“They are Waiting for You”
Sermon Preached by
The Rev. Dr. Andrew Stirling
Sunday, June 6, 2010
Text: Matthew 9:35-10:8
Some say he had a very disfigured appearance, that he had a rather small body with a large head. Whenever there was a presentation made by him, his friends would get him to wear a gown with a lot of pleats, and, as I can attest, a gown covers a multitude of sins. He looked bigger in person wearing his gown and somehow that covered up his deformation. He was somebody who looked peculiar. He was also a person who didn't always act very well. I don't mean badly, I just mean that he had mental disturbances. Sometimes he was depressed and very low indeed. But, he tried to cover it up with a brilliant mind, and a brilliant mind he certainly had. By the age of 13 he was fluent in Hebrew and Greek and Latin and French. By the time he reached his early 20s he'd written text books on astronomy, on logic and reason and on theology.
This man with a big head and a little body was an awesome intellect. However, there came a time when he wanted to go to university, but was prohibited from doing so, not by virtue of health as one would think, or an incapacity of the mind, but because he was a dissenting Protestant and in those days you weren't allowed to go to a university unless you ascribed to a certain faith. He grew up in England, his father was also a great intellect. His father was a strong preacher, so much so that he ended up in prison for his beliefs. He was following this new movement called Protestantism. He was looked down upon, this Dissenter, this Congregationalist. It is even said that the mother of this young man, when she was nursing him, sat on the steps of the jail outside the father's window. Yet, this person grew up to become one of the most knowledgeable, acknowledged, brilliant hymn writers, philosophers, and theologians of his generation.
Ironically, according to Victor Shepherd, the very universities that prohibited him from entering eventually used his books on logic. Universities like Harvard and Yale and Oxford and Cambridge would turn to his writings for inspiration. When it came time for great hymns to be written in Britain, this man with the big head and small body wrote the greatest of them all. His name, if you didn't already guess, is Isaac Watts.
Sir Isaac Watts wrote his great hymns not because he was concerned about the quality of musicianship but he was concerned about the souls of people. He felt that the music being used in churches was banal and boring, that all that was sung was the psalters and as great as they were, they were dirges, without much passion. So, one day after his father had come out of jail, he said to him, “Son, if you don't like the hymns that have been written, write some new ones yourself.” And Isaac Watts did. He wrote, “Joy to the World, the Lord has Come.” He wrote, “O, God, Our Help in Ages Past.” He wrote many of the great hymns that touched the hearts and souls of his era.
You can feel that in his hymns in such a way that even in one of them he recounts the following with this short verse:
Turn, turn us, mighty God,
And mould our souls afresh;
Break, sovereign grace, these hearts of stone,
And give us hearts of flesh.
Isaac Watts wanted ordinary people to worship God in song and in faith. As I look at our text today from the Gospel of Matthew, that beautiful text, I think Jesus wanted exactly what Isaac Watts wanted. His desire when he brought the disciples together was for the ordinary person, the average person, to know and to experience and to feel the love and the power and the passion of his heavenly father. When he gathered the disciples together, he wanted to give them an invitation to go to ordinary people, to go to the souls of the world and to bring the good news that the kingdom is near.
Last Sunday, for those of you who will recall the message that I gave to the confirmation class, those wonderful young people who committed their lives to Christ and to the church, I said to them that they were being called, not only into the church, but to a form of ministry. That we in the United Church believe in what we call the “priesthood of all believers,” a phrase that was coined by Martin Luther himself. That belief that every baptized person has an invitation to minister to, to reach out to ordinary, common people with the good news that Jesus Christ's ministry embodies. Here in this text, in Matthew, we find the reason for this, the foundation for it. Jesus brings together the 12 and sits them down together and invites them to participate in his ministry. He give them the power, the authority to go into all the world, he wants them to do so and he call them by name.
It is fascinating that Matthew, whenever he recounts the disciples, always in his list, begins with Simon Peter and ends with Judas Iscariot. He begins with the one who was the first called and ends with the one who would walk away. And so, the 12 actually became 11. Those 11 and the 12th were originally invited to participate in the ministry of Jesus. Jesus set the limits for their ministry. He doesn't expect them to go everywhere initially. He expects them to begin with their own people, with the people of Israel, with the chosen ones. He wants them to go to their own, for they were Jews. He wants them to go within the community of the faith and he wants them simple to say this, “The Kingdom of God is near.” As Jesus healed, as Jesus ministered to the sick, as Jesus proclaimed the good news, so he wanted the disciples to participate in this great and glorious venture.
