Making Disciples

"...."Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptising them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit."

In a little newsletter that came to me from an organization within our denomination called Presbyterian Health, Education and Welfare Association, there appeared a curious excerpt from a sermon having to do with the text before us this day. The Great Commission, as it is called, was critiqued by a preacher who had recently led worship during a meeting of this church board and whose sermon had greatly impressed the newletter's editor. Said the preacher of these words at the end of Matthew's Gospel, "We can't make disciples. I wish it had said, include everyone. Teach them what I taught you--and then--ask them to decide whether or not they choose to be my followers...."

Can you not hear our resurrected Lord now, on top of a mountain, saying to his disciples, "You just might, if you so choose, or if it seems to be in keeping with what you feel comfortable doing, you just might ask people--I mean if it is appropriate and not too intrusive--you possibly could see if they would like to follow me...no commitments, you understand...they can follow me for a little while, see how it feels...and then, no pressure, whatever."

Hard to imagine and yet that is what we take him to have said, you and I, if our meagre efforts at making disciples are any indication of our response to these words. Consider how we act, as a culture, on behalf of the future faith of our children. "We want our child to be exposed to the Christian faith," say new parents in search of a church soon after a baby's birth, "just like we were exposed." Sounds like exposing them to the chicken pox or the measles in hopes hat they get over this ordeal at an early age. "Go therefore, and expose your children to me," saith the Lord, "so that they might consider the option of following me."

Or consider our nervousness at simply inviting a friend to church. The setting might be a dinner party, and the conversation turns to a tee off time or court time early on Sunday morning. "No can do on Sunday morning," we say with regret. Period. Silence. I think of the family who piled in the car to make 9 o'clock Sunday worship as their neighbors were loading golf clubs in the trunk for a 9 o'clock foursome. One day, after gathering great courage and trying not to be intrusive, the church members asked the neighbors why they never went to church. "You never asked us," comes the reply. We act toward one another as though Jesus in fact had said at the end of Matthew's gospel: "Go therefore and don't mention my name in mixed company lest you make someone uncomfortable."

To put our evangelical reluctance in its best light, the reason for our silence has something to do with a peculiar take on human freedom. In the words of our health, education and welfare preacher, "This thing about discipleship has to be based upon freedom....We can't "make" disciples." Our own freedom is best nurtured, it seems, and another's is best preserved, when no claims are made on our lives, save those we freely choose to assume. The problem with this spin on our silence is that we know better. We know the wilderness of those who have been claimed by nothing much more than the culture around them. We know the vulnerability of those who, because they have been claimed by nothing much, are victim to the lastest self-help scheme or empty spiritual enterprise offered over the internet...our young people being the most vulnerable of all.

The truth of human freedom is this: that we were made to be claimed. The question is simply: claimed by what or by whom. Each of us know people literally dying for want of a claim worth their lives, though they know it not. You and I know our children's lives will have missed the point, if they are but lives of worldly achievement and accumulation of prizes to be grasped, rather than lives centered in a lively and demanding discipleship. We know our lives and theirs hang by a thread without Him.

The question then becomes not ought we, but how ought we "go therefore, and make disciples," walking a fine line between timidity and temerity? The first and most obvious hing to say, though for entirely different reasons than the first preacher cited, is that we don't make disciples: God does. Faith is a gift of God, and all in the world we do is call out of another what has already been given. All in the world we do is call another into the community of faith, given us by Christ to nurture and strengthen discipleship.

You can always spot somebody who thinks otherwise, who believes that the population of the Kingdom is up to them. "Every attempt to impose the gospel by force," wrote Dietrich Bonhoffer in his book on discipleship's cost, "to run after people and proselytize them, to use our own resources to arrange the salvation of other people, is both futile and dangerous....Our easy trafficking with the word of cheap grace simply bores the world to disgust, so that in the end it turns against those who try to force on it what it does not want....the zeal which refuses to take note of resistence, [he goes one] springs from a confusion of the gospel with a victorious ideology. An ideology requires fanatics, who neither know nor notice opposition.... But the Word of God in its weakness takes the risk of meeting the scorn of [others] and being rejected."

"Do you know the Lord as your personal savior?" they ask. "She must have to ask this of everyone, absolutely everyone, she meets," said Annie Dillard of the type. "This," says Dillard, "is Christian witness. It makes sense, given its premises." Since the Presbyterian premise teaches a salvation already accomplished for us in Jesus Christ, the first thing to remember in making disciples is that Christ has asked of us what God has already done for the world in Him. Our invitation may be rejected, but this is a risk worth our lives.

