This sermon was preached on Sunday, April 11 at St. Lydia's. The text is Matthew 28:16-20; read it here.
It turns out that even witnessing the risen Christ making a
grand entrance on top of a mountain doesn’t produce pure, untarnished faith in
the hearts of the disciples. Some
worshipped him, Matthew tells us, and
some doubted. After the resurrection, faith is still a funny, fickle
thing. And that’s okay. That’s just part of the deal.
This text brings out the teenager in me. Go therefore and make disciples of
all nations, Jesus proclaims, and a voice
in my mind says, why?
Why should I?
Why are we doing all of this?
Why do we show up on church on Sunday morning or Sunday
evening?
Why does Jesus want us to tell people this strange, unlikely
story?
Why teach, preach, heal, baptize?
Why are we doing this?
Why should we?
My teenaged reaction to this text brings to mind a teenaged story. I was a teenager who had parents who were just slightly overprotective. As a thirteen year old, I think, I convinced my mom to let a friend and I take the bus into the city from the suburbs of Seattle where we lived to visit the Woodland Park Zoo. She wasn’t too excited about the idea, but I won out, and off we went on the bus, and had a fantastic day at the zoo.
On the way back though, we found that the bus headed toward home made some kind of strange loop, and we couldn’t figure out where to get back on the bus. But I was hellbent to prove to my Mom that I could do this on my own. So instead of calling her and telling her that we were basically lost and didn’t know how to get back, I convinced my friend that we could walk to the transfer center where I knew we could catch a bus back home.
The thing is, it didn’t look very far on the map…but it was
really far. And it had us walking
along Aurora Ave, which is not really a neighborhood where you want two thirteen
year old girls to be hanging out.
And it took a really long time.
It took and hour and a half, actually. By the time we got to Northgate, it was dark, and I called
my parents, who were by this point completely hysterical.
I had wanted so badly to prove that I was independent, that
I could do it on my own. And I
couldn’t. What I couldn’t recognize
at the time was that my failure wasn’t my inability to decipher the bus
system. It was my inability to
acknowledge that I couldn’t do it alone.
You can’t be a Christian alone.
And it’s really frustrating.
From a toddler who learned to say, “I can do it myself,” to
a teenager who decided to walk down Aurora Ave for an hour and a half, to an
adult who sometimes thinks that being strong and independent means she
shouldn’t need anyone but herself, not being able to be a Christian alone
really annoys me a lot of the time.
And Jesus telling me what to do in this passage kind of
annoys me too.
You can’t be a Christian alone.
Go and baptize, Jesus
tells us. Go preach, go
teach, go heal.
Go transform the world.
Cultivate life that rises up from the ashes.
Heal what’s broken
And break what’s boring.
Go and baptize.
When we go down into the water, we die and are raised with
Christ. We start a new life.
The word “baptize” actually means to dunk, to immerse. The word was used to describe dying
cloth, as it was pushed down into the water and emerged with a new color and a
new purpose. When we come up out
of that water, we have died and been raised. Our lives don’t belong to us anymore. They belong to God. And they belong to the community. It’s not just about us anymore.
I’ve spent a lot of time trying to prove to someone, anyone,
that I could do it myself.
The beauty and the frustration of this reality is held, for
me, in the final verse of Matthew’s gospel: And remember, I am with you
always, to the end of the age. Christ with us.
In us. A part of us. There’s something about that that
quiets my resistance to
Because God is with me, and with each of you. Emmanuel: God with us. Christ resides with each of us, in each
of us, like a small but sure compass right here, in our gut. And that compass has a magnetic pull
that is strong and a heading that is true. Sometimes we ignore it, talk over it, walk away from
it. Sometimes we insist that we don't need it. That we don't need anyone. We often need the
community around us to help us read that compass. It’s there, the still, small voice
of God, compelling us to go down into that water yet again, and emerge into a life that
doesn’t belong to us anymore, because it’s bigger than we are.
That’s, I think, why I do this: why I come here every Sunday. Because we can’t do it alone.
We finish the sermon together at St. Lydia's, and so I invite you to share a story that's connected to the text we read together and the words I've shared.
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