January 20

A Missionary Heart

January 20, 2008 Rev. Dr. Christopher Carlson

About 26 years ago, I was walking through my seminary’s mail room and looked up on the bulletin board and there was an opportunity there to volunteer. The mission’s professor was looking for some students to go with him to Africa, to Uganda to be specific. This was a couple of years after Edi Amin had been there. So it wasn’t a real nice place. I looked at that and I said, “Gosh I’d like to go.” I went home and talked to Cyndi about it and I said, “Gosh I’d like to go.” Then I said, “But I don’t see how I could do that.” You see we had just got married and had a three month old child… And Cyndi, being who she is, said “Why not?” “Oh, O.K.” So I went. It was a life changing experience. I remember sitting in the middle of no place with the mission’s professor who was talking about being a missionary; he asked us, he challenged us about doing that. I remember praying, “Lord I will be glad to come here, if you want it.” Well that call never came, but I don’t think God failed in that calling. I think I have become a missionary to this church. I also think that in some way God, in His sense of humor maybe, but in His calling, gave me the Army as well, to be a missionary to that from the church. Over the years, I have come to believe that everyone is a missionary. Every Christian is a missionary. It doesn’t matter if you have a special calling to the Army, or to the church, or to Africa, or to South America, you are a missionary where you are just be virtue of being Christian. That’s what I want talk about today, that’s the kind of vision I want to leave with you.

It’s all over the bible, listen to what Paul says:

2 Corinthians 5:1-2

Now we know that if the earthly tent we live in is destroyed, we have a building from God, an eternal house in heaven, not built by human hands. Meanwhile we groan, longing to be clothed with our heavenly dwelling, because when we are clothed, we will not be found naked.

2 Corinthians 5: 4-5

For while we are in this tent, we groan and are burdened, because we do not wish to be unclothed but to be clothed with our heavenly dwelling, so that what is mortal may be swallowed up by life. Now it is God who has made us for this very purpose and has given us the Spirit as a deposit, guaranteeing what is to come.

2 Corinthians 5: 6-11,14-15

Therefore we are always confident and know that as long as we are at home in the body we are away from the Lord.

Since, then, we know what it is to fear the Lord, we try to persuade men.

For Christ’s love compels us, because we are convinced that one died for all, and therefore all died. And he died for all, that those who live should no longer live for themselves but for him who died for them and was raised again.

2 Corinthians 5: 18-19

All this is from God, who reconciled us to himself through Christ and gave us the ministry of reconciliation: that God was reconciling the world to himself in Christ, not counting men’s sins against them. And he has committed to us the message of reconciliation.

Would you pray with me?

Father, thank you for the call. First the call to come to you, confess you, believe you, to know you. Thank you for the call to serve you, to serve others in this world while we are here just a short time. Lord help us to hear again the call and to heed it both as your individuals, as your children and as this institution as a church. We pray this in Jesus’ name. Amen.

What does being a missionary mean? It means a lot of things but there are three or four things I want to share very briefly with you today.

First, A MISSIONARY KNOWS THIS WORLD IS NOT OUR HOME

This world is not our home. There is an old story about in the early days when someone was going out as a missionary to Africa, someone said, “Don’t you know that you might die there?” And the missionary designate said, “I am already dead.” Now what did they mean by that? They didn’t mean that life wasn’t important or that they had a wish to go out and die, or anything like that; but they had given over their lives so much to Christ that they knew their lives were in his hands and there is a sense in which we, if we do that, know that this world is not our home.

Now, the temptation for all of us, as individuals and as a church, is to do everything we can to be comfortable here and make this place our home. And we know better. All we have to do is look at the mirror as the years go by and see the hair change and the wrinkles happen and the sagging and you know what I mean. No need to go into the details, the gory details. All you have to do is to go walk out into the cemetery, which I think is a good thing to do from time to time, just to remind ourselves that life is short and this world is not our home. Yet if you were to look at our bank accounts and look at our day timers and everything and see how much time we spend and what we spend it on, it would be vastly in favor of making ourselves comfortable here, making ourselves successful here. Now I don’t want to say that comfort and success are all wrong, I don’t believe that, that is just a matter of perspective, a matter of priorities. What are we living for? What are people going to say at your funeral? Did you live for yourself or did you live for God? Were you a missionary, or not? Did you treat this world as your home and try to be as comfortable as possible as long as possible, or were you willing to do what God told you to do as a human being and as a church. Yet the same temptation is for churches as well, to make ourselves as comfortable as possible in our little conclave in our community where we just love each other but nothing really happens outside the walls.

