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The first missionary Gen 11: 27 – 12: 5 Rev. Peter R Green, Sunday morning, 04 May, 2008 |
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MAY IS missions month for Baptists. This is a month when our focus should specially be on starting the ultimate relationship, because mission is about leading people to know God. A CALL TO GO Missions are, in a very real sense, the main activity of the Christian Church. But mission is not a Christian invention, and has its roots in God’s call to Abram and his family over 2000 years before Christ. We need to get rid of our mental images of Abram. Don’t imagine a desert Arab with a towel over his head and flowing robes. Think of a dark skinned man with a long, square-cut beard. Think of someone who customarily went shirtless, wearing a knee-length tunic and no shoes. Think of his wife, Sarai, in a simple straight–cut dress, with a short haircut that wouldn’t look out of place in an office today. They were Sumerians. They came from what we now call Iraq. If Abram was educated, he could probably write, using a pointed stick to press symbols into a clay pad, which was then dried in the sun. He had a system of writing numbers. He came from a society where there were written laws which were enforced by the King and his officials. But God called him out of that land, away from his society, to a foreign land. In those days, people often lived and died in their own village. Only a few travelled far, usually because they were sent by their king. Abram went because he believed God. In fact, Abram was born into a family which had begun the journey but had not been obedient to the heavenly vision. Abram’s father, Terah, began travelling towards Canaan, but only got to Haran. He hadn’t managed to move outside his own country. He began the journey but went only a little way. We read, GEN 11:31 Terah took his son Abram, his grandson Lot son of Haran, and his daughter-in-law Sarai, the wife of his son Abram, and together they set out from Ur of the Chaldeans to go to Canaan. But when they came to Haran, they settled there. One suggestion is that Haran was about 120 – 150km from Ur. They didn’t get far. But we shouldn’t be too critical of Terah. There is no record that God had called him to go. It may have been his own plan to move to a new location. Was he a sheep farmer, who wandered in search of good pastures until he reached a place where he could settle? Was he even a robber, who found a place where he was safe from pursuit — that’s a vague possibility according to one interpretation of the Hebrew text. The fact is that we don’t have a clue. All we know is that Terah moved out of Ur. I remember many occasions during my time at Marrickville when people came to me and talked about their spiritual gifts. I am reluctant to guess too far what your gifts may be, because I don’t want to read something in which reflects my desires rather than your calling. But I have had to think a lot, and one thing I can say is that what we are called to often has strong links to our family backgrounds. For example, I grew up in a situation where our neighbours, our family friends, the people I went to school with, came from many different backgrounds. I remember Chinese students like Lee Sian-Tek who visited us when I was a child, because they worked with my father. I remember the Prinners, Hungarian Eddy and Austrian Inge, and their children. I remember George, the Jugoslav, who lived next door with his wife Katrina, who was probably German. I remember Anne Psalidas in High School — you’d know where her family came from. I remember Han Ping and Peter Wong, sitting together eating their lunches from little bowls and using chopsticks. When I came to Marrickville, I felt at home. Every nation was here. That was how life should be. I used to work with Engineers, Architects, Planners, Solicitors and Surveyors. I also used to work with field staff, survey assistants, concretors, general labourers. There were days when I had to meet with the head of a Government Department, or consult with a Barrister, or appear as a witness in an Appeal case; there were other days when I was having to explain to a greengrocer how to calculate how much he could legally expand his shop, and other days when I had to get in with a shovel to help spread concrete because it was going off too quickly on a hot, dry day. I felt at home with people from a wide range of socio–economic backgrounds. And you will generally find that, when God calls you to a certain task, he gives you experiences which help equip you to that task. That was one of my worries when God’s call first came to me, because I know that my background equips me for missionary service outside Australia; and I wondered if someday the call would come to leave Sydney and go to New Guinea or Africa or somewhere else. And I wasn’t sure I was ready to go. But that call never came, and I think that God moved me as far as he wanted me to go when he brought me to Marrickville, with its wide range of residents. And God spoke to Abram, spoke to a man whose experiences included moving from one city to another. God spoke to a man who didn’t have strong roots in any place. God called a man whose extended family was not around him, a man who didn’t have to stay in any one place. And God told him, “Leave your country, your people and your father’s household and go to the land I will show you. And Abram went. As the writer to the Hebrews says, HEB 11:8 By faith Abraham, when called to go to a place he would later receive as his inheritance, obeyed and went, even though he did not know where he was going. 9 By faith he made his home in the promised land like a stranger in a foreign country; he lived in tents, as did Isaac and Jacob, who were heirs with him of the same promise. Abram obeyed God and went, not knowing where he had to go to, but willing to obey God. When Jesus was leaving his disciples, when he prepared to return to heaven, he gave them a commandment. He said, “All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me. 19 Therefore, as you go, make disciples of all nations, baptising them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, 20 and teaching them to obey everything I have commanded you. And surely I am with you always, to the very end of the age.” This is a verse about going. Sometimes we Evangelicals have pushed the going bit too hard. We have based our views on a mistranslation. We have said, “Therefore, go, and make disciples...” In fact, the New Internation Version still keeps that mistranslation. Jesus doesn’t command us to go: he assumes that we will go. For some, the call is to go to a new country to people with unfamiliar languages and unfamiliar customs. For others the call is to go across the street. It is not a question of how far or on how many days you go: it is a question of making disciples as we go. When I came to Marrickville, the wife of one of the Anglican ministers, a man named Bruce, had just died. He was grieving. A couple of times I called in at the rectory and asked how he was going, nothing special. And, when we had Ministers’ Fraternal meetings at All Saints Church, a couple of times I went early so I had five minutes to ask him how he was keeping. Eventually, Bruce remarried and then the time came for him to leave. We had a farewell afternoon tea with him. He told us how hard the years had been when his wife died. Then he said something which stuck with me. “Those were dark days, and I specially thank two people whose support helped me get through: the two Baptist ministers, John Conner and Peter Green, who kept in touch and gave me the chance to talk about what was happening.” Then he said the sad bit: “No one else from this fraternal did that.” I had no idea that it meant very much to him, and I know that John Conner did vastly more than I did. My point is that you might only have to go a very short distance, but that can still be a very important ministry. That can be real mission at work, as I will show us in a moment. Abram didn’t know where he was going, but he went there anyway.
