Mixin It Up – Mission Sunday

Mixin It Up – Mission Sunday
Sycamore Creek Church
March 27, 2011
Tom Arthur

Peace, Friends!

Over the last several months we’ve been mixin it up: putting together missions and small groups.  Each small group has been working to explore various mission opportunities in our community, and then seeking to make a commitment to one of them.  This hasn’t been an easy task, and we probably didn’t give the small groups quite enough time to complete it, so today we’ll be exploring and celebrating the mixin thus far, and come our spring Vision Meeting, we’ll be looking to make some more concrete commitments.

So we’re mixin up mission and small groups.  How can we mix it up any more than we already have?  Today I’d like to go back to our four week teaching series on the topic and mix it up backwards.  Yes.  Backwards.  We started with a basic recipe, went on to an incarnational (aka “God in the flesh in Jesus”) model, explored mission to vs. mission with, and ended with mission as justice.  Today I want to recap each of those messages but take the order backwards.  So let’s start with justice.

Justice

In the book of Amos we read about what makes God lose patience.  God shows Amos a vision:
Thus the Lord God showed me a cage of fruit,
He asked me, “What do you see, Amos?”
I said, “A cage of fruit.”
The Lord God said to me, “My people, Israel, have become fruitless;
I will not forgive them forever.”
Amos 8:2 (Tom’s Translation)

Yikes!  God will not forgive them forever!  What could possibly cause God to lose patience?  God loses patience because God’s people, the spiritual ones, the religious ones, the ones who should know better, are cheating the poor and trying to wring as much profit out of them as possible while ignoring their plight.  Thus, God shows Amos a vision of a basket (or cage) of ripe fruit because the time is ripe for judgment.

Martin Luther King, Jr. spoke to this basic idea when he said, “Any religion that professes to be concerned about the souls of men and is not concerned about the slums that damn them, the economic conditions that strangle them and the social conditions that cripple them is a spiritually moribund religion awaiting burial.”  Sycamore Creek Church, let’s not be a spiritually dying community.  Let’s make sure our personal lives and our community life together is one that brings justice to the poor.

Mission “to” vs. Mission “with”

So why show concern to the poor?  Because God calls us to be not just in mission to the poor but in mission with the poor.

We see both of these ideas in the famous passage found in Matthew chapter twenty-five.  Jesus tells a story about judgment day and what happens.  He says that when we did something to the least of these we did it to him.  Here we see both mission to and mission with.  I’ve underlined first mission to:  “I was hungry and you gave me food, I was thirsty and you gave me something to drink, I was a stranger and you welcomed me,  I was naked and you gave me clothing, I was sick and you took care of me, I was in prison and you visited me” (Matthew 25:35-36, NRSV).

Now read it again and see the mission with:  “I was hungry and you gave me food, I was thirsty and you gave me something to drink, I was a stranger and you welcomed me,  I was naked and you gave me clothing, I was sick and you took care of me, I was in prison and you visited me.”

(Matthew 25:35-36, NRSV).  Do you see the difference?  This is perhaps the difference between “presents” and “presence.”  God isn’t just interested in out presents to people (though that is important) but also our presence with people.  Mission to is good.  But mission with is BETTER!

Jesus blazed the trail to mission with.  He came and gave us his presence, not just his presents from heaven.  John says, “So the Word became human and lived here on earth among us” (John 1:14, NLT).  And that bring us to an incarnational model of mission.

An Incarnational Model of Friendship

Incarnational?  “Carn” means flesh so “incarnational” means in the flesh.  God came in the flesh in the person of Jesus.  One paraphrase of John 1:14 says, the Word became flesh and “moved into the neighborhood.”  Or you might say, God became our friend in Jesus so that we might become friends with God.

Philippians 2:1-11 describes this well.  We don’t have time to look at this fully today, but if you read what is sometimes considered the oldest passage in the New Testament because it is a very very early church song, you will see that this incarnational model of friendship means that our friendship with the poor is other centered, proximity (close), emptying of self, risk taking, and finds its source in God’s power at work in our lives.

Maybe one of the moments I felt like I lived into this kind of incarnational model of friendship was when I volunteered at a boys club in the projects on the south side of Chicago.  Every Saturday I would go down with other Wheaton College students to take kids to the park to play.  Every Sunday I would join more students who ran a Sunday school class for these kids.  And every Wednesday I would go down with still more students for tutoring.  I developed a special relationship with two young men.  Their real names were Jeremy and Romerial but their nicknames were Squeaky and Nuke.

One Wednesday night as I sat on the floor in the hall of the school helping Squeaky and Nuke with their homework, I realized Squeaky was feeling my arm, gently rubbing it.  I looked down and he asked, “Why are some people white and some people black?”  Great question.  I paused to prepare my answer.  I was going to tell him what I thought at the time was the right answer.  That people had begun light skinned and as they migrated to warmer climates, their skin color darkened over time to be able to bear the intensity of the sun.  In other words, in my mind at the time, people had started out white and become black.

Before I had a chance to give my answer to Squeaky’s question, Nuke jumped in and said, “I know why.”  I said, “Tell us,” and he said, “Y’all lost your blackness!”  Whoa!  I realized in that moment of friendship through presence (not presents), of friendship through “moving” into a neighborhood that I most likely would never go into, that the way I saw the world was a very “white” way of seeing the world.  In that moment, Nuke helped me see something I had never seen and in that sense, come closer to Truth.

Basic Recipe

So how do we replicate this same kind of thing at SCC?  Well, in one sense SCC is itself a mission.  We exist to ignite authentic life in Christ by connecting and growing.  We are a mission to those who have spiritual needs to connect them to God and others and to grow in the character of Christ.  (Actually we all have spiritual needs don’t we!)  But in another sense SCC is on a mission.  We exist to ignite authentic life in Christ by serving, serving our church, our community, and our world.

This is a mission to both the “poor in spirit” (those who have spiritual needs) and the poor (those who are literally poor).  Jesus says in the Sermon on the Mount, “Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven” (Matthew 5:3, NRSV).  And in the Sermon on the Plain, Jesus says, “Blessed are you who are poor, for yours is the kingdom of God” (Luke 6:20, NRSV).

Ultimately this is all about friendship.  It’s about building friendships with those who have spiritual needs and physical needs.  It’s about following Jesus’ model of becoming friends with us so that we might become friends with God.  It’s about breaking out of our familiar friendships, the easy ones, the ones with people who are so very similar to us, and building friendships with people who are different than we are, who stretch us and draw us closer into the Truth.  Mixin It Up is about mixing our small groups and missions together so that small groups become a door into missions and missions become a door into small groups.  Why do we seek friendship with those who are in spiritual and physical need?  Because God first sought out friendship with each of us, each of us who is in spiritual and physical need.

Friends, let’s mix it up!