What Are We Doing Here, Anyway?

Let me lay out my approach for you this morning. I have a question I want to answer – the question in the sermon title, to which I will suggest some beginning answers. Finally, we come to the texts we read and listen to them in light of this basic question. So, let’s start with the question: What are we doing here, anyway?  

 

Many years ago in India, a man named Waskom Pickett researched this question among Indian Christians. He asked them why they had become Christians and joined the church. He found that some of them became Christians for social reasons – they were looking for friends and for marriage partners, and they joined the church as part of their search. Some of them became Christians for economic reasons – they knew that the church would help them find a job and other economic help. Some of them became Christians for spiritual reasons – they were looking for the truth about God and life, and they found that truth in Christian faith and in the church. 

 

Curiously, the reason that people gave for becoming a Christian had little to do with how serious and sincere their faith was. Whatever reason they had for coming to Christian faith, those who gave themselves completely to Christ and the church grew in their faith to real maturity. 

 

Social – Economic – Spiritual 

We live in a different time than Waskom Pickett did. He was studying a surge of Indians coming to Christian faith in the 1930s. We live in a place and time when people are drifting away from church. Sociologists studying patterns of church attendance have a name for such people – they are “the dones”. A recent article in Christianity Today noted that Baby Boomers and Generation X are leaving the church faster than any other group. That means that people between ages 40 and 75 are wondering why they should keep attending church. They are just “done”. 

 

This state of affairs leads us to ask why people are leaving, the reverse of Pickett’s question (why people are coming). We have time today only to consider the question of why people come to church. The same basic answers apply today as were true in Pickett’s day. Some come for help. They are in economic or social or some other kind of trouble, and they come to the church. Some come for friends. They find a group of people who help them feel at home. Some come for spiritual reasons. They believe that Jesus is the Son of God and that worshipping God means praying in a church. 

 

We could reword these responses like this: People come to church for friendship, for help, and for worship. To put it more simply, these responses boil down to two basic responses. The first is that we need community – we need other people, and the congregation is a good place to find other people. The second is that we need God, and the church is a good place to find God. 

 

Worship and Community 

You notice of course that the church is not the only place that we find God or that we find other people. If all you need is other people, any voluntary association will do, from curling in the winter to playing chess in a chess club. I like chess, and I have found friendship in Zimbabwe, Australia, and Indiana by going to the local club to play with other people who like chess. 

 

Similarly, if all you need is God, you can worship God in many places, not just in church. This is what’s behind the feeling that some people have. They say, “I don’t need to go to church to worship God. I can worship God in my living room with an online church or spending time out in nature.” 

 

It is true that we can worship God in many different places. I remember a dark night I spent lost in the woods of Pennsylvania about 53 years ago – May 28, 1969. I remember the date well! I remember watching the light growing as dawn came. I started walking towards the light and found myself in a cathedral-like setting with the sun glowing through the leaves and branches around me, lighting up the grass and undergrowth around me. It was incredibly beautiful, and after a night of fear and darkness, I experienced God’s presence in a wonderful way. You better believe it: You can worship God in nature! 

 

So, if you can find friendship in a curling club and worship God in your living room, what do we need church for? 

 

A Worshipping Community 

Go back to the three elements I suggested we find in church: friendship, help when we’re in trouble, and a place to worship God. Church is the one place on earth where we find all three brought together. We need all three. If all we need is help when we’re in trouble, government can provide a program for that. If all we need is friendship when we’re lonely, clubs are good for finding friends. If all we need is worship, we can worship God anywhere. 

 

The truth is we need all three – friendship and help and worship. Consider worship: Solitary worship is good and necessary, but it is what it sounds like: Solitary. We need to worship with God’s people. Compare solitary worship to another shared experience in our culture: Hockey. If you’re a Jets fan, you can enjoy watching a Jets game in your own living room – at least when they win. But how much better is it to watch it in your living room with three or four good friends, especially if they’re playing the Leafs and one of your friends is a Leafs fan. How much better is it to watch the game with 10,000 other fans in the MTS Centre. The shared experience really is better than the solitary experience. 

 

Similarly, you can have a real experience of God’s presence when you are alone. I hope you do. Such experiences are really important. But how much better is it to come together with a care group and pray together over the needs and concerns of our lives. Even better is to gather together with the whole congregation. The big gatherings of such events as Mennonite World Conference are cream on the top of a wonderful dessert. 

 

To expand the food metaphor, we need the full meal of friendship and help and worship, mixed together in an ongoing buffet for our spiritual and emotional and mental nourishment. We need to worship God together, to meet God together, to be filled with God’s Holy Spirit as the community of God’s People. 

