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The God Who Says “Go”: Go Therefore
Sermon by Cynthia A. Jarvis November 2, 2003, Presbyterian Church of Chestnut Hill Genesis 12:1-4; Exodus 3:7-14 Matthew 28:16-20
This first Sunday in November being the Sunday when even Presbyterians admit to the role of saints in the church’s history [not as intercessors, mind you, but as witnesses summoned before us and sent into the world with news of God’s redeeming love], we would do well to remember that we are surrounded by a cloud of witnesses stretching back 150 years on this Hill. We are here because of their witness. Therefore joined by these saints, let us lean in close enough and linger long enough in the same scriptures given them for us, that we may hear anew the God who says, “Go therefore.” Now the leap we are about to take in the next twenty minutes would appear to be insurmountable! Could the God who said “Go from” to Abraham under a starry sky of old…and the God who said to Moses “Go to” from out of a burning bush…[now take a deep breath and leap literally 1831 pages from the 3rd of Exodus to the 28th of Matthew]…could that God possibly be the same God who was in Christ saying from the other side of the grave to his assembled disciples, “Go therefore”? This is not simply a leap over two thousand years of history (from Moses to Jesus) and two thousand years more (from Jesus to us), but it is a theological bound beyond the ken even of many a professing Christian. God’s disembodied promise “to be with” Abraham and Moses is hard enough for our post-modern minds to imagine, let alone the claim that God’s promise is made flesh in Jesus Christ, God’s only Son, our Lord! Yet it is precisely through the story of God’s covenant with Israel that Matthew wants to help us believe and so bear witness to “all nations” that this is the same God who in Jesus Christ is “with us always, even to the end of the age.” In the part of the story read for Epiphany Sunday, the season when the church celebrates the mission to the Gentiles and so the universal reach of the gospel, Matthew tells us the story of Jesus’ birth as midrash on the story of Moses’ infancy. Just as Pharaoh ordered the murder of infant boys born to Hebrew women in Egypt in an attempt to defeat the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac and the God of Jacob once for all, so Herod orders the slaughter of innocents in Bethlehem to secure his power against the same surprising God. Likewise the God who said to a fearful Moses “I will be with you,” as he sent Moses to save his people from their slavery to Pharaoh, now has said to Joseph, “Do not be afraid,” for the child born of Mary is from the Holy Spirit, born to save his people from their slavery to sin, and his name shall be Emmanuel, which means “God with us.” In Matthew’s mind, the leap no doubt was a leap of faith, though it was a leap Matthew had traced through the scriptures. Through 1831 pages he painstakingly matches the promises of God spoken through the law and the prophets with the person of Jesus Christ, until this surprising God named “I will be who I will be” is revealed in a human life. Jesus is God’s Son in a functional sense for Matthew: “the miraculously born Messiah who was destined from birth to be exalted to God’s right hand.” Matthew would be our teacher and, like a good teacher, leaves room in his gospel for some to believe and some to doubt. We, on the other hand, are not so sanguine about those who do not believe. We come to the end of this gospel as those now directly addressed by the God who says “Go,” in words spoken by him who had been raised from the dead. “Go therefore and teach [disciple …make disciples of] all nations.” But we hear this “Go,” the church has heard this “Go” as Jesus’ marching orders to his followers, commissioning us to be evangelists responsible for saving souls and converting the world to the Christian religion and the church’s confession. To be fair, Presbyterians generally cringe at the thought, imagining ourselves in the position of the woman encountered by Annie Dillard behind a screen door. “The woman was very nervous,” writes Dillard. “She was dark, pretty, hard…and worried about something else. She worked her hands. I waited on the other side of the screen door until she came out with it: ‘Do you know the Lord as your personal savior?’ My heart went out to her. No wonder she had been so nervous. She must have to ask this of everyone, absolutely everyone she meets. That is Christian witness. It makes sense, given its premises. I wanted to make her as happy as possible, reward her courage, and run. She was stunned that I knew the Lord, and clearly uncertain whether we were referring to the same third party.” I repeat: we cringe at the thought of doing this or having it done to us! Of such a take on these verses, no less a theologian than Dietrich Bonhoeffer railed: “Every attempt to impose the gospel by force, to run after people and proselytize them, to use our own resources to arrange the salvation of other people, is both futile and dangerous.” And Matthew, if we lean in close enough to hear the truth he has to tell, is about to say the same! In the first place, that Matthew locates Jesus’ appearance to the eleven in Galilee and not in Jerusalem, that Jesus tells the disciples to meet him on a mountain rather than appearing to them in a room: these are meant to be more than idle