I.N.I.

A sermon to be preached at Christ Episcopal Church, Accokeek, Maryland on Sunday 24 February 2019, the Second to Last Sunday after the Epiphany, and based on all three of the appointed lessons in the ACNA lectionary: Romans 10:9-17; Isaiah 61:1-4; and John 20:19-31

Grace, mercy, and peace be yours in Christ Jesus, our Lord.

Dear Friends in Christ,

I’d like to start this morning with a brief pointer to the Church’s calendar. We are nearing the end of the season of Epiphany, which began back on 6 January. This season has traditionally been about Jesus, the light of the world, being revealed to the world. It starts with the wise men showing up in Bethlehem, the first non-Jews to worship Jesus. And the season has wound its way to this Sunday, marked as one on which we note an emphasis on world missions.

In the history of the immigrant church body of my youth we talked about two kinds of mission work. In German it was Innere Mission and Aussere Mission, that is, Inner Mission and Outer Mission. Briefly, the difference could be thought of as ‘home missions’ and ‘foreign missions,’ as Christian mission work nearby and far away. Back in the late 19th and very early 20th centuries it also meant German-language mission work, and non-German-language mission work.

One place in Scripture where that mission work was based is today’s lesson from Romans, especially 10:13-15. In a chain of questions, Paul writes: For “everyone who calls on the name of the Lord will be saved.” How then will they call on him in whom they have not believed? And how are they to believe in him of whom they have never heard? And how are they to hear without someone preaching? And how are they to preach unless they are sent?

Circle that word “sent”.

That’s the real core of the problem we are looking at this morning: how can anyone call on the name of the Lord and be saved, unless someone is sent to preach the good news to them so that they can hear it, so that they can believe it, so that they can call on that name of the Lord? Back when Saint Paul wrote these words, back in the earliest days of the Christian church, it was absolutely necessary that individual people were going from place to place to share the amazing message of salvation face to face. It’s still needed today, and with modern communication methods sometimes, clearly, the sending is virtual. That is, sometimes today the mission is carried out in print and in broadcasts and, of course, over the Internet.

But however it is done, the sending is still required. And it still happens. And it happens with great regularity.

Before we look for how it is Christian people get sent to do mission work, maybe we could look to see what can be included in the commission that a sent person receives. Christians are sent to the other side of the earth to speak the Gospel to others. They are sent to translate the Scriptures. They are sent to celebrate the Sacraments.

There’s actually a better description of all this in today’s Old Testament lesson from Isaiah 61. There we read: “The Spirit of the Lord God is upon me, because the Lord has anointed me to bring good news to the poor; he has sent me to bind up the brokenhearted, to proclaim liberty to the captives, and the opening of the prison to those who are bound; to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor, and the day of vengeance of our God; to comfort all who mourn; to grant to those who mourn in Zion—to give them a beautiful headdress instead of ashes, the oil of gladness instead of mourning, the garment of praise instead of a faint spirit; that they may be called oaks of righteousness, the planting of the Lord, that he may be glorified.”

These, my friends, are the core duties of Christians who are sent on missions for God. Each of us has particular ways in which we carry this out. But as imitators of the Lord Jesus, these activities of proclaiming and binding up and opening and comforting and giving, they’re underneath and behind what we do. Do you know why? Because they are what Jesus did. We have Jesus’s own words that this prophecy from Isaiah was fulfilled in what Jesus did.

Lest my shift in language was too subtle – that shift from speaking of ‘those missionaries out there, sent to the ends of the earth’ to speaking about ‘us and what we do’ — lest you miss the point, let me speak plainly: each and every Christian is sent into mission work for God.

Some are still sent far away, yes. But this is key: some people are sent much closer to home.

How can I claim that? How can that be true?

I invite you to turn your attention now to today’s Gospel. In John 20:21-23 we read: “Jesus said to them again, “Peace be with you. As the Father has sent me, even so I am sending you.” And when he had said this, he breathed on them and said to them, “Receive the Holy Spirit. If you forgive the sins of any, they are forgiven them; if you withhold forgiveness from any, it is withheld.”