That said, it is also important to remind ourselves of the world of difference between making disciples and marketing a Savior. "Look you," said one preacher to his congregation, "the great, quiet secret of most great speakers, preachers, and authors is this: they are outstanding salesmen who know how to reach their customers and stir their desire to buy....For many great causes in the world, and for most of the so-called spiritual and religious movements, what counts is not so much that they are good or new or useful, but that they have good salesmen who can achieve the desired sales and find a satisfied public. This is how it is done." Little did Jesus know, when he commanded us to "Make disciples," the power of media and marketing which would be at our fingertips. From sophistocated ad campaigns meant to target a certain audience...to the emotionally charged glitz that passes for Christianity on television or in megachurches, one way our age has attempted to take him at his word is by marketing God's Word.

"The Word of God (meaning Jesus Christ)," this preacher goes on to proclaim to his people, "is not for sale, and therefore needs no skillful salesmen. The Word of God does not seek customers, and therefore we cannot hawk it or trade it...it needs no middleman. The Word of God does not compete with other articles that are on sale at life's bargain counter. It is not ready to be sold at any price. Its only demand is that it should simply be itself, that it should not have to undergo any changes or adjustments, that it should be allowed to shine in its own glory and thus be snapped up by those who do not want to buy it but who will accept it as grace, as a gift, just as it is." Christ did not commission us to be salesmen on that mountaintop long ago. Quite to the contrary: he has made us bearers of a gift, a free and costly gift given all nations, all peoples, in Him.

That gift, my friends, takes on tangible dimensions in the simple summons first to be joined to the life of the church through the sacrament of baptism. Make disciples, he said, baptizing. It is what the church is given to do for all the world. Baptize in the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit. Say and so act out on the bare head of a newborn babe or the bald head of an old man that this one lives and breathes and has his being in the love and mercy and forgivenness of a gracious God. Say and so act out on the self-conscious head of a confirmand or the humbled head of a grateful adult that they were bought with a price and born for a reason. Say and so act out on the unworthy head of one who has falled that there is nothing, nothing she can do to separate herself from the love of God in Christ Jesus her Lord. Say and so make visible on the trembling head of a crying infant or the contrite head of a lost sheep that in Christ she is, he is found. Then say we "welcome" to the household of God, the body of Christ, the communion of saints.

But more, for I am sure that most of the people with whom you and I have to do, but who have nothing to do with the church, are men and women who once were baptized. Once their parents bore them in their arms, you bore them in your own arms, and so under some preacher's wet hand. Or once they knelt as a young person to be initiated in the faith before they were confirmed into church membership. Or once they were immersed in a pool before they were abandoned to the shallow waters of the world. And though baptism happens but once in a lifetime, it is for a lifetime that we must be reminded of such invisible grace, upholding us day by day. Most people with whom we have to do have forgotten the love with which they were first loved. Nobody on the tennis court to tell them. Noone over the dinner table to bring it up. Nobody on the fifth hole to mention it. No person at work bold enough to suggest that they might be missing something of significance...like a purpose. No parent confident enough in God's mercy toward them to make it matter more than occasionally.

But the truth be known, we are talking not first about those folks out there, but about us in here. We are here because we live forgetting Him. We are here because we live at such a distance from His presence that we must come to seek His face. We are here because we barely, for all our years in the pew, we barely know Him.

Presbyterians don't talk much about a personal relationship with Jesus Christ and that, in part, is why was comfortable in the Presbyterian Church for many years. But I tell you, the longer I live, the more I turn to Him...or perhaps it is that the more He turns me to Himself by way of the church's ministry...the more I long for the world to know Him. I know that is so because of the life we have been given to live together--the great joys shared, the darkness endured, the sadness held not alone, the Word proclaimed again and again and again. There simply is nowhere else to turn for evidence of God's nearness save to Jesus Christ. And there is no place else where I am so turned save in the community of faith. Without the nurture, the teaching, the claims of this community's faith, week in and week out on my life, I would not know Him to speak of. Because of the nurture, the teaching, the claims of this community's faith, I cannot keep from wanting to make disciples of the whole world.

King Agrippa said to the Apostle Paul, "In a short time you think to make me a Christian!" Remembering our baptism, let us together say what none else in the world will say if we don't, "Whether short or long, I would to God that not only you but also all who hear me this day might become such as I am, except for these chains": a disciple of Jesus Christ. Go therefore and make disciples, baptising them in the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit. Amen.

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