Okay, we don't mean to alarm you, but there is a chance that you might just sleep in this Sunday. That is because Sunday the 11th is the first day of Daylight Savings time in 2018. If you don't adjust your clocks, your alarm might not go off and might just not make it to church at St. Andrew's Hespeler and believe us, you won't want to miss it. Why? Well...
It is the fourth Sunday in Lent and we will continue our journey towards the wonders and marvels of Easter. We continue to reflect on the teaching of A Catechism for Today which turns, this week, towards the all-important idea of a covenant.
People have been working on some incredible music for this service including
A beautiful arrangement of Pachelbel's Canon by the Adult choir accompanied by Zoé McAndless on the violin
A duet by Heather & Corey
A duet (The old Rugged Cross) by Ray & Bob
The sermon will focus on the meaning and application of covenant to our Christian lives:
O give thanks to the Lord, for he is good, for his steadfast love endures forever!
In Malawi there is not much hope. There is disease, corruption and famine; no education and misery ride tall among the residents there. But there is a compassionate God that has given us plenty and with this plenty we can share and bring a better way of life to the Malawian people. Please consider those who go without their entire lives and find out more about this mission; God’s mission given to us. For more information go to: http://presbyterian.ca/pwsd/
I am announcing our spring 2018 order window for meat pies and soups. Order forms will be available from April 3rd until April 21, 2018 for the delicious offerings you have come to know.
I thank you for your continued support of this program that, is now in its 3rd year and has raised in excess of $3,360 since 2016. 100% of these monies have been used in our quest to achieve sustainable financing.
Session opened many continuing missions in 2015-2016 to offset expenses that were threatening our continued operation. Over a few years we have been blessed buy the efforts of many opening "giving doors of opportunity" and endowments that have created change. In addition, subtle changes in the staffing and operations has also been instrumental to more changes. You should know, that last year's fiscal results saw the deficit for 2017 was reduced to almost zero. A marked change that is welcome and quite remarkable compared to many churches.
Session was challenged to make changes and I think that the results speak for themselves. The path forward has been difficult, but with God's providence, some astute decisions and the support of the congregation we are in a much better place than one would expect in 2018. Thank you for the support.
hey had grasped her by the arms and by the legs and then dragged her through the streets little caring that her clothes were being ripped and torn away from her. Frankly a number of them took advantage of the situation by ogling the exposed portions of her body that would normally never be seen in public. A few of them were even so bold as to take advantage of her vulnerability by reaching out to touch what should have been off limits.
It was fine. They were sure that it was fine because they were on a holy mission. They had taken her in a flagrant act of sin. They were protecting the community from her filth. Surely, if they took advantage just a little bit, it was only in a good cause.
They were looking for the popular preacher who had been seen around town recently – gathering large crowds and preaching all sorts of nonsense. He had been getting certain people in the community all worked up – treating them like they mattered or something and it had been causing trouble. They had decided to take the man’s popularity down a peg or two by forcing him to take a position on this clear matter of sin.
A cry went up from the men at the front of the mob. They had spotted the preacher. They soon had him cornered and forced the woman to stand on her feet in front of him. Their leader, a big ruffian, spoke for the group. “Teacher,” he said, “this woman was caught in the very act of committing adultery. Now in the law Moses commanded us to stone such women. Now what do you say?”
Now I think it is probably helpful to pause for a moment and try to understand what that mob was actually asking. They were accusing that woman of sin – the specific sin being, of course, adultery. And you may think that you know what they meant by that accusation, but it doesn’t mean exactly the same thing for us as it did for them. For us, adultery refers to some sort of marital infidelity, usually of a sexual nature. It is what we accuse someone of if they break their marriage vows.
It didn’t mean exactly that to them, which is kind of obvious when you think about it. For us, there are always two (or maybe more) people involved in adultery. It takes two to tango, as they say. But these men have brought only one “sinner” to be judged in this case. A lot of modern people react to this story by asking, “If she was taken in adultery, why did this gang just bring her for judgement to Jesus. Where is the guy? Why didn’t he get brought along too?
