Matthew 28:16-20
April 16, 2023
Sermon by Rev. Caela Simmons Wood
In the summer of 2002, David and I - recently graduated college students - pulled out of Manhattan, KS with an overflowing U-Haul and headed south for Dallas, Texas. That fall I started my seminary education at Perkins School of Theology, a United Methodist seminary. But my religious education began as soon as we arrived in Texas that summer.
It turns out that Texas - at least 20 years ago - was a bit of a different religious landscape than the one I had grown up with here in Kansas. For starters, when meeting new people and making small talk, one of the questions that was often asked was, “Where do y’all go to church?” Which assumes, of course, that everyone GOES to church.
David and I struggled to find a church that fit us because Methodism was a whole other thing in Texas. It seemed that everything had a twinge of Baptist to it. There were altar call-ish type things even at the end of Methodist worship services, which I had never experienced before. The overall default towards Evangelical culture was a new experience for me.
I was not ignorant of Evangelicalism, of course. In fact, I would have described myself as a “Jesus freak” in high school and college. It was the 90s and I went to a DC Talk concert and read I Kissed Dating Goodbye. I had multiple bibles that were allll marked up from my attempts at daily “quiet time with the Lord.” Although my home church tended towards a middle-of-the-road-mainline-protestantism, I had dabbled in more Evangelical circles. I participated in several other youth groups that were a bit more fervent. I went to a few tent revivals and responded to more than one altar call. I prayed with my friends before school in the hallway and even at the flagpole on that “meet me at the flagpole day.” When it came time to choose a college, I decided I did not want to go to a private Christian school but would prefer a state school because I saw it as my mission field.
I was conflicted about Evangelical culture. I didn’t like it when people gave me weird tracts that said I was going to hell if I didn’t say “the Jesus prayer.” I thought kissing dating goodbye seemed like a terrible idea and found complementarian gender roles to be horrifying to my feminist sensibilities. And I was pretty freaked out when I went to volunteer at my boyfriend’s Southern Baptist Church’s Vacation Bible School and there was a literal thermometer on the wall so they could count up how many kids had been saved that week.
I had a lot of questions - but at the age of 18 I was also pretty convinced that Jesus was the best and only way to get to God. My faith meant a lot to me and I wanted to share it with other people.
But when we arrived in Texas, the questions became more puzzling. Some of this was my age. Some of this was that I was in seminary. But a lot of it was simply that I was talking about faith with people who followed Jesus very differently than I did. I remember a seminary professor casually talking about “the Great Commission” and I raised my hand and asked what that was. I distinctly remember several classmates swiveling around and looking at me like, “WHAT?” but I didn’t know what he was talking about.
Turns out, he was talking about the passage from Matthew’s gospel we heard today: Jesus’s commandment (or invitation - depending on how you see it) to “go and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.” Despite my own zealousness and my toe-dippings into Evangelical culture, I had somehow never heard or paid much attention to this little story but I came to understand that for many Christians it was at the CORE of their faith. It was seen as akin to the 10 Commandments or Greatest Commandment to love one another. It represented the MAIN THING we were supposed to be doing as followers of Jesus.
And this made me - still makes me - feel squeamish. Make disciples of ALL nations? I mean, we’ve read the history books, right? We can see how the legacies of colonialism and religious imperialism are still with us. The atrocities committed against people all over the world in hopes of “making disciples of all nations” is surely not what Jesus had in mind, right? Plus, the part about baptism gave me some pause, too. In my early 20s I was pretty angrily-non-Trinitarian and although that has changed for me now, I still don’t think there’s anything magical about baptizing people in the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. I’ve used other names for God when asked and I pretty much always tack on “one God, Mother of us all” at the end just to make the language more expansive.
The idea that I NEED to be out there convincing people that Jesus is THE answer makes me profoundly uncomfortable. Because even though I find following Jesus to be meaningful, I don’t believe that faith is a one-sized-fits-all kind of thing. I believe there are many pathways to this mysterious force that many of us call God. I believe it’s a worthwhile endeavor to nurture our spirituality and seek a pathway and community that supports us in doing so - I just don’t happen to think Jesus is the only way to do that.
