Luke 4: 16-21
4th Mark of Mission:
Transform unjust structures
Whaley Bridge
Sunday 07.02.21
Today we going to carry on working through what we mean by the word “mission”. You’ll remember that ‘mission’ is a really important word for us in the church and people sometimes to come to it with preconceived ideas about what it means.
So, to help us get into the true heart of what mission means, we’re looking at what are called the “Five Marks of Mission”. These five domains are the widely accepted definitions of what mission means for the church today. Here they are again as a reminder (slide/screen share).
To proclaim the Good News of the Kingdom: TELL
To teach, baptise and nurture new believers: TEACH
To respond to human need by loving service: TEND
To transform unjust structures of society, to challenge violence of every kind and pursue peace and reconciliation: TRANSFORM
To strive to safeguard the integrity of creation, and sustain and renew the life of the earth: TREASURE
I think that they’re a really broad, all-encompassing picture of what mission should look like. Perhaps we should all take time to memorise them!
And let’s remind ourselves that mission is the work of God’s Spirit. It’s God’s work. Our job is to join in. We know is that God’s creative Spirit is out and about in Whaley Bridge and across the whole world. Our job is to discern where God is active and then join in, committing ourselves wholeheartedly with creativity and energy.
(End screen share)
Now, my talk today is going to look at mark number four, “To transform unjust structures of society, to challenge violence of every kind and pursue peace and reconciliation.”
And that’s an awfully big ask for one little sermon, so I’m going to focus on that first part, on the call to build a just society.
Let’s start then, where we always should, with Jesus as we find him in the Bible. The reading today from Luke is a really important passage and is one of the keys to understanding his whole gospel. We’re at the start of Jesus ministry. Jesus comes out from his testing in the wilderness to Nazareth. He chooses a very particular passage from the prophet Isaiah and reads the words we heard: to bring good news to the poor, to let the oppressed go free. These words have sometimes been described as Jesus’ manifesto or programme. He’s saying, right at the start of his mission, ‘this is what I’m about. Let those with ears to hear, hear’.
Jesus is making clear that he’s standing in the line of succession to the prophets on the importance of justice to God. In our Old Testament reading we heard the prophet Amos’ purple passage telling us that God wasn’t interested in really good quality acts of worship. He wanted an end to oppression of the poor and vulnerable and needy. And this theme was owned and taken up by the early church. James’ letter is a particularly pithy put down of Christians who make distinctions because of wealth and status. For James there is a radical equality in the Kingdom of God.
So, we can see that there’s a clear and continuous line in the understanding in the Bible that God is bothered about the social and political structures of this world. God’s Kingdom is about justice.
Now, what does that mean for us in the nitty gritty of our lives here in Whaley Bridge today? How can we understand this call as missional for us today?
Let’s face it, there are still lots of things going wrong in society. Children who go hungry. Some people who are really wealthy while others are homeless. Discrimination is still rife.
The fact that we live in a modern society hasn’t removed the reality that there is injustice and unfairness in so many places. So how should we as Christians start to engage with these issues? It’s easy to feel overwhelmed but we should remember that we are a people of hope. Hope is a fundamental Christian characteristic.
To understand what God wants of us, we should look at the person of Jesus and see how he lived his life on earth. Remember, Jesus is the human face of God. If we want to know what God is like then we look at Jesus.
What we see in Jesus is someone who was radically inclusive and who wouldn’t stand for boundaries between people. I’m going to suggest that there is an important lesson for us here.
The disciple Matthew was a tax collector. That means he was a lying, extorting crook. He worked for the Romans. It wouldn’t be too extreme to draw a comparison with someone who collaborated with the Nazi’s. He would have been, understandably, hated by good, religious Jews. And Jesus called him. He called him to be included with his closest companions.
And who did Jesus call to be the first evangelist, the first person who told the world who Jesus was? We find her in John 4, a Samaritan woman of dodgy past who seems to have got through an awful lot of husbands. The Samaritans were hated by the Jews, she was a woman, and she had an unusual history. Jesus should have steered clear of her, but he met her where she was, showed her who he was, and she went to out tell her people about him.
And my final example of Jesus having no regard for the rules about who is in and who is out is His attitude to keeping the Sabbath. Now this was very important to good religious people back in Jesus time, but the Gospels are positively full of stories showing Jesus butting up against the Sabbath rules and knocking them down. It’s not religious rules that matter but our heart for God’s Kingdom.
I wanted to run through those examples of how Jesus included people that society or religious people excluded to form the backdrop to two issues which we might challenge ourselves about. Both can be gathered under a banner of what’s called ‘inclusion’ and I believe that both are justice issues which resonate strongly in today’s society. They are important.
The first is to look at the experience of black and brown people in this country. Whaley Bridge is overwhelmingly white, that’s just how it is, but there will still be some black and brown people out there in the town. How would it be if a black family moved into town post lockdown and wanted to come and join us for worship on a Sunday morning? Would we be able to meet them where they are, with all their history and experience?
Well, I hope there would be that genuine and inclusive welcome if that black family arrived in church as I described earlier. I’m going to try and do something on the issue now through by educating myself. I’ve just bought the book ‘Ghost Ship’ by black C of E priest Azariah France-Williams. It’s subtitled ‘Institutional Racism in the Church of England’. It’s been very well reviewed, and France-Williams is considered a very significant voice in the church at the moment. I don’t think it will be an easy read but I’m going to let myself be challenged by it. Perhaps that’s something we could all commit to, finding out about the experiences of black people in the church and society today, hearing their voices.
And secondly, I want us to think about how we can welcome and include gay and lesbian people. Sometimes this is a controversial subject for churches and sometimes it isn’t. Inclusion of gay people has sometimes served as a lightening rod test for how people read their Bible, a sort of unfortunate shorthand.
I’m sensitive about raising the issue in this way. There may be a range of views and I don’t want anyone to feel silenced. And there may, of course, be gay and lesbian people in this service, and certainly in our friends and families and colleagues. I’m hesitant about talking about people without their own voices being heard. Nevertheless, the Jesus we have heard about today wasn’t interested in rules and boundaries about who was inside and who was outside. He went outside the boundaries and called people in. Tax collectors, women with unusual histories, all kinds of people that were excluded and hated because of who they were. If we want to truly follow Jesus, then I think we need to take some first steps on the road to imitating his kind of welcome.
The C of E has recently published some resources to help Christians do that. If you google ‘Living in Love and Faith’ (that’s Living in Love and Faith) you’ll be able to find all kinds of information and resources to help you go deeper on this issue and I hope it’s something we can talk to each other about, with love and graciously, over the coming months. I think it’s a critical issue in the church.
So, we heard today that the God we find revealed in the Old and New Testament has always been a God who wants to see his justice roll down like a torrent of water. And we’ve seen how welcoming Jesus was to outsiders, no matter how unpopular that made him. He was an includer. My prayer is that we can take steps as a church to becoming more like Jesus. to become more concerned with issues of justice, particularly issues of welcome and inclusion, so that there is more Jesus and therefore more justice in the world and I think that we will, then, be truly missional. Amen