Fifth Sunday of Epiphany / Mission Sunday
- Genesis 12:1-3
- Psalm 86:8-13
- Revelation 7:9-17
- Matthew 28:16-20
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It’s Super Bowl Sunday!
Oh, wait… It’s Mission Sunday! Sorry, got my pep talks mixed up.
It’s Mission Sunday!
We’re two Sundays away from Ash Wednesday and the start of the lenten march to calvary. We will soon start our trek to Jerusalem to watch Jesus die… and resurrect.
Jesus knew he was walking toward his death. How then did he persevere to Jerusalem, to his final Passover? Hebrews 12:2 tells us: “for the joy that was set before him [he] endured the cross.” As I read and meditated on the wonderful passages the lectionary has for us, I see the Holy Spirit is highlighting the joy and glory we share with Jesus as we head into a season of sharing his suffering, a season of considering our sinfulness and recommitting to a lifestyle of repentance.
The same joy that sustained Jesus can sustain us. We see that joy and glory in God’s mission strategy. And God has a part for us to play. Let’s take a look.
In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth. Actually, before that, the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit huddled together to call the play: Let us make humanity in our image and welcome them into our community of love. But, we know humanity will choose to love itself over us. Still, we will pursue them with our love. The Son will take on the flesh of humanity and die to redeem them, to make them holy so they can indeed join our community of love. OK? OK! 1…2…3… BREAK! [clap]
We serve a missionary God. We serve the God who sent himself to make us his students, his heirs. And in his calling us to be his students and heirs, he calls us to be missionaries just like him and to call wayward humanity home to the community of love it was created for.
Our readings today give us God’s playbook, his game strategy. He tells us how the game starts and how it ends. Spoiler alert: God wins! And he invites us to play in the big game and to win with him.
We know the beginning of the story. God creates humanity, but our earthly forebearers, Adam and Eve, fall for the lie that they can be like God without God. And so they separate themselves and all their offspring – including us – from our life-giving Creator.
Things get really bad by Noah’s day, and God cleanses the earth with a flood. But Noah’s family is still infected with this idolatry of self. So we get the Tower of Babel incident.
At that time there are 70 major families or people groups on the earth. These peoples unite in a building project to show God that they can reach heaven by the work of their hands. The nations are united in the idolatry of self. So God divides the peoples by confusing the languages and scattering them across the planet.
Is God through with the nations? Instead of destroying them like in Noah’s day, is God just going to leave them to roam the earth in confusion?
No.
God showed his love for the nations in this way: he called Abram, his first missionary. (For those keeping score at home, this is Abraham we’re talking about, but God hasn’t changed his name yet.)
‘Abram. I want you to leave everything you know and go to a foreign land. Why? So I can bless all that nations I scattered from Babel. In you, Abram, all the families of the earth will be blessed.’
So starts the one family – the Jewish people – through which God chose to bless all the other families that were at Babel. Abram’s family was to be the people that would bring forth the Redeemer, the promised seed of the woman! We know his name is Jesus, the one who brings salvation to the nations.
Our next reading flies us from the beginning in Genesis to the end of all things in Revelation. The God who knows the end from the beginning shares with us his view of how his missionary plan works out. In Revelation 7, we see God’s throne in heaven. On the throne is the Son, who has faithfully executed his redemption play. Around the throne is what?
Behold, a great multitude that no one could number, from every nation, from all tribes and peoples and languages, standing before the throne and before the Lamb, clothed in white robes, with palm branches in their hands, and crying out with a loud voice, “Salvation belongs to our God who sits on the throne, and to the Lamb!” (Rev 7:9-10)
The nations are no longer worshipping themselves in Revelation. They are worshipping the God of Israel, the Son of God who sacrificed himself to bring the nations into the community of love. They sing him a love song.
Is this the scene of joy that sustains Jesus through his missionary journey that ends with him carrying his own execution stake outside the city wall.? As he’s dying, does he catch a glimpse in his mind’s eye of the nations singing to him: “Salvation belongs to our God, to the Lamb”? Maybe with this glimpse of joy, Jesus is faithful to the end, even unto death.
And the Father is faithful and resurrects the Son.
Jesus is alive!
What does Rabbi Jesus do then? He gathers his disciples, his students. He gathers them on a mountain in Galilee. So now we’re at our Gospel passage in Matthew 28.
Why Galilee? Jerusalem is God’s beloved city, his footstool. It is spiritually from where God sends forth his glory. But it is not geographically conducive to travel. It is ensconced in the hills of Judea. Galilee in the north was known for its trade routes.