details. It is as though the story traced from the beginning over the birth of Moses now is traced in the end over the death of Moses. He has brought the Israelites through the wilderness to the land God has promised, the land of the Canaanites, the Hittites, the Amorites, the Perizites, the Hivites and the Jebusites. There on a mountain overlooking Jericho, Moses dies, leaving the people of the first covenant to venture into a land filled with people who worshipped other gods, gods that the scriptures judged to be powerless to help, idols who can neither hear human cries nor save. These people are known as Gentiles—as non-Jews—in Moses’ time, in Hebrew the word is goyyim. At the end of Matthew’s gospel, the view from the mountain has not changed. That Jesus meets the disciples in Galilee where worshippers of other gods dwell, rather than in Jerusalem where the temple once stood, suggests that the disciples are sent to people outside the covenant. Furthermore, when our English translations have Jesus telling the disciples to teach “all nations,” the word is not nation. The word in Greek is ethne, a technical term designating non-Jewish individuals. “The target of the commission,” says Douglas Hare, “is ‘all the Gentiles.’” No doubt most of the people with whom you and I have to do were once baptized, but have forgotten the love with which they were first loved: nobody on the tennis court to tell them…no one over the dinner table to bring it up…nobody on the fifth hole to mention the community that would take them in. No person at work who cares enough to suggest that they might be missing something of significance, like a purpose. No parent confident enough of God’s mercy to make the worship of God matter more than occasionally. We are sent to our own who have either never heard or have forgotten the news that God is with them. That said the question still remains as to how Christ’s disciples are to teach the Gentiles: a question both of content and of pedagogy. So in the second place, according to Matthew, Jesus summons the disciples to the mount where he most likely had delivered a sermon that some have read as a Midrash on the commandments Moses delivered from top of another mountain. The literal translation of Matthew’s 16th verse is, “And the eleven disciples went to Galilee, to the mountain where Jesus laid down the rules for them.” The rules in the sermon on the mount, if you recall, pushed the commandments over the edge of merely human obedience: thou shalt not murder precluded anger against a brother or sister; thou shalt not commit adultery precluded lust in the heart (a presidential favorite); thou shalt love your neighbor and hate your enemy became, thou shalt love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, and so on and so forth! Who can stand? There is only one we confess and, as for the rest of us, only by his grace do any have reason to boast! Yet lean in a little closer and listen a bit longer. For as Jesus alone was the fulfillment of the rule, of the law--law being the revelation from God concerning what a right relationship with God and neighbor looked like--then according to Matthew, in the words of Jesus, this looked like the blind receiving their sight, the lame walking, the lepers cleansed, the deaf hearing, the dead being raised and the poor having good news brought to them. It looked liked the love and mercy of God made flesh. So the witness they were to bear, the teaching that was to be observed, involved a pointing to those things in human history, a putting of flesh on such love and mercy toward the other, a doing of those things which provisionally might coincide with the promised kingdom of God’s rule. In this manner, they would be his witnesses! This is very different from believing that by our good deeds and our rightly ordered politics, we are the architects of God’s kingdom on earth. Rather we are those who, by grace, may see the world through him, and so have been given eyes to glimpse, now and again, here and there, that which God has finally promised all people in God’s kingdom. But more than that, God’s “Go” may now be heard as a command to come, to be called out by God’s address to be, haltingly, a community wherein the blessed are the poor, them that mourn, the meek and those who hunger for righteousness, the merciful, the pure in heart, the peacemakers, the persecuted. Finally for Matthew, the Gentiles were “not to be converted to a philosophy, but to a unique way of living together.” Or to put it as one of the last century’s greatest missionaries put it, the congregation is to be a hermeneutic [an interpretive matrix] of the gospel. “Jesus,” notes Lesslie Newbigin, “did not write a book but formed a community. This community has at heart the remembering and rehearsing of his words and deeds…. Insofar as it is true to its calling, the congregation becomes the place where men and women and children find that the gospel gives them…the ‘lenses’ through which they are able to understand and cope with the world.” My friends, my prayer on this 150th year of our life is that the Presbyterian Church of Chestnut Hill, more and more, may be converted by his love to a unique way of living together, having at our heart the remembering and rehearsing of his words and deeds, and trusting that the God made known to the saints who have gone before us, is with us always too, even to the end of the age. Thanks be to God. Amen. |