Or Listen Here after reading the scripture.
Mt. 10:16-23
Mt 28:16-20
The Great Commission
16 Now the eleven disciples went to Galilee, to the mountain to which Jesus had directed them. 17 And when they saw him they worshiped him, and doubted. 18 And Jesus came and said to them, “All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me. 19 Therefore, as you go make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, 20 teaching them to observe all that I have commanded you. And behold, I am with you always, to the end of the age.”
Our own Chuck Sparks this week
returned from a mission trip and related a quote from his brother… “The people
of the Way need to GO away sometimes.” And indeed we do. This morning, we read the words of the Great
Commission… My seminary professor and New Testament scholar, Francis
Taylor-Gench helped us translate this passage one day. The grammar rules are tricky, but most Bibles
translate this badly in her opinion, and I agree. They often translate the verb GO as the
command. However, GO is the
assumption. Make disciples and baptize
are the commands. It’s best translated
as I read it… Therefore, AS YOU GO, make disciples of all nations. There is no IF. It’s a WHEN.
It’s a foregone conclusion. And
so is the title of this book by Dr. Seuss.
The title is not, “Oh, the Places You Could Go,” “Oh, the Places You Should Go,” or “All, the
Things that Could Happen to You.” The
title is, “Oh, the Places You WILL Go.”
Seuss is sending this “kid,” as
he calls ‘im into the world… just as Christ sent the disciples, and sends
us. Jesus turns to his disciples and he
does not say, “build a church here,
advertise, promote, start amazing outreach and Christian education, a great
youth program and be super friendly and hospitable to everyone who walks in the
door.” Not that those are bad things,
and I’ve been asked to tell you not to cancel your pledge this year. But Jesus doesn’t indicate that some of them have “gifts for evangelism”
or “talents for reaching the unloved and forgotten.” He says to ALL of them, “Therefore, AS YOU
GO…”
And folks, this is a great
challenge for us. It means that we can’t
just be Christians here in these walls or even just here in Denver. Who here has sung “This Little Light of Mine?” Raise your hand. And what do we do with this light? Do we hide it under a bushel? NO! We
put it on a stand. But having that
light, shining that light, being that
light is more than just setting a fine example.
It requires a kind of proactive approach. It requires us to ask God for opportunities,
to seek needs, to be wise enough to spot them and courageous enough to act. Oh the places, you’ll go.
If you’re the person at work or
in your school who is kind to everyone you meet and a good spirit, always doing
what is right, you’re someone deserving of much respect. Truly.
But Jesus came to challenge us to more.
At Highlands Camp this summer, the kids are learning about
parables. In the Gospel of Luke, Jesus
tells parables of lost sheep, lost coins and the lost prodigal son. He tells us that his mission here on earth is
to seek and save the lost. This is our mission. In our places of work, in our schools, in our
homes, our communities and churches, we are called to look for those in need,
to seek and save the lost.
Sometimes I challenge the
children or youth with who I work to spend all day or all week looking for
someone in their life who is lost, lonely or excluded. This is the person who needs them to reach
out to them. Maybe they are sitting next
to you right now. Who is that person for
you? Who is the person who makes your
life most difficult? Is that the person
you pray for the most? Should it
be? These are the lost. These are the ones in need. We are called to find and welcome those in
our midst. And we are called to go
and be in the midst of those in need.
Oh, the Places We’ll
Go! For we are called into this world…
into the midst of all need. As I began
reading this book again, something new hit me.
Seuss illustrates the “wide open air” with the little kid wandering out down
streets that crisscross bare open patches of grass and earth. This is exactly what it looked like in
Joplin, Missouri as we drove through the neighborhoods demolished by the
tornado, streets that crisscrossed bare patches of yards where houses once
stood.
And Seuss tells us we’ll come to
places where the streets are not marked, that “some windows are lighted, but
mostly they’re darked.” In Joplin, once
the debris was cleared, they had to spray paint the names of streets on the
pavement because life-long residents could not tell where they were in
town. Landmarks had been erased. So many homes still standing were abandoned,
and “darked.” He follows this with the
questions of self-doubt… do you go in, stay out, how do you approach such a
problem, how do you help? So, we
“mind-maker-uppers” end up… in the waiting
place.
So the question we must face is…
Is our church a Waiting Place? Is our
church, as indicated by the banner above our children’s education hallway
downstairs… A Church on the Move? Or is our church a place where we wait for
needs to manifest, for committees to report the needs out there so that we can
react, a place where overwhelming need paralyzes us into inaction? What does Seuss say? And I quote, “NO! That’s not for you!” You see, we have places to go.
