Mission Trip Sunday 2009
Matthew 5: 1-12
Blessed to Be a Blessing
Brothers and sisters, grace to you and peace from God our Father and our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ. Amen.
Today we are celebrating the return of our junior and senior high youth from their mission trip experiences this summer. I am always thrilled to hear the stories that young people bring back from these few days carved out of their busy lives and given over to education and service to their neighbors in the world.
Mission trips are a key part of our ministry today because they serve as an opportunity to pull people out of the hustle and bustle of their everyday lives to see what it looks like, feels like, to see what it lives like to be thinking about someone or something other than yourself. Our dominant culture is endlessly and precariously preoccupied with individual success and survival with little energy or thought given to other people both near and far.
So I was thrilled to see that our mission trip youth selected this Gospel text from Matthew 5, which is called the Beatitudes. Beatitude is a word that means happy or blessed and indeed Jesus is teaching his disciples where they will find blessedness but the impressive thing for me and how this text relates to mission is that the beatitudes of Jesus Christ are for a community that will not be formed along the expectations of the dominant culture but will speak another word to that world. This is the Word that we speak to our young people and it is a Word that we all were commissioned into in our baptisms. And so it begs a question: what is the mission to which we are all called? And are we to go about that mission individually or together? And, in this mission, are we allowed or are we even able to hold anything back for ourselves you know, just in case things don’t work out?
This text can be divided into four parts and if you look on your bulletins I invite you to do so either in your head or using a pencil. The first section is vs. 1-2 that set us up for what is about to happen. The next section is 3-6 then 7-10 and finally 11 and 12.
Jesus’ ministry is starting to attract large crowds and so he takes his committed followers with him up a mountain and then sits down to teach. What he is, in fact, doing is commissioning these followers to be his hands his feet his presence in the world but they don’t even realize it yet.
The next part is kind of the first verse of the hymn. You’re blessed when you are at the end of your rope. You are blessed when you have lost what is most dear to you. You are blessed when you don’t put yourself in the middle. You are blessed when you are hungry and thirsty for God, when you are most empty. So blessed are you when you have no hope, no joy, no ego, and are hungry. Wow.
Now many people would take that first part of Jesus’ talk as an instruction book and say, ooh boy, so all I have to do is get sad and hungry real fast and then God will bless me. Or, on the other hand they say, ooh boy, those things are too hard for me I want to sign up for the other kind of blessed and happy. I thought the purpose of life was to pursue happiness and to hold on to what we love and to strive to be all we can be and to keep our selves healthy, wealthy and wise.
And then you come to that second verse. You’re blessed when you care about someone besides yourself. You’re blessed when you get your own heart right with God instead of worrying about if someone else is doing a good enough job at it because then you will start seeing God in the world. You’re blessed when you actively work to reconcile people with each other. You’re blessed when your commitment to God provokes persecution.
Now there’s the instruction book. Here’s what Jesus is doing in these verses. He is telling his followers, he is showing you and me, just what the kingdom of God looks like and then that there is no sitting back watching it happen but that we have a part to play in that kingdom as well.
Because the truth of what Jesus is preaching to us here is that those who work for those second group of things are more often than not going to find themselves in the company of those in the first group. When we care for others before ourselves we may find that there can be moments of hopelessness. When we get our own heart right with God and notice that our eyes are seeing things in a new way and our hearts are feeling things in a new way that we might find ourselves without all of the things, people, jobs, money, whatever it is that today defines you as a person, gone and that is when we find ourselves embraced by God. When we become not just fans of peace but actual peacemakers then we find our own egos sublimated to the needs of those who are in struggle, anger, even war with each other. And when we remain committed to god no matter what other people say or do to us the persecution can become excruciating. Our hunger for God, though, becomes deeper and our thirst pervasive so that when we are fed and watered here at this alter in communion or in a remembrance of our baptism that it is the best food and drink we have ever had.
And then Jesus closes it out in fine form. Oh, and one more thing, count yourselves blessed every time people put you down or throw you out or tell lies about you in order to discredit me. That’s what happens when people used to the dark are shown the great light. And even if they don’t like it, Jesus says, I DO. And all of heaven too. And guess what, isn’t that the kind of company you want to keep?
My prophets and witnesses have always gotten into this kind of trouble.
Brothers and sisters, when was the last time you got into trouble because of your faith in Jesus Christ? And if you did was it for the right reasons? A lot of Christians call it persecution if someone gets mad at them but often it is because they have left themselves in the middle you see, they set themselves up as a judge over someone else and then claim to be wanting to help them but it isn’t about them at all it is about the person doing the acting.
So when was the last time you got into trouble because of Jesus? Has Jesus been calling you into a mission field that seems unsafe, where you might lose all that you have worked so hard to gain, where your status, reputation, job, everything that defines you as you are right now might go bye-bye? Have you ever been thirsty for God?
It is fun for us today to talk about these kids mission trips and those youth’s service but just as Jesus did with the disciples and followers, so I am now doing to you and turning the tables because yes, it is good to celebrate others who have “done service” but in the words of Christ that we are hearing this morning we are confronted with a reality that we are called to care, to get our minds and hearts right with God and not our boss or our spouse, we are called to be active reconcilers in the world and not spectators we cannot hear this word and remain watchers of others doing God’s work in the world. We are being called today to get in trouble on account of Jesus Christ… to speak the truth to power, to become a community that refuses to be shaped by what our culture expects and demands, and, finally, to find ourselves in the company of heaven not just one week a year but each and every day of our lives.
Just found your blog throught the Sarcastic Lutheran blog. Love your sermons. Looking forward to reading more. thanks!
Posted by: Karen | August 21, 2009 at 03:15 AM