Where Are We Going?
Or Are We Ready to Follow?

Matthew Introduction:
The passage I am about to read is known as “The Great Commission.” Actually, every Gospel ends with a Great Commission, words of Jesus to his disciples about their future mission and ministry. What we see is each Commission is different. That probably should not surprise us, for each Gospel is written to a different audience, a different community, and speaks to their specific needs and issues. So how they hear the good news and how they live it will be experienced and expressed in the ways the community needs to receive it. Lets hear from Matthew, who is writing to a newly emerging Jewish Christian Community.
Read Matthew 28:16-20

Acts Introduction:
The words we are about to hear are spoken by Jesus to his disciples just before he ascends into heaven. They are his final instructions before he leaves them. He challenges them not to get too parochial or too focused on their own people. He says that they are to be His witnesses first to Jerusalem, but then hear what Jesus says. From Jerusalem, you are to move out into the whole country of Judea, but it does not stop there. Then Samaria, the land or home of their enemies. But it does not stop here. Then to the furthest reaches of creation. There are no boundaries, there are no peoples who they are to withhold their witness to, for all are children of God.
Read Acts 1:6-8

SERMON:

Last week, Nancy shared some thoughts about baptism. How, in baptism we symbolically accept God’s love for us, embrace the fact that we are members in the family of God, and that we drown to our old selves and rise to a new life. After the long litany of life impacts, she made the statement, that’s a lot of power in a little water. It reminded us of what we were recommitting ourselves and our lives to when we did our rededication of our baptismal vows.

The service reminded me of a time when I did a renewal of baptismal vows in my very first appointment. My experience is that when you are a new pastor, you will do most anything to please the people in your congregation. Several parishioners who were already baptized did not feel that sprinkling, as we do in our church, was enough for their Christian walk. They wanted to be fully immersed. We had a creek right near the church, I say creek, but it was about ten times larger than any river I have seen in Arizona. So they wanted to go to the river, just like Jesus did and be immersed. I agreed. The creek truly was quite large and had a good current, but we found a bend where the water was calm and where we could do the renewal. So we climbed down the bank into the water and I began to do the baptisms. The first couple went well. My last parishioner was a woman, and she was a little heavier than the previous people I immersed. I must have been moving some as I did the first couple of immersions, and gotten a little closer to the middle of the creek. And as you can now surmise, when I immersed the woman, the current caught her and I could not pull her back up. All I could do was hold on and try to stay even with her. Well her husband, who was above me on the bank began running along keeping pace with me and his submerged wife yelling, “Pull her up! Pull her up!” I’m yelling back, “I’m trying! I’m trying!” Finally I was able to get a little ahead of her and anchor myself in front of where the current was carrying her and use my body as a block to stop her progress and then use the current to help pull her head above the water.

I share the story, so none of you will ever ask me to do a baptism at the river, but also because it shows a deeper understanding that a few simple sprinkles does not demonstrate to us. Baptism, in its fullest sense, can be dangerous, especially if you get caught by the current, caught by the power of God’s presence, God’s Holy Spirit. And when that current catches you, it may be hard to stop.

The passage we heard today from Matthew is know as the Great Commission. Jesus tells us to go into the world, preaching, teaching and baptizing in his name. We, as the followers, the disciples of Jesus are asked to bring his message and new life to those we meet. Just a few weeks ago, I had someone say to me, “I have been a member of the church for a long time, most of my life, and I hear preachers over and over say, we need to walk in the footsteps of Jesus. What does that mean? What does it look like?” A great question, for in essence it is asking “What does it look like for me to live the ‘Great Commission?’” The answer is difficult, because it may look differently for each of us, just as we said, there are different commissions given for different communities in the Bible. But what I can do, is share a thought that Jesus taught that I believe shows us all the process of being his disciples.

The teaching is found in the Gospel of Luke where Jesus says, “Be compassionate as God is compassionate.” I truly believe that this thought is the cornerstone of our faith. It is also the cornerstone of our United Methodist tradition. Albert Outler, a Wesley scholar said, “If John Wesley had died before the age of 36 he would not have warranted even a footnote in history. And yet he is now seen as one of the great church reformers in history. So what happened?” Outler says it was a transformation of Wesley’s primary emotion from being a passionate zealot of God’s truth to a winsome witness of God’s compassion.” It was his transformation from trying to get people to believe as he did, to helping people experience God’s grace.

