“One Last Thing”

Matthew 28:16-20

May 22, 2005

St. Paul United Methodist Church

Rev. John A. Fleming

My dad loves classical music. He was trained in it. He has been a church musician since he was sixteen. He is retired now, but he taught music classes and lessons and was the chairman of the music department at my alma mater, Lambuth University, in Jackson. And when I was a kid, growing up in his house, and riding in the cars that he paid for, he often played the trump card and made me listen to his radio station, a classical radio station where composers like Ludwig Van Beethoven, Johann Sebastian Bach, Mozart, Chopin, and Handel’s works were

being played. Give me artists like Poison and Bryan Adams any day. But give me Beethoven and I would roll my eyes and leave the room. Dad also drug me, uh, I mean gave me the opportunity to go to something that my hometown called Community Concerts. I spent hours at a time at the Jackson Civic Center, now named for its most famous citizen, Carl Perkins.

I feel a little different about classical music these days. It is still not my music of choice but I appreciate it more the older I get. Now I love things like the Hallelujah Chorus and Widor’s Tocatta. Susie and I processed out of the church our wedding day to Widor’s Tocatta. The sometimes soft sounds of classical music put me in a place of peace.

So I have listened to classical music fro most of my life, even though for a time I did that reluctantly. I am by no means an expert, but sometimes I wondered whether or not some of the great classical composers knew how to bring a piece to an end. I have also wondered that about preachers, too. I have heard some sermons and I have preached some sermons that had a great stopping place, a perfect exclamation point that was passed by. The preacher of these sermons ended up preaching another ten minutes or so. Two boys were in church one Sunday morning. One of the boys was visiting his friend’s church for the first time. The preacher had been preaching for quite a while when he said, “And in conclusion...” The boy who was visiting his friend’s church asked, “What does that mean.” The boy whose church this was said, “As far as I can tell absolutely nothing.” To be honest with you, the hardest part of the sermon for me is its ending. I try to tie up neatly for an Amen, but that is very hard to do.

One of the most notorious composers for having trouble with the end of a piece, my dad tells me, was Beethoven. There are times when, at the end of the symphony you think that you are coming to an end, but then the chords go on and on, leaving room for just one more, and then another, until the last one dies away and the symphony is complete. A serious student, like my dad, could explain how a great deal has been packed into the ending of a piece, as if the whole thing is being gathered up into those last, few, explosive chords.

I think that the ending to Matthew’s gospel is like that. Not that it goes on and on, longer than you would expect. It is, in fact, quite compact. But it says so much that we would do well to slow down as we think about it, listening carefully to how each line gathers up this gospel. Matthew has the scene happening up on a mountain, which is not surprising. A great deal of Matthew’s gospel happens on a mountain top. Jesus is tempted on a mountain top. He preaches his most powerful sermon, The Sermon on the Mount, on top of a mountain. Jesus is transfigured before two of his disciples, on a mountain top. And now Jesus wants to say a last and a lasting word on top of a mountain. So I would like for you to go on this mountain top with Jesus this morning. I would like for you to look in his eyes as he says these important words.

You will have to share the moment with the remaining disciples. Matthew tells us that they met Christ up there, on that mountain, and that they worshiped him. Now my translation of the verse reads, “When they saw him, they worshiped him, but some doubted.” Actually I think that the verse literally means that they worshiped and they doubted. Now does that go together? I think that it does. I don’t think that I have ever met anyone who had one hundred percent faith, a faith without a shadow of a doubt. Sometimes we sit in our pews without an ounce of doubt. But most of the time we worship and shift edgily in our pews and force back the bad taste of doubt. We still have haunting questions, that’s only natural. We want to know: “Why her? Why us? Why that? Why now?” They worshiped and they doubted. That was the church when Jesus appeared to the eleven disciples two thousand years ago. And that is the church of our day, too.

In their worship and in their doubt, Jesus said to them, “All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me, to give you these words of instructions.” Jesus says, “I want you to go out into the whole world and make disciples.

Make disciples, Jesus? I’ve wondered how you do that. Is there some kind of a machine, like a bread machine, that when you throw in all of the ingredients, a disciple pops out? What would the recipe look like? I guess that you would throw in a tablespoon of love, a cup of commitment, a smidgen of truth, a teaspoon of integrity. Mix it all together, and bake it for thirty minutes and wha-la, out comes a disciple. Now wouldn’t that be great?!

It is not that easy. It does not happen that way. It is harder than that. I know some people who hear the word “make” disciples and think that it means to coerce or pressure people into becoming disciples. I do not think that that is the right approach. I believe that the word disciple was mean to be a verb. We are to disciple people. That is what we are called to do. But how do you do that? How do you disciple people? Well, I think that you are supposed to do it the same way that Jesus did it. Jesus discipled people by loving them, by caring for them, by helping them, by healing them, by blessing them.