And the wisdom we learn from
Seuss is no different than the many warnings of scripture we get from
Jesus. It’s not all boom bands. “Behold, I send you as sheep amidst the
wolves!” Splendid. We’ll meet up with things that “scare you
right out of your pants.” Things “down
the road between hither and yon that will scare you so much you won’t want to
go on.” And brothers and sisters, there
is no shortage of such scary things in this world. The road between Hither and Yon is as close
as Shoreline Boulevard. Our community
was once again rocked by violence, something so scary that no one could be
blamed for not wanting to go on.
Oh, the places you’ll go. The wolves that lurk, the Hakken-Kraks of
Denver and Aurora and all the places we call home where our “enemies prowl,”
they scare us out of our pants. And
neither “brains in our head and feet in our shoes,” nor belief in the God who
seeks and saves us, is a guarantee that we won’t have to face these scary
people or terrifying and heartbreaking circumstances. But
Jesus never sends the disciples out alone.
He sends them in pairs. He sends
them as a community to “love one another” as he loved us. And he sends them with the gift of his
presence and help and comfort… the Holy Spirit.
In life and death, we belong to Jesus Christ. And though we’ll hike far, “we’ll face up to
our problems whatever they are.”
Because, as believers, we are promised that we are never alone, that
Christ is with us, “even to the end of the age.” In fact, we’re told in capital letters, “KID, YOU’LL MOVE MOUNTAINS!” For if we have the faith of a mustard seed,
we will say to a mountain, “move,” and it’ll toss itself in the sea. And it’s no coincidence that Jesus calls us
all children of God and that Seuss writes a book for children AND adults and
the protagonist is merely called, “Kid.”
Dr. Seuss doesn’t tell us that
Hakken-Kraks aren’t real. He says we can
still go on. G.K. Chesterson once said
that, “Fairy tales do not tell children that dragons exist. Children already
know that dragons exist. Fairy tales tell children the dragons can be defeated.” We do not read God’s word to learn how hard
this world will be to face each day. We
know. We read scripture and we teach our
children God’s Word because God’s promise is that we will never face anything
alone. We are called by God to go into
the world in the same breath as the promise that we do not ever walk alone. And that is good news when the darkest times
come, when we face tragedy, when we face evil.
God sends us to be the arms of comfort in mourning. He sends us to be the voice of reason spoken
to anger and hatred. He sends us as the
voice of inclusion and help when people are so anguished that they seek to hurt
others. And he does not send us… alone.
Oh, the places you’ll go. Jesus calls us to respond, not just to
comfort those who mourn, but to seek those who are in pain before they do
desperate things. I do not know if Jesus
had a public policy plan that included laws to prevent bullying and violence or
medical care to lepers and the possessed or taxes for the wealthy and the tax
collectors to help the poorest and the downtrodden. I don’t know.
But I do know he exemplified a life of kindness, mercy, generosity, and
servanthood, loving all and ignoring none.
And we cannot be content to leave that responsibility to anyone
else. We are called to that life and
called now. We are called to move mountains and told that
we can.
Oh, the places we’ll go. Anyone who has ever been to the Holy Land has
done some sort of “walking in the footsteps of Jesus” tour. His ministry was a journey. Early believers were not called Christians
right away, but were called followers of “The Way.” The early founders of the Church were not
called ministers, priests, rulers or Jedis – much to my disappointment. They were called Apostles, a word that comes
from the Greek for one who is sent. Jesus begins his ministry after his baptism
being driven into the desert, calls his disciples to leave their lives, and
sends them out in the great commission.
We are not students of Rabbi Jesus, studiers of the Prophet of Nazareth
or students of the school of the Nazarene.
We are followers of Christ. And
the places he calls us to, the places he sends us, those are the places we will
go.
The places we’ll go may be
around the world to Haiti or Russia, across the country Joplin or Galveston,
across town to New Genesis or across the room to the person sitting alone. The places we’ll go may be hospitals or
shelters, schools or prisons, to homes or to the homeless. They may be in these walls, but they will
probably be to the person you didn’t notice until God tugged on your sleeve or
on your heart and dragged you outside your comfort zone and into someone else’s
pain, loneliness or problems.
I’m
going to suggest something radical and maybe uncomfortable. I’m going to suggestion that there is great
opportunity this week and in the weeks to come.
I’m going to challenge you to consider that we need to do more
than comfort those affected by the tragedy in Aurora. I’m going to challenge you to seek and to
reach out to the lost. I think it’s
incredibly likely that each of you has someone in your life in deeper pain than
you know, or someone with bigger struggles than anyone knows, or someone who
just needs to know they aren’t alone, that help is there. I’m going to tell you that God can and will
show you those people, if you ask. I’m
going to tell you that you can help, that you can love, that you can save lives
and change this world. And I’m going to
implore you to trust God to move in your life this way.
Oh,
the places you’ll go… they might not look or feel like any of the places you’ve
been. They may be scary. They may be monumentally challenging. The problems we face are quite scary and
large, and to fix them we must listen to the big guy in charge. He has sent us his Spirit while he is away,
so let’s move our mountain and get on our way.
Amen.