Galilee of the Gentiles or District of the Nations had long been a crossroads. The Via Maris, an ancient international highway, ran through there. This road went up to what is now Iraq and Turkey and down into Egypt. In Matthew, this is the crossroads of the world. It is the perfect place from which to send missionaries out to all the nations, those nations represented in Genesis 12 and Revelation 7.
Jesus tells his 11 remaining students, “Go therefore and make disciples of all nations.”
What is a disciple? In first-century Judaism, a disciple was a student of a rabbi. But these students didn’t just go to seminary for a few hours a day and go home. No! They lived with the rabbi. They traveled with him. They watched how he did everything: did his prayers, made his bed, studied Torah, made his breakfast. And then they did as he did. They learned how to live a holy life by imitating their teacher.
Now Jesus is sending his students out to become the teachers. He tells them to make new students. How? By baptizing them and by teaching them to observe Jesus’ commands. This isn’t finger-pointing teaching. This isn’t baptism by force. They are to teach as Jesus taught them, by living an exemplary life meant to be imitated. Do not hear “exemplary” as perfect or outstanding so as to be unattainable. Hear the word for itself: exemplary, a life of example, a life worthy of imitating.
Most of us here consider ourselves disciples of Jesus. We are his students. So, practically, how do we live as good disciples? How do we make disciples? How do we partake in God’s missionary work of drawing the nations into the Trinity’s community of love?
First, how do we learn to be good disciples? We imitate Jesus.
This is not a salvation question. This is not about earning our redemption. We are saved by God’s grace and our trust in the sacrifice of the Son.
What I am asking is, How do allow the Holy Spirit to transform our dark, sinful natures inherited from Adam and Eve into bright-shining godly natures? We imitate God.
- We love the brokenhearted. We sit with them. We mourn with them. We gently walk them toward the healing of God.
- We lift up to the poor. We provide for those lacking. We share with the impoverished. The Psalms are filled with descriptions of God aiding the poor. The Proverbs tell us that God is pleased when we give to the poor.
- We heal the sick. We pray for them. We literally bind up their wounds. We provide for their medical care.
- We relieve the oppressed. We fight for justice when our neighbor is wronged. We stand with them and shield them from those who would persecute them for their religion, social status, or the color of their skin.
- We repair creation and the environments around us, houses and forests, oceans and farm fields.
- We forgive as God has forgiven us. We give of ourselves just as God has given us Jesus from himself.
In short, we learn to be holy by watching God be holy and do holy things.
And then, we invite others to join us in imitating God.
- We proclaim the good news of his redemption bought on that Roman cross.
- We show that redeeming blood of Jesus repairing our brokenness before their eyes.
- We maybe even say – as Paul says to us – imitate me as I imitate Messiah.
Our missionary God is calling us to imitate him.
He will send some of us, like Abram, to faraway lands. But for most of us, our mission field starts right in our homes and extends through our neighborhoods and workplaces, to the gym and the grocery store.
For those of us called to fields close to home, remember our brothers and sisters called far away. They need your prayer support. They need your practical and financial support. Remember, even Jesus had financial supporters who funded him and his band of disciples as they traveled around Galilee, north to what is now Lebanon and south to Jerusalem. The money didn’t usually come from the mouths of fish in the Sea of Galilee. It came from several wealthy women.
Perhaps this all sounds overwhelming. Imitating God may sound to you like an impossible task. And as the rest of the Revelation 7 passage implies, being Jesus’ disciple can be a dangerous proposition. Imitating Jesus may call us to imitate even his faithfulness unto to death.
Jesus promises us that we won’t be left alone for this intimidating mission. He “will be with us always even to the end of the age.” Listen to this again in a different translation: “I will be with you the whole of every day, to the end of history.”
Jesus also promises us the Comforter and guide, the Holy Spirit. We cannot make disciples without the Holy Spirit. We all receive the Holy Spirit at baptism. We must rely on him, not on our own intellect or powers of persuasion, not on our knowledge of the Bible or theology. We do not transform people. That’s the Holy Spirit’s job.
Our job is not to fight the culture. Our mission is to make disciples, students of Jesus. The culture will change when there are more faithful disciples of the Messiah.
Our job, our calling, our mission, straight from Rabbi Jesus, is to imitate Jesus and to call others to do the same.
Let us pray.
Lord Jesus Christ, you stretched out your arms of love on the hardwood of the Cross that everyone might come within the reach of your saving embrace: So clothe us in your Spirit that we, reaching forth our hands in love, may bring those who do not know you to the knowledge and love of you; for the honor of your Name. Amen.
Image credit: The LUMO Project via FreeBibleImages.org