Grace and Peace to you from the one who is, who was, and who is to come, Jesus Christ our Lord, Amen.
The Church has had a long history of what it means to be a Christian. Is a Christian someone who believes in Christ, or is a Christian someone who has the faith of Jesus? In short is Christianity about believing the right things or right living?
What we say about what it means to be Christian ultimately becomes a value statement. This week, I read an article by William Lamar IV, a pastor of the Metropolis AME Church, Washington, D.C. The article argued that it isn’t the coronavirus, racism, or greed that is killing us, instead, he points to our bad theology that has led the American people and the American churches and American government to this point in our history. It has been bad, dangerous beliefs about what it means to be Christian and our beliefs about God that have caused racism, individualism, and greed, the root causes of much of American injustice, American inequality by design.
In light of this week’s texts, and really the entire trajectory and direction of the Gospel, we have a way to correct ourselves, our churches, and our government, to be responsive to God’s will and agents of the coming kingdom of God.
We begin at the end; the Gospel of Matthew culminates in what we have called the Great Commission.
“Now the eleven disciples went to Galilee, to the mountain to which Jesus had directed them. When they saw him, they worshiped him; but some doubted. And Jesus came and said to them, ‘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. And remember, I am with you always, to the end of the age.’” (Matthew 28:16-20)
The first disciples are commanded to do three things here: make disciples, baptize, and teach. During different parts of Christian history, we have put emphasis on different aspects of this commission. For the American age, the 1500’s until now, the dominate theology has been a settler colonialism. This theology is focused on baptism and teaching. It has been a theology that allowed early Americans to paint the native population as unchristian, and unworthy of God’s love. It was this theology that caused the creation of reservations. It is a theology that viewed all of North America as the new promised land and the Native Americans as the new Cannanites, to be purged from the land. This same belief system allows us to justify inequality and slavery, because as God’s supposedly Chosen People, everyone else and all wealth is ours for the taking. Because if God is on our side, then we will be given all good things. Today, this same theology allows us to believe that success is your reward for being a good Christian, for believing the right things. Healthcare is privatized, access to education, food, shelter, and safety are all based on wealth and not the fact that you are a human, a wonderful creation of God. Wealth that we view as being God given blessing for each of our own personal reward.
But, these past few weeks and months are showing us increasingly that our beliefs about God are inadequate, incomplete, and, frankly, unbiblical.
To answer this failed theology, we must look to the bible to find our roots. We have to become radically biblical again. (that’s a play on words, to be radical is to go back to the roots, think radishes, they are roots, Latin is fun). Let’s look at the Great Commission using the Bible to interpret the Bible.
“teaching them to obey everything that I have commanded you.” What exactly has Jesus commanded us?
When the Pharisees heard that he had silenced the Sadducees, they gathered together, and one of them, a lawyer, asked him a question to test him. “Teacher, which commandment in the law is the greatest?” He said to him, “‘You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind.’ This is the greatest and first commandment. And a second is like it: ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself.’ On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets.” (Matthew 22:34-40)
What are we commanded to teach others to obey? That they love the Lord our God with our whole being, and like it, that we love our neighbors as ourselves. Loving our neighbors as ourselves means that we work for their good as we would seek our own good. We call this working for the common good. What is best for everyone, not just me, my family, my friends, or my community, but What benefits all people and all creation. This commandment calls us to think about the whole of creation as our family. By saying that loving our neighbor is like loving, God, we know that loving our neighbor is part of how we show our love of God.
“baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit,” What does it mean to baptize? In baptism we are welcomed into Christ’s family through Christ’s death. We are welcomed into the family of God, in the water and the words. When we are baptized into Christ’s death, we are baptized into Christ’s resurrection, we are freed from the consequences of sin so that we can freely love God and our neighbors without fear of death, damnation, and the devil.
“Go therefore and make disciples of all nations,” What does it mean to make disciples. This is where we can hear this week’s gospel text.
“Then Jesus went about all the cities and villages, teaching in their synagogues, and proclaiming the good news of the kingdom, and curing every disease and every sickness. When he saw the crowds, he had compassion for them, because they were harassed and helpless, like sheep without a shepherd […] These twelve Jesus sent out with the following instructions: […] ‘go rather to the lost sheep of the house of Israel. As you go, proclaim the good news, the kingdom of heaven has come near. Cure the sick, raise the dead, cleanse the lepers, cast out demons.’” (Matthew 9:35-36, 10:5-8)
The work of the disciples is the work of Christ. Jesus is proclaiming the Good News that the kingdom is near and tells his disciples to do the same. Jesus is healing the sick and tells his disciples to do the same. Christ sees the crowd as sheep without a shepherd and tells the disciples to go to the lost sheep.
The Great Commission is our call to make disciples, to empower others to go out doing the work of Christ. And we make disciples by baptizing them, welcoming them into the family of God, and teaching them to obey Christ’s commandments to Love God with our whole being, by loving our neighbors, the whole of creation as members of our family, through working for the common good.
That is it, that is the correction our theology needs to respond to the chaos, disquiet, and inequality that we are experiencing in our world. The answer to the disease of bad theology, is to become a church of the Great Commission, Christians who are called to be Christ to the world. Lights in the darkness.
Luther taught that Christ died pro me, Jesus died on the cross for me. Luther didn’t stop there, but many protestants have stopped at the individualism of the pro me. Christ died for me is important in Luther, because we can only come to that realization when we have felt the conviction of the law. When we recognize that we are each individually the worst sinner that have ever been. We each separately are sinners, separated from God, all have sinned and all fall short of the grace of God works when we realize that we are each part of the all. And yet,
“while we were still weak, at the right time Christ died for the ungodly. Indeed, rarely will anyone die for a righteous person—though perhaps for a good person someone might actually dare to die. But God proves his love for us in that while we still were sinners Christ died for us.” (Romans 5:6-8)
Since Christ died for me when I was still a sinner, the worst sinner, then I can acknowledge that Christ died for all of fallen creation, and God loves all of creation. If God loves others as God has loved me, then I must show that same love and care.
We hear from those who still think that the Gospel teaches that individual rewards are gifts for belief, that God has chosen me exclusively, or my church or my nation exclusively, that this way of thinking is social justice church, it was meant as an insult. SJW, social justice warriors. But when we hear the words from Micah 6:8, when Israel demanded to know what form of worship God demanded from them...God responded:
He has told you, O mortal, what is good;
and what does the Lord require of you
but to do justice, and to love kindness,
and to walk humbly with your God?
The Bible sounds to me to be a book calling for social justice as a means of worshiping and honoring God.
Go my family, make disciples, be Christ to the community, show God’s love, by loving your neighbors, proclaim that God’s kingdom is near. Become Christians of the Great Commission, make your Church a church of the commission, proclaim the Good news of Christ’s love to a nation and a world sorely in need of Christ’s light in these troubled times.