 

When I think of my own life experience, I think of all of these kinds of experiences. I enjoy going out for breakfast with good Christian brothers who support me when I am discouraged. I have benefitted by praying with my brothers and sisters in a care group. I have found help from my small group when trying to decide what the next step should be in life’s journey. I have been swept up in a throng of people praying and worshipping God together. Help, friendship, and worship go together to nourish me in my whole life. 

 

Believing and Belonging 

Another way of thinking of this subject is to consider the idea of believing and belonging in church life. Sometimes, we insist that everyone believes the whole Christian message in order to become part of the church. We think that believing the truth leads to belonging in the church, so we ask people to affirm that they believe what we believe. That’s why we have membership classes and instruct people in what they should believe. 

 

What I have been saying this morning suggests another path that many have discovered. Often, belonging leads to believing. Someone finds friendship or help in the church, and as they belong to the group, they start to believe what the church teaches. 

 

I suggest that both paths are acceptable. C.S. Lewis is an example of someone who came to the church by believing before he could belong. He was an atheist who gradually came to the realization that God exists, and then that Jesus is the Son of God. This growing belief led him to the church. But the more common path is that friendships and belonging create a space in which we can explore and adopt Christian faith as our own. That is what Waskom Pickett found in his study of Indian Christians a hundred years ago, and that is true today for most Canadians and Americans.

Excursus: We don’t have our usual growing deeper class today because of the long weekend. Here are four questions that you can use for your own process of going deeper as you reflect on the morning sermon: 

1) Why do you come to church? (Everyone’s reason is a little different) 

2) What would you miss if you didn’t have church? (Some say, “Nothing”, which leads to the next question – and which is a problem we should take seriously) 

3) What could we/should we do in church that would make our worship more meaningful? 

4) How would you invite a friend to join you in church?

 

Finally, Our Texts!  

We can think of these three elements as a set of concentric circles: Help and Friendship in the two outer circles, and Worship in the centre circle. Like a bullseye. However we come to it, worship is at the centre of our experience as God’s people. The texts we read describe that centre. 

 

Psalm 67 describes worship that is rooted in the gifts God gives us, gifts of salvation from our enemies, justice for our lives, and provision of food for daily lives. We thank God in our worship for God’s good gifts of life, food, and friends. 

 

It is a useful exercise to write down or make a list of all that God has given us. For good harvests (we pray for them this year!) to a job worth working at, for family and friends who gather round us, for life and freedom in our society, we worship and praise God. The Psalm doesn’t make this connection, but such lists lead me also to repentance. When we misuse God’s good gifts, we repent and say sorry. We repent and recognize our need to change and live the way that God wants us to live. 

 

Revelation 21 and 22 present a picture of the end of time, the goal of all our living. This goal shapes the way we live now, showing us what is really true and how we should shape our lives today. The picture is of a city, showing us that ultimate reality is social, lived with other people. The city has no church building, because the church building is meant to point to God. That’s why some churches have a spire – to point towards God. But God is there in fullness. We can see God and need no building to remind us of God. In the same way, God is the light of the city, so that other sources of light are no longer needed. 

 

To put it another way, God is the centre and source of life. All creatures, indeed, all creation praise and worship God perfectly and fully. All that makes life bitter and difficult in this life is erased. The river of life and the tree of life are there – symbols to show us that this is a place of full and perfect life and joy. 

 

Revelations uses images to paint a picture of perfection. If we try to work out exactly what we will be doing in this place of perfection, we miss the point. It is beyond our ability to understand what it looks and feels like. All we can say is that it is perfect joy and delight, and that God is at the centre. We worship God now because our lives are moving towards the perfection of God’s eternity. 

 

Conclusion 

It’s time to wrap this up. Have you ever been in a worship service that you come out saying, “A foretaste of Heaven!” That doesn’t mean that Heaven will be one long sermon or an endless choir – Heaven forbid! It does mean that at the centre of reality is a perfection of joy and goodness that we can approach best together. 

 

You never know when God will come to you most clearly. Perhaps it is in a solitary moment, as I experienced walking through the woods at dawn. Perhaps it is in a gathered moment. I remember August 1992. It was the gathering of the church in Zimbabwe for our general conference. We were moving from Zimbabwe to the USA, and I knew I would probably never live in Africa again. I was leaving my birthplace behind. In a sense, I was leaving my heart behind, and I was grieving. I found it hard to leave my home and move to North America, and I didn’t know how to process that sadness. That night the conference met for worship, and a preacher named Shadrack Maloka started preaching. I don’t remember what he said, but I do remember him suddenly starting to sing, “Mayenziwe intando yakho.” The words of Jesus as he went to the cross and also words from the Lord’s Prayer, “Your will be done.” As a thousand voices around me sang, I wept and found the strength also to say, “Your will be done.” 

