Introduction
Last week I was listening to a presentation of the American
Scientific Affiliation, an organization that brings science and Christian faith
together. Philip Yancey was speaking on “God, Science, and the Pandemic with
Lessons from John Donne. He began his remarks by quoting C.S. Lewis’
description of our world as “a good thing spoiled”. Our understanding of the
mission of God begins with this reality: Our world is good, and our world is
spoiled – gone bad.
A Good Creation
One of the most notable things about Genesis chapter
one is the way each day comes to an end: “And God saw what he had made, and it
was good.” Finally, the writer says, “God saw all that he had made, and it was
very good.” We are God’s creatures – images or representatives of God in this
creation – and God made us and all of creation good.
I was born near Victoria Falls in Zambia. Mosi
watunya – the smoke that thunders. David Livingstone, the first European to see
them, called them “scenes so beautiful that angels must have gazed on them in
their flight.” From the majesty of the Rockies to the beauty of a winter
sunrise in Manitoba, from lush gardens around the world to the glory of sundogs
on a bitter January morning, we live in a world of almost terrifying delight. Goodness
and beauty are deeply rooted in our souls. As Steve Bell reminds us in song, we
long for them when they are hidden from us.
A Spoiled Creation
The physical world contains horror and deformity as
well as beauty and delight – such as the volcano that has devastated the island
of Tonga recently. Humankind contains the same infuriating mixture of good and
evil. I remember a day in 1982 when a plane crashed in the Potomac River just
after take-off, due to ice build up. Only five people survived. They survived
because another passenger repeatedly handed them the lifeline to safety before
finally drowning himself. I was moved deeply by his actions when I heard the
reports, and I am moved now as I remember them.
Alongside such stories of self-sacrificing goodness,
we have a daily diet of news stories that describe selfishness and cruelty. We
live in a good world – spoiled. Worse, we spoiled it. The cruelty that we read
about in the news is our own cruelty. The choice to serve ourselves above all
others is our own choice. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn was right: “The line
separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between classes, nor
between political parties either — but right through every human heart.” We
live in a good world, spoiled by human sin and rebellion.
I could tell story after story of a world gone bad,
but you know the stories as well as I do. For now, it is enough to say that God
made our world, and that we have messed up the world. The essence of that
“spoiling” is human rebellion – which is where the mission of God begins.
The Mission of God
I referred to the creation account of Genesis one:
God’s created world is very good. Genesis three tells the story of human
rebellion. Without going into detail, God made the world to live under God’s
rule – what we sometimes call “the kingdom of God”. The first man and woman
chose to rule the world themselves, and so this good creation was spoiled. Each
of us faces the same invitation to live in the reign of God; each of us is
familiar with the desire to run our own lives, to be our own god.
The mission of God is to end our rebellion and to
heal the world of the ills that flow from the rupture of the Fall. Consider
just two Scriptures that describe this mission.
2 Corinthians 5
16 So from now on we regard no one from a worldly point of view. Though we
once regarded Christ in this way, we do so no longer. 17 Therefore,
if anyone is in Christ, the new creation has come: the old has gone, the new is
here! 18 [Note: A new creation! Not just new people,
but the whole world made new!] All this is from God, who reconciled us to
himself through Christ and gave us the ministry of reconciliation: 19 that
God was reconciling the world to himself in Christ, not counting people’s sins
against them. And he has committed to us the message of reconciliation.
Paul’s grammar may work well in Greek, but he can be
confusing in modern English. Let me restate what he says here: “In Christ, the
world is created again – it is remade good! God reconciles the world to himself
in and through Christ, and God gives to us also the ministry and message of
reconciliation.”
The fall of humankind broke our relationship with
God. God has worked throughout human history to heal that break, to reconcile
the human family and indeed the whole of creation with himself, to remake
everything good. Chris Wright has indicated that this holistic mission embraces
at least creation care, social action, and evangelism.
Romans 8
18 I consider that
our present sufferings are not worth comparing with the glory that will be
revealed in us. 19 For the creation waits in eager expectation
for the children of God to be revealed. 20 For the creation was
subjected to frustration, not by its own choice, but by the will of the one who
subjected it, in hope 21 that the creation itself will be
liberated from its bondage to decay and brought into the freedom and glory of
the children of God. 22 We know that the whole creation has
been groaning as in the pains of childbirth right up to the present time. 23 Not
only so, but we ourselves, who have the first fruits of the Spirit, groan
inwardly as we wait eagerly for our adoption to sonship, the redemption of our
bodies.
Again, Paul writes long convoluted sentences! But
his point is clear enough. God’s good world has been spoiled by human
rebellion, and God’s good world is anticipating the glory of complete
liberation from sin and decay. Paul uses the image of adoption – bringing us
into God’s family, reconciled and healed – to describe the beginning of the
whole process of salvation.
You see that Paul speaks of reconciliation in 2
Corinthians 5 and of redemption in Romans 8. I think that these are the same
thing in terms of God’s mission. God seeks to save the world from sin, death,
and hell; God seeks to redeem (buy back) the world; God seeks to reconcile the
world to himself; God seeks to restore all things to where they belong in him;
God seeks to make the world a new creation. This is God’s mission in this
world.