But having invited them to go into all the world, and having invited them to go to ordinary people with the message of Jesus Christ. He didn't just want it to stop there as some have suggested. On the contrary, further on at the end of Matthew's Gospel, in Chapter 28 we have this incredible commission where Jesus says to the 11, for Judas has departed, “Go into all the world and make disciples. Teach them to obey everything that I have commanded.” In other words the 12 were selected, were chosen, were appointed but not to be an end in themselves but to be a means of reaching out to the rest of the world. “Go and make disciples,” says Jesus. But the starting point was when he gathered the original 12 together. And so I agree with Calvin, and Luther, that in the great commission, in this great invitation that Jesus issues to the disciples there is an invitation to every subsequent believer throughout time. “Go and make disciples.” Go and reach the world, go and touch ordinary men, women and children.
You're saying, “Andrew, like Poirot, use your little grey cells. We do not have wandering, itinerant ministers roaming around Toronto to follow. We have had 2,000 years of church ministry, we have built great buildings, we have all manner of outreach ministries in the world. Surely, we don't need to add another one to the cumbersome and often problematic movement of Christian history. That, in fact, Jesus was only really speaking to them and maybe the next generation, but not to me and you, not now.” Oh, how wrong you are! In fact, God's word is for you, you have already heard it. It is not a vacuum, it is not an idea. You have heard the Word. The fact it was read, the fact that it is being proclaimed, is God's very invitation to you to follow in the very footsteps of Peter and James and John and Andrew et al.
Having heard the Word, you cannot just throw up your hands and say, “It is not for us.” The Word has been proclaimed. The invitation has been issued. But what is Christ saying? While I think if Jesus were at Timothy Eaton Memorial Church this morning he would say a few things and they would be pretty direct. The first thing I think he would say, and this arises from the text, not my imagination is, “What moved me should move you.” What moved Jesus, was compassion. In fact the literal translation of the word when Jesus had compassion for the crowd was that he felt the pain of love. That's the literal translation: the pain of love. We are told by Matthew that the crowds Jesus was addressing and pointing to were helpless and harassed because of the power of Rome taxing them. It took over their land and having done so, then imposed a tax on them to support the work of the oppressor. “How more humiliating,” says Dr. Thiessen “than that.” But they were also harassed by their own. They were harassed by religious leaders who were imposing on them, not a financial tax, but the tax of the burden of legalism. The tax of knowing that no matter how righteous they tried to be, the common, ordinary people of the land were never going to be able to fulfil all the laws and therefore fully belong and have a clear conscience. They felt the burden of guilt and the tax of not living up to the reputations around them.
Jesus looks at these people and has compassion. His heart goes out to them. This is not though, just some silly sentimentality. Jesus' words are not a palliative, Jesus practically engages them at the point of their need. He addresses them, not just with words, but with the power of healing. He does not just proclaim the good news, he embodies the good news in their presence by restoring the broken. He knows that the oppression that the people are under is not just political and it is not just ecclesiastical, it is spiritual. And, being under this spiritual burden, he knows that only through the power and the grace of his ministry will the burden be relieved. Far from being sentimental, Jesus is eminently practical. He engages them where they really are.
There were also those who had compassion on the masses. If you read Plato and Socrates, they had compassion, they believed in a form of social reconciliation, but when you scratch the surface it is only really the elite who are the beneficiaries. Jesus was not the elite, it's the crowds, it's the ordinary people, it's the masses that count. Jesus is saying to the disciples, “What moves me should move you. What motivates me should motivate you.”
Jesus is also saying something else, he is saying, “Look, you can't help everyone, but you must help someone.” I was reading not long ago a wonderful book about leadership in Jesus' name by Henri Nouwen. We've quoted him many times from this pulpit, both myself and others. There is a moment in Henri Nouwen's life where he has to make a dramatic change. He's been a professor at Harvard, a great scholar, renowned. Yet, in his life he feels a void. He says:
I came face to face with a question: Did becoming older and more important bring me closer to Jesus? After 25 years of priesthood and academia I found myself praying poorly, living somewhat isolated from other people and very much preoccupied with burning issues. Everyone else was saying that I was doing very well but something inside me was telling me that my success was putting my own soul in danger. I began to ask myself whether my lack of contemplative prayer, my loneliness, my constantly changing involvement in what seemed most urgent were signs that the spirit of Jesus was gradually being suppressed within me. It was very hard for me to see clearly. And though I never spoke about hell or only jokingly so, I woke up one day with the realization that I was living in a very dark place and that the term “burn-out” was a convenient psychological translation for what was an increasing spiritual death. I kept praying: 'Lord, show me where I should go. Be clear and unambiguous about what I should do.' The next day, there was God speaking to me in the person of Jean Vanier, the founder of the L'Arche community for the mentally handicapped. He said: 'Go and live amongst the poor in spirit and they will heal you and bring you back to me.'