 

Leaving home was hard, but it was also good. Worship and fellowship helped me to integrate my life and put things together. Why do we go to church? To put our lives together with our friends and through worship and praise of the God who is at the centre of everything. 

 

Steinbach Mennonite Church 

22 May 2022 

Scriptures 

Psalm 67

¹ May God be gracious to us and bless us and make his face to shine upon us, ² that your way may be known upon earth, your saving power among all nations. 

³ Let the peoples praise you, O God; let all the peoples praise you. ⁴ Let the nations be glad and sing for joy, for you judge the peoples with equity and guide the nations upon earth. ⁵ Let the peoples praise you, O God; let all the peoples praise you. 

⁶ The earth has yielded its increase; God, our God, has blessed us. ⁷ May God continue to bless us; let all the ends of the earth revere him.

 

Revelation 21:10

¹⁰ And in the spirit  he carried me away to a great, high mountain and showed me the holy city Jerusalem coming down out of heaven from God.

Revelation 21:22-22:5

²² I saw no temple in the city, for its temple is the Lord God the Almighty and the Lamb. ²³ And the city has no need of sun or moon to shine on it, for the glory of God is its light, and its lamp is the Lamb. ²⁴ The nations will walk by its light, and the kings of the earth will bring their glory into it. ²⁵ Its gates will never be shut by day—and there will be no night there. ²⁶ People will bring into it the glory and the honor of the nations. ²⁷ But nothing unclean will enter it, nor anyone who practices abomination or falsehood, but only those who are written in the Lamb’s book of life. 

22 Then the angel showed me the river of the water of life, bright as crystal, flowing from the throne of God and of the Lamb ² through the middle of the street of the city. On either side of the river is the tree of life with its twelve kinds of fruit, producing its fruit each month, and the leaves of the tree are for the healing of the nations. ³ Nothing accursed will be found there anymore. But the throne of God and of the Lamb will be in it, and his servants will worship him; ⁴ they will see his face, and his name will be on their foreheads. ⁵ And there will be no more night; they need no light of lamp or sun, for the Lord God will be their light, and they will reign forever and ever.

Big Churchy Words: Justification

I have wondered how we might use this word, “justification”, in a normal sentence. I use it as a teacher, because I ask my students to write their essays using left justification only, with a ragged right margin. Some of you aren’t sure what I just said, because that’s still a fairly technical use of the word, even if it’s not a churchy word. [To illustrate: I typed this sermon “left-justified”.]

I gather (thanks to the resource of Wikipedia) that “Justified” was also a TV show that aired on American TV from 2010 to 2015, based in contemporary Lexington, Kentucky. Its basic idea was to dramatize the exploits of a US Marshall, Raymond Givens, who made his name through shooting a mob hit man in a “controversial but justified quick-draw” contest. From the story arc, we can guess that the show wrestles with the idea that bad and violent actions are sometimes justified by the good results they bring.

This show introduces us to several basic ideas in the word “justification”.

• Justification assumes the rule of law, in which people are either just – righteous (or good) people, or unjust – bad people.
• Justified is a legal term, indicating that someone has been found to be in compliance with the law.
• Behind the rule of law lies a further idea – that we should want to be just or righteous people, i.e., people whose lives fit with the good.

When we start to speak theologically, we go deeper and further. Consider the passages we read from Genesis and Romans.

Genesis 15

Abram’s encounter with God is one of a sequence of encounters in which God promises that Abraham and Sarah will have many descendants – God said, “Look up at the sky and count the stars—if indeed you can count them. So shall your offspring be.” The point of the passage for our purposes comes in the final verse: “Abram believed the Lord, and he credited it to him as righteousness.”

I chose this passage because Paul uses this verse in several places to invite people to trust God. Romans 4 and 5 use this verse to help us understand what the church means when we talk about justification. (See Romans 4: 3 and 22.)