Listen to what Paul says.

Now listen to the language here. He is talking about our bodies and he is talking about a longing that we all have in our hearts. We all have a longing to go home and that is why we are so tempted to make this place our home because we want it to be comfortable. We want to have a home. We see it at Christmas. We want to go home. And even when we have a home here, it gets old. We know this is not our home, but we still want to make it that way. With all the knick knacks and stuff we fix it up. We do this and there is nothing wrong with that, but it’s not our home and we will leave it all behind. I remember going to an apartment of someone who had passed away and this person had happened to leave their belongings to the church so that’s why I was there. But as you walked through how pointed it was. The whole closet was full of clothes, the record player had all the records stacked up that reminded us of who this person was, certain kind of furniture and pictures on the wall all kinds of things that said, this is me. They were gone, they left it behind.

2 Corinthians 5: 1-2

We long for the future. Listen to this remark, it is very, very challenging and we pass it over sometimes but he says:

2 Corinthians 5: 6-7

Therefore we are always confident and know that as long as we are at home in the body we are away from the Lord. We live by faith, not by sight. As long as we treat this place as our home we are not walking as we should.

A MISSIONARY BUILDS BRIDGES TO HIS COMMUNITY

Do you know who the greatest missionary was? Is? It is God. It is God Himself. God is the greatest of missionaries, because he built a bridge to us. He became like us. Phil Yancey…I love Phil Yancey; I recommend his books to everybody. He writes about going to visit an aquarium. He was looking at the fish and he was musing a little bit about the fish and he kind of said to himself, “Well, how would I influence these fish if I really wanted to?” Well the only way to do that would be to become one and to live in their water and learn to speak their language. God did that, in the person of Jesus Christ. Jesus wasn’t just a nice guy but he knew God. He was God, as well as human. That’s what we confess. That’s what the bible says. As such he is the greatest of missionaries because he became one of us and said, “I am like this. This is how you can understand me.” How does that work out practically?

Well, first I want you to see the scriptures that talk about this.

Philippians 2:7

Your attitude should be the same as that of Christ Jesus: Who, being in very nature God, did not consider equality with God something to be grasped, but made himself nothing, taking the very nature of a servant, being made in human likeness.

2 Corinthians 5:20

We are therefore Christ’s ambassadors, as though God were making his appeal through us.

How does that work out practically? Well being as a church and as individuals we have to work to be a part of the community. We have to be a part of the world. You know the danger for every church is to kind of build walls around yourselves. We have seen that in history quite a lot where people want to create monasteries way up on a hills. I am not against monasteries at all but sometimes they do it as an escape from the world, and churches do that too. They have their own little communities with their own walls. They do invite people in, but you are who you are and they are who they are, and everywhere in the bible it says go. It says go. That’s the first command of Jesus- it was to go. Now I find the Army kind of an analogy of that. What do you have to do to be in the Army as a chaplain? Well, you have to go learn how to be a soldier and to look like one and to dress like one and to salute like one. You know when I first got into basics it was fun. You know, a bunch of clergy people with a bunch of fat around the edges, you know, didn’t know how to salute, didn’t know how to walk. I was one of them -- didn’t know how to do anything. But you have to learn. As a chaplain you are a staff officer, you are part of the commander’s staff and you advise him as the staff always does to a commander so we can complete the mission. Now my subject matter of expertise has to be religion. So part of my job is to advise the commander about local religions, what do they believe, how do we not screw up by dealing with people. “Now if you go and do that, Sir, you are going to insult half the population and that won’t be very good. And it is exceptionally important right now, exceptionally important.” Chaplains do some of that work but they also take care of the spiritual needs of the soldiers. The Army has recognized, you know, the Army is kind of a funny organization, it is a mission. Sometimes when you are doing a mission, you don’t care about people; you just keep doing the mission. I am kind of the lonely voice that says, “What about this? How are the soldiers going to feel if you do that, just like that? What about worship?” I was looking on the training schedule just the other day, I even emailed a guy and said, “You haven’t had a chaplain in a while, but we need to have a worship service at such and such a time, was that on the training schedule? No.” So I have to go fight for it and advocate for it. So I put on a uniform and entered into the world, and I am Christian in the midst of that. My crest up here says “Pro Deo et Patria”, “For God and Country”. If that ever gets reversed, I will resign my commission, because God is first, always.

