Mission, Vision, Values: Matthew 28:16-20
Trinity Sunday
Now the eleven disciples went to Galilee, to the mountain to which
Jesus had directed them. 17 When they saw him, they worshiped him, but they
doubted. 18 And Jesus came and said to them, “All
authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me. 19 Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing
them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit 20 and
teaching them to obey everything that I have commanded you. And remember, I am with you always, to the end of the age.” (NRSVue)
A congregant said to a colleague of
mine once that she clearly needed to have some extra training as a pastor
because the congregation wasn’t growing.
My colleague asked what the congregant was doing to grow in their own
faith and the person looked at her with scorn; the purpose of a pastor is to
grow a church, they said, and to make sure there were people to step up to take
over leadership roles when that person and their friends decided to step
down. In the mind of the congregant, the
mission of the church was self-replication.
“Now the eleven disciples went to
Galilee,” Matthew writes, and it matters in all Scripture readings that we put
them in context but it matters tremendously here. Although we celebrated Pentecost and the
gifting of the Holy Spirit last week, we’re going back in time a bit. Five verses before today’s reading, the
newly-risen Jesus told Mary Magdalene and the other women as they ran back from
the empty tomb to send everyone on to Galilee to meet Him there. “Do not be afraid,” Jesus said, because Jesus
was always saying that and God is always saying that and I can’t be the only
one who wishes God would stop saying “don’t” and start saying “no I totally get
it, fear makes sense here.” “Do not be
afraid…there [in Galilee] they will see me.”[1]
At least a couple of days have passed since
that promise and now the eleven disciples have gone to Galilee—eleven. Professor Stanley Saunders writes, “Matthew
introduces elements into the story that challenge the apparently triumphal
character of this scene. There are not twelve disciples with Jesus, but eleven,
a reminder not only of the absence of Judas but, implicitly, of the betrayals
in which the eleven also participated. Matthew also notes that their initial
response to the presence of the risen Jesus is a mixture of worship and doubt.”[2]
This text, especially verse 19 in
which Jesus tells the disciples to go, is commonly known as the Great
Commission. It’s a passage often used to
say that the mission of the Church is to go out and convert the world to
Christianity, often understood to include whatever means necessary. Clearly, some say, it is of paramount
importance that Jesus takes this post-resurrection moment to make sure the disciples
know what they are meant to do: go out and make other disciples, just like them. If that’s true, the mission of the Church is
self-replication, just like that one congregant said.
Our sermon series here at Ann Arbor First spent the whole of the
Easter season talking about that dreaded “e” word, evangelism, acclimating us
to the reality that it doesn’t always have to be chucking Bibles at people and
telling them how sinful they are. We were
reminded that we are called to tell the story of our faith as though we’re not
ashamed to hold it, as though we’re committed to learning how deep it runs for
ourselves, as though we want to understand how praying the Lord’s Prayer and
advocating in the House of Representatives are connected and true. I’m aware that coming in after all that
conversation with this of all texts may have some of you running for the nonexistent
Midwestern hills yelling, “I knew it! I
knew it was a trap!”
It’s not a trap. It is an invitation to think about why we tell
that story. As we shift into the
months-long season of Ordinary Time in which we take time away from the major
holy days to learn about and observe the church being itself in the world, I
wanted to take the time to look at this commissioning text as mission, as vision,
and as values. When I was working
through my MBA, these three things were in nearly every class I took because no
organization will get anywhere if they aren’t clear on what their mission, vision,
and values are. There must be a
direction; there have to be boundaries where the organization will not go;
there must be a purpose, clearly communicated, so that everyone knows why and
how they are part of that organization and its mission.
Church, please tell me you know our
mission can’t be self-replication.
“Go therefore and make disciples of
all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the
Holy Spirit and teaching them to obey everything that I have commanded you”. In The United Methodist Church, we’ve
distilled this into a mission of “making disciples of Jesus Christ for the
transformation of the world.” But what
does Jesus mean? Am I really about to
send all of you out to State Street and tell you to baptize whoever stands still
long enough and make them recite the Golden Rule?
(Don’t worry, I’m not.)
Just as we need to put today’s reading into context, we need to put
this command into context. Before saying
“go,” Jesus says, “All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me.” It is the first thing Jesus has said since “they
will meet me there.” It is the first
thing we read after learning that the disciples are worshipping and
doubting, that there are eleven where there should have been twelve, that the
whole concept of Church is falling apart before it even gets off the
ground. “All authority in heaven and on
earth has been given to me” says this Man Who defeated death, Who barreled
through the might of Rome and lived to talk about it, Who waited in Galilee
because He promised He would. All authority,
which means that whatever comes out of Jesus’ mouth next will not be swayed by
the disciples’ doubt or their fickleness or their grief or their assumptions
about profit or butts in seats. All authority,
which means that “go” comes with power, with a pointed awareness that nothing
on earth can touch the will of Heaven.
