"And yet..."

“And yet…”

Mathew 28:16-20

Scripture has been used throughout history to justify terrible things:  slavery, prejudice, misogyny, vengeance, homophobia. Choose a hateful action.  Find a verse that supports it.  Take that verse out of context.  Make those few words your foundation.  Christian preachers have preached hate this way for centuries.

Often these hateful sermons hang on a single word in a translation.  For example, in the first creation story—the one about the days—God grants human beings “dominion” over the earth and all it’s creatures.  That English word—“dominion”—seems to give us permission to “dominate” the natural world.  God seems to grant us permission to do whatever we want to the earth.  What if we were actually being appointed “caretakers” of the earth?  What if instead of dominating the earth we were taught that the earth was amazing and sacred? What if we were meant to live in relationship to the earth rather than exploit it?

I thought about that this week when I was watching the amazing coverage of the eclipse.  Millions of people gathered along the path of totality.  They were there to wear some very silly glasses and stare at the sky.  And as they did, their jaws, almost universally, dropped in wonder and awe.  People laughed and applauded and cried.  Nature was amazing.  People felt joy and were humbled and united in their delight. The eclipse was amazing but the shared amazement was incredible!

How long did it take us to get back to the domination life?  Was it fighting the crowd in the parking lot or the traffic on the highway?  Was it when we took our focus off the moon and the sun and turned it back to being annoyed by someone who was different than us?  Was it when my problems returned to their previous dimensions as the largest, most pressing things in the universe?  I hope that we will be haunted by what it felt like when we made room to be amazed and how good it felt to be amazed—together.

Our text for this morning, throws some more loaded words our way: “authority” and “command” and “obedience.”  Such words have been used historically to justify the church’s attempts to overpower and control people—another form of domination. This morning, let’s set the stage to hear them differently.

As we prepare to hear the end of the Gospel of Matthew, let’s remind ourselves of the endings in the other Gospels.  In Mark, the first Gospel written, the women encounter an empty tomb and run.  There are no angels.  There is no risen Christ.  The story just ends in mystery.  People hated that ending so much, they wrote an extra one and stuck it on years later. (I’m not kidding!).  In Luke, there are a host of encounters with the risen Christ which culminate in Christ’s ascension—quite a mysterious ending in its’ own right.  In John, doubt is located in one person—Thomas.  Eventually the risen Jesus is so emphatically resurrected as a body (a big debate by the time John was written) that he eats breakfast with the disciples.  Then, John basically says, “I’ve got so many other stories I could tell you but, sadly, we’re out of time…” So much for the notion that there is the “one story” told in exactly the same way by all four gospels!

This year, we’ve been tracking the ending of the story of Matthew.  On Easter, we went to the tomb with the two Mary’s who simply wanted to be close to Jesus’ body.  The disciples are nowhere to be found.  When the women arrive, there is an earthquake, an angel, a rolling stone, and fainting guards. Although Hollywood might jump at the chance to bring those special effects to life, the real story is that the faithful women are charged—by the angel and then by the risen Christ, himself—to go and tell the good news to the disciples.  In Matthew, Easter hinges on women preaching the good news.

This, of course, is a complete contrast to all the ways that the Bible has been used to keep women from preaching at all, to make them submissive and silent and powerless for centuries.  The faithful women made it to the cross, braved real dangers to get to the tomb, and followed through on their calling and found the disciples and told them the truth.  Stop talking to me about Eve.  Stop talking to me about Bathsheba.  Start talking about these two Mary’s and so many other faithful women.

The cowering disciples are given their calling:  meet Jesus in Galilee.  However, Matthew tells us about something else that is going on.  Having killed Jesus, those in power now wanted to “kill” the notion that Jesus rose from the dead.  The guards are paid to spread the word that, yes, the tomb was empty but the reason it was empty was because the disciples stole the body to make it look like he had risen.  The religious leaders responded to the mystery of resurrection by hanging a lie around the necks of Jesus’ followers.

So, the women tell the men the good news.  They tell the disciples that they need to get to Galilee, the place where their time with Jesus began.  Sadly, Matthew doesn’t include the details of this conversation.  (Luke tells us about the conversation and goes out of his way to tell us that the disciples don’t believe one word that the women say!). Somehow, some way, the disciples are convinced to go.  Pause, though, and imagine how broken they must have been at that point.  They haven’t see the risen Jesus.  They’ve received a message, second-hand, from women—in a world in which women were not allowed to testify in court because they were not reliable witnesses.  Above all else, they know that they had utterly failed their friend and their teacher.  To top things off, now the hottest tip in town is that the disciples are body snatchers.