And some of them responded and followed and some, quite frankly, did not. I have used him a lot lately in my sermons, but look at the rich young ruler. I don’t know what I’ll do when his story comes up in the lectionary. This man came to Jesus and said with some anguish, “What must I do to have eternal life?” Jesus looked at him, he loved him, and he said, “Your life is full of so much stuff. It’s keeping you from a relationship with God. Go and sell all of it, then come back here and follow me.” The man was sad, I suspect. He had so many things. But do you see what Jesus did, he gave him room to make his decision, he gave him the chance to say no. Because if there isn’t room to say no, then yes doesn’t mean a thing.

One of the things that us preachers are supposed to do is to close the deal, to get folks to sign on the dotted line and join the church. I have never been one to beat people over the head with my Bible. I want people to come here, to feel comfortable here, to know that I know their name, and when the time is right, to talk with them about what it means to be a part of the St. Paul family. I can remember a woman in the Harmony Grove Church who came back to church after a nasty divorce. She was invited by a church member, picked up in her car, and came to a worship service. That is the way that you are supposed to do it, by the way. Our member who brought her gently said to me, “Go slow with her, preacher. Don’t scare her off. In fact, don’t call her for at least a month.” It was her way of saying that she needed time to heal. She came back the next week and attended for almost a year when she gently said to me, “I know about your conversations with Joyce. I am ready to join the church.” She wrote me a letter after she joined. Turns out she hadn’t been baptized. She told me how she appreciated the fact that the church invited her, loved her, and let her take the time that she needed.

We need to give people time to become disciples and we don’t need to get mad when they don’t accept our invitation. For some it will take several invitations. For others, it will take only one. For still others they will never accept our invitation to come to church and begin the journey towards God. That was the case with an entire town. In Luke’s gospel, Luke tells us that Jesus sent a few of his disciples ahead of the rest to a town of Samaria. Jesus was in hopes that their message would be received by the town’s residents. The message was not received. The delegation came back upset. They told Jesus that they would not accept him because his face was set towards Jerusalem. These Samaritans wanted nothing to do with the journey to Jerusalem. And the disciples were mad. They asked Jesus, “Lord, do you want us to command fire to come down from heaven and consume them?” It might have been tempting. Luke tells us that Jesus did not go for the idea, that he turned and rebuked those disciples.

The best way that you can make someone else a disciple is to be a disciple, to drink deeply of the spiritual waters, to live the life that Jesus challenged and encouraged us to live, to be someone deep inside, full of integrity and full of life so that when other people see it in you they will want it for themselves. And when they are ready, we are to lead them to Christ.

One of my favorite stories is told by a medical missionary to China of his experiences there. He tells that one day a man who happened to be blind. He came to the clinic and his treatment began. After several weeks of treatment, the man received his sight. His particular sight problem was fixed by a special but tedious procedure. When the bandages were taken off of his eyes, the man was thrilled. A day or two later he left the clinic, profusely thanking everyone for their help. No one expected to see the man again. So everyone was surprised when he came back almost a month later. But this time he was not alone this time, with a single rope, he was leading forty-eight persons to the clinic. Some of them had walked more than two hundred and fifty miles to get there. That is the way that it is supposed to happen in the church, isn’t it? God’s plan has always been pretty simple. Those who need healing come to Jesus. Jesus heals them, and then those who have this new life and a new hope reach out to others who need healing and hope in their own lives and they bring them to Jesus. You know, I guess that we could put it this way. From the very start, God’s plan for reaching people has been, well, people. One person touching another person’s life and that person touching another person’s life. And that person touching another person’s life. We should do this with the good news of Jesus Christ, shouldn’t we?

Now I guess that the symphony ought to end here, but there is one more thing that I want to say to you this morning. I’ve talked about making disciples, the second command is to baptize, which we’ve reserved for the church. So before we go home I want you to know that once people are disciples, our job is to teach them what Jesus has taught us. You can disguise it, you can say it’s not true, but what new disciples really need are lessons.

We think that our youth aren’t interested in things like this, then I’ll tell you that you’re wrong. Go with them to a retreat, and be with them until the campfire dwindles. Be available for them and one of them just might come up to you and say, “I know that the Bible tells me that I am supposed to honor my mother and father. What do I do if I don’t agree with my parents are doing and how they are living their lives?” Who asked that? Isn’t that a thirteen year old girl? Make yourselves available and you might hear this, “I wonder what happened to those boys in Colorado, the ones who killed their classmates. What do you think that God did about them when they died?” Who asked that? I believe that it was a fifteen year old boy. And those are the easy questions.

I know that it is not just our youth who yearn for the lessons. Adults have come to see me, sat down in one of the chairs in my office and said something like, “I’ve hurt a lot of people in my life. Do you think that God could ever forgive me?” Our job, friends, is to teach the lessons that have been taught to us. I know that we don’t think that we are qualified. No one ever thinks that they are qualified for teaching in the church. But we must do it. We must stir up the confidence to tell what we know. And by the way, these teachings happen more around coffee cups than they do in the Sunday School classroom.

We must have the courage to live our lives in such a way that we help make disciples and when someone has notices it in us, we must be ready to tell our story and answer the hard questions. Let us pray.