Professor Susan Hylen writes, “The passage is…a strong statement of
the authority of the risen Jesus. The word ‘therefore’ in ‘Go therefore and
make disciples’ suggests that the action of making disciples results from the
previous verse…Jesus’ instructions result from the authority he possesses.” When Jesus says to go and baptize, He does so
knowing that the disciples are grounded in His own connection to God’s promise of
family, of love, of belonging, and that no power can override that. Hylen continues, “Although baptism has not
been mentioned since Matthew 3, in that context John the Baptist connected
Jesus’ authority to judge with baptism. John pointed to one ‘more powerful than
I’ who ‘will baptize you with the Holy Spirit and fire. His winnowing fork is
in his hand, and he will clear his threshing floor and will gather his wheat
into the granary; but the chaff he will burn with unquenchable fire’ (3:11-12).”[3] Jesus does not say “go and baptize and teach
and we’ll talk about how that works later;” He says “go, for My authority goes
with you.”
When Jesus calls to His disciples and tells them to go and make
more disciples, He isn’t interested in self-replication because He does not need
more people to make sure He is powerful enough.
Let me repeat that: Jesus, Who
has all authority in heaven and on earth, does not need us to make sure that
the Church is powerful or profitable or that enough disciples are being made to
cover the mortgage payment or the vacant trustee spot. These things proceed from the mission to go;
they are not, cannot be the mission itself or we lose the incredible gift of
Christ’s authority. Jesus is not
interested in copies but in changemakers, in doubting fools who come to Galilee
even when they don’t understand because Jesus knows that no amount of uncertainty
will undermine His work of moving heaven and earth into the alignment intended
for them. Go, He says, go,
therefore, and make disciples and baptize them and teach them what I have
taught you: to remember every person’s
humanity, to stand with the marginalized, to refuse judgment that comes out of
power and shaming, to forgive even the ones who leave us alone in the hour of
death, to eat with the ones planning to kill us, to refuse silence in the face
of oppression, to set boundaries in care of ourselves, to choose kindness, to
honor God, to love, to love, to love.
These are our values, Church!
These are what undergird the mission to go out into the world, not to
forcibly bend it to our doctrine but to fling wide the doors to this magnificently
weird experiment called faith. It is not
and never was ours to build the Church, to remake heaven as earth, because
Jesus had the authority to bring earth to heaven and did not give us the mission
of self-replication or of power. “All authority
in heaven and on earth has been given to me,” which means we don’t need to
fight for it, or fear for it, or force anyone into it. We as Christians have centuries of
harm in doing exactly that because we have missed, over and over, what comes after
the Great Commission: “And remember,
I am with you always, to the end of the age.”
Today is Trinity Sunday in the liturgical calendar of the Church, which
is always a bit of a mess of a day. The
Episcopalian Rev. Dr. Marshall Jolly writes, “Trinity Sunday is the only day of
the entire church year that is devoted exclusively to a doctrine—which is never
mentioned by name in Scripture. Preachers
must use caution and craft careful language to avoid the minefields of heresy.”[4] The Trinity is the Christian doctrine that
God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit—or, if you like, God as Creator,
Redeemer, and Sustainer, or any number of other names anchored in beginning, human,
and advocate—are one and the same God.
We are not polytheists with three separate gods but Christ-followers who
understand Christ to be a person of three face.
It’s a weird doctrine because it makes no metaphysical or mathematical
sense, but that’s the point. Martin
Luther is variously quoted as saying, “To try to deny the Trinity endangers
your salvation; to try to comprehend the Trinity endangers your sanity.”
We take one day a year to honor this doctrine not because Jesus sat
His disciples down to explain multiphasic theology but because Jesus said, “I will
be with you.” Rev. Dr. Jolly writes, “When
we think about the Trinity abstractly, it is ever so easy to forget that the
central tenet of our faith is not just that we are created by God, but that God
walks among us, most fully in the person of Jesus, and also in the face of the
stranger and the oppressed and the marginalized, and God leads us to new depths
of faithfulness in the power of the Holy Spirit…The Trinity gives us perhaps
the most complete understanding of what God is like: God creates us purely out
of God’s love and desire for relationship; relentlessly pursues us, even
stepping in to offer to die so that we might live; and abides with us.”[5]
Eleven disciples stood together in Galilee and worshipped and doubted
and were not twelve; eleven disciples heard that Jesus had been given all the
authority; eleven disciples were told to go, baptize, and teach; eleven disciples
were promised that they would never be alone in the journey of telling the story
of a God so in love with creation that Jesus lived and died and lived again,
that the Spirit came with tongues of fire to make a statement in no uncertain
terms and every single language that God was there, is here, will be ever-present
and always alive.
This is our mission, Church: not to break the world around our understanding
of God but to allow ourselves to be remade into God’s understanding of us. It is our mission to go out and be the ones
who have heard that love is not a religion but a difficult and beautiful choice,
a core value, a guiding vision of a world in which all are welcome, all are valued,
all are seen and heard and recognized as holy creations of a bafflingly
three-in-one and one-in-three God. It is
our mission to go into the world, into all of our highways and byways, and say
to others that I met a Man in Galilee, in Jerusalem, in Ann Arbor, and He
changed my life. It is our mission to
remember that God is with us to the end of the age, even when we doubt, even
when we are brokenhearted by what the world has become and by how much of that
damage is what we Christians have done and how we are constantly being invited to
make a different world as it is in heaven.
This is our mission: to go, therefore, in the name of the Father, and of
the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.
Will you take up the mission, child of God?
Comments
Post a Comment