And so - like many of you - I’ve been all over the place when it comes to the “e-word,” evangelism. At its most basic it simply means sharing good news with other people. It comes from the same root as angel - a messenger of tidings of comfort and joy. It seems nice to get on board with being a messenger who gives good news, right? But, of course, it’s way more loaded than that in our culture. Especially when what I like to refer to as “Big E Evangelicalism” is pretty much synonymous with Christian fundamentalism. In our particular moment in time, calling yourself an “Evangelical” (did you hear the capital E?) almost always means that you hold tightly a checklist of “things you have to believe to be a real Christian.” And those checklist items are often very different from how many of us here experience following Jesus.
The word “disciple” that Jesus throws around so easily has gotten complicated in similar ways. At its most basic level, a disciple is just a student. And to be a disciple of Jesus means following him as our teacher. It doesn’t actually have anything to do with eternal life or going to heaven. It’s about living like Jesus here and now - loving God and loving our neighbor as ourselves. And our neighbor, of course, is defined by Jesus as absolutely everyone - especially those who are different than us or marginalized in some day.
My guess is, many of us here are comfortable with the idea of looking to Jesus as our teacher, but we probably also don’t have bumper stickers on our cars that say, “I’m a disciple of Jesus Christ!” Am I right? Disciple is another one of those religious terms that feels loaded. And even though it doesn’t mean, “I believe in a more fundamentalist form of Christianity” when we hear it, we may think that, right?
And yet - here we are with Jesus in the Gospel of Matthew. He’s just been resurrected and the ONE THING he wants to tell his disciples before he leaves them again is, “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.”
If we believe that Jesus is still with us, as he said, what does it mean for us to take seriously his invitation to “go and make disciples”? Is there a way for progressive Christians to do this faithfully?
I don’t know what your answers to those questions are, but I know that, for me, there is something compelling and life-giving for me about my faith and about being a part of a community of people who are trying to follow Jesus. My faith makes a difference in my life. I see Jesus in the faces of my neighbors and I feel connected to them on a deeper level because of that Christ-force that radiates from them. I find strength and comfort and challenge in these ancient stories. Sometimes they confuse me and sometimes they anger me, but they always provide a starting place for me to explore important questions about how I want to live my “one wild and precious life.” [1] And I know that I need to journey alongside other humans to do this faith thing. I need companions who will celebrate, grieve, question, and wonder with me. My life is fuller and richer because my faith - imperfect as it may be - is a foundation for my life. And it is my hope that everyone can have a rich and full foundation for their lives, too, whatever that looks like for them.
And so it seems to me that there IS still room for a progressive evangelicalism. We can call it something else if we need to. I get that. That’s okay. But there’s room to speak freely and honestly about what our faith means to us - and what Jesus means to us - in a way that isn’t colonizing. In a way that is respectful of other faiths. In a way that doesn’t shame or cause violence. To hold it up and said, “This is what I’ve experienced” and to answer questions as people ask them and journey alongside them. I know this can be done in a way that’s respectful because one of the greatest compliments I’ve ever received in my life was from a dear friend who is Jewish. She told me, “When I hear you talk about your faith it makes me want to be more intentional about my own faith, even though it’s not the same as yours.”
I do believe Jesus’s invitation to share our own experiences of God is still valid. It doesn’t need to look like knocking on doors. It certainly should be shame-inducing or coercive or colonial. But I do think it still matters. We just have to keep finding ways to do so in the spirit of the one who proclaimed love for absolutely everyone as the most important thing. The one who stood up against empire and always stood on the side of the oppressed. Otherwise, it’s not following Jesus at all. Rooted in Christ’s ethic of non-negotiable love, let us boldly keep sharing God’s dream of Beloved Community with others.
(You can call it whatever you’d like.)
NOTES:
[1] Good ol’ Mary Oliver quote.
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