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Missionary Zeal                        Matthew 28: 16-20                   May 18, 2008

In 1820, When The Rev. Abner Hale, the central character in James Michener's epic historical novel Hawaii, arrived in Maui, he and his fellow missionaries encountered a people steeped in a tradition that offended Hale's proper, New England Calvinist sensibilities. Abner thought of the Hawaiians as a band of naked, vile, heathen savages, and his view of them colored his entire ministry. And so he preaches little other than Hell fire and damnation to the people he meets and comes to know.

Hale, Michener's missionary caricature, had answers for everything. The accumulated wisdom of the islanders, on the other hand, he either ridiculed or completely ignored.

Following Hale's lead, the missionaries refused to eat the abundant, local fresh fruits, fish and vegetables and persisted in dressing in the heavy woolen clothes they had brought with them from Boston - even in the heat of the Polynesian summer. Amusingly, they also refused to bathe in the cool lagoon, preferring, instead, to remain smelly and dirty - as if swimming was somehow an affirmation of some evil pagan rite.

For his first formal sermon - one lasting two hours, incidentally, and preached to a crowd of three thousand - missionary Hale chose a text from Zephaniah Chapter 2: "The Lord will be terrible against them; he will shrivel all the gods of the earth, and to him shall bow down, each in its place, all the coasts and islands of the nations." And the message he preached, with his words that day and with his actions over many years spent on the island, was terrible indeed. In the words of another of Michener's characters, Abraham Hewlett, a missionary who was eventually de-frocked for the unforgivable sin of marrying a Hawaiian woman, the mission was "founded upon an impossible contradiction." "You love the Hawaiians as potential Christians," Hewlett said to Hale and the others as they were about to banish him from the ministry, "but you despise them as people."

The picture of the New England missionaries who worked in Hawaii in the 1920s is archaic to be sure. We church "insiders" know that today's Christian missionaries are nothing like those depicted in Hawaii. We Moravians, in particular, are justifiably proud of our worldwide mission efforts - both foreign and domestic.

But, some suggest, Abner Hale is alive and well and can still be found.

Mark Dixon, writing in the online magazine Unworthy, writes "The Abner Hale of the 21st century is the conservative evangelical, and the 'pagan' society that surrounds him has become his Hawaii. American society and culture has undergone radical and fundamental change since the Eisenhower years, yet evangelicals continue to cherish the sincerely held belief that America is their rightful Christian homeland and their non-Christian neighbors merely pagan interlopers. They rail in moral outrage against every aspect of American society from public education to punk rock, as if they were the proprietors of the store and those who spurn their values merely a gang of adolescent vandals."

Ouch! But there's more. Dixon is not alone in his criticism. In a recent book entitled Un Christian, which I read, recently, on Matt's recommendation, David Kinnaman and Gabe Lyons, of the Barna Group, a Christian research organization, write about the view of the church held by Millenniums or Gen Ys or Mosaics or whatever you choose to call the generation of people born between, roughly, 1980 and 2000. The generation that lives in the world of Facebook, MySpace, YouTube and Instant Messaging.

The picture is not pretty. According the Barna research, an overwhelming majority of young people view Christians, particularly evangelical Christians, as hypocritical, too judgmental, too focused on the afterlife, and too political in the worst sense of the word. Perhaps even more troubling, fewer than ten percent of those surveyed saw Christians as people you can trust or saw our faith as something that makes sense for them.

If you do the math, there are in excess of 75 million Americans in the Millennium Generation. It is a bulge in the population that rivals the baby boom generation born in the mid to late 1940s. And while it's a cliché to say that these young adults and teenagers are the face of the future, like so many other clichés it is no less true for being a cliché.

When surveyed, these Millenniums tell us that while we may not wear stovepipe hats or heavy, long-sleeved, down-to-the- ankle dresses like the missionaries in Hawaii, we still appear more like Abner Hale to the young people outside of the church than you might think.

And we certainly don't appear, to their eyes anyway, to be anything like Jesus, the one whose example we are trying to follow.

Yes, we have an image problem, my friends. And if we are to follow the directive that Jesus lays out so simply and clearly in our Gospel lesson for this Trinity Sunday, we need to do something about it.

"Go therefore and make disciples of all nations," Jesus says to his disciples in this final paragraph of Matthew's Gospel.

There are probably no words in the Scriptures that have had a more profound effect on our common history as people of the Christian faith than that simple phrase.