But the fact of the matter is that adultery wasn’t just a matter of infidelity between two persons to them. Marriage, for them, was not just something between two people. Marriage was about the larger family and, to a certain extent, the entire community. It was also very much about property with marriage being the prime method of transferring property between families. For that matter, the woman in a marriage was herself considered to be a piece of property.
You are all familiar, I imagine with the commandment that goes, “You shall not covet your neighbour’s house; you shall not covet your neighbour’s wife, or male or female slave, or ox, or donkey, or anything that belongs to your neighbour.” Well, you realize that that commandment is all about not trying to take your neighbour’s property away from him. And note that, in this context, a neighbour can only be a “him” because your neighbour’s wife is not your neighbour but obviously a piece of property that belongs to your neighbour. So a marriage, for them, was a property deal with the wife being just another piece of property.
And if that is the case, then adultery, for them, was as much a crime of theft as it was a matter of the breaking of any marriage vows. And what’s more, anything that a woman did to devalue herself as a piece of property could have been seen as an act of adultery.
What do I mean by that? Well, for example, before she became a piece of her husband’s property a woman was considered to be a piece of her father’s property and so he could give her, in marriage to whomever he chose. But what if she didn’t like her father’s choice? What if she rejected his choice and, horror of horrors, pledged herself in some way (and, yes, perhaps in some carnal way) to someone else. Well, that would have been to devalue herself as a piece of her father’s property. And it would have been to break the sanctity of the marriage vow because she, as a woman, was not considered competent to make any marriage vows by herself. So actually it was not all that uncommon for a woman to be accused of committing adultery all by herself.
All of this goes to illustrate, I hope, that questions of sin did not mean exactly the same to them as they do to us. For them, how you dealt with sin had much more to do with protecting the whole of society than with the concerns of the individual. That is why, of course, the response to sin that is proposed in this case – stoning someone to death – is a communal punishment. It is something that the entire community has to participate in because what she has done is seen as a threat to the entire community. She has threatened the very foundations of that community.
And so I have lots of problems with how this woman is being treated and judged in this passage. Basically she is being offered up as a kind of scapegoat for all of the problems, lacks and failures of her entire society. All of the failures of marriages in her society, all of the misery that powerless women are put through in their relationships, all of the men who act out their anger at their lot in life against weaker people than them (like women) – all of these failures and miseries produced by the society, these are being laid upon this woman. She must die to save the community because she has dared to challenge the rules of her society in some way. It is not right and I, like you, like all “civilized” modern people, bristle at what is being described in this passage.
Jesus, I am glad to say, bristles at it too. He agrees with you and me that this is not right. But you shouldn’t assume that his objection comes because he is looking at this issue as you would. Jesus, whatever else he was (and he was a whole lot else) was a man of his time.
You see, we, as modern people, would likely suggest a very modern resolution to this situation. We would likely say that this woman’s offence (if we saw it as an offense at all) was a personal matter – something to be worked out between her and her husband or whoever else she might have offended. We would likely not see any role for anyone else except, perhaps, some sort of mediator. We would certainly not see the rocks and stones of the entire community as a necessary remedy.
Jesus would agree that the stones are not going to solve anything, but his reasoning is quite different from what ours would be. Jesus does recognize that her sin is not just her own personal matter. It is something that affects and is a part of the community. In that he agrees with the people of his own time and with the overall view of the Bible regarding sin. But his response is that the traditional solution, which is collective punishment of the perceived offender, is not going to work. Why? Because we all participate in the sin.
That is what Jesus is referring to when he confronts the men in the mob by saying, “Let anyone among you who is without sin be the first to throw a stone at her.” He is not accusing them of any particular sin here. He is not saying that they have committed any particular offense much less the specific sin of adultery. Some of them may have, of course, and may feel some shame on a personal level, but Jesus is not seeking to shame them in that way. He is saying something significantly different. He is taking sin seriously and is not denying that it is a threat to the community, but he is rejecting the traditional response to sin which has been to say that we can just find someone to shame and punish to expiate the sin and be done with it. Jesus challenges us to look at the problem differently, to see how we are all participants in it.
