Matthew
28:16-20
Today
we are recognizing the achievements of our graduates, people who have worked
long and hard to learn many things that will stay with them for the rest of
their lives and many things that will be forgotten shortly. I can tell you the capitals of all fifty
states. I can no longer tell you the
valence of a fluorine atom. I know that
pi is the ratio of a circle’s circumference to its diameter, approximately
3.14159265359, and that Julius Caesar was killed on March 15, 44 B.C. When I am tired I often have to look up the
spelling of “balloon” because I have the French spelling stuck in my brain next
to it. All of us have an agglomeration of
facts like that tucked inside our brains.
In the long run, though, what a good education does is not so much to
fill your head with raw data as teach how to organize it, analyze it, and put
it to work. Sometimes that’s called “thinking”.
Everyone
thinks. Not everyone thinks well. To do that takes time and effort. All too often, we’re asked to do our thinking
quickly and when that happens it can become hit-or-miss how things turn out. Influences that have nothing to do with the
matter in hand begin to intrude or pertinent information is overlooked.
Fortunately,
it is possible to do some thinking about important matters ahead of time. I am not saying to be close-minded or to
enter into serious situations with your decisions already made. I am saying that it is a good idea to
consider the big questions first, so that the smaller ones, which can also be
important, can get the attention that they, too, deserve. It’s like when you know that the week ahead
is going to be busy and you make up dinners that you can microwave as
needed. It allows time to sit down and
eat, and takes some of the general pressure off.
So,
what does this have to do with the gospel passage for today?
In
Matthew, we read what is sometimes called “The Great Commission”, where Jesus
gives his disciples a concise summary of what they are to do with the rest of
their lives:
“Go therefore and make disciples of all
nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the
Holy Spirit, and teaching them
to obey everything that I have commanded you.”
Teaching (which
requires learning, and learning on an ongoing basis) is part of faithfully
carrying out Jesus’ directions. It’s
teaching that is aimed at helping people to obey Jesus’ commands, and that
takes a lot of forms, which is why our learning takes a lot of forms, too.
One of the ways that we, as a local church, try to stay
faithful to the Great Commission is to provide a variety of resources for
learning that are available to anybody who wants to use them. The rest of this sermon may sound a little
like a commercial, and I ask you to excuse me for that, but I want you to
realize the wide range of resources sitting right down the hall that are there
for you, both to build up your own life in Christ and to know how to help
others do the same. Some of them are
from the church library and some of them are found in the staff office. So, here goes.
Bibles. It can
often help to read the scriptures in different translations, each trying to
catch some of the nuances that are not always easy to transfer from one
language to another.
Bible commentaries.
Some of them are general, like the Interpreter’s
Bible (that’s actually on the shelf in the lounge for some reason) or the Interpreter’s Dictionary of the Bible,
both of which are good at answering questions like: “Why was Jeremiah mad at
the Egyptians?” or “Who were the Samaritans?” or “Was the Song of Solomon written
as a song?” Some are commentaries on
individual books of the Bible or even on individual passages, like this one on
Psalm 23. Others look at themes that run
throughout the Bible or compare the lives of biblical figures to one another
and to us – for instance, this copy of Bad
Girls of the Bible.
That sort of shades over into biography. How have other people before us faced the challenges
of their own times? Knowing that can
help us when we think we may be the only person who has ever had to deal with
some situation or another. Here’s a
two-CD set of lectures on that subject by a professor at Georgetown.
A big part of discipleship is prayer. There are a lot of books to help with
that. Some, like Drawing the Circle, that was used as a study guide by a short-term
class we held earlier this year, are designed to help people look at their own
prayer life and to strengthen it where it can use the help or to put it to use
where it is healthy and vigorous. Others
provide words for prayer when you may find yourself fumbling for a way to express
what is in your heart, which is a situation everybody faces sometimes.
Prayer can take the form of music, too. Hymnals contain expressions of the soul’s
experience of God’s grace in its many aspects.
Instrumental music (and we have some recordings, too) can provide a
background for prayer or offer its own form of spiritual encouragement.
Some of the materials are meant to be general and some of
them are age-specific. We have a whole
lot of children’s books that are out in the lounge rather than the library
because they are intended to be where a parent can grab them more easily if a
child is antsy during church or if a parent is on the move, passing to or from
the nursery. There are shelves that are
labeled to show that they are meant to address concerns common to youth or to
seniors or that address things that can come up in the course of a marriage.
Add to this the many times that people share helpful
articles or devotions on our facebook page, where there is also a link every
morning to The Upper Room (and, yes,
we still provide it in hard copy, including a large print edition).
None of this takes the place of actual ministry, actual
discipleship. That would be to say that reading
cookbooks could take the place of eating.
It would be like what happens when people watch sports but never get
even a little bit of exercise. But
cookbooks are helpful in the kitchen and watching Serena Williams play can
inspire someone to pick up a racquet, so if a copy of The Screwtape Letters can help you recognize and fight off
temptation, it’s good to have on hand.
Through it all, too, is the greatest resource anyone
could ever have.
“Now the eleven disciples went to Galilee, to
the mountain to which Jesus had directed them. When they saw him, they worshiped him; but some doubted. And Jesus came and said to them, ‘All authority in heaven and
on earth has been given to me. Go therefore and
make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of
the Son and of the Holy Spirit, and teaching them
to obey everything that I have commanded you. And remember, I am with you
always, to the end of the age.’” [Matthew 28:16-20]
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