My First Sermon

I was blessed over my Christmas Break to preach a sermon at my home church of Gregory United Methodist Church. Because I trust you all to be a community of grace, I'm posting this for you to read and comment on.

Scripture: Matthew 28: 16-20, The Great Commission

First of all, I’d like to just say that I find it very appropriate that I’m doing this for the first “official” time here. As most of you know, I’m a junior Theology & Philosophy major at the University of Sioux Falls who is looking at seminaries in his free time. But it feels really great to be back in my home church with my home church family, who was vital in my spiritual development. When I look at where I was, where I am, and where I’m going, I thank God for you all. Thank you for allowing me to do this here.
Now this past week we celebrated Christmas, God sending His Son Jesus to dwell among us, minister to a hurting world, and die on a cross to save us from our sins. Wow. I would really like to talk to you all about the importance of taking time to stop and reflect upon this. It is so important that we not lose sight of what God did for us when He sent His Son to be our savior. The love that He showed leaves us with no other appropriate response but praise and obedience.

But because this is such a busy time of the year, I would like for us to move on. As we’re nearing the end of our calendar year, I’d like to talk to you today about the end of Jesus’ ministry on earth. After his crucifixion, he spends some more time with the eleven remaining apostles. During this time, the Gospels tell us, He commissions them to go out into all the nations and make disciples of everyone.
Now, it is customary during this week—the week of the New Year to think about what we’d like to make as our “New Year’s Resolution.” Perhaps you’d like to knock off a few of those pounds you put on during the Christmas season, or budget your money better. But I would like to challenge you for a few minutes to think broader about this task that we all find so important. Perhaps we could think about making our New Year’s Resolution in the year 2009 to deepen our faith development and live out this Great Commission that Jesus gave to his disciples and gives to us still today.

Before we begin a phrase-by-phrase discection of the Great Commission, I’d like to talk to you about the people that Jesus spent his time with on earth—the twelve disciples. Sometimes we can look at this passage, identify the audience and say “Well, I’m off the hook because I’m not a disciple.” Well, I’m sorry but it’s just not this easy to write off the Great Commission. Jesus said this to his disciples, true, but it is important to understand who these eleven people were before Jesus called them. They were a bunch of fishermen, and a tax collector, the tax collector from whose Gospel we are reading. In their culture, being a fisherman would be like being a farmer in this area. Very, very common, ordinary folks that were transformed by God’s will in their lives. How are we different from these eleven? We aren’t that different. We are, for the most part, very common people in our communities who are transformed by God’s will in our lives. Also from the time we gave our lives to Christ, we became His disciples to this world. Thus, we are called to live out the Great Commission.

Since we have all been called to live out the Great Commission, let’s take a few minutes and dissect the content of the Commission. Jesus opens up by saying “Go, therefore, into all nations…” One would think that He’s mainly talking about leaving our own country, our own situation and blasting holes in our comfort zone. This is partially true, but partially a misconception. This summer, the youth group that I lead at Southern Hills will be going on its annual mission trip; this year we’re heading to Thunder Bay, Ontario, Canada, after last summer’s trip to Juarez, Mexico. This is a great ministry for our young people to be engaged in for a lot of reasons. One, it allows us to touch a lot of lives to hurting teens in other parts of the world. Two, it allows our youth to see how great we have it and be humbled by God’s provision. It is an excellent thing to leave our own situations and put ourselves into the situations of others’ to know how to reach them. Shane Claiborne, in his book Irresistible Revolution describes his experiences as a missionary in his hometown, Philadelphia. He chose homelessness to learn how to minister to those who were less fortunate.
But this isn’t always the case for us. The Great Commission does not mean that we are to be a nation of Shane Claibornes. Would it be great if we were? Yes, but we all have individual callings. Even in our hometown, there are missions we can be a part of. We can volunteer our time with the food pantries, help others in need during pancake feeds, or even just provide encouragement to those who need it by being a positive light in this world. By a show of hands, how many people know someone without a church home? This is an excellent opportunity to at least start down the road to discipleship.
While God will not usually blow holes into our comfort zone, He will push us out of our boxes slowly. As our comfort zones become bigger and bigger, God can give us a nudge into a direction that we hadn’t planned—like leading a kid that wanted to be a band director to being a minister.