How should we deal with the issue of sin in the church today? There are some Christians, I know, who are just like the mob in this gospel story. They want to be seen as tough on sin and they love to pick out particular types of sinners in order to shame them. Ironically, just like the men in the story, they never seem to pick those whose sin is greed or pride or the use of power to subjugate others. No, they prefer to ignore those sins (which are heartily denounced in the Bible) in order to find some sinner who can be accused of something else, something that seems worse to them because it is sexual in nature. They then focus on shaming that person or group of people as a way of making themselves feel that they are righteous. That is an approach to sin that I see Jesus roundly rejecting in this passage.
There is another approach that some Christians take that may lead to them to being accused of being soft on sin. Some Christians even desire to be seen that way. I don’t think that is the approach that Jesus takes in this story either. He takes the sin seriously, but he is not willing to use shame – especially not on the the individual – the woman. He knows how ineffective shaming is and that it often twists and even destroys those it is deployed against.
But even more important than that, he understands that it is never as simple as blaming one person. The choices made by individuals are never taken in isolation. They are often forced or constrained by others – by the flaws in the society itself that deprives people of income or forces them into unhealthy relationships. Jesus asks us all, as he asks the men in this story, to examine the ways in which we participate in the flawed society that has a penchant for creating ever more victims.
And we do. We participate in the capitalistic system – a good system in many ways, maybe even the best possible economic system, but one that nevertheless continues to create more losers than winners. We participate in activities that accelerate the destruction of the environment. We participate in a society that has a way of turning a blind eye to too much injustice, inequality and open racism and hatred.
I do not say this to shame anyone. I know that, in many ways, these things are just part of how the world works and that the world is flawed. You really don’t have much choice but to participate in these systems and that does affect each and everyone of us. But we all do participate and that is part of the problem. Our obsession with shaming others doesn’t help to make any of us any better.
Instead of shame, Jesus is looking for repentance – for change. Instead of finding a victim to blame, he is asking for an honest look at the things that we allow to go wrong in society. This is what Jesus is disturbed about and so should we be.
How seriously should we take sin? Very! How much should we invest in piling on those who are easy to blame for what goes wrong in society? We should give no energy or legitimacy to that. We should be gracious. We must look to ourselves first. Let the ones who do not participate in systems of injustice and unrighteousness be the first to cast a stone.
In Canada we take many things for granted: warm homes that shelter us from the elements, easily accessible food and clean water, a great education system and health care that looks after our needs. But in some places in the world like Malawi, there is barely any access to clean water; let alone the other necessities that are needed to survive and perpetuate their culture. We can make a difference! In April, 2 or our members are taking part in a PWS&D trip to Malawi. We look forward to hearing about how our donations to PWS&D are making a difference.
Church budgets tend to be a bit dry for everyone except those who get excited by numbers. That's why we set out to do a budget this year that reflects our passion and our calling to be the church
leven days ago, a young man walked into a school in Florida with an AR-15 rifle near the end of the school day. He pulled a fire alarm and started firing on students and teachers indiscriminately for about six minutes. By the time he dropped his pack and gun and left, 17 people were dead and 15 more wounded. It was an afternoon of bravery and terrible suffering on the school grounds with one teacher even putting his own body in front of his students. It was an afternoon of a million tears. And yet we as Christians proclaim, “The Lord is king forever and ever.” I have to ask: what kind of king stands by and watches something like that?
At the end of last September the tenth most powerful hurricane ever recorded in the Atlantic Ocean finally sputtered out. When that hurricane, named Maria, was near the peak of its strength, it had slammed into the island of Puerto Rico with unprecedented destructive power. The island, already destroyed by decades of economic neglect had seen almost all of its infrastructure destroyed including power, water and housing. In the immediate aftermath over sixty people died, but in the time since, the number has grown to well over a thousand. The legacy of Maria in Puerto Rico may well be an entire lost generation of potential. And yet we proclaim, “The Lord is king forever and ever.” What kind of king permits that to happen to his people?