Those few words set in motion the entire Christian missionary movement. It is because of those words that we believe we are commanded by Christ to go into the world and share our witness with other men and women of different cultures, different traditions and faiths, and in doing so, win them over, convert them to the Christian faith.

The message of that passage essentially created the historic missionary movement that has touched every continent and every culture on earth. They are the words that produced the missionary zeal that has motivated the church for centuries.

As Christians, and certainly as Moravians, you and I are heirs to that tradition. At the end of the day, we are a missionary church. And as members of that missionary church we are called - no, commanded - to find ways to carry out that "great commission," as it is often called. Commanded to follow Jesus' directive.

And without a doubt, this means we need to address our image problem. Or, in the words of David Kinnaman in the book I referenced a moment ago, it means we need to ask, and answer, this question: "How do we move from unChristian to Christian?"

Kinnaman's research suggests that the way to do that is to learn to respond to people the way Jesus did.

Sounds simple, doesn't it? But, in fact, it is anything but simple. In Kinnaman's words, responding to people the way Jesus did "is perhaps the hardest thing in the world to get right."

How, then, can we get it right?

One way, as he correctly points out, is to recognize that Jesus principally influenced people through relationships and friendships.

To the best of our knowledge, Jesus never wrote anything down. Nor did he create an organization. He was certainly a masterful speaker, but he was influential - more influential than any other person ever to walk this earth - mostly because he changed people. And he changed them by relating to them. He changed them because his day-to-day behavior spoke volumes about what he was and is and about the kind of God who sent him.

And so we, as followers of Jesus, need to realize that the people we interact with day after day are observing what it means to be Christian by observing us!

If we are harsh and judgmental, then the people who see us will conclude that the church is harsh and judgmental.

If we are insincere - if our words don't square with our actions - then the people who see us will conclude that the church is a bunch of hypocrites (how many time have you heard that criticism?).

If, on the other hand, we are open, and accepting and giving and ready to listen, then the person outside the church may just believe that becoming a follower of Christ might actually be a good thing.

If Christianity is to be attractive to those outside the church, then we who are inside need to find a way to be compassionate, soft-hearted and kind to people who are not only different from us, but even hostile to us.

For those of us who define what it means to be the church in traditional, time-honored ways, this can sometimes be a tall order.

In fact, it is not surprising that this process has been described as the hardest thing in the world to get right. You and I love the church the way it is. Most of us have grown up in the church. So when we hear the kind of criticism I've been talking about this morning it makes us uncomfortable.

Speaking for myself, when I read or hear that there is a whole generation of people "out there" who find my definition of what it means to be the church to be unappealing, it knocks me back on my heels.

Church, for me - and I'm guessing for most of you - means familiar programming. It means worship on Sunday with hymns and liturgies and anthems and a sermon; it means Sunday school and youth fellowship and boards and committees; it means ham suppers and discussion groups and Bible studies. These are the things that we church people do in order to carry out that great commission Jesus issued. It's the model we have followed for decades - centuries in some places.

So when I hear people saying that programming is not the answer, that expecting non-church people - particularly young non-church people - to join in our programming is similar to the New England missionaries arriving in Hawaii in 1920 and expecting native Hawaiians to throw away everything about their culture and adopt a new one, I can accept what they are saying, but it makes me plenty uneasy. I find myself unsure of what to do with that information.

Some have suggested that what we need is a clean slate. That we need to pretend that the last 2,000 years of organized Christianity never happened, and then, using the model of just who Jesus was, the way he lived and what he taught his disciples, put aside our preconceived notions and try to discern, from the principles Jesus gave us, what we his disciples ought to be doing in the world today.

I suspect that they are correct.

The question, then, is this: if we started with a clean slate and proceeded from there, and built a church based on the life and teachings of Jesus, would we end up with something similar to the church we attend now? Or would our new church be something entirely different?

I don't know. What I do know, however, is that if we want to respond to Jesus' great commission; if we want to invite people outside the church to make the same discovery that you and I have made in our faith journey; if we want to help people discover the God of light and of goodness, of mercy and of compassion, of justice and of reconciliation, then we need to find ways to do that without imposing our own cultural values or our own traditions in the process.

We need to find new ways to enable others to make their discovery freely and joyfully. Hopefully, with the leading of the Holy Spirit, we will be willing to risk doing that very thing.

                                                                             AMEN

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