Matthew 28:16-20
"Go therefore and make disciples of all nations." There are probably fewer words in the Scriptures that have had a more profound effect on our common history as the men and women of the Christian faith in that simple phrase: "Go therefore and make disciples of all nations."
Those few words set in motion the entire missionary movement of Christianity through the centuries. It was on that basis, that understanding, that we had been commanded by Christ to go into the world, and convert men and women to the Christian faith.
As a disciple of Christ, as a Christian, I am an heir to that tradition, just as you are. And if I look over my shoulder historically at all that the missionary movement of Christianity has meant, I have a very mixed reaction. There are moments when I can see truly noble and wonderful acts of selfless dedication to the Gospel, which missionaries had lived out in their lives doing wonderful works in the name of Christ, starting hospitals and schools while winning souls for the Lord. But I also have to be honest in saying that when I look over my shoulder, I see a littered memory of hurt, of pain, of loss and suffering, all in the name of Jesus, all because we have been a missionary church.
As a person who minored in ethnic studies in college, I cannot escape the legacy of the missionary movement in North America, and its effect particularly on Native Americans. I cannot ignore the realities which impacted other indigenous people from Africa or Latin America or Asia. The truth of the missionary expansion of Christianity was often not just a question of the message but of the medium.
The message was good news. The message was hope and light, healing, love and freedom from fear. But the medium that brought that message around the world was often the medium of colonization. Christianity was a part, not just of trying to convert people into a different faith, but of an effort to convert them into a different culture, the western European culture, a culture that told them not just how to pray and how to worship but also how to dress, how to act, and how to think and who to love.
So what does that mean to us today as Christians? How do we deal with that as people of faith. Do we join those who say, "Well, because there is this terrible history, this tragic legacy from missionary activity in the Christian faith, we need to stop sharing the message of Jesus? Are we oppressors and imperialists if we try to share our faith with other people. There are many who say that to honor all the world religious traditions we must be careful to stay away from any imposition of our beliefs on others.
One question to ask ourselves on this Trinity Sunday, when we stand at the moment of proclaiming the great mystery of our faith in the triune God, is the question of our attitude about whether or not we still believe Christianity should continue to be a missionary church.
Let us look at the concept of the Trinity. It is a doctrine, that is not meant to be a mere intellectual speculation, or a cool philosophical reflection on the nature of Being or the structure of the cosmos. It was born out of the heat of the life and death of a man who lived and died as Jesus of Nazareth. It is the healing, reconciling message of the death and resurrection of Jesus as it continued to work in individual lives and communities. It is born out of the clash between the power of the one God and the powers of the world; between the gospel of Jesus and the gospel of Caesar; between the power of love and the love of power. The Trinity did not begin with abstract thought, though it will stretch the mind of anyone who reflects on it. It began with passion: the passion of Jesus, the passion of the apostles, the passion for reconciliation, God’s passion for the world. It is not, to begin with, a thinking person’s doctrine. It is a passionate person’s doctrine.
What happens when people try to think up doctrine? When human beings have tried to reflect on the sense of the divine that most have felt. Actually atheism is very much a minority option in the history of the world. Most of the time humans have come up with two main alternative types of doctrine. Some have seen God, or the sacred, as infinitely transcendent, utterly other than worldly; some power to be acknowledged at a distance. That picture rescues God from the problem of evil: God is not involved in the mess we’ve made of the world; but it does so at the cost of any solution to that problem, and also of any intimacy with God.
Others have seen God or the sacred, as strangely present within the world, within the forces of nature, surrounding and encompassing creation as we know it, bubbling up from below. That picture gives us a sense of God’s presence, but hugely accentuates the problem of evil: if God is present in and with the world, why do so many awful things happen? That way, you end up either saying evil isn’t very bad after all, or you end up saying that God is simply part of the process of it all.