We enter the world. How do we do that as a church? Well sometimes we have to take opportunities that God gives us, sometimes we have to go out and do things and that’ really what I am hoping for you. You have done many things in the community, but we need to do more. We need to be a going church, more than we are. One of the things God has brought us is a local school; and the school may be with us one year, two years three years, I have no idea, but what does it do? It requires us to deal with the world. And if it is ever too painful in terms of compromise, we won’t do it. But it does require us to deal with other people and it serves the community.

The third thing is: A MISSIONARY KNOWS THERE IS A COST

Jesus knew that.

2 Corinthians 5: 21

God made him who had no sin to be sin for us, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God.

Philippians 2:8

And being found in appearance as a man, he humbled himself and became obedient to death—even death on a cross!

There is payment. Sometimes it means going to Africa or Afghanistan, or wherever. Not everybody is called to that but what does it mean to us. Maybe it means you just go into a bad neighborhood, maybe it means to go to people we don’t know very well, we can’t deal with, we don’t know their language. Maybe it means dealing with a school that comes in and says well we have to arrange the furniture this way in this room, and then we’ll push it back and you have to use the room that way. There is pause for inconvenience. When new people come in it is highly inconvenient. They come in; they dress different; they are different; they have different sets of beliefs. You know, if you have ever taken Alpha training it is very, very interesting. We teach you if you get a person who hasn’t been in church they don’t know how to speak the language, like a military language. Now, churches have their own little God talk. They don’t know how to do that. They may come up with the craziest ideas you ever heard of. Do you slap them around because they are different? No, you try to say, “That’s interesting. I’ll be your friend. Let me show you something else.” Let God do His work. Going costs. Sometimes it is the ultimate cost. Sometimes it is just being inconvenienced. Sometimes it means doing something a little bit different.

Last but not least,

AS MISSIONARIES WE HAVE A MISSION AND A MESSAGE

2 Corinthians 5: 18-19

That’s our message. The message is the gospel. It is a message of mercy. It is a message that says to people, God has his arms open for you if you will but come. Buck is ready to lead you; and he and I are on the same page, about a lot of things, most everything; but one of the things we are really on the same page now is that over the next fifteen months it is not just the fingernails holding on sort of deal. Go. Do. You will, I know you will. This is not a holding pattern time. We can’t be replaced. That’s one thing I learned in the Army, if you leave, somebody comes in behind you. And it is good. My desire and my plan is to come back. But we will see what God has planned. God may take me to heaven. God may do something else. You have been around 120 years now. God is the Lord of this church. Whether I am here or not, God will still be the Lord of this church. It is not a holding pattern, it is a going pattern. Be missionaries. Be missionaries as individuals and as a church. That’s God’s calling, no matter what happens, no matter where we go, no matter who you are. We belong to Him, that’s what we are. I leave you with that. In the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit. Amen.

Would you pray with me?

Lord, I thank you for this church and its witness for 120 years. I thank you for the godly people here who you have had and worked with and who have stood in this place and built this place and sent people and done so many things. I thank you that you do that here and all over the world, that you choose people and you put them in a place. Help us Lord to not be too comfortable. Help us Lord to heed the call to deal with the temptation just to sit and watch. Help us to be goers and senders and doers. I thank you again for this place and these people. I ask your blessing upon them. We pray in Jesus’ name. Amen.