Romans 5

•           Verses 1 to 5: Paul notes that we are “justified by faith.” On another day, we could explore the way that God’s people experience trouble in this life. “Suffering produces perseverance, perseverance character, and character hope.” That is to say, the troubles of our lives lead to God’s glory revealed in us as God’s Spirit cares for us. Today, we note simply that “justification”, whatever it is, comes through faith.
•           Verses 6 to 8: We were powerless and “ungodly”, but Christ died for us. This “for us” assumes a substitution in which we face death, but Jesus dies in our place. What exactly that “for us” means is part of what Lee explored two weeks ago as he preached on atonement. Whatever else it means, Jesus’ death demonstrates God’s love for us. Our care group was studying a book some time ago in which we read about two American soldiers in Iraq. They were close friends throughout the war there, until one day when a grenade was thrown into the place they were sitting. The one closest to the grenade looked at his friend and smiled, then threw himself on the grenade. He was killed instantly, but his friend lived. The author used that sacrifice to remind us that God loves us so much that he “threw himself on the grenade that would have killed us”. How that exchange works belongs in further conversations about “atonement”. For us this morning, it is enough to say that God loves us and that we live because God loves us.
•          Verses 9 to 11: Sin has made us “enemies of God”, and we can expect God to destroy God’s enemies. In that dangerous situation, God saves us through Jesus and makes us God’s friends – “reconciled with God”. Next week, Lee will take us into the waters of reconciliation, so I say no more here about that. Only this: That, being “reconciled with God” and therefore God’s friends, we have real life!
•          Verses 18 to 21: At the end of the chapter, Paul locates our enmity with God in the way that we share in Adam’s sin, and he locates the saving action of God in the work of Jesus. All of which we receive by faith, like Abraham – trusting God to make us what God wants us to be.

Justification, then, is the story of God making us right when we went wrong. God justifies us through the work of Christ. This we call “God’s grace”. We receive this grace by faith. Faith is our response to God’s grace at work in our lives. And Paul promises that “where sin increases” – that is, wherever human rebellion makes life destructive and horrible – “God’s grace increases even more.” [Notice that this story is the opposite of our world’s story, in which we have to “justify ourselves”. We cannot make ourselves “right with the good”, “consistent with the reality of God’s creation.]

Do We Get It?

There’s a problem here. As I look around the congregation this morning, I see people who are for the most part good people. We have been tried in the fire, and God has reshaped our lives. Can Paul’s description apply to us? Do we feel as though we live “where sin increases”? God’s grace has increased in our lives, and we thank God for dealing kindly with us. Do we even need “justification”?

Go back to the TV series, “Justified”. The US Marshall at the centre of the series appears to be a generally good man, truly desiring justice – “law and order”. He does some things that are questionable on the way to stopping the bad actors from doing bad things. His actions are justified by their results, but he remains a person of questionable character. In North America, we worship power and success, so we are often willing to justify bad actions by their (apparently) good results.

That kind of thinking is wrong. The whole of Paul’s argument leading up to this chapter has been to show that all of us – Jews and Gentiles, men and women, religious and irreligious – all of us “fall short of God’s glory”. We fall short of what God wants us to be. Which brings me back to my comment a moment ago, wondering if we really think we are that bad, wondering if we believe that we fall short of what God wants us to be.

A Brief Example

Some time ago I was at supper with some friends, and one of them was describing a recent event in his life and then burst out, “I was surprised at how I reacted! I didn’t know I was so vindictive!” I would not describe my friend as vindictive. He works hard to show care to other people, but in the case he was describing, something in his character surfaced. I admire his willingness to name it.

The truth is that such feelings lurk beneath the surface for most of us. (I would say: “all”, but I am not the judge of all people.) This week as I was cleaning out the coffee maker, the lid slammed down and cut my hand. I was alone at home, and the shouting that followed reminded me that an uncomfortable level of anger lurks beneath the surface within me. The part that scares me is how easy it is for me to fail to see what lies in my subconscious. [This kind of thing happens often enough to let me know there really is a problem. I say no more here: My job is to work that out elsewhere.]

Have you experienced depression or despair? Depression can be anger turned inwards against one’s own innermost being. Do you find yourself wishing that God would remove someone from the face of the earth? Hatred of others can grow out of hatred of evil. I don’t want to preach about politics, so I will say no more, except to say that only by God’s grace is sin removed from our lives.

God loves us, and so Jesus died for us. His self-sacrifice “justifies” us – something we could never do for ourselves. Marshall Givens in the TV show is not truly “justified”. He remains a man who has killed other people. He remains someone who is separated from God by his own choices to act violently. Only God can justify him. And God will do so, if – like Abraham – he believes God and receives God’s grace, making him righteous, making him the person God wants him to be.

Without God’s grace, every one of us is separated from God and deserve death. Through God’s grace, we are reconciled with God and receive life. God makes us right. That’s justification!

What Do We Do? The role of sanctification

From this description, justification is all God’s work. God makes us the way that God wants us to be. The Bible uses many images to describe this new way – “new birth” or regeneration is one of the most common. The point is expressed in 2 Corinthians 5: “If anyone is in Christ, he/she is a new creation.” We become new people when God makes us new. Obvious, when you put it that way! Just as we become new people when we are born again.

