Mission Impossible

Robert E. Hall
Tarrytown United Methodist Church

June 15, 2008

Text: Matthew 9: 35-10:8

I have heard of pulpits that are built in the shape of the bow of a ship. The pulpit is bolted down, of course, but the image is obvious. The Church of Jesus Christ is often symbolized by the form of a ship----and not as one in port with the anchor down, but as a ship with all the sails flying, on the high seas, traveling from port to port for a purpose.

On the one hand, a ship is a place of safety in a storm. But, on the other hand, the purpose of a ship is to carry people or goods to other places. Though I have heard of people living on boats that are docked all of the time, I can only guess that the docking fee is cheaper than rent.

The Church of Christ has been and is being created to be a community of faith on the move. The challenge is how to see ourselves as people on a mission when we are physically set in relatively permanent physical locations. (Martin Luther’s hymn was “A Mighty Fortress is our God,” not “A Mighty Fortress is our Church.”)

This is why the story of Jesus’ sending of the first twelve disciples, the “apostles,” is so important. We are an “apostolic church,” inheritors of this first deployment of disciples.

The sequence of the story is important.

Jesus sees with the eyes of a shepherd, even when looking at  the crowds that were desperately pressing in upon him. His heart went out to them----his insides turned over in the desire to help them, to guide them. They were “harassed and helpless,” dejected, harried, exhausted. Powerful people in leadership had written the great crowds off. Jesus loved them---not for what they could do for him, but because they were persons made in God’s image, fellow human beings.

You and I can find it in ourselves to love the beautiful, the love-able. But only when we go through the heart of God can our hearts be warmed to love the wretched of the earth. Our inclinations are either to turn away, or to become angry that they are asking for help.

You would think that Jesus’ would have first told the twelve to go help these people. But he first tells them to pray: There are not enough of us; “pray to the Lord of the harvest to send out laborers into his harvest.”

In the face of such need, Jesus first tells them to pray for helpers. Don’t try to do it all yourselves. Behind this is the belief that God calls people to the tasks God needs to have done. We can talk about “recruiting” or seeking volunteers, but the fact is that this kind of difficult work can’t be endured unless we are called and equipped by God with agape love.

So Jesus calls the apostles and sent them out. As Adam Jones said last week, Jesus is always saying “go.”

These are ordinary people with names like yours and mine. And this commission even included Judas! But they go, not in their strength alone, but they are given “authority,” or power to do what Jesus did. They are to be “little Christs” in the work of the kingdom of God. Jesus needed helpers, real human beings in whose actions people are brought into a renewed and renewing life. The disciples carry this treasure (the gospel) in earthen vessels----themselves. Power comes from God. These ordinary men (and women among the others) will extend the ministry of Jesus to others.

“Of one hundred persons, one will read the Bible; the ninety-nine will read the Christian.” (Dwight L. Moody)

Their duty at this point is restricted: for the time being, they are to go to fellow brothers and sisters of the Covenant people: people of the tribes of Israel. (The circle of outreach will grow over time to include all peoples.)

As they go, they have a show and tell message: they are to tell people that God is drawing near to them in a powerful way-- that they now have access to God for the forgiveness of their sins and a new future for themselves. They are given a new way to be in the world. And they are to minister to people in their real needs, in all the ways that people suffer.

If we believe that we are the latest generation of those who have been sent----that we are the church in the present time being summoned to go and do these things-----then what form would such work take in our present situation?

Compassion has to be the background in all we do: Harvesting people can be genuinely demonic unless we are motivated by the love that comes from God. “We are mobilized by God’s love toward us, and by our love toward him.”

Prayer is not a last resort or a tag-on to plans we have already made on our own. It must be a daily practice. This means humility on our part, and freedom from grandiosity: God raises up persons for the work God desires to happen---even from among Good Samaritans (outsiders)!

Our Lord knows, we---most of us who love God and seek to love the neighbors in need---do not have the ability to cure people, raise the dead and cast out demons in the way that Jesus and the apostles apparently did! So often, in the face of such human needs, we feel so helpless because we cannot do miracles.

But we are not called to act helplessly or to do miracles (which is God’s business), but to use the abilities and resources God has given us to proclaim and heal in ways that are open to us.

For example, we can advocate for the poor, who have cripplingly limited access to health care in our own rich nation. And we can press for the provision of health care for the millions around our globe who have no health care at all. The followers of Jesus the Healer can do no less.

(Though the number seems unreal, I have picked it up from reliable sources: Thirty thousand children world-wide die each day from diseases that are preventable.)

We are not sure about demon-talk and dead-raising feats, but we see people every day who are obsessed with violence, hatred, divisions. And there are those who are dead in despair, apathy, grief, workaholism, “gadgetism,”  hedonism, substance abuse, and the absence of meaning and hope. And these cut across any economic lines. We have a message about a God who in Jesus Christ has come to liberate people, to bring reconciliation to God and peace-making between people and groups at war with each other. Never underestimate the power of God’s love to renovate people----to flat turn their lives in new directions.

The mission for which God still empowers us is always word and deed. (See the work of the apostles in Acts 2 through 4.) Ouur mission is to engage in conversation and deliver concrete help to people in their needs----using our gifts for ministry in places near and far.

The disciples of Jesus would always be followers, learners, dependent upon the gatherings of word and table, where would encounter the risen crucified One over and over. But they were given a mind-set of “sentness,” a way of living their lives and making their decisions. Their gatherings were for the sake of being equipped to be sent out. Even their times together were infused with prayers for those “out there.” We, too, are recipient-givers, stewards of a life-changing message which we did not earn and did not invent.

Of course, the church also resembles a hospital, a sanctuary, a shelter from the storms of life. We are like an army: we are not all deployed out on the front lines, and those who are need their R and R. And yet the Church of Jesus Christ must always see itself in a sent mind-set.(Even “repairing for the future” is for the sake of our sentness, our apostolic mission.

God calls each of us to be missionaries in our ordinary, weekday circumstances, in family relationships, in neighborhoods and schools, in our friendships, through local outreach efforts, in opening doors for those who have had them slammed shut. In all of these, you are the church at work. You represent Christ to others.
From time to time, some members find themselves called to travel to distant lands to become partners in ministry with other Christians. They do not take Christ to the people in these places; they join with sisters in brothers already engaged in the ministries of Christ.

Bishop Bill Oden, recently retired, spoke at Mt Sequoyah a few years ago. He said that when he was a seminary student at Harvard, he was in anguish, harassed and helpless, forlorn. He went into Harvard Chapel and was staring up at the stained glass window of Jesus. There was no face on Jesus, just an oblong flesh-colored blank. From a door in the back of the chapel, George Buttrick, Preacher to the University at Harvard, came into the chapel. Buttrick spoke out loud, to no one in particular:

“No face on Jesus is there? Maybe we are called to be his face---to give Jesus a face for others, now.”

The Church’s mission is as simple and as multi-faceted as that.

He is looking at you today, this Jesus, our risen Lord. He is looking at us, TUMC. He knows we are often harassed and helpless, too.  And he gives us authority and says to you and to us, “Go, preach, heal, cast out demons, raise the dead!”

What will you do? What will we do now?