Today I want to touch very briefly again on the theology of mission that I have
outlined in sermons on community ministry and more recently on relation to
dialogue between the way of Jesus (Christianity) and the world religions. When I
say “theology of mission” I mean the invitation to you to think about the way
God engages in the world for the world.
Now before I go any further it is, I think, timely that I remind you of the way that
I approach the task of preaching. This is important because sometimes the
preaching raises questions and posits theories and ideas that challenge us in our
beliefs, our faith and our religious habits. When it does it is important for us to
respond to the preaching in a manner that is appropriate to the intent of the
preaching. Today I will make one key distinction that I hope will assist us. Some
preaching (often very good preaching) is rhetorical. By this I mean that it is
intended that the preaching convey an idea or ‘truth’ in such a way that the
audience will be convinced of its efficacy and relevance for them. It is often the
intent of the rhetorical preacher that the audience will receive the preaching as
Word of God in the sense of being a final word of instruction. “The preacher
said it so it must be true and I must now go out and put it into practice!” That is
necessarily a caricature of such preaching but for our purposes it reveals that
rhetorical preaching is meant to be the final word on the subject, a word that
concludes the issue and prepares the way for lived response. Such preaching is
very popular.
I have preached sermons and I have given public speeches in the rhetorical way
and I have usually been the recipient of great appreciation when I did so. We all
like to be convinced by skillful rhetoric. Rhetorical preaching is not, however,
the kind of preaching most conducive to the task of faithful questing for the
truth about God and the world.
The kind of preaching that I prefer to engage in is invitational preaching.
Obviously I don’t use invitational to mean an alter call. What I mean is that
instead of the preaching being the final word on any given topic it is offered as a
‘first word’ in what will be, it is hoped, a vigorous conversation in the faith
community. I like to preach in the same way that I like to lob a stone into a still
pool of water and watch the ripples spread out to the edges. When I preach, I
do not intend that what I say will be the final word on the matter but the first
words of invitation to a broader discussion. I know you can hear the difference
and I hope you are as interested as I am in ongoing conversation about the
matters raised by various sermons. This kind of preaching is of course less
popular generally. It does not always leave us feeling well instructed. We often
go away with more questions than we had when we began. I am convinced,
however, that when preaching is the first word of a broad conversation rather
than the final word of a rhetorical monologue, we are at the heart of what we
are seeking as radical protestant Christians, and that is a conversation that
seeks to know who Jesus is for us today.
Very simply today I want to invite you again in this way to consider who the
Jesus is that calls us to mission and what that looks like, particularly as we seek
to deepen our mission to our local neighbourhood through the Community
Centre pilot project.
And I want to begin by making a simple statement with the first letter of John.
Love is mission! Your human capacity to love is the real presence of God in the
world. Your capacity to be loved by others is the presence of God in the world.
Your capacity to recognize, name, nurture and celebrate the love you see in
others regardless of their creed, ethnicity, social status or moral standing in the
community, is the presence of God in the world. And when I say "presence of
God" I mean the active spirit of life, the dynamic that centres human beings in
that which causes them to flourish with abundant life.
John declares that "...everyone who loves is born of God and knows God... for
God is love". Earlier in chapter three John urges his readers to love, "not in word
or speech, but in truth and action". Let me suggest to you that in these simple
words is a theology of mission. John is teaching us that our human capacity to
love and be loved reveals the nature of life itself as that which flourishes and
heals and renews. When we love others and when we allow them to love us,
John says then we have implicitly proclaimed the meaning of Jesus as the Christ.
Jesus is at the heart of John's understanding of love. John correlates love with
proclaiming the truth about Jesus to the world. But let's be clear in this. For
John, proclaiming the truth about Jesus is not about convincing non-believers to
assent to a religious creed about him. If you want to proclaim Jesus, says John,
you must live in and through your capacity to love your fellow human beings, to
love the world you live in and to be loved by it. The capacity to be loved by
others is central to John's understanding of the mission of God in the world. He
declares that we love because God first loved us. Love is stirred in the human
heart because it is the Ground of our Being. Little wonder that being loved by
another person can so powerfully stir love in us!
It follows that if we as human beings want to stir love in one another, if we want
to see our neighbours and our enemies flourish as lovers of life and each other,
then we must seek to awaken love in them by first loving them. Love begets
love and reveals the divine ground of all living things. That is not all, however.
For we must also have the humility to allow our neighbours and our enemies to
love us and to awaken love in us by their capacity to love. When this loving
reciprocity occurs we have together revealed the divine depth of life itself.