Here near the end of John’s Gospel, on the evening of that first day of the week, the evening of the very first Easter, the same day Jesus rose from the dead, Jesus says to his disciples, “As the Father has sent me, even so I am sending you.”

Now, it is a little unclear whether the “disciples” Jesus mentioned were only 10 of the 12 apostles, or whether there were others there that evening. We get to 10 because Judas the betrayer had gone off and committed suicide by this point and because for some un-named reason Thomas was absent. But we can think more expansively because the Gospel writers use word “disciple” to designate a larger group of those who followed Jesus. Just the chapter before this one, for example, St. John writes that Joseph of Arimathea “was a disciple of Jesus, but secretly because he feared the Jews.” So I believe that when Jesus breathed his holy breath on the disciples, he was sending out and giving the Holy Spirit to more than just the special close-in group of apostles.

Back in 2017 a man named Sam Kean wrote a book called “Caesar’s Last Breath: Decoding the Secrets of the Air Around Us”. The title comes from a thought experiment. He asked himself what are the chances that the molecules in Julius Caesar’s last breath — he died in 44 BC — are currently in your lungs, after having circulated throughout the atmosphere for centuries? With some estimates and quick calculations, along with his knowledge of physics, he figured out that there are likely 1 to 2 molecules of oxygen from Caesar’s last breath entering your lungs each time you breathe. Interesting, but so what?

How about this? Julius Caesar died in 44 BC and his last breath was one single exhalation. Jesus was standing among his disciples in that locked room in AD 33 and consciously breathed 10 or more than 10 times so that each of the people there that evening received the Holy Spirit. So even if Sam Kean’s calculations about Julius Caesar are off a little, if looks to me that it is even more likely that every time you and I breathe we are inhaling oxygen atoms that Jesus exhaled when he breathed on his disciples and told them “Receive the Holy Spirit.”

Let me say that again. My pious conjecture, my guess, is that every time we breathe in, we are inhaling some of the same oxygen atoms that Jesus breathed on his disciples. That is, I am saying that his breath – his Spirit – is our breath – is our spirit,

The Spirit of Christ, the Holy Spirit, is in you. Now.

All of us who are disciples of the Lord Jesus, all of us who are baptized with the Baptism he gave the Church, all of us who receive the body and blood of Jesus in communion at the altar, all of us who confess our sins and hear the announcement of our forgiveness, each and every one of us has been given the Holy Spirit. Each and every one of us is sent out in the same way that the heavenly Father sent out Jesus. Each and every one of us is on a mission from God.

By God’s grace we can each recognize that the Holy Spirit is in us. By God’s grace we can live into and inhabit that precious truth. By God’s grace, I say, we can each begin and continue to grasp our individual vocations, our particular callings as 21st century disciples of Jesus.

The list of functions from Isaiah should guide us in figuring this out. “To bring good news to the poor” … how can I bring good news to the poor? “To bind up the brokenhearted” … what can I do or say that binds up brokenhearted people? “To proclaim liberty to the captives” … to what people who are captive to what kinds of things can I bring a proclamation of liberty? And so on.

This Scripture gives us a list specifications for building the Kingdom of God and we are all called and sent out to do this. Overseas; here in our own hometown; through the Internet; in face-to-face conversation; at work; in school; around the dining room table; while we drive; wherever we are and whatever we are doing, you and I and every Christian around the globe are on our own mission from the Lord to bring good news, to heal, and to free.

Now, I can’t tell you exactly what your God-given mission is or how you are meant to carry it out. Those details are for us to discern in prayer. But the fact that we are each sent on mission to preach in our various ways as are suitable to our station in life seems pretty settled. Every Christian preaches in word and deed so that others can hear. They hear, which makes it possible to believe. They believe so they can call on the name of the Lord. And everyone who calls on the name of the Lord will be saved. It all starts with you being sent.

Amen.

May the peace of God that passes all understanding keep your hearts and minds in Christ Jesus our Lord. Amen.

S.D.G.

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