June 7, 2020 – Pastor Chris Steubing “Mission In Crisis”
Beloved, we are living in a crisis. The world has changed over the
last three months and it will never be the same. In fact, the world is changing
and the crisis evolving so rapidly, that many of the ways we are used to being
church are either unavailable to us or irrelevant at the present moment. While
our world is in crisis, the very mission of the church seems to be in crisis as
well. How are we supposed to be church and carry out God's mission in this
moment as our Intern Pastor Katie emphasized last week that “we are out of
breath” and the world is on fire”? The theme of our sermon series this month:
"MISSION IN CRISIS," we’ll be exploring our understanding of God’s
mission for the church, to “Encounter God, Love One Another, and Reach the
World” within the context of a crisis. Today, I want to get some helicopter
footage of the situation, to look broadly at the crisis we are in as a human
race, as a nation, as a church.
We’re
dealing with a global pandemic and now a global reaction to the killing of
George Floyd, an unarmed, handcuffed black man by a white police officer in
Minneapolis. The anger and frustration that have filled the streets with shouts
of “no justice no peace” and “black lives matter,” are not just about one man
in one neighborhood, not just about racist attitudes and individual actions, but
about one more example of a long history of white supremacy, racial
discrimination, and systemic abuse of authority within our institutions,
relationships, and even our churches that goes back to the very foundations of
this country. In the midst of a crisis, things are often revealed for what they
really are. The
Coronavirus pandemic has revealed disparities that have long been present in
our systems related to health care, the environment, the economy, education,
and the use of authority by those in power. We may long for a
way to go “back to normal,” but “normal” has been killing our siblings of color,
we’ve been sacrificing our siblings of color in the name of “normal.”
The word crisis comes from the Greek and it is most often
translated as judgment in the New Testament. Judgment. Jesus says in the gospel
of John, “And this is the judgment (crisis), that the light has come into the
world, and people loved darkness rather than light because their deeds were
evil. For all who do evil
hate the light and do not come to the light, so that their deeds may not be
exposed.” This is our crisis, our judgment, our problem, our deeds that are
being exposed and there is no escaping it, no shifting responsibility. There is
no getting around it, no avoiding the crisis, no burying it, only living in it
and through it together. In fact, trying to avoid it will actually prolong it
and make it worse, because that’s what’s been going on for over 400 years.
If you have a health issue and require medical attention, but
refuse to present yourself for treatment, the problem will likely get worse. If
a wound goes untreated it can become infected, sickening the entire body, so
the body begins attacking itself. The sin of racism in this country, beginning
with the foundation of this nation on the backs of black slaves and the
stealing of land from native people, is a wound that has never healed, a
spiritual sickness that’s just been covered up, it’s symptoms evolving to
disguise the original infection, and we’ve refused to submit ourselves to the
kind of treatment that would bring healing, we’ve put bandaids on a wound that originally
required surgery and rehabilitation so the whole body could learn how to
include the wounded parts as equal and vital to our common survival. This wound
has become septic, infected, and we have been attacking ourselves in the name
of “rioting” and “looting” and of “law
and order” and “dominating the streets.” The suffering of African American,
Indigenous, and People of Color has been a long, neglected, festering, infected
wound in the body of our society, and our humanity. We must present ourselves
for treatment to
address white supremacy, racial violence, and the need for lasting and
substantial reform, not just to how our police forces operate, but to how we
organize every aspect of our common life. The burden of the lack of treatment
for this sickness has for too long and too often been placed on the lives and
bodies of people of color.
In Jesus’ last words to his disciples from the gospel of Matthew,
he gave them a clear mission to go out into the world and make disciples of
others as he had made disciples of them, teaching people to obey everything he
taught, to live like he lived, love like he loved, protest like he protested, sacrifice
like he sacrificed, suffer like he suffered, and to do it all together as
children of God, baptized in the name of the Father, of the Son, and of the
Holy Spirit, as one spiritual family on mission together, one body of Christ.
He’d been given all authority in heaven and on earth and he used it to give his
life away so that others would be free, so that the world would be healed. This
is the authority we have been given, which Paul says is, “authority to build up
and not to tear down,” authority to give our lives away for the neighbor and
the stranger as members of our own family, our own body. That’s the proper use
of authority to build others up, to build the world up, to build up structures
and systems that will heal the nation, but first we must submit ourselves for
treatment.
The spiritual treatment for sin is what the scriptures call
repentance. Now is the time to admit ourselves for treatment, to repent of the
sin of racism in this country, in our own hearts and lives, in our churches,
for repentance, repentance is where God’s mission begins. Repentance is where
the church stands in a time of crisis, under God’s judgment, but still hearing
the words, “For God so loved the world that he gave his only son.” Repentance
is where encountering God begins, where loving one another begins, where
reaching the world begins. And repentance means admitting we have a problem,
and we need God’s forgiveness, that we need to open up the wound and let the
light the light in, let the healing begin, healing that comes from Jesus’ death
on the cross, his blood shed, his life poured out for us and for the world, to
make us whole, to unite us in one common humanity and one common mission, so
that standing together in the midst of a crisis, at the foot of the cross where
the son of God died at the hands of this world’s power and authority, with all
of our deeds exposed, we can begin heal. Amen.
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