It is precisely this kind of loving that we are seeking together to demonstrate in
and through the Community Centre project. We are not only seeking to provide
a service for the community. We are certainly not condescending to help our
neighbours out. What we are seeking to do is create an environment in which
human beings of any, all or no religious creed can come together to offer what
they have in love to their neighbours and to receive what their neighbours have
to offer them in love. In the giving of ourselves and in the receiving of what
others have to offer us we discover the depth of Being Itself, the one we call
God revealed in Jesus; the one John calls love itself.
This is the theology of mission that I am inviting you to consider together with
me. It is a theology that requires us to let go of the conversion agenda without
suggesting that conversion is wrong in any way. We can feel that as a great risk
to our religion. Yet, as John declares, if we focus our attention on words and
fine speeches (so says the preacher), or perhaps we could say if we focus too
much on creeds and carefully crafted doctrines, then we have missed the actual
dynamics of the divine life. If we want to participate in the life of God in the
world then we must give ourselves over to the dynamics of love. Love is, after
all, the Ground of our Being.
This is of course most difficult when we encounter people who are so different
to us that it can be hard to avoid the urge to transform them into people like us!
When I cut Oliver's hair nice and short with the clippers at home people often
comment that he looks just like a mini me. I feel proud in that moment. It is
good to have a mini me hanging around. That is appropriate for the two of us
but the same dynamic is not appropriate in the divine mission. Much Christian
mission is about creating people who all live according to the same creed. An
army of Jesus' mini 'mees'. But Jesus himself did not require people to merely
imitate him. Jesus admired people who ‘got’ the love he was demonstrating in
his own life and who demonstrated that love in their own way in their lives. I
wonder if Jesus would say to each of us today, "It is your love, your unique way
of loving and your unique capacity to be loved, that reveals the divine depth of
life in the world."
The story of Jesus and the Centurion in Matthew is one of my favourite
examples of Jesus recognising in a stranger what he sought to demonstrate in
his own life. The Centurion comes to Jesus and tells him of his servant who is
paralyzed and in deep distress. Jesus, without hesitation, says he will come and
cure him. Now at first glance this seems unremarkable. But when I take a
second glance all kinds of things occur to me. Jesus is confronted by a man who
is foreign to him in so many ways...
The centurion is Roman and therefore ethnically foreign. He is a member of the
colonial power that occupies the land and is therefore potentially an enemy. As
a Roman soldier he would have considered the edicts of the Emperor to be
divine and as such his religious perspective would have been utterly different to
Jesus' perspective. In these ways and no doubt in many cultural ways the
centurion was a complete stranger to Jesus.
Liberal commentators on this story suggest that Jesus also encountered in the
centurion a man who was pleading for his homosexual lover. It is more common
in the New Testament to use the word Doulos when referring to a slave or
servant. In this case however Matthew uses the word Pais, which also means
son or daughter and therefore, it is argued, carries much greater affection than
Doulos. There is no doubt at all that those in Jesus' time who could afford to
own slaves did so for sexual purposes as much as anything else. It was common
place to do so. Though it is textually a long bow to draw it is not completely out
of the question to suggest that Jesus could have been aware that the great love
the centurion held for this particular servant was possibly on the basis of their
homosexual relationship. Though I think it is a very long bow to draw to reach
this conclusion merely on the basis of the text, those who put forward this
argument suggest that here is further evidence that Jesus was open to
recognising faith and love in people very different to himself.
The response of the centurion to Jesus is well known to us. And Jesus, when he
witnesses the faith of the centurion, names it, celebrates it and sends it on its
way to live and flourish in the world. Now get this... Jesus makes no other claim
on the centurion. He does not demand his discipleship, he does not denounce
his religion, he does not denounce his morality nor demand his allegiance.
Instead, he turns to those who assume that they are in the kingdom by virtue of
their ethnic and religious affiliations and declares...
"I tell you, many will come from east and west and will eat with Abraham and
Isaac and Jacob in the kingdom of heaven, while the heirs of the kingdom will be
thrown into outer darkness..."
Jesus is prepared to recognise in a complete stranger all that is required to
enter the kingdom of heaven. For me, this points to a view held by Jesus which
essentially amounts to the old saying, "where there is smoke there is fire". In
the context of what I am inviting you to consider with me today we could say,
where there is love there is God. For Jesus it was like saying "where there is
faith there is God" no matter where or in whom you see it, name it and
celebrate it for what it actually is.
We don't need to turn it into a Christian. We can celebrate it for its true and
authentic expression of the Ground of Being.
C.S. Lewis touched on this idea in the last pages of “The Last Battle”. In that
delightful story a Calormene soldier, a worshipper of the pagan god Tash, finds
himself in Aslan’s country after the end of his own world. He tells the story of
his encounter with Aslan whom he greatly loves now that he has seen him
though he fears him as much. Aslan’s welcome of this foreign soldier is akin to
Jesus’ welcome of the centurion. We are called to see all people with these
keen eyes that seek out what is really true and embrace it.