Making us new is God’s work, but we have a part to play – the part of response. “Abraham believed God, and God ‘justified him.” We believe God. We live into the new person God has made us. We open ourselves to the fullness of God’s Spirit at work in us. This is what we call “sanctification” – being made holy, filled with God’s Spirit.

In Romans 6 and 7, Paul explores the way that our tendencies to sin that lurk beneath the surface struggle with the new person God has made us. He finishes his description thus, “Thanks be to God who gives us the victory through our Lord Jesus Christ!” Then come his stirring words: “Therefore, there is now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus, because through Christ Jesus the law of the Spirit who gives life has set you free from the law of sin and death. For what the law was powerless to do because it was weakened by the flesh, God did by sending his own Son in the likeness of sinful flesh to be a sin offering. And so he condemned sin in the flesh, in order that the righteous requirement of the law might be fully met in us, who do not live according to the flesh but according to the Spirit.”

For this morning, we note just this much from Romans 8: God “justifies” us – makes us righteous – so we live that way through the presence and power of God’s Spirit within us. This “sanctification”, then, is our response to God’s work in us. We embrace God’s Spirit and open every door of our life to God.

I have heard described this way. Your life and mine is like a house. When we choose to follow Christ, he saves us and we give him the key to the front door and the title to the house. That’s justification. But this house has many rooms, and there are doors down dark corridors that we have never explored. Whenever we find another one of this unexplored rooms, we fish out the key and open it and give it to God’s Spirit to clean up and live in.

Conclusion

Big words: justification and sanctification. A simple core at their centre: God loves us and we grow in God’s love. Paul understood this. He ends the long section (chapters 1 to 8) in which we find our passage this morning with a soaring description of God’s love: “What can separate us from the love of God? Nothing! Absolutely nothing! (Romans 8: 31 to 39) No matter what happens to you in this life, God has your back. We give ourselves to God completely, and in return God gives us life to the full.

Steinbach Mennonite Church

2 February 2020

Genesis 15: 1 to 6

Romans 5: 1 to 11, 18 to 20

Genesis 15: 1 to 6

The Lord’s Covenant with Abram

15 After this, the word of the Lord came to Abram in a vision: “Do not be afraid, Abram. I am your shield, your very great reward.”

² But Abram said, “Sovereign Lord, what can you give me since I remain childless and the one who will inherit my estate is Eliezer of Damascus?” ³ And Abram said, “You have given me no children; so a servant in my household will be my heir.”

⁴ Then the word of the Lord came to him: “This man will not be your heir, but a son who is your own flesh and blood will be your heir.” ⁵ He took him outside and said, “Look up at the sky and count the stars—if indeed you can count them.” Then he said to him, “So shall your offspring be.”

⁶ Abram believed the Lord, and he credited it to him as righteousness.

Romans 5: 1 to 11, 18 to 20

Peace and Hope

5 Therefore, since we have been justified through faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ, ² through whom we have gained access by faith into this grace in which we now stand. And we boast in the hope of the glory of God. ³ Not only so, but we also glory in our sufferings, because we know that suffering produces perseverance; ⁴ perseverance, character; and character, hope. ⁵ And hope does not put us to shame, because God’s love has been poured out into our hearts through the Holy Spirit, who has been given to us.

⁶ You see, at just the right time, when we were still powerless, Christ died for the ungodly. ⁷ Very rarely will anyone die for a righteous person, though for a good person someone might possibly dare to die. ⁸ But God demonstrates his own love for us in this: While we were still sinners, Christ died for us.

⁹ Since we have now been justified by his blood, how much more shall we be saved from God’s wrath through him! ¹⁰ For if, while we were God’s enemies, we were reconciled to him through the death of his Son, how much more, having been reconciled, shall we be saved through his life! ¹¹ Not only is this so, but we also boast in God through our Lord Jesus Christ, through whom we have now received reconciliation.

…

¹⁸ Consequently, just as one trespass resulted in condemnation for all people, so also one righteous act resulted in justification and life for all people. ¹⁹ For just as through the disobedience of the one man the many were made sinners, so also through the obedience of the one man the many will be made righteous. ²⁰ The law was brought in so that the trespass might increase. But where sin increased, grace increased all the more, ²¹ so that, just as sin reigned in death, so also grace might reign through righteousness to bring eternal life through Jesus Christ our Lord.

Questions:

·         What does justification mean?

·         Why do we need to be “justified”?

·         How does justification happen?

·         What does justification lead to?

·         What does it look like every day?

Bonus Questions:

·         Can you think of hymns that help us sing about “justification”?

·         How does sanctification fit into the picture?