A man shot a young aboriginal man at point blank range in the back of his head at a moment when neither he nor his family were in danger of violence and yet was found guilty of no crime. Yet we claim, “The Lord is king forever and ever.” Is not a king responsible to see that justice is done?
The list goes on and on. We could cite so many disasters and crimes and injustices that have happened over the last few months. They are all, in their own way, horrible and awful. And each one of them raises a challenge to us as people of faith. They are a challenge because we proclaim a God of providence – that is to say, a God who cares about this world and who seeks the good of the people who inhabit it. This is something that we affirm every time we say, “Thank God,” when something good happens or something bad is avoided. In fact, we are inclined to give God the credit for all sorts of great things.
But here is the problem: if God gets the credit for all the stuff that goes right, doesn’t he also have to take the blame for all of the stuff that goes wrong? I mean, how many times have you heard of someone who got into an accident – who was afraid that they might get killed or injured and just managed to come through it – and came through the other side full of praise and thanksgiving for the God who saved them. But if you are going to thank God for saving you through an accident, how can you possibly object if I were to blame God for the accident even happening in the first place, not to mention all of the other people who didn’t get saved or helped or healed in the midst of the accident or disaster.
With all of this in mind, I am glad to see the three questions that we have from A Catechism for Today today. The Catechism rightly speaks about God’s providence – about how God truly cares about the needs of his creatures and responds to them – and then goes on to consider God’s sovereignty – the recognition that God is in charge in this world which is actually something that makes God’s providence possible. But, most important of all, it recognizes that you cannot have those first two things – God’s providence and God’s sovereignty – without it raising very serious questions about the evil that exists in this world under God’s supposed benevolent watch.
So, the question is, why is there so much evil in this world? I appreciate the response to this question in the Catechism because it acknowledges right away that there are no simple or easy answers to that question. “Evil and suffering are a mystery and fill us with anguish.” Now, calling evil a mystery might seem like a cop-out, but compared to a lot of the other “answers” to the question of evil I have heard, it is actually not a bad answer at all.
Because, if you ask people – especially people of faith – that question, some of the answers you get are not as helpful as they seem at first. One of the answers you might get, for example, when you ask “Why do bad things happen,” is that some people will say, “Everything happens for a purpose.” That sounds good, of course, because it is always nice to think, even in a tragedy, that at least there is some purpose to it all. But the problem is that the purposes that people come up with often lead us to twist our view of God.
If we say that God permits evil as a way or testing us, for example, it turns God into some kind of mad scientist who is running these experiments on us – making us live through horrific experiences – simply as a way of discovering things about us. We require human scientists to design their experiments in humane ways, why wouldn’t we expect the same from God?
Sometimes people will try to justify God by saying that God allows the bad things to happen because he has plans to bring greater good out of them. But that argument tends to lead us into some kind of gruesome calculous – trying to outweigh history’s greatest evils with even greater good. Who would dare to go to the family of 17 people gunned down in a high school eleven days ago and suggest that anything – anything no matter how good – that happens as a result of that crime could possibly make up for what they have lost? (It is especially discouraging when you begin to fear that nothing at all will really change.)
Now, I realize that some might argue that our reading this morning from the Letter to the Romans is making the argument that God allows evil to bring about greater good. Paul writes, “We know that the whole creation has been groaning in labour pains until now.” He seems to be comparing the evil and trouble in this world to the pain that a woman goes through when she is delivering a child, pain that I cannot personally attest to but that certainly seems to be overwhelming in most cases.
He seems to be saying that, just as a woman will find the pain that she went through to be worthwhile once she holds her healthy child in her arms, we too will find that the evil of this world will have been worthwhile when we see what God is bringing into being.
