Sermon 2019.03.31
Risk-Taking Mission
(Matthew 25:32-40; sermon 5 of 6 in Lenten series “Bearing Fruit”)

1. Bearing fruit.  For Lent, we’ve been thinking about John the Baptist’s warning to “Bear fruit worthy of repentance” (Matthew 3:8). Our guide to fruit bearing, individually and as a church, has been Bishop Schnase’s book Five Practices of Fruitful Congregations, updated to emphasize both “come and see” and “go and do.”

We began with radical hospitality – making sure that we welcome all who come to our church looking for an experience of God’s unconditional love, and we take our welcoming attitude out into the world in ways that invite people to know us and know God better. We love unconditionally.

We practice passionate worship – giving God the best praise we can each week at church, and as we go out to the world looking for ways to praise God in daily life. We celebrate God in all we do.

We engage in intentional faith development – always growing in our faith and knowledge of God through small groups and study, and carrying that attitude of learning into the classroom of the world. We prepare our hearts, minds, and hands. How is it with your soul?

Today, our focus is on risk-taking mission and service – we serve Jesus when we serve others. This means going outside our comfort zones. Sometimes we have to put ourselves “out there” to make a difference “in here,” in our hearts.

2. Love in action.  Jesus is quite clear in scripture that we are to care for those in need. Our scripture reading today is part of a larger passage where Jesus talks about sorting the people of the world at the final judgment. Those who have fed the hungry, welcomed strangers, clothed the needy, cared for the sick, and visited the prisoners are welcomed into heaven (25:32-40). Those who have failed in these basic duties of compassion, charity, and service are sent away to eternal punishment (25:46).

It isn’t that these actions earn us a ticket to heaven. Rather, we engage in loving service and charity as a living embodiment of Jesus’ great commandment, “Love God with everything you’ve got, and love your neighbor as yourself” (Mark 12:29-31). We are saved by faith, but we live out that faith in the real world. We can’t separate loving God from loving our neighbor. Love isn’t just theoretical; love is practical. Love is active.

Or as Jesus’ brother James put it in his letter, “Faith by itself, if it does not have works, is dead” (James 2:17). Living faith is loving faith, love put into action through mission and service.

3. Toxic charity.  In recent years, Christians have recognized that we sometimes do damage where we mean to help. Books like Toxic Charity have demonstrated the unintended consequences of thoughtless mission work.

Done poorly, mission work can be deadening to us and harmful to those we intend to help. Mission work is deadening to us when we isolate ourselves from the people we want to serve. When we salve our souls and soothe our consciences without really engaging, it is a temporary spiritual fix at best.

But unengaged, “safe” charity can be even worse for those in need. Toxic charity happens when would-be do-gooders don’t consider the real needs of those they hope to help. When we parachute drop into a desperate situation with tons of food or clothing imported from overseas, what does that do to local merchants trying to make a living? Sometimes we unintentionally destroy fragile economies.

Or when we force third-world people to implement first-world technologies or practices without considering infrastructure or tradition, the long-term consequences can be toxic. What happens when the batteries die, or the bottle of pills is empty, and we are long gone? Our well-intended charity becomes just another broken piece of plastic on the junk pile, another penicillin-resistant infection in the wild.

4. Engage!  In his book, Bishop Schnase describes authentic mission and service as “risk-taking.” By this he means that we have to get out of our comfort zones and engage in active mission and service. 

The best missions and service are relational. We engage with those we serve, getting to know them as real people. In the process we learn to respect them. We learn what they think will help in their context, and we work to make that a reality.

We are pretty good at relational mission work here at Onalaska UMC. We meet the people who come to the community dinner. We go to the warming center to serve dinner to the homeless. We do to the jail and the nursing homes to lead worship. We send teams on mission trips around the US and across the world.

As our vision statement for Onalaska UMC says, we “SERVE in all the ways we can!”

I experienced a good example of this on our Guatemalan mission trip last fall. Our main project was helping to construct a school administration building. But we worked in small teams with local construction workers, and we learned their ways of doing things as we made new friends. The teachers came and talked to us about how they would use the building. We met the doctors and patients at the local medical clinic, and families in their homes. We came away impressed by the ingenuity and resilience of these folks, and they knew that we came to serve in love and humility.

A side note: not everyone has the time or ability to engage hands-on in relational mission work. For some of us, our ability to support missions financially is the gift we can offer. But we can still be engaged by choosing and learning about the missions we support. We can be praying for these missions. And we can be risk-taking in our level of support.

5. Jesus in person.  Risk-taking mission and service takes us out of our comfort zone. We put ourselves “out there” and serve with humility. And we are often surprised in our service.

In Matthew 25:40, Jesus says, “Truly I tell you, just as you did it to one of the least of these who are members of my family, you did it to me.” 

Countless are the stories of people coming back from engaging in mission work and saying they grew spiritually, that they have a deeper love for others, and a more intimate knowledge of God’s love for them. 

When we engage in risk-taking mission and service, more often than not Jesus shows up.

- Amen.