·     I said that “God has your back” when bad things happen. How do we experience God’s love when life falls apart?

Vacation Stories: Churches

Today is a Sunday, so here are some stories of the churches we went to.

Our first Sunday, we attended St. Patrick’s Cathedral, “mother church of the Archdiocese of Melbourne”. We had noticed the cathedral in our walks, often with tourists taking pictures. Beautiful grounds with some lovely magnolia flowers; a striking steeple, which became a landmark for us to find our way back to Nevin and Ali’s apartment; uncomfortable pews (designated by our hosts as the most uncomfortable they had experienced).

The morning mass was led by a Palestinian priest. Notable in our worship experience was the closing prayer – the Ave Maria chanted in Arabic, sounding similar to the Arabic I have heard used in the mosque in Winnipeg.

Our second Sunday, we attended St. Francis’ Church, billed as the oldest Catholic church in the Province of Victoria. The cantor was a woman, which our daughter-in-law told us is unusual. The priest reminded the parishioners to carry their belongings with them when they took communion – a reminder that this is a downtown church and one’s stuff is not safe left in the pew. We went to the church hall for tea and coffee when the service was done. One has the impression of a vibrant community in the heart of the city of Melbourne.

Our last Sunday was at St. Peter’s Anglican Church, more fully, “St. Peter’s Eastern Hill”. We realised immediately that we were not in a low church Anglican setting, as the trio of clergy wended their way to the front, scattering incense as they went. This is not a church for those with scent sensitivity!

St. Peter’s is definitely “Anglo-Catholic”, with some elements that would be unusual even in other high Anglican churches. The New Testament Scripture and Gospel were chanted rather than simply read – giving me a sense of connection to the way that Jews read the Torah using a set chanted melody. The responses included an excellent choir. Someone else might have found the music “too highbrow”, but I found it deeply stimulating. It was a wonderful time of worship.

St. Peter’s was also the scene of another serendipity. The sermon was given by a visiting preacher, Dean of Trinity College at the University of Melbourne. He turned out to have been Associate Dean of Tyndale UC and Seminary in Toronto, one of Providence’s sister schools in Canada, about 15 to 20 years ago. So the preacher knew Providence, and in this high Anglican scented setting with the chants of the psalms and scriptures in our ears, I found a colleague from the Canadian seminary scene.

We enjoyed our church contacts in Melbourne, but it was good to worship at home this morning. Steinbach Mennonite Church is home, and we are glad to be home.

God’s Mission: Our Mission

I am a missions professor. That’s what I do. The greatest danger this morning is that I will try to say everything I have been teaching for the past 22 years in one short sermon. A bad idea! At least I have to begin with what the words “mission/missions” mean. They come from the Latin word for “sending”. In the New Testament the same word occurs in Greek as “apostle”. The apostles were missionaries – sent ones, sent by God to their world. God sends us also into the world as God’s people. In John 21, Jesus said to the disciples, “As the Father sent me into the world, I am sending you.” We are sent both as God’s representatives and in the way that God entered our world as the Incarnate Son.

From the beginning of Scripture to the end, God’s people are called from every nation and sent to every nation. Paul puts it this way, “God was in Christ, reconciling the world to God’s self, and God has given to you and me the ministry and message of reconciliation” (my paraphrase from 2 Corinthians 5).

To put it another way, God sends us into the world around us as a reconciling people. We are Christ’s hands and feet and voice to all those we meet. In Martin Luther’s words, each one of us is a “little Christ”. Together we are the presence of Christ in the world. A key point in this overarching statement is that it applies to everyone. There are no barriers in the Reign of God.

This morning, I want to reflect on this basic theme by looking at Genesis 12 and the call of Abram and Sarai, Matthew 28 and what we call “the Great Commission”, and Revelation 7 with its picture of God’s people at the end of all things. A common theme in all these passages is that we are God’s people for the sake of all people on earth, now and forever.

Genesis 12: 1 to 5

The call of Abram and Sarai is sometimes thought of as the beginning of missions. God calls them to follow because humankind had rebelled against God. This call is the beginning of God’s work to reconcile humankind to the eternal Godhead. There is much here that we will not treat this morning – such as the contrasting parallels with chapter 11 (contrast “Let us build, let us make a name for ourselves” with “I [God] will build you, I [God] will make a name for you”). Rather I will focus in on one main point.

We see that Abram was already part of a nomadic family, which had moved from “Ur of the Chaldeans” to Harran, on their way to Canaan. Ur was southeast of Babylon, close to the Persian Gulf in modern Iraq. If the text means for us to think of Babylon when we read about Babel in Genesis 11, Abraham’s ancestors moved southeast from Babylon towards the Gulf. Abraham’s father, Terah, set out from Ur to move to Canaan (Genesis 11: 31), but settled in Harran instead. Harran is northwest of Babylon and Ur, following the great rivers of that land almost to their source. It lies just within the modern state of Turkey.