So what does it mean to be compassionate and why is it important to us as disciples, and collectively to us as the church? Compassion in its deepest sense means to enter into another person’s life so fully and completely that you can feel their feelings in your guts. That you can understand life from their perspective. The word itself is made from two Latin words, com which means “with” and pati, which means “suffer.” So literally it means entering into another’s life even if you must suffer with them. Why is this important?

I shared a story with my book study group that I believe begins to help us understand what compassion does in our relationship with others. Nancy and I had some very close friends in another church. So close they became Sarah’s God Parents. This was her second marriage, and she had a family from her first. After her children left the home, the husband, who loved children, decided that he would like to have a family so the began to adopt. They adopted a baby boy, and then they were in the process of adopting two brothers, who had been in foster care for awhile. It was hard, and finally they recognized that the younger brother had already been scarred so deeply emotionally that they could not keep him in the family, so he went back into the system. The older brother has now lost parents, and now a brother, but finally had two parents that loved him deeply. He was a good athlete and his new dad loved sports so he began to flourish. But, his dad developed cancer and died. About a year later we saw the wife and learned that Douglas had been in a spiral downward, and was now in “Juvie.” I realized that if someone just looked at Douglas they could simply label him a bad kid, and judge him and dismiss him as a person. Yet, as you see his life unfold, he was shown over and over and over again, that life is harsh and uncaring and that you cannot trust it at all. Even when someone loved you, you still lose them anyway. Compassion, knowing life from another’s perspective changes totally how we see the person and how we relate to them.

Many years ago, I was at a Pastor’s School and one of our speakers told a story about attending a growing, alive and vital church. Her presupposition as she walked into the church was she was going to hear a great sermon and experience a wonderful worship. When the pastor spoke, she realized that he actually was not very good. He spoke kind of monotone and his sermon kind of meandered around. Puzzled, after the service she asked a person next to her if this was a normal sermon for the pastor, thinking maybe he was just having a bad day. No, this was a usual. The next question blurted out, “Well you are a growing and alive church. What do you attribute that to?” The parishioner said, “When people join the church, our pastor puts them all in the church van after the service and takes them to the three main ministries we support. He then says to the new members, “Which one of these three are you going to get active in? It is in this activity and meeting others that we grow in our faith.”

My daughter Sarah goes to the new Northpoint Academy. Every semester they have what they call “intensives” which means they can choose a topic and they focus on it for several weeks, not just in the classroom, but experientially. Sarah’s intensive these past two weeks has been on homelessness. Her group has done some classroom activity, but they have also gone to Open Door, Church on the Street, and to the Youth Homeless Shelter called Turning Point. They talked with people and heard their stories and found out how they came to this point in their lives. Sarah was very impressed with Church on the Street. There she and her group interviewed an 18 year old boy, who referred to himself as a Jesus baby. Both of his parents were addicted to several different drugs, but he was born without any physical disabilities. Obviously, he was removed from the home immediately and placed into the foster care system. At age 10, he ran away and lived on the street for two years. At 18, through his affiliation with Church on the Street, he is putting his life back together, he has a girl friend and he wants to get married and have a family and move into a life he only once dreamed about. But what has struck me about all of this is my own daughter. She has grown up in the church, we talk about issues of compassion and concern all the time, she has studied it in Sunday School, and even been on man mission trips, but after her experience with Church on the Street, she said, “Dad, we’ve got t do something! People shouldn’t have to live like this!” She was transformed by what she experienced.

Once you have experienced life from another’s perspective, you, me, we are the ones who change. We are the ones who are transformed. Compassion always moves us so deeply that we cannot simply walk away. It’s so easy to judge and condemn someone when you do not know them on a personal level and you can give them a label as a bad boy, or gay or illegal. It is totally different when you know their story and can call them by name.

It is why baptism is so dangerous. You never know where that current will lead you. Dan Dick, a church consultant says, “Our world needs what the church, at its best, has to offer. It needs grace, mercy, love, forgiveness, hope, vision, and justice.” When we experience compassion, things like budgets and the giving of our time seem to take care of themselves, because we realize that they are not the end of our call to be disciples, only the means to living our lives as disciples. When we experience the stories of people and we become transformed, then it just becomes a part of who we are to make a difference. We can’t let a friend, live in their hurt.

So what does it mean to be good stewards, disciples of Jesus and walk in his footsteps and live the Great Commission? I believe it is all found in one simple line. “Be compassionate as God is compassionate.” The rest seems to take care of itself.

Sermon delived by Rev. George Cushman on January 20, 2008.