In addition, Paul also writes a few verses later, “We know that all things work together for good for those who love God, who are called according to his purpose.” This has also been taken to mean much the same thing on the level of the personal lives of believers, that yes, God might allow bad things to happen to you personally but that you shouldn’t worry because God has a plan to bring even greater good out of that evil.
So, what it says in these passages does somewhat resemble the popular idea that God allows evil in order to bring about a greater good, but I do not think that that is exactly what they are saying. I don’t think that Paul is saying that God causes bad things to happen in order to bring about a greater good as much as he is saying that God works to bring about some good even in the evil that does happen. That is an important distinction that I would make.
You see, the Bible doesn’t really solve for us the mystery of the evil that is found in this world, but it does affirm something that is very important. The Catechism puts it this way: “In such a world – a world filled with too much evil – only a God who has entered into our sufferings can help.”
And I believe that that is what Paul is affirming in this passage. He doesn’t necessarily promise God will solve everything for you, but he does say that, “the Spirit helps us in our weakness; for we do not know how to pray as we ought, but that very Spirit intercedes with sighs too deep for words.” He is saying that, in very significant ways and even if we are feeling so lost that we don’t even know what to pray for, God will actually join us in our pain and anguish. God will not leave us alone and that makes all the difference.
Of course, for Christians, the moment when God most decisively entered into our suffering is the Jesus event. “As we ponder our Saviour upon the cross, we know that God is with us in our pain.” This is the central mystery of the Christian faith, that God would not stay safely at a distance and far removed from this world and its suffering and evil but would actually choose to enter into the muck and mire of this world. God didn’t need to, but God chose to experience everything that it means to be human by somehow becoming one of us in the person of Jesus Christ.
That is what the incarnation – the Christmas story and really the whole story of the life of Jesus is actually about. The wonder of it is not, as some suggest, that Jesus was somehow God. The true wonder is that God was somehow human – not just seeming human or pretend human but real human with everything that goes with that.
God does not promise that there will be no evil or suffering in this world. Neither does God offer to explain why the suffering and evil are even permitted. Maybe that is something that you will understand someday when you can look at this life from a completely different perspective, but, here and now, God doesn’t always answer the why question.
But God does promise one thing: he will not leave you alone in the suffering. He is with you in it – and not just in a handholding but insincere way (you know, like you sometimes get from people who listen to your tale of woe and say, “I know exactly how you feel,” when you know very well that they don’t). God is with you in it in the sense that he feels what you feel, knows the depths of your pain and loss. And that is only possible because of Jesus.
You know, it is ironic in some ways. We tend to look at the suffering of the innocent as the greatest evil that you can find in this world. A gunman walks into a school and guns down children who have never done anything to deserve such treatment. A hurricane strikes the countryside, destroying young and old, good and evil in its path. These things are taken by many people to be the greatest indication that God is not there or, if he is, God is not worth worshipping.
And, yes, those things are evils and great injustices. But, for Christians, the greatest proof that God exists and that God cares is in fact, a case of an innocent man who suffered unjustly. His name was Jesus, he didn’t deserve anything that happened to him. There was no redeeming good in the terrible violence that was committed against him on the Friday just before Passover. But there was love – the supreme demonstration of God’s love seen in God entering into our suffering and into the suffering of the innocent. And love changes things. Love brings hope and life and new beginnings.
I don’t have an explanation for why there is so much that is so wrong in this world. If I tried to offer you one, it would fall flat. It is a mystery. But so is hope, and love and life itself. And I will continue to worship a God who doesn’t answer all of the why questions but who isn’t afraid of entering into them with us either.
In the world there is much need, and unfortunately some people have the will but no way to change things for the better. This is the kind of situation that is in Malawi where they are being afflicted with poor education and famine. A child is lucky to make it to adulthood because of the circumstances in this country; but we can help. In April 2 of members are going to Malawi on a PWS&D trip. Please keep this trip and the participants in your prayers.
month ago, as you will remember, I had Andy Cann tell me what to preach about. He was given that privilege because he had the top bid in the auction last fall when I put up the right to name a sermon topic. There was also a second highest bid in that same auction and Jean Godin agreed to match Andy’s bid and be able to name a topic for this month.