God called Abraham and Sarah to finish the journey that Terah began and follow the road southwest into the land of Canaan. The story of that journey and its results takes up much of the book of Genesis, but I want to emphasize the accompanying promise God made Genesis 12: 2-3,

I will make you into a great nation, and I will bless you; I will make your name great, and you will be a blessing. I will bless those who bless you, and whoever curses you I will curse; and all peoples on earth will be blessed through you.

More issues to mention briefly and then leave alone: The place of blessing and cursing; the way that these people therefore represent God; and so on. In all these ideas I see one overarching idea: That God is using Abraham to bring God’s blessing to “all peoples on earth”. Who are “all peoples”? At the beginning of the promise, God says that Abraham and Sarah will be the first parents of a great “nation”. This seems to be a larger category than “peoples of the earth”. The difference is like the difference between Canada and the Randolph Peters. Sometimes the phrase, “the peoples on earth”, is translated as “the families of the earth”.

I see three simple points here.

One: We are individuals who always belong to a group. No one is a full person in isolation. Anyone who is cut off from all others is unhappy and alienated. Fully human life is lived together in community.

Two: Every community finds its fullest joy in God’s blessing. Indeed, salvation here appears to be directed first towards the group. We are saved in community and for community.

Three: There is no one left out of God’s plan – no individual and no group of people. God wants all people to receive God’s blessing. God wants everyone to be saved.

This emphasis on “everyone” – every individual and every people group – is what we carry forward as we turn to Matthew 28.

Matthew 28: 16 to 20

We usually call this brief passage that concludes Matthew’s gospel, “The Great Commission.” Again, there are many important themes we will mention and then leave aside. The commission is set up by the location, a mountain in Galilee to which Jesus had directed them. Evidently, Jesus wanted to echo the way that Moses went up the mountain to receive the Law. This commission is part of “Christ’s Law”.

Then, Jesus reminds them of his authority. He is the King of the Universe. The theme of Jesus’ rule over all runs throughout Matthew’s Gospel from beginning to end. Jesus’ exercises this authority in giving the mandate that follows. The actual command is to make disciples. The setting for the command is the lives of the disciples: “As you go, wherever you go, make disciples.” The content of discipling is the invitation to join God’s family (“baptizing”) and the commitment to obedience (“teaching them to obey whatever Jesus commands”).

Sometimes we stop there. We hear the commission and emphasize the necessity of witness and invitation and obedience, but Jesus did not stop there. Jesus includes the scope of our missionary mandate: “Make disciples of all peoples.” The word that Jesus used for “peoples” could be translated as “Gentiles”. In Matthew 10, during his earthly ministry, Jesus used the same word to restrict his own ministry: “Go nowhere among the Gentiles, but go only to the Lost Sheep of Israel.” Now, at the end of his ministry, Jesus lifts the exclusion: Go to the Gentiles also. Make disciples of the Gentiles also.

It is hard for us to see how revolutionary this extension of the gospel to Gentiles was. The boundary between “God’s Chosen People” and all the rest was strong in the Jewish identity. In times of strength and peace, the people might be open to outsiders – such as Ruth, Moabite woman, who was brought into Boaz’ family in the book of Ruth. In times of danger, such as the Return from the Exile recorded in Ezra and Nehemiah, they were not open to outsiders of any kind. Ezra the priest forced those who had married non-Gentile wives to send their wives away. Those outsiders could not be part of God’s People.

Now Jesus removes the boundary decisively and forever. No one needs to remain outside God’s blessing. No one is automatically excluded. Everyone, which really means everyone, is invited to God’s Banquet. Here the blessing extended through Abraham and Sarah and their descendants is fulfilled within the church.

Revelation 7: 9 to 17

This brings us to our third passage, a vision of the end of time. John portrays events in human history, showing both their earthly appearance and their heavenly or spiritual reality. So, in chapter 6 we read about the fifth seal:

⁹ When he opened the fifth seal, I saw under the altar the souls of those who had been slain because of the word of God and the testimony they had maintained. ¹⁰ They called out in a loud voice, “How long, Sovereign Lord, holy and true, until you judge the inhabitants of the earth and avenge our blood?” ¹¹ Then each of them was given a white robe, and they were told to wait a little longer, until the full number of their fellow servants, their brothers and sisters, were killed just as they had been.

