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| Easter 2 "The great commission" |
I would start by seeking some congregational participation. I would look for people who have changed their lives in some way, and are now feeling totally committed to their new lifestyle. Maybe they quit smoking, joined Weight Watchers, became a vegetarian or an advocate for homeless people... I would ask how they feel about people who haven’t caught their vision – who continue to smoke, who still supersize fast food, use exclusively masculine images for God, etc. Most likely, there will be some lack of patience with those who have not seen the light yet. That, I would explain, was the mood of the early church. They felt compelled to go out and show the stick-in-the-mud folk around them the error of their ways. That’s the rationale behind this passage from Matthew. Matthew doesn’t say much about the new faith community after the Resurrection, but what he does say has been taken by that faith community as a mandate to evangelize the world. Both my father and my grandfather went to India as missionaries. My grandfather’s diaries record his travels among farming villages, preaching and baptizing. He rejoiced at one village, where he converted the man who owned the local well. On his return journey, he found the village near rioting – the well owner now refused to let other villagers get water from his well unless they converted to Christianity! The Matthew reading also gives us the formula used in baptism. Baptisms in the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit are valid in any branch of Christianity – although those words were never used, for example, by John the Baptist at Jesus’ own baptism. I might digress a little into the symbolic significance of threes. (See excerpt below from one of my Soft Edges newspaper and e-mail columns.) Three is therefore probably symbolic across all cultures. It simultaneously confirms that this is not just one person’s perspective, and warns us against assuming that there is only one answer, one perspective, one understanding -- and we have it! Which would bring me back to the central question: to what extent are others entitled to maintain their present religious views, when those views conflict with the truth I have come to know? In a multicultural age, it’s a crucial question. Once you believe strongly in something, how willing are you to let others continue in their unbelief? Excerpt from Soft Edges column by Jim Taylor, Lake Country Calendar newspaper and e-mail subscription list, DATE We were studying the biblical book of Genesis, when we came across the passage where three strangers meet Abraham under the fabled oak trees at Mamre. According to the Bible, Abraham was 100 years old at the time; his wife Sarah was 90. But the three strangers – later referred to as The Lord – assured Abraham that he and Sarah would have a son, within a year. “How did three people become ‘The Lord’?” someone asked. “Maybe three is supposed to represent Father, Son, and Holy Spirit,” someone else suggested. I didn’t think so. Mainly, because that was long before anyone thought of the Trinity. I suspect, in fact, that it was the other way around. The number three seems to have such profound cultural significance that the people who first defined Christian doctrines may not have realized why they focused on three facets of God. Think about it. There were three crosses at Calvary. Jesus chose three disciples – Peter, James, and John – as his closest companions. He took them with him in the Garden of Gethsemane; he took them up the Mount of Transfiguration – where they saw three figures in white. The Magi brought three gifts for the baby Jesus. Jesus suffered three temptations in the wilderness. After Jesus’ arrest, Peter denied Jesus three times. On the lakeshore, Jesus asked Peter three times, “Do you love me?” Jesus rose from death on the third day... And it’s not just in Christianity. Hinduism has three primary avatars of the ultimate Godhead: Brahma the creator, Vishnu the preserver, Shiva the destroyer. When you enter a Buddhist temple, you’re expected to bow three times: first for the Buddha himself; then for the Dharma, the Buddha’s teachings; finally for the Sangha, the community of believers. Think too of the Three Musketeers, Three Men in a Boat, Three Little Pigs, the Three Stooges... And, of course, there’s the three-point sermon! So what gives three such power, I wonder? In geometry, two points define a line; three points define a solid surface. A chair with two legs will fall over; a chair with four legs will almost always wobble; but a three-legged stool will stay stable even on an uneven floor. A photographer once taught me that a picture with two people tends to split apart; with three, it holds together; with more than three, numbers don’t matter any more. In writing, three examples are enough. Fewer examples fail to make the case; more examples are just overkill. In conflict resolution situations, adversaries often “triangulate” – the issue they’re supposedly fighting over is actually about someone or something else. Perhaps three manages to be simultaneously reassuring and cautionary. It reassures us that this is not a one-shot wonder, a single unsupported opinion, a one-size-fits-all solution. At the same time, it warns us not to get sucked into a monolithic mentality; beware of supposedly uniform perspectives and universal answers. Even the one God, it says, can be known in at least three different ways. JIm's full List of suggestions for preaching these stories
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