And I like Jean, I really do. In fact, I know many people who would only too happily attest to what a wonderful person she is. But I am going to confess to you that there were a few times as I prepared for this morning’s sermon when I wondered whether or not she liked me. (Just kidding, Jean.) The topic that Jean chose was this: How do we live out the Great Commission today? On the surface it is a wonderful question, of course, something that gets to the heart of what the church is supposed to be. It’s just that when you really take the question seriously (as we should all such questions) it seems to raise some issues that make many fine upstanding Presbyterians (and other Christians) uncomfortable.
The Great Commission is a popular name for the passage that we read this morning from the Gospel of Matthew – in particular, the part where Jesus says, “All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me. 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.” For generations, Christians have taken those words as the clearest statement of the task that Jesus gives us. It is our commission – our assignment. And the traditional understanding of this assignment is that that we are to announce the basic message of the Christian gospel to people in every nation of the world, convert them to our faith and baptize them into the church. Since this is such a big job, it is called the Great Commission.
And, not all that long ago, Christians would have probably felt quite fine with the idea that our main job as Christians was simply to go out there and preach the gospel to everyone in the whole world, make them Christians and bring them into the fold of the church. But many Christians are not quite so comfortable with that whole line of thinking these days. Part of the reason for that is that, in former times, Christians only had to deal with other Christians for the most part. Western Society, by and large, was Christian Society. Yes, there were a few Jews here and there, but that was about it. Non-Christians or pagans were usually people who lived in far-off countries on the other side of the world. So it was fairly easy to think that we had it all right and they were all wrong.
We live in a very different world today where followers of other religions or of no religions at all are not across the ocean, they are across the street. They are our neighbours and coworkers and friends and, what’s more, as we get to know them, we recognize that they are decent people who, like us, are mostly just trying to get by in this world and do the right things. So, while we still may hold to our scriptures and our doctrines, we have to recognize that it is not just people who believe exactly like us who are good people. To think otherwise is just to be petty and maybe racist.
So we find ourselves in this situation where it doesn’t seem right to tell people what they ought to believe – not in any forceful way. But that is only just part of the problem. Not only have we begun to suspect that non-Christians might be good people all on their own, we have also seen things that make us suspect that at least some of those who are enthusiastic for the task of sharing the gospel with everyone might not be the best people.
The group of people that today are most associated with the idea of preaching the gospel to the whole world are Christian evangelicals. Evangelicals have long worked hard at preaching the gospel to any who would hear it. But, in recent years, some of the choices that many representatives of this group have made have seemed a little bit suspect. They have entered into alliances with particular political groups, most significantly in the United States with the Republican Party. And some of the ways in which they have been acting in recent years have left people with the impression that they are far more interested in gaining power and influence for themselves and their policy goals than they are truly dedicated to living out the gospel.
One example stands out in the last couple of months. Recently the report came out that the American president had had an affair with a porn star and had paid her off to keep silent just before the election. And I don’t really know (or much care) if the accusation is true. That’s not why I bring it up. The disturbing thing about it is that some key evangelical leaders apparently assumed that it was true and they didn’t care at all. Take Tony Perkins, president of the very prominent evangelical activist group, the Family Research Council, for example. He apparently believed it but his response (and this is what he actually said) was that he figured that evangelicals should give the president “a mulligan.”
A mulligan? A consequence-free do over offered to a man who he accepted had probably had an affair just after his wife had given birth to his son? It seemed to be a prime indication that people who were supposed to be only interested in telling some good news were much more interested in power and influence and were willing to abandon some of their core convictions in order to get it from powerful people like presidents.
I realize it is very unfair to tar all evangelical Christians with the brush of a few leaders like Perkins or Jerry Falwell Jr, (who has also said similar things recently). Of course, not all Christians who are keen to preach the gospel are seduced by the lure of power – far from it! But fair or not, I am afraid that it has entered into the common perception that the people who push the Christian gospel message these days have not the purest motivations.
