Unto the End of the Present Age (Matthew 28:16-20; 2nd Sunday of Easter; April 12, 2015)

Unto the End of the Present Age

Matthew 28:16-20
2nd Sunday of Easter
April 12, 2015

Rev. John M. Caldwell, PhD
First United Methodist Church
Decorah, IA

“Therefore, go and make disciples of all nations.” We know these workds as the Great Commission. If I’ve said them right. you were able to hear the capital letters. The Great Commission.

If you were like me you’ve had this drummed into your head since your Sunday School days: “…go and make disciples.” I heard that a lot, especially every time a missionary visited. I remember hearing it, but I didn’t really see much actual going. We collected money or used clothing or other stuff. We sent money, but someone else went. We didn’t go. We stayed. But still in some sense we saw ourselves as fulfilling the Great Commission.

The Great Commission for us was as central to what Jesus taught and who he was as the Lord’s Prayer and the Golden Rule. “Our Father who art in heaven…” “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.” “Therefore, go and make disciples of all nations.” I got the impression that, if you got those three things right, you pretty much had being a Christian handled.

It’s strange, then, that the Great Commission is only given once in the four gospels. John’s Jesus’ last earthly act is to settle a dispute between Peter and John, or perhaps better, among their disciples. Luke’s Jesus sent the apostles to preach the forgiveness of sins to all nations, but says nothing about whether anyone will be persuaded to be Jesus’ disciple. In Mark, no one even finds out that Jesus has been raised since the women who say him “said nothing to nobody, because there were afraid.” Why, then, did we latch onto this set of instructions for how to be the Church, especdially since most of us have no intention of going anywhere?

Would it surprise you to learn that using these verses as the basis for our mission is relatively recent? This text hardly ever got mentioned when peo[ple in the ancient church talked about mission. They didn think that their mission was to make Christian disciples of everyone; they thought it was enough to have some disciples everywhere, so that God’s praise could be spoken and heard to the ends of the earth.

It wasn’t until the middle of the 1800s that the idea that everyone should be converted to Christianity became popular and these verses became the basis and slogan for the modern missionary movement. We could say that we were just really slow to catch on to the obvious, that it took us eighteen hundred years to notice Jesus’ instructions. Maybe so.

I’m always a little suspicious though when a text that has languished for centuries is suddenly in vogue, suddenly becoming the foundation on which the Church builds its whole notion of what it means to be followers of Jesus. When I see that happen, I look around to see what else was going on at the time and if they are perhaps connected. When I ask why there verses because so popular in the middle of nineteenth century and what else was happening in our country at the time, I can’t hape but notice that we were in the middle of building an empire. We were finishing the centuries-long work of expelling the original inhabitants of our country, shoving them beyond the our frontiers, enclosing them in reservations, or just simply killing them. Local militias and the Army had the major roles in the effort, but the churches had their part to play, too. In reservations and scattered through the country were Iindians from various nations who had had their cultures smashed to bits and who were demoralized. Others were angry to their core, looking for some way, any way, to strike back at those who had destroyed their lives. (Let me assure that it was not because they hated our freedoms.)

Making these defeated nations in disciples of Christ not only seemed like obedience to these newly-discovered verses. It was also part of the project of “pacifying” the Indians so that we could enjoy in peace in places like Decorah the land we had taken.

Then, the continent fully under white control, we turned our eyes abroad to places like Cuba, the Philippines, Panama, and the rest of Central America. The Army, Navy, and Marines imposed our will around the world to make it safe for our companies. And everywhere they went, missionaries followed, making disciples out of heathens and “real” Christians out of the Catholics of the former Spanish colonies. It was the golden age of imperialism and the Great Commission supplied the slogans for a cheerleading Church.

When we read a text from the Bible, what it means is not the only important question. It’s also important to ask how a text has been used. This text has been used to oppress the weak, to shatter cultures, and to secure power and possessions on “our” continent and around the world.

In spite of all that, though, I think there is something here that calls us to sanity, health, and even holiness. And it hjas to do with the direction of the movement in the text. It’s in that one word, “Go!”

We used to talk a great deal about “Go and make disciples” but we never actually went. The work of securing and empire and the work of the missionary movement–and, really, they were always two sides of the same coin–were the job of specialists: sailors, soldier, and marines on the one hand, and missionanries on the other. A few people were “called” to go, but most of us were not. Instead, we stayed hojme and supported their efforts with our taxes and our offerings. The frontier–the boundary between the Christian and developed capitalist world and the un- or under-developed and non-Christian world–was far away.

In the churches we worked on getting people to come to help us support those souls brave enough–braver that we were–to actually “go and make disicples.” The rest of the time we tried to be good citizens who paid our taxes so that the frontiers could be held or maybe even pushed back.

But all of that has come unraveled. We still send our military overseas, but they only seem to make us enemies faster that we can kill them. We try to secure our borders, at least the one between us and the countries with brown-skinned people, but the frontiers feel more porous than ever. Now Christians in Korea and Africa send missionaries to us.

Maybe we had only fooled ourselves before, but our country no longer seems all that Christian. Even our little newspaper here in Decorah tell the story. On Tuesday we learned that someone who thinks about these things has rated Luther Collegew as the best of its kind in the state. How did they do that? They compared the costs of attending with the income of its graduates. Then on Tuesday we read about the unhappiness over the later start of the school year, a change mandated by the governor, not for its educational benefit but for the good of the tourism industry that needs teh cheap labor of high school students for its profitability. It’s hard to square either of these stories with the man who taught us that “you cannot serve God and money.”

The frontiers have shifted. We live in the midst of a culture that talks a great deal about God, but that has apparently never heard of the God of Jesus. The missionary frontier begins at the doors our church. Our main concern thirty years ago was how to get people to come to church. We’re still thinking that way. We worry about empty pews, last Sunday not withstanding. A parents tells me, his vboivce breaking with anxiety, that we have to entice you to come.

Mattthew’s Jesus turns our notions upside down. The point of church is not to get people to come. The point of church is for us to go. We gather so we can be formed so we can be scattered into our community and world. Matthew’s Jesus turns our attention from the struggles involved in running any church in the early twentieth-first century toward the broken world around us.

Make no mistake. It’s not a matter of taking up these verses with the pride and arrogance of the imperial age. We may find that we listen more than preach. We may find that we are the ones who are converted to Christ. We may find that far from having all the answers and taking charge, that someone else may already know what needs to be done. And all they need is one more set of hands, hands that could be ours.

Jesus turns us outward, humbler and–it is devoutly to be hoped–a little wiser. He turns us outward and gives us a promise. If we follow our path of discipleship out the doors, into the missionary frontier that is American culture in our age, Jessu promises “I myself will be with you every day until the end of the present age.”

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