Elementary Teaching
All of this is elementary teaching in the Christian
faith. These are the basics. God made us good. We rebelled and broke our
relationship with God and with each other. God wants to restore that
relationship and has worked tirelessly throughout history to heal us.
This may be basic teaching, but much of the time we
forget it. We act as if we can fix the problems around us and as if God were
not essential to the process. The truth is that only God can save the world and
only God can save us. The mission of the church is first of all the mission of
God, and the mission of God is God’s desire and work to reconcile the world to
himself. Mission begins and ends with God.
On The Ground
What does this mean for our daily lives? What does
the mission of God look like on the ground? That’s an almost impossible
question. The answer begins with learning to see God at work in the world,
instead of thinking that somehow missions depends on us. We begin by looking
and listening for God.
This means, for example, that we read the Bible as
the story of God’s mission to save the world. Reconciliation and redemption are
at the heart of Scripture. From the Exodus to the Exile and Return to the life,
death, and resurrection of Jesus, the Bible tells how God strives to redeem the
world. George Earnest Wright called the Old Testament “the mighty saving acts
of God.” His description applies to the whole Bible.
We often read the Bible for all sorts of things that
the original authors never intended. That is not always bad. The Bible is an
amazing book, and it speaks God’s word into our lives even when we use it in
unusual ways. But the Bible is first of all the story of God’s mission to save
the world. Read it. Look for that story in every part of Scripture, and you
will hear the voice of God speaking deeply within your soul.
We also learn to read history as the story of God’s
work in our world. Look for the way that God acts in history – in our own
stories and in the story of our nation.
Consider the work of someone like William
Wilberforce. He spent his life working to end slavery within the British
Empire. He was a politician in England in the late 18th and early 19th
centuries. One can study his life and ask what his example teaches us. Or
better, we can search the story for what God was doing within the British
Empire to “set the captives free”. There is a real danger in reading history
this way. It can lead us to confuse our political desires with God’s reign. I’m
not interested in any such syncretism. In my teaching at Providence, I
sometimes say, “When church and state fuse, the church loses.” It’s true. We
are looking for God’s presence in our stories, not for an excuse to turn
ourselves into the heroes of the story.
With this warning in mind, consider a painful
episode in the history of southern Africa. In 1964, I was baptized into the
Brethren in Christ Church in Zimbabwe – in the Mpopoma BIC church in Bulawayo.
Brethren in Christ missionaries first went to
Zimbabwe in 1898. In the years that followed, BIC missionaries gave their lives
– figuratively and literally – to carry the gospel to the Ndebele people. By
the mid-1970s, the church they planted had grown to about 5,000 people, but it
was a church that looked and felt quite American. We planted a church that
looked like us. Many of the Ndebele people loved and respected us, but they did
not necessarily embrace the gospel we preached. We remained a foreign church. [Note:
This is an oversimplification. We really did try to become part of the local
culture and we really did want to be at home among the people, but we succeeded
only partially.]
At that time, Zimbabwe was known as Rhodesia and it
was governed by a small white minority. In the 1970s, a liberation movement
turned to armed struggle, a bitter liberation war. It was a hard time. I taught
there for three years at the beginning of that period, and I used to have
dreams about being killed by the guerrillas (as we called them) coming out of
the bush. The war ended with the forming of independent Zimbabwe in 1980.
BIC missionaries were withdrawn from Zimbabwe in
1977, at the request of the local church leaders. After independence, a further
period of political instability rocked the country, as the Shona-led government
sent the military against so-called dissidents in the BIC area. Another 20,000
to 30,000 people died in that action, sometimes called Gukaruhundi.
Look at those events through a different lens. What
was God was doing in the liberation war? As a result of the violence, the
church became the primary source of strength and help for many people. The
people no longer saw it as the missionaries’ church, but as their own. God’s
Spirit was poured out on the Christians as they gathered together, and the
church began to grow. By the time I returned to Zimbabwe in 1988, there were
perhaps 20,000 in the BIC church. Today, the church numbers perhaps 60,000.
Numbers don’t tell the whole story, but they do reflect the way that God worked
to reconcile people to himself through difficult and bitter events.
One sees a similar story in Ethiopia. A military
government came to power in 1977 through a coup. In 1982, the government confiscated
church property, imprisoned the church leaders, and banned meetings of more
than five people. The church responded by reorganizing in cells of five people,
which met over the next ten years in the members’ homes. In 1992, the
government released the leaders and restored the church property. When the
Meserete Kristos church went underground, they were about 5,000 people. They emerged
as a church of 34,000 people. Today they have a membership of 300,000 or more.
What was God doing when a communist-leaning military
seized power in a coup? Ask the people in the Meserete Kristos Church.
Conclusion
One final story: A personal story from my family.
Details omitted online.
The mission of God is to reconcile the world to
himself. God desires that all people and that the whole of creation be
redeemed, set free, and brought into the reign of God. Next week, we will ask
what our part in God’s mission is. For now, it is enough to rest in the joy of
God’s desire and endless work to bring us back to God. To God be the glory!
Fort Garry EMC
6 February 2022
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