So, for all of these reasons, the very idea of evangelism – of sharing the Christian message with people who aren’t already Christians – has fallen into some disrepute these days even among Christians. All of this certainly makes Jean’s question a very timely one indeed. We do feel a certain discomfort with the very notion of living out the Great Commission. But, of course, none of this changes the fact that the Great Commission is there and if we have been commissioned to preach the gospel to everyone, then shouldn’t we just get over whatever we are feeling and get on with it?
Perhaps, but maybe, before we get too far, we should look closer at what Jesus actually says and what he really expects of us. First, let us look at the context of the Great Commission. It comes at the very end of the Gospel of Matthew and definitely picks up some up the major themes of the whole gospel. For example, the very last words that Jesus says are “And remember, I am with you always, to the end of the age.”
Does anyone remember how the Gospel of Matthew starts? We read it not too long ago at Christmastime. It starts with the story of the birth of Jesus and says that his birth is a fulfillment of the promise of Emmanuel which means “God with us.”
So actually, the Gospel of Matthew doesn’t end with a commission, it ends (as it began) with a promise and that promise is, “I am with you.” Remember, Jesus is speaking to his disciples here just after the resurrection. They haven’t really grasped what has happened here, they just know that everything has suddenly changed. Some are so bewildered, Matthew tells us, that they still doubt despite seeing the risen Jesus right there! So I think that, whatever we take from this passage, it is important that we take these words of Jesus as encouragement and hope, not as mere burden and duty.
Nevertheless, there is a commandment in what Jesus says, and we want to take that command seriously, so let us focus on that. Jesus says, “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.” Now, that is a long and somewhat complex sentence in the Greek original. There are four verbs: Go, make disciples, baptize and teach but actually only one of those verbs is in the form of a command and that is the verb that is translated as make disciples. So basically the order that Jesus is giving is make disciples and he is saying that the way to do that is by going, baptizing and teaching.
Now here again is something that picks up on the entire theme of the Gospel of Matthew which has been all about how Jesus chose these people that he is talking to and made them his disciples by teaching and training them. He is telling them to go and do for others what he has done for them.
And I think that is a key point that we must keep in mind as we consider what it means for us to follow the Great Commission in the world today. The goal, Jesus makes absolutely clear, is to make disciples. The goal is not to go out there and preach the gospel message at people everywhere. Yes, it is true that making disciples will likely include some preaching, but if you think that you could fulfil this commission just by preaching to everyone in every nation, you have another think coming.
What Jesus is looking for is not converts or church members, he is looking for disciples – for people who are willing to do what he had done and put their lives on the line for the sake of what is right. It is not about making people believe certain things or join an organization, it is about changing people’s lives for the better.
And I don’t necessarily see that there is a huge problem with that. Think of it this way: what if each one of us here made a decision over the next couple of years to invest ourselves into someone’s life – someone, maybe, in need of finding a better path. What if you decided to do the kinds of things that Jesus did for his disciples, if you shared your time and wisdom with that person and showed you really cared for them. Can you see how something like that could transform a person’s life? What if you really built that person up? And in the process, shared your own beliefs and priorities with them – not as a way of saying, “here, this is what you have to believe,” but more by saying, “This is what has worked for me, maybe it will help you too.”
If you could do that, you would be responding to Jesus’ commandment because you would be making disciples or at least giving someone the chance to be best disciple that they can be. That is what the Great Commission is about. It is not about preaching a specific message to people everywhere, though it could include some of that. It is certainly not about building up the power and influence of particular institutions. It is also not about making everyone believe exactly the same things. It is about being involved in people’s lives for transformation – just like Jesus was involved in his disciple’s lives.
I think that if the church could put its energy into that – and not into protecting its own interest and complaining about the power that it has lost, the idea of being a church that takes the Great Commission seriously would not be something to be embarrassed about. It is not about an obsession with numbers; it is about finding the time to build up those who do come along so that they can change the world.
