigin once noted that every organization or entity can be defined either by its boundaries or its center. The church, he notes, is sent to every nation, so it can never be bounded by local limits or national interests. But the church is defined by its center. As he puts it,
It is impossible to define exactly the boundaries of the church, and the attempt to do so always ends in an unevangelical legalism. But it is always possible and necessary to define the centre. The church is its proper self, and is a sign of the kingdom, only insofar as it continually points men and women beyond itself to Jesus and invites them to conversion and commitment to him.4
Sisters and brothers, we have a Word to speak, a message to proclaim, and a story to tell the nations. Jesus Christ is risen, with authority from beyond heaven and earth. He has claimed us with the love and justice of a Holy God. Jesus promises to be present with us, always meddling in our lives, until we become the kind of people who share God's justice and love with every person under heaven.
That, if you ask me, is the meaning, and the promise, of the Great Commission.
____________
1. James H. Smylie, Dean K. Thompson, and Cary Patrick, Go Therefore: 150 Years of Presbyterians in Global Mission, ed. Cary Patrick (Atlanta: Presbyterian Publishing House, 1987), p. v.
2. Walker Percy, "A Cranky Novelist Reflects on the Church," Signposts in a Strange Land (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1991), p. 322.
3. Mortimer Arias, "Rethinking the Great Commission," Theology Today 47/4 (January 1991), p. 412.
4. Lesslie Newbigin, Sign of the Kingdom (Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Co., 1980), p. 68.
