The readings I’ve chosen to use this evening are the second service readings for today in the revised common lectionary. In fact they’re the first readings on which I ever preached, quite a few years ago now. I might have just blown dust off that sermon and recycled it tonight, but perhaps not. Instead I’d like to think about mission. At the time I preached that very first sermon, I’d just started at college training for the ministry, and back in my home church in Stafford there was a mission campaign in process. Through the summer before we set off for college I’d been part of the team preparing for it.
We’d visited every home in the parish, and from the questionnaire sheets we filled in, the parish leadership team and the visiting mission team had drawn up a programme of targeted visits to make during the mission fortnight. We’d had prayer and Bible study groups through the summer as well, as part of what was a very intensive and thought out process, planned in great detail.
“It’s going to be quite a campaign,” said my vicar in his sermon, maybe a couple of Sundays before I left to start at college. “But,” he continued, “don’t imagine that when it’s over, that’s it, we’ll have done mission and won’t need to think about it any more. The mission team will work hard on our behalf; but nothing they do will be of any use unless we all go on doing mission here after they’ve gone.”
Back in 1931, Emil Brunner wrote this: “The Church exists by mission, just as a fire exists by burning. Where there is no mission, there is no Church; and where there is neither Church nor mission, there is no faith.” So mission isn’t one project within the Church’s programme of activities, but the fundamental reason why the Church exists at all. It’s why we’re here. That may come as a shock to those Christians who think their primary purpose is to maintain their building or to keep things how they’ve always been.
It may also come as a shock to those who say, “Yes, but look how small and weak we are. How can we do anything? It’s as much as we can manage just to keep going!” I spend a lot of my time working in very small churches, and so I can understand that point of view; and there is a very valid and Biblical ministry of being the faithful remnant, of holding on, hanging on in there until the tide turns.
But there’s also a message for us in our first reading tonight, that lovely story from the second Book of Kings. The prophet Elisha seems to have got himself into a bit of a pickle. And his servant is alarmed, even if Elisha isn’t, when he sees the vast army that surrounds them, with their horses and chariots. So the prophet opens his servant’s eyes to see what’s really there: the hills all around their enemies is covered with the armies of the Lord, with their chariots of fire. As Elisha tells him: “Those who are for us are very much more than those who are against us.”
I love this story, in part because, unlike many Old Testament accounts where enemies get comprehensively slain, in this story they all just have a really good knees-up feast together and then go safely home. But the message for us is a timely reminder that we are on the winning side, and that, however weak we may think we are, those who are for us are very much more than those who are against us.
All of which says to me that mission is still our primary task even when we really are just two or three gathered together. In fact almost everything in the New Testament scriptures is addressed to small disciple groups with big tasks ahead of them. And when Paul writes to Corinth that “not many of you have status or learning as it is measured by the world,” we’re reminded that the extraordinary things we read about in the New Testament were done by ordinary people. Like the disciples of Jesus - ordinary people: hardly the cream of the rabbinical schools.
But when we’re working for Jesus, we’ll not be doing that work in our own strength alone. When we work for him we also work with him. And while some missions require complex and well-prepared campaigns like in my home church, and others might involve internationally known evangelists and football stadia, and there’s certainly a place for that - what really works better than any of that is the opportunistic, maybe one-to-one bit of evangelism that not only invites but accompanies, that brings people in soul by soul.
I’ve spoken often about a friend of mine who whistles hymn tunes when he goes round his local Sainsbury’s - so if I’ve already mentioned him to you, my apologies. Anyway, his story’s worth repeating. People respond, and conversations are started; it’s amazing, he tells me, just what can come out of a quick whistle of “The Old Rugged Cross” in the cheese aisle at Sainsbury’s. Since you don’t have a Sainsbury’s here, I promise it’ll work just as well in Tesco or Morrison’s or Lidl.
We can find a good example of opportunistic evangelism in our second reading. Paul’s been left stranded for a while in Athens, and you do rather get the impression that Athens is a place he’d like to get out of as soon as he can. But in the meantime he’s open to any opportunity to share the good news, and, among all the variety of temples and altars and shrines, it’s a shrine inscribed “to an unknown God” that presents the opening he needs.
The story behind this inscription goes back another six hundred years, to a time when Athens was devastated by plague. The poet Epimenides proposed that a flock of black and white sheep be released to roam through the city. Where any sheep lay down, it would be sacrificed to the god whose shrine was nearest. If no shrine was close, the sheep would be sacrificed “to an unknown God” - hence the shrine Paul saw that day, and on which he based his sermon.
There are always opportunities to do mission, and while Paul certainly had a way with words, if words are not your strong point that doesn’t exclude you from mission. Francis of Assisi famously said, “Preach at all times, and where necessary use words.” We share our faith as much by what we do as what we say, by how we live rather than what we talk about. Ours is an inclusive God - we know that God is like Jesus, who was open to all who came to him - so if our approach to life is narrow and exclusive, we’re getting it wrong. But ours is a God who challenges and who encourages us to seek perfection - he does indeed already love us, just as we are, but he loves us too much to leave us that way - so to do mission is also to challenge people to look at themselves, to see what needs to change, to start afresh.
So if we say, “God is love,” and then act in an unloving way, people will see through what we say; our success in mission is very dependant on how we are when we think we’re off duty. If we say “God is love,” and then fail to challenge what is unloving in the world around us, then again, any success in mission is going to be short-term. A clergy friend of mine, when asked her secret as regards getting people into church, smiled and said, “Chocolate!” Well, she does have a very healthy and thriving church, and chocolate may well be what gets people in through that door, but what keeps them there is a fellowship where the love of Christ is not only sung about and talked about, but shown and lived.
I spent three years of my ministry working for a mission agency, which had for over three hundred years been sending missionaries overseas. Nowadays our emphasis was much more on partnership in mission than primary evangelism, but still people were going into places that were culturally challenging with a big task to perform. But wherever we go with the word of God, and in the name of Christ, we’ll find, as did our very first missionaries, that Christ is already there.
Having said that, not all will hear, and hear gladly. Jesus of course told the parable of the sower to make that point. Some seed doesn’t grow, or if it does grow it isn’t fruitful, for a host of reasons. That might put us off sowing, but it shouldn’t. If nothing is sown, nothing will grow. If something is sown, some of that will grow. We might not see it grow, sometimes the seed takes time to germinate. But our task in mission is to sow anyway.
So with Paul. Some of those who heard him that day in the Court of Areopagus were contemptuous and dismissive, especially when he started talking about resurrection, something they couldn’t accept. Others said, “We will hear you on this some other time,” which probably meant they had no intention of doing so. But some did respond, and we’re told their names. And who knows? Maybe some of the others thought again, maybe some of the seed sown lodged and sprouted, long after Paul himself had left. We may never know where the witness we offer might lead.
Thinking back to that mission campaign in - when was it? - probably 1978, I’ve often wondered about the conversations I had with people we visited. Our job was to test the water, to prepare the way. Sometimes people were dismissive, and those addresses presumably didn’t made it onto the list for the mission team. Some people were already members of other churches, and often they were eager to pray with me for the success of our mission. And maybe some of the people I talked to, even though they didn’t respond then, did do so later. I’ll never know, this side of the veil.
But here’s what motivated the guys who came as the mission team to my home church; here’s what motivated Paul that day in Athens (and throughout an amazing ministry); here’s what I hope will motivate me and you - that what we have been freely given in Christ is so amazing and transformative, and burns so bright within us, that we can’t help but pass it on. Amen.
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