The truly extraordinary thing about the emergence of the early Christian belief in the one God who is known as Father, Son and Spirit is that this belief doesn’t seem to have emerged, or been hammered out, as the intellectual answer to those two options. It was born, as I said, out of the story of Jesus. The Trinity speaks of a God who is at the same time completely other than the world and richly present in the world; of the creator who, having created the drama that we call world history, has himself come to play the leading part in the play; to lay down his life for the children he loves, and then gives them the breath of peace and only love and forgiveness can offer.
The Trinity then, is not a philosophical answer, it is a personal answer, a passionate answer, God’s passionate answer. That’s how much God loved the world; or, in the language of St Paul, ‘Through the death of his Son we are reconciled to God.’
Come forward two millennia. You hardly need to open the newspapers to see that the greatest need of our day is reconciliation. It seems impossible; our best hope, we usually think, is that we can persuade India and Pakistan, Israel and Palestine, East Belfast and West Belfast, to back off and sulk in silence. We live today with the social and political equivalents of those two great systems of thought.
On the one hand, there are those who have tried to organize the whole world under one roof: the dream of empire and world domination. That’s where we were a century ago; some believe that’s where America is again heading now. But, however much empires declare that they are bringing justice, freedom and peace to the world, the rest of the world for some strange reason doesn’t see it that way. The god of empire is too high-and-dry to solve the problems of the world.
On the other hand, there are those who today want to celebrate diversity, to rediscover local and tribal identity, to come out from under the large oppressive regimes that had crushed them and find out again who they, uniquely, really are. But the gods from below quickly discover that they are competing for space: for land, as in the Balkans; for land and water, as in the Middle East; for ethnic purity, as in Rwanda.
The only place I know where the crushing dream of imperial supremacy has met the rising tide of ethnic diversity with anything other than disastrous results is South Africa. In South Africa apartheid has been slowly dismantled in rooms the size of this one. In hearings between blacks and the whites who once held complete control over their lives.
Here is a short example of what goes on in the hearings of the truth and reconciliation commissions as reported by the BBC: Facing ex-security guards of the white Afrikaner government, a Black woman speaks of her first-born son who resisted the legalized separation of the races in the uprising of 1985. She describes his birth and how he was named and speaks proudly of his performance at school. Then she tells of the night the security police smashed down the door and dragged him away and about how an anonymous policeman sent for her some days later to come to the mortuary. In horrifying detail, she describes the bruised and almost unrecognizable corpse, riddled with 19 bullet wounds, that had been her son.
The remembrance overwhelms her and affects both panel and audience. Some weep quietly while she struggles with her grief. "I do not know if I can forgive," she says. "I must know who did this to my son. When I see the face of the one who killed him, and he tells me why, then perhaps I can forgive.
On of the ex-policemen reads from a prepared text: "We blindfolded them and took them to a stone quarry outside the town. We hung Subject Number 1 upside down from a tree branch and lit a fire under him. When his hair burned he screamed a lot, then told us everything. The others also confessed. After that, we shot them. Our report said they had resisted arrest." In the front row are the families of "Subjects 1, 2, and 3." They are learning for the first time how their sons and brothers died. That night the nation also watches and listens to the report on national television.
Hearings like these have been held across South Africa. The nation's Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) has attracted interest around the world. Its attempt to uncover and deal with a brutal past goes further than any similar exercise in history. Furthermore, the Commission’s hearings seem to reach beyond the limitations of secular law, exploring new potentials for forgiveness and national reconciliation. Nowhere else has secular legislation produced such a scriptural understanding of what it takes to heal a nation.
The story of Jesus is one of love, forgiveness and reconciliation. It is for you and me. For our partners and friends and children, our neighborhoods and our world. It centers us on the love we need personally, and the love we need to live with those we would call our enemies. I cannot see that this is the time to stop going into all the world with this message.
One of the lesser-known poets of the first world war, Edmund Sillito, put it like this:
The other gods were strong; but thou wast weak.
They rode, but thou didst stumble, to a throne.
But to our wounds, only God’s wounds can speak;
And not a god has wounds, but thou alone. Amen.