Second, we are called to baptize in the name of the Three-Fold God. I do not want to get into a deep discussion of sacramentology, so I will allow my comments to be brief here. We all believe that through baptism, God’s Holy Spirit washes us clean of our sins, and as we are told earlier in Matthew’s Gospel “Baptism involved repentance, confession of sin, preparation for Christ, a start of a new life that would bear ‘good’ fruit.” This tradition was an essential part of the early church, as we learn from Luke in Acts. It stands an initiation into the universal Church.

Third, we are called to teach others how to be Christians. Does that make you a little uncomfortable? It makes me feel pretty uncomfortable because it forces me to be accountable. It forces us to take it seriously when Jesus says that the Greatest Commandment is to Love the Lord our God with all our strength, heart, mind, and soul and love our neighbor as ourselves. It means that we must analyze ourselves in the light of what it means to truly live out our faith. Christianity is an inherited faith, passed on from one generation of believers to the next. Let’s face the facts—a lot of our practices and beliefs were formed from someone in our past—our parents, a mentor, a teacher. This is not a bad thing. In fact, tradition is one of the ways John Wesley suggests we can know God. Let’s encourage the people of our congregations to each find a Timothy to be Paul for. Encourage the older to mentor the younger.
If this all makes you as uncomfortable as it makes me sometimes, I’d like to offer you the words of hope that Jesus gives to his disciples: I am with you. The promise of Jesus' abiding presence with his disciples "to the end of the age" (v. 20) may serve as the fulfillment of the promise implied in the name given to Jesus at his birth, Emmanuel (Matthew 1:23), God with us. This takes a load of pressure off us. We can all take a deep breath, relax, and let God be God through us.

I recently read a book by Robert Schnase entitled Five Practices of Fruitful Congregations. This book highlighted one element in light of this statement of God’s continual presence with us: risk-taking mission and service. As a result of God being “God With Us,” we should not allow fear to paralyze us as it does. Often one of the reasons we do not do this is because we are afraid of offending someone, of being rejected, or some other self-developed fear. We can afford to be Risk Takers. However, at this point in our history, nearly everyone has heard the gospel of Jesus. Our challenge becomes, then as the Body of Christ, to think about new and exciting ways to present the Gospel, while making sure to stay true to the message of Jesus Christ. Risk-Taking means once we develop something that we think might work, we engage it. If it fails, we go back to the drawing board and not let fear of failure hinder us from pushing forward. For example, last year, Southern Hills Church brought in Pillar, Building 429, Wavorly, and Brooke Barrettsmith. We were hoping on selling a lot of tickets and packing our new gymnasium. This was not the case. We took a risk, we lost, and a few months later, Casting Pearls came to do a concert at our church. Despite past failures, we kept moving forward unapologetically and unashamed of our botched concert.

Finally, I’d like to take another look at one last element of this commission. We are called to make disciples, not just converts. We all tend to think that evangelism is just getting people to recite a prayer in which they admit their sins and ask God to be their Lord. But then what? We are called to plant the seeds, water, and cultivate. This means that we have to make a commitment to people to walk them through those first months or even years as a Christian, supporting them in a community of grace and love.

In light of this coming year, I’d challenge you all to spend a few minutes thinking about how exactly you can live out the Great Commission. This could mean being more invitational as you head to church, or even considering a new path in your life. I was forced to really think about how this verse plays out on my life when I took a new job as an After-School Care provider at Southern Hills Church. I took a job taking care of around eighty-five kids from John Harris Elementary School from a variety of backgrounds, and home situations. How can I live out the Commission to these kids and families, some of which without a church family of their own? I got to thinking about this and said to myself, "Well, I feel more called to the edification of believers, rather than evangelism." I honestly said that to myself. And as I was thinking about this as my job continued and as I connected more and more with these children and their familes and stopped just to say, "Wow, that is crap," to my prior view of these verses.

So I hope that as you move through this week, this week of new beginnings, you stop to think about how you can live out this Commission. But just remember that when you feel afraid or overwhelmed, that God is with you, to the end of this age.