And yet…they go.  They stop hiding and start walking.  They put one foot in front of another without any real sense of hope or confidence or really any solid answer as to what they would hope for if they had any hope.  The risen Jesus has called them.  They go.

So, let’s think about this.  The disciples are sure of nothing.  They know they don’t really have a leg to stand on.  They also know that trying to follow Jesus has made them suspects in the public’s eyes—again.  Don’t forget how angry people would have been when they abandoned their families and their communities to follow Jesus in the first place.  Maybe Jesus was thought of as the “body snatcher” back then.  They followed Jesus with a lot of uncertainty about what would happen next.  Now, they were following his calling again.

And yet…the risen Jesus meets them.  For centuries, people have worked hard to make the disciples saints. For centuries, people have been told that believers have to become like saints, themselves.  The reality is that these guys are a mess, but Jesus is there, waiting for them to arrive.  For a church like us and a pastor like me, this is the foundation for thinking about being a “come as you are” church and “come as you are” people.  Jesus isn’t waiting for us to get perfect.  Jesus isn’t waiting for us to say some magic words.  The risen Jesus is waiting for us to put one foot in front of the other and show up—doubts and all.

Interestingly, Matthew tells us nothing about what the risen Jesus looks like.  Jesus doesn’t perform a miracle or describe what heaven is like or make some big promise of a payoff for the disciples.  He doesn’t even spend time forgiving them.  The risen Jesus just stands there.  He is simply present.  The disciples drag all their doubts and fears and faith with them, see Jesus, and drop to the ground and worship him.  And this is so important…in the best of the translations, Matthew points out that all of them believe and all of them have doubts and all of them, together, worship.  

As far as I’m concerned, this is a 100 percent accurate depiction of what it means to be a community of faith.  We do the best we can to put one foot in front of another.  We make our way up whatever the latest mountain might be in the hopes that the Christ who has promised to show up for the community might show up for us, too.  And we do this not by pretending that we have no doubts or fears or regrets but by owning all those things as a necessary part of what it means to be a human being.  We all worship and doubt, all at the same time.  In the mean time, people care for one another, people feed the hungry and care for the sick, and the “something more” happens that leaves us feeling like the risen Christ is around here somewhere.

Here’s the unfortunate part.  When the risen Jesus speaks, in our English translations, we find words like “authority” and “obedience”—the kind of words that “tempt” an awful lot of people.  In the wilderness before his ministry began,  the “power” to rule over all things that had been offered to Jesus if he would just worship something less than God. Now Jesus has been given that power by God.  Here’s what no one remembers, though:  Jesus rejected the power of violence and revenge and hate.  Jesus embraced the power of love. For centuries, though, Christians have heard about the risen Christ’s power and assumed that this means we are now in charge.  It’s now our duty, our highest calling, to dominate the world in Christ’s name.  We need to use our power to manipulate and guilt and shame people into becoming Christians.

Jesus’ focus was on living a loving life by caring for the people that we meet along the way.  We hear his calling to make disciples and baptize and teach and think, “What we need to do is create religious people.” We believed our job was to “Christianize” and “civilize” people we thought were savages. We believed our job was to crusade and offer our enemies a chance to convert or die.  Or,  in less war-like moments, we scared people and guilted people and shamed people into conforming to our beliefs because the point wasn’t to love anyone or help anyone but simply to keep them from going to hell.

I am convinced that if we were to truly make disciples, we would do what Jesus did.  We would care for people.  We would feed people.  We would do everything we could to help the lonely be less lonely.  We would throw our arms wide open and offer comfort to those who know grief.  We would baptize people not to save them but to celebrate that they are a gift from God and to invite them to enter a life of grace and love.  We would teach the things that Jesus taught—to love our enemies, to renounce revenge, to forgive relentlessly, and to humble ourselves.  We would invite them to discover the joy of serving others.  We would remember that Jesus said that what mattered most was this:  to love God and to love our neighbors.  We wouldn’t come to church to worship the church or to worship the pastor.  We would come to church in order to practice the love that we were determined to live in the rest of our lives.

Christianity has often been about dominating the world and dominating one another, all in God’s name.  Christ’s way has never been about such things.  As a follower of Christ, I don’t get my way and I don’t get to make others do things my way.  Instead, I get to ask myself, “Okay…what’s the next loving thing for me to do now?”