I thought about that this week when Rick and David and I played, just over a week ago, to the Handicapable ministry here. We got our guitars and we sang some silly songs. Rick did some great licks from Blue Suede Shoes that blew my mind. And David sang, Thank God I'm a Country Boy. For an Irishman it was really strange. I sang something sappy like John Denver's Annie's Song and thought afterwards that it was syrup turned into goop. Yet at the end of it all, we sang some of the songs we sing in the morning here, some of the praise songs. I looked into the eyes of the participants and the students and watched them dance and I watched them pray, and I watched them enjoy themselves and thought to myself: “In that prayer and in that joy, is not the celebration of some great aria or magnificent performance, but the experience of the compassionate love of Jesus Christ.” You know, in watching that I changed. In engaging in that ministry, as many of our people do faithfully every week, I changed.
Jesus knew that if the disciples would go into the world and engage people with the love and the compassion that he had, even though it might seem an enormous task in a great world, they still had to go to someone and, in going to someone they were changed.
I listened to an interview with the singer Dan Hill this past week. I hadn't heard about Dan Hill for 30 years. Sometimes When we Touch is the last thing I remember from Dan Hill but there he was on television, being interviewed, talking about a concert for young people, going with members of the Toronto Argonauts to help young people at risk in this city and, as he said, “Showing them some leadership in what creative and good things can be.” I thought: “Good on you, Dan Hill.” Because there are a lot of people who are helpless, even in Toronto, and there are a lot of people harassed, even in Toronto, and there are a lot of people who are spiritually barren, like Henri Nouwen, there are a lot of people who live with a spiritual burden in their lives. Jesus says, “You cannot help everyone, but you must help someone.”
He would also say finally, “Whatever you do, you don't do it alone. Whatever compassion, whatever act of caring in my name you do, you don't do it on your own.” It's interesting, scholars get hung up on this text from Matthew and they notice something that's strange about it and they say for example, “Jesus is calling on the disciples to go and heal the sick and minister to the poor as he does, right there and then.” Yet in other gospels like Luke and John, they receive the power to do these things later on, after Pentecost, at a moment when the spirit descends upon them.
Scholars ask, “Which one is it?” It's not an either-or. Jesus in Matthew is giving them the authority to go and do this ministry. He is inviting them to participate in this ministry. As he says at the very end of the Gospel of Matthew, “All authority has been given to me and I give you now the authority.” But the power came at Pentecost when the church was born. There is no dichotomy here. The authority and the power are two sides of the same coin. Jesus is giving them authority and he is giving them power, and have you noticed that on all occasions they are not alone? It's not a singular call. It's a call to the 11. When they are in the upper room, they gather together to receive the power of the spirit, they do not do it on their own. They do it as a community of faith. Yet, even so, that call still needs to touch the life and the heart of the individual who hears the invitation.
I started out with Isaac Watts, a solitary man with a big head and a little body, but a man who caused people to sing together to the glory and the praise and the adoration of God. It's the one person who is moved but moves to lead others. So, even if the invitation is solitary it is still an invitation that will have a corporate manifestation to it.
Last Sunday I was talking about being a boy in Bermuda and I don't know why but my mind was cast to when I used to go fishing as a young lad. I used to go to a place called All Buoys Point in Hamilton behind the bank. I would take my line but I never caught a thing, it was pathetic. But I kept going, week after week catching nothing. I would come home with an empty bucket. My mother would say, “Did you have a good day fishing, dear?”
I said, “I had a wonderful day.”
She said, “So where's the fish?”
It was sad, and you know why it was sad? Because I was there with all the others with their lines, throwing them into the water, bait on the hooks, all of us on one side of the point trying to catch fish… splash, splash the bait went in the water. I never caught a thing. Finally some wise old boy who had been watching me and who had fished on the point for years said to me, “You know the secret to catching fish?”
I said, “No, but please tell me.”
He said, “Go to the other side of the point where nobody else is.”
So, I took my line, along with a friend of mine and we just cast it on the other side of the point. Now, you would think that an intelligent person would have been able to figure that out for themselves but it doesn't always work that way. I cast my line and I was absolutely astonished. I went to the boy afterwards, having caught three or four fish and I said, “Is it just because I'm on the other side, is that what it is? Am I casting it out further? Am I just on the right side?”
He said, “No, your problem is that you're just not thinking like a fish. The fish will all go, splish, splash, splish, splash and know that there is a lot of fuss going on over there, but when they hear something or see something in another place, they are smart enough to know where to go. It's not you whose smart, it's the fish. The only problem is that they are too smart for their own good and you caught them.”
It's made me think about missions and what Jesus was finally saying to the disciples. He was saying to them, “Look, I want you to go to this limited group of people and in a sense cast your net into the sea. I want you to harvest what is there. You might not get all the fish and you might not go with everybody else, but if you go with my word you will be amazed with what you can do.” My friends, this word is for you. This word is for us. Have compassion on the world and bring the love of Christ to it. Amen.