Trinity Sunday                                                                                    19 June 2011

Our Gospel lesson today is very familiar to us as “The Great Commission.”  I cannot remember how many sermons I have heard on these words in the course of my life.  It is easily understood, if not regularly carried out, by those who say that they believe in Jesus as their Lord and Saviour.   Jesus tells his followers that he is giving them the responsibility to go out and make disciples and that the way they are to do it is by baptizing those who listen to them and by teaching those people how to do everything he himself had told and shown them.  It is hard to imagine what was in the mind of those disciples when they first heard these words.  Looking back on them, we may be inclined to suppose that this is the charter of a new religious organization: here we see Jesus founding a new religion.  If that is not what he had in mind, it is certainly what we have to show for the 2000 years since the time he met his friends on the mountain after his resurrection.  Was he out to start a new religion?  If not, what was he doing?

Matthew hints at it in those first words of Jesus: “All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me.”  These words obviously have to do with his identity and his own mission: to inaugurate the Kingdom of God.  In Luke’s version of the last words of Jesus, in the Book of Acts, the disciples ask him if he is going to restore the Kingdom to Israel right then.  And Jesus tells them that is no concern of theirs.  Instead they are to be his witnesses, empowered by the promised Holy Spirit.  “All authority” refers to the fact that Jesus, in virtue of his resurrection, now is the King and Lord of all, as the human and also glorified Son of Man.  But he is not going to manifest the Kingdom right away—instead, ordinary time will continue and he is going away.  When he goes, he will send the Spirit to secure his presence amongst his followers until the end of the age—that is, the present age of the world, which will end when the age of the Kingdom appears.  During this present age, which is passing away, the Spirit will empower the disciples as the Spirit had empowered Jesus in his earthly ministry.  So the reason for making disciples begins to appear: it is to create witnesses to the resurrection life of Christ and workers to prepare the way for the coming Kingdom.  Eventually Jesus’ followers decided that it was only as an organized religion that they were able to carry on that task—although this led to lots of compromises along the way that often substituted the needs of an organized religion for the clear demands of discipleship.  We have inherited both the glories of our past and the effects of the manifold compromises along the way, as we seek now to understand what this Great Commission might be requiring of us.

Even after all this time, the Kingdom has not yet arrived, so our job is pretty much the same as those first disciples of Jesus: to witness to the reality of the coming Kingdom by going and making disciples.  But what does that mean?  These days when we think of doing Kingdom work, we think of planting a new Church or revitalizing an old one.  All the experts tell us it is much easier to start something new, at least in our culture, than to revitalize something old.  When something is already here, there are all these things that are left over from the past that you have to deal with.  But are disciple-making and church-planting the same?  I think I would conclude that they are not the same.  A Christian Church exists to foster the creation of disciples and thereby to witness to the reality of the Kingdom of God.  But there are so many other things involved, especially when you have a building to maintain, utilities to pay, a resident clergy person to care for, and all of the other details involved with running an institution.  Sometimes the institutional issues can even overshadow the primary reason for the Church’s existence—especially in our consumer culture, in which discipleship is not a very attractive incentive for potential customers.  Discipleship is not necessarily the same thing as Church membership. 

So, then, what did Jesus have in mind?  In light of the fact that his resurrection testified to his identity as King of kings—his royal authority over the whole world—everything that he had done and taught in his ministry was vindicated and verified.  The one who lived as the Servant of all, who acted as he had taught in the Sermon on the Mount, now was seeking out followers who would commit themselves to the same way of life and by so doing, become living witnesses to the reality of the Kingdom of God, which was coming and would one day bring to an end to way the world currently operates.  To be a disciple meant to believe that the old order of sin and death had been defeated and to live in the reality of that victory, even while the old order stumbles long for the time being—and the time being has turned out to be quite a long time.  Disciples were to prepare the world for the Kingdom by living as Jesus lived, knowing that he vindicated this way of life when he rose from the dead.  The way they did this was by making of others disciples like themselves who can carry on this work in the world.  And we are the heirs of those disciples.  The task is now ours to perform.

How do we do it?  In two ways: we initiate people into the kind of spiritual power that will enable them to be disciples and we teach them how to live as Jesus lived and taught.  These are the only two things that really count in Christianity, although the results of such discipleship can be multifaceted.  That is, when a person is really living in the power of the risen Lord and operating on the basis of what he taught and how he lived, there are all sorts of creative ways in which such a life can be expressed.  All the trades and arts and professions, all the forms of service and parenting—we should mention the art of Fatherhood also on this day—all are included.  All are parts of the manifold wisdom that we learn in Christ—a notion at the heart of our mission statement.  We inaugurate people into the power of the risen Christ, of course, in baptism.  The life of God imparted to us by the Holy Spirit, in which we come to share Jesus’ own relationship with the Father, is what gives us the ability to live the life of discipleship.  The teachings and examples of Jesus, which we are committed to study and practice in fellowship with our fellow-learners, then shape the life which we are given and enable us to express it in lives of love and service. 

This is an active kind of life—all the verbs in our Gospel lesson are action verbs: go, make, baptize, teach.  None of these are consumer words based on what makes you comfortable, what ministers to your self-esteem, what makes you think will be popular or cool or sweet.  You do not get the vision of a group of people attracted to a kind of entertainment, nor to a seminar where they are promised huge benefits for their investments of time and money.  Instead, we are all directed to Jesus Himself—our great and glorious King.  We are offered a chance to serve him by his gift of the Blessed Spirit to us and by this service to show to the people of our own generation exactly what his Father is up to and how to be on his side of things.  We are offered an opportunity to escape the emptiness and perverseness of the way things are ordinarily done around us and to share a vision of a world that is coming—a world of justice and love and compassion and goodness and joy.  And we are offered a foretaste of that world right now, to hold us on course until we see the fruition of our hopes.