Chapter 7 does not present a subsequent scene, but rather we see the lives of John’s readers from a different perspective. Both chapters describe, not future history, but the readers’ present experience. In chapter 6, we see the results of persecution, “the souls of those who had been slain”. In chapter 7, they are described as “they who have come out of the great tribulation”.

I see no benefit in trying to work out time schemes and predict when some event called “the great tribulation” will occur. This is rather a description of life here on this earth as servants of the Living God. In 2 Corinthians 6: 9-10 (NEB), Paul describes us as “the unknown men whom all men know; dying we still live on; disciplined by suffering, we are not done to death; in our sorrows we have always cause for joy; poor ourselves, we bring wealth to many; penniless, we own the world.” This description captures the scene in Revelation 7.

Again, I want to emphasize one theme only from this description. “I saw a great crowd of every nation and kindred and people and tongue.” With great force, John picks up the description from Genesis 12 (“all families of the earth”) and Matthew 28 (“even the Gentiles! – All of them”), and he spells out what “everyone” means: People from every country, people from ethnic group, people from every social group, people from every language on earth. Everyone!

Synthesis

This description could be the poster verse for any conversation on diversity. From it, I take one simple lesson: The church is meant to include everyone. In the first sermon I preached from this pulpit, I said that there is something about being Christian that breaks down barriers and includes everyone. I believed it then, and I believe it now.

Missions is the life blood of the church because we are always in danger of turning into our own little community, unintentionally excluding those not like us. When that happens, we become only a social group, a sub-culture within the larger society. God wants us to be open, inviting everyone, always reaching out to those who do not know God and participating in Christ’s great work of reconciling the world to God.

What Does This Look Like?

We are in a three-part series on missions. Next Sunday, Dorothy Fontaine can give us more of a picture of what our participation in God’s mission looks like, but I will begin today with four simple observations.

1. Missions begins with the people around us. We look around us for those who are experiencing alienation from God and from other people, and then we reach out to them as the mouth and hands and feet of Jesus. (I am relying on Paul’s description of mission in 2 Corinthians 5: God has given us the ministry and message of reconciliation.)

We naturally reach out to those who look like us and think like us. We grew out of the migrations of Russian Mennonites to Canada in the late 1940s. People who share that experience fit well with us, but Scripture emphasizes the reach of the gospel to everyone. In being God’s reconciling people, we look also for people who do not look or act just like us. The only requirement is that they are people whom God loves and we know.

Our SCO is a good example of such outreach. We reach out to the people around us, wherever they are in their lives, and together we become community.

2. Missions includes people across the oceans, as far away as you can imagine. I have friends in Egypt and in United Arab Emirates. I know people from Ukraine and from New Zealand. Any place you can imagine, God is there and God wants the people there to experience reconciliation. God calls all of us to minister to the people closest to us, and God calls some of us to go far away as Christ’s reconciling agents.

[Here I talked about some of our own missionaries: Descriptions omitted online.]

3. Missions is a group ministry. You notice the group language in all three texts. God normally calls God’s people to mission in community. We go as community, and we call people into community. Our lives together as God’s people is at the heart of mission.

4. This fact leads to the relationship between nurture and evangelism. We don’t have time to develop this relationship, but I will say this much. The Great Commission begins in worship (v. 17) and ends in our intimate relationship with Christ (v.20). We can say it briefly: Revival is the engine of missions. You cannot give what you do not have, and when you are filled with God’s Spirit, you cannot keep from sharing what you have with everyone around you.

Emil Brunner once said, “The Church exists by mission, just as a fire exists by burning. Where there is no mission, there is no church; and where there is neither Church nor mission, there is no faith.” (Brunner was Swiss theologian who could have said it in German, which would sound even more impressive.) Think of that. It fits well with the texts we read. If people around us do not receive God’s blessings through us, we fall short of being God’s Church. If we do not invite people around us to Jesus, we fall short of being God’s Church. If our fellowship does not reflect the diversity of the world around us, we fall short of being God’s Church.

Many years ago, the founder of Operation Mobilization, George Verwer, recited a parody of the old hymn, “Onward Christian Soldiers.” Here is part of what he said:

Like a mighty tortoise moves the Church of God;

Brothers we are treading where we’ve always trod.

We are much divided, many bodies we,

Having many doctrines, not much charity.

Of course, this is a parody. The original hymn is what Verwer wanted us to hear, and it is what I would call us to as well.

Like a mighty army moves the church of God,

Brothers we are treading where the saints have trod.

We are not divided, all one body we.

One in hope and doctrine. One in charity.

God calls us to move forward in love and community, united by God’s Spirit, and blessing everyone we meet. May it be so.

Steinbach Mennonite Church

12 May 2019