THE NATURE OF MISSION But we Evangelicals have often not only been wrong in our understanding of going as Jesus’ missionaries, we have often also had too narrow an idea of what mission means. When I did a course on listening skills many years ago, we had an exercise. One of the team played the role of a Sunday School parent facing major surgery. Another played the role of a Sunday School Teacher, visiting the sick Sunday School mum and offering support. The rest of us watched and assessed. The woman playing the teacher role, came in with a whole list of things she had to say, already worked out. She presented the gospel to the sick mother, shook her hand, prayed briefly for her, and left. The rest of us could see that, even in a role play, the woman playing the part of the Sick Sunday School mum was getting irritated. Afterwards, the woman playing the sick woman said, “I was so angry with what this other woman did. I have been really ill and faced major surgery, so I know how that feels. And what I needed was someone who understood my fears, someone to reassure me that they would be there for my husband and kids if I was in for a long time, or if I didn’t make it. I didn’t want to hear the gospel: I wanted to have my had held by someone who understood what I was going through!” The girl who played the Sunday School teacher was a truly delightful woman, but she bombed out badly this time. She panicked, and revealed that she had too small a vision of what misson is about. There are many ways we can try to define mission. I like to emphasise that anything we do to make earth more like heaven is mission. That includes seeing people converted; it includes getting them fair treatment, it includes looking after their basic needs, it includes helping them develop healthier relationships. All of those things are included in mission. Jesus says it is about making informed and obedient disciples. And that really is another way of saying what I just said. Here’s how it applied to Abram. God said, GEN 12:2 “I will make you into a great nation 12:3 I will bless those who bless you, Abram’s mission was to be a blessing to the world wherever he was placed. That is another way of looking at it. A pastor I know was surprised to discover that suddenly a number of teenaged girls were becoming Christians. He was not an evangelist, and he wasn’t even much of a preacher. He was a great pastor, though. When he investigated, he discovered that the evangelist was his teenaged daughter. She just talked to her friends about everything happening in her life. If she was up, she was up. If she was down, she was down. And her friends began seeing how much Jesus was part of her life, and they began to want what she had. So they went to her father to find out how to begin a life with Jesus. That girl was a blessing to the people she lived among. She didn’t have to spell out the basic Gospel facts. She didn’t come preaching, “God loves you and has a wonderful plan for your life.” She knew that God loved her, and she was discovering that plan, and, quite unconsciously, she included her friends, and they saw it was real, and wanted it for themselves. She didn’t have to tell them that sin separated them from God, because all have sinned and come short of God’s glory, because she was free enough to tell them when she messed up. She didn’t have to preach about Jesus dying on the cross and taking her sins on himself,.Her confidence to get up and keep going when she had fallen and failed was enough to show Jesus to her friends. Her faith was real and contageous, and others wanted it too.
OUR MISSIONARY CALLING Abram is the father of missions, because God sent him out to be a blessing to his world. Jesus sharpens the focus. He clearly shows how to be a blessing, by going that bit further, by paying the price, by giving ourselves so that others can receive. He died, the just for the unjust, to bring us to God. And Jesus says, Receive Holy Spirit. In the same way as the father has sent me, that is how I am sending you. As God the Father sent Abram to bless the world, as God the Father sent his only Son, Jesus, to save the world, so Jesus, the Son, sends you and me to bless and save the world. You can’t complete the work of blessing others without including a mission of saving others. But mission is about doing good wherever we can. I attended a lecture this week about John Saunders, the first official Baptist minister in Australia, in the 1830s and 1840s. He was a considerable evangelist. Under his ministry the Bathurst Street Baptist Church grew from around the size we are now to over 100 in some ten years. He was also a man who saw his mission in terms of blessing the people of Australia. He laboured hard for temperance: not for prohibition of alcohol, but to encourage men and women to avoid the stronger brews and to drink alcohol with caution. He fought against the injustices of the transportation system, and tried to encourage free migration to Australia. He struggled for justice for aborigines, and preached that God would judge European Australians for invading Aboriginal land, for murdering Aborigines and for brutalising their fellow humans. That is how to be a blessing to our world. Let’s make sure to be in mission this year! AMEN! |
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© Peter R. Green 2007. Permission is granted for quotation in full for non-commercial purposes provided that authorship is acknowledged and this copyright notice is displayed with the text. Portions also copyright The Bible, NIV (Zondervan Ltd.) |
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