Staying on message

Rev. Dr. Rod Sykes’ teaching time for June 15, 2008

Read Matthew 9:9–13, 18–26

Putting our message in a nutshell

If you look at the bottom of page 4 in our bulletin this week you’ll see in item that we include every Sunday – a prayer focus within our Calgary Presbytery. This week we are praying for St. David’s United Church up in the northwest near the University. Its Mission statement is “to love God, to love our neighbours as ourselves, and to nurture and strengthen our Christian faith.” Across on page 5 of our bulletin you can see our Mission Statement here at St. Andrew’s. We write these Mission or Vision statements to condense in a nutshell how our congregation understands its life as a church. We have Good News, a message for ourselves and the world. A mission statement tries to express the essence of that message.

Today’s “ Neighbour Nudge”

In a few minutes we’re going to do a time of discussion in the pews, what Shannon calls a “Neighbour Nudge”. And the goal is to give you a chance to contribute how you understand the core of our message in a way that might be perhaps more personal than our St. Andrew’s Mission Statement.

How Matthew presented Jesus’ core message

Our passage from Matthew’s Gospel demonstrates just what we are asking you to do during the Neighbour Nudge. What Matthew was trying to do was to put Jesus’ core message in a nutshell and in a way that spoke to the life of his church. So he portrayed Jesus’ giving instructions to his followers on how to carry on his ministry into the future.

Stay “on message”

The communities of faith for whom Matthew’s was writing needed encouragement to stay true to the Good News of Jesus. Matthew portrays Jesus as giving campaign instructions, telling his followers, as the marketing consultants would say, to “stay on message”. For they will face many temptations and distractions. They will be pressured to water down the Good News, or distort it to fit the expectations of their hearers. They will find that those who oppose Jesus’ message will try to shift attention to Jesus himself, questioning his motives or authority, making the issue personal as a way of avoiding the message. Beware of all this, insists Jesus; stay on message.

The core of “the message”

And what is the core of that message, as Matthew understood it for his communities of faith? You’ll find it in the third paragraph of our reading [Matthew 10:5-8 ]. Let’s look at each point from three perspectives. The first perspective is the close-to-literal translation in the New Revised Standard Version. The second is Eugene Peterson’s paraphrase in The Message, which tries to put the biblical text in contemporary idiom, and thus translate them into our cultural framework. The third is a suggestion of the motto or campaign slogan that puts it in a nutshell.

Q: Where do we live out the message?

A: Start locally.

Matthew was writing for a community that still thought of itself as people of the Covenant, as over against the Gentiles and the Samaritans, and he portrays Jesus as the new Moses. Such concerns are simply no longer with us. But the text can speak to us still when it instructs us to “go to the lost sheep of Israel”. Peterson’s paraphrase, The Message, makes it meaningful for North American Evangelical Christians – his target audience. For them foreign missions of conversion have always been a top priority. But Jesus’ message for them would be, as Peterson translates it: “Don’t begin by traveling to some far-off place to convert unbelievers” – the mission is “right here in the neighbourhood.”

That’s a good move but it still doesn’t quite touch us. We are, we like to think, “progressive” or “expansive” Christians, and for us attempts to convert others are not a high priority. At least, that’s not where we start. Nonetheless, we also have this tendency to divide the world between “us” and “them” and to think that “they” need fixing before we do. So what Matthew’s Jesus is saying to us through this text is: “Start locally” – live out the message locally. Be a follower of the Way in your own setting before you worry about others.

Q: What is the essence of the message?

A: The Reign of God, NOW.

Because Matthew has the traditional Jewish reticence to use the name or description of God, he consistently refers to the “Kingdom of Heaven”. Now mention “heaven” and people start thinking of “the sweet hereafter”. But, as Peterson’s paraphrase makes clear when you’re reading through it, what is meant is God’s kingdom operating now. This gets us closer to the nub of it.

But we’re not quite there yet, because for us “kingdom” is an old-fashioned word. In Jesus’ day, it meant the ruling powers, the “domination system”, the ages-old alliance between religion and government and military that had kept the rulers rich and the peasants poor. Today, we don’t have kings. We don’t have official “Emperors”. But we do have “the powers” of our age. There are different labels we could use: the international political order, or the core values of our North Atlantic society, or the system that shapes our lives and to some extent lives in our hearts. Whatever the label, the important point is that Jesus was protesting against all the forces and values that run counter to the purposes of God – for the Reign of God is upon us. This is the central thing that Jesus says: What my work represents is the transformation of the world from its control under the powers of this age into the fulfilment of life through the leadership of God. That is Jesus’ core message. When we allow his Spirit to wean us away from those attitudes and assumptions and habits within us that are not part of the Reign of God, we will more and more “stay on message”.

Q: “How then shall we live?”

A: Seek fullness of life.

No sooner does Matthew’s Jesus proclaim that the Reign of God is at hand than he issues four concrete instructions. This little to-do list makes concrete the vague and general idea of the Reign of God. The specific actions commands seem to require us to work miracles. That is because they fit within the first-century worldview. But we should not dismiss them because we no longer share that framework. Instead we should take them metaphorically.

For instance, we do not expect to “cure the sick” simply by uttering the name of Jesus. In the first century people that the way to bring healing was to utter a mysterious incantation. That looks to us like an attempt to perform magic – in which we do not believe. But we do believe in the many gifts for healing that God does provide – the healing arts, both scientific and personal, that help mend people in body and soul. And that is the crucial point. God’s Spirit is there to work through all our gifts, gifts of medical knowledge and gifts of personal caring, in order to achieve what God wants, which is fullness of life for the person with the illness.

To the extent that we acknowledge the Reign of God as the focus for our life we will do exactly those kinds of thing. We will be open to God’s Spirit working through us. We will do those things which aim to overcome the limitations that haunt our human condition. We will contribute to human flourishing. All such endeavours I would sum up as the effort to “Work with God for fullness of life for all.”

Stay on message

In our concrete situation, in our daily life, as we engage with our neighbours, as a result of our awareness of the whole world around us, there are specific actions we can do. Using the personal gifts God has given us, as God’s Spirit prompts us, we seek to follow the Way of Jesus. That’s how we can “Stay on message”.

May it be so.