June 19, 2011 | 8:00 a.m.

Where Heaven Meets Earth

Joyce Shin
Associate Pastor, Fourth Presbyterian Church

Psalm 8
Genesis 1:1—2:4a
Matthew 28:16–20

“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.”

Matthew 28:18–19a (NRSV)

We join the angels in praise, and we keep our feet in time and place . . . awed to heaven, rooted in earth. We are daily stretched between communion with you and our bodied lives, spent but alive, summoned and cherished but stretched between. And we are reminded that before us there has been this One truly divine . . . truly human. . . . We are thankful for him, and glad to be in his missional company. Alleluia. Amen.

Walter Brueggemann
“Awed to Heaven, Rooted in Earth”
from the book by the same name

Though only forty words long, the final three verses that conclude Matthew’s Gospel have been the subject of voluminous studies, the longest study extending more than 573 pages (a study by Joachim Lange). No doubt these verses have received such attention because they have come to be known as the “Great Commission,” the paradigmatic mission statement for the church.

Over the course of history, this mission statement has been used to justify the Crusades as well as efforts by Christian countries to colonize and Christianize non-Christian peoples and lands. Despite its sordid past, it has not been dismissed or discarded. The church has not been able to lay it to rest. Instead the Great Commission continues to reverberate, inspiring and empowering the church to look beyond its borders, to behold the horizon, and to bear witness.

Every good mission statement identifies a horizon. Without it in sight, physically and figuratively, we can lose our bearings, our sense of balance. We can suffer from vertigo. In his book The Spell of the Sensuous, ecologist and philosopher David Abram recounts such an experience. Stepping out of his “little hut in the rice paddies of eastern Bali,” he writes, was like “falling through space” (David Abram, The Spell of the Sensuous, p. 3). It was night time, and the black night enveloped him. The Milky Way of stars not only shone in the sky above him but was reflected in the pools of water filling up the rice paddies all around his hut. Whereas by day the green tips of growing rice poking out of their watery beds separated earth from sky, by night there was no such separation. Add to this the movement and reflection of fireflies, and the world seemed to whirl. To get his bearings, all that this ecologist could do was to crawl back inside, into his hut, where he could shut out his environment until daylight.

Without a clear view of the horizon, we cannot get our bearings, certainly not enough to venture out. Jesus must have known this, and in the wake of his violent crucifixion and death in Jerusalem—events that had turned his disciples’ lives upside down—the risen Jesus commanded his disciples to return to Galilee. Galilee had been their home. It was in Galilee that Jesus had taught and healed people, had received a large and positive popular response, and had met his disciples for the first time. Galilee was also the place to which Jesus, as a small child, had fled with his parents and, again later in his life, had himself withdrawn in order to escape Herod. Now, risen, Jesus commanded his disciples, whom he knew were in sore need of solace, peace, and the kind of rest you can get only at home, to return to Galilee.

Once in Galilee though, Jesus led them to the top of a mountain. It was on a mountain that Jesus had famously preached the sermon that summed up the whole Jewish law with the commandment to love God and neighbor; it was on a mountain that Jesus had been transfigured; and now it was atop a mountain, the highest point where earth rises to meet heaven, that Jesus gave to the disciples—and generations to follow—the Great Commission.

“Go,” Jesus commanded. “Go, 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.” Having brought his weary disciples to their home region of Galilee, he tells them now to go and equips them with a sense of mission. Having brought them home for rest and recovery, he shows them the horizon from which they can take their bearings, so that when they are ready, they can take their leave again.

The mission with which Jesus sent out his disciples was nothing new. “All authority in heaven and on earth” had been given to him, and with the authority of his Father, who had created heaven and earth, Jesus commissioned his followers. Commissioning them to baptize people into the body of Christ and to teach people to love God and one another, Jesus equipped them with the same grand purpose with which God created the world in the first place.

Remember the way Genesis begins: “In the beginning when God created the heavens and the earth, the earth was a formless void and darkness covered the face of the deep.” It was out of this darkness and formlessness that God spoke. [God] articulated a form for each kind of thing and gave each one its own name: day and night, sun and moon, earth and heaven, sea and sky, every kind of plant and every kind of animal, creeping and flying. God differentiated each from the other and, furthermore, all from yet another kind of creature, humankind, male and female.

According to this account, creation is clearly not a careless, casual, or accidental event. Instead the created world exhibits an order, a design, in which everything exists in relation to everything else. Although the relations among all the existing things are too numerous to name and too vast and mysterious for us to comprehend with our powers of observation, we cannot help but intuit that embedded in creation is some sort of divine plan.

In an essay entitled “Heaven and Earth in Jest,” novelist Annie Dillard questions the Creator’s motives in creating the world. She begins her essay by describing her encounter with a frog in a creek. Unlike the frogs flying all around her, this frog, half in and half out of the water, stayed still. Staring at this frog, she became horrified when right before her eyes, he slowly began to deflate and sag. Dillard writes, “His skin emptied and drooped; his very skull seemed to collapse and settle like a kicked tent.” Then the frog sunk. What she later learned was that the frog had been the victim of a giant water bug that seizes its victims with its strong legs and then injects enzymes that paralyze its prey and poisons that dissolve the inner organs, muscles, and bones into a juice that it simply sucks out. Not to leave us with that horrific image, let me move on to another, more pleasant, encounter that Dillard describes. Dillard recalls once seeing a mockingbird taking a single step into the air and then dropping, with its wings slicked back against its sides, accelerating down through the air. “Just a breath,” she writes, “before he would have been dashed to the ground, he unfurled his wings with exact, deliberate care . . . and so floated onto the grass” (Annie Dillard, “Heaven and Earth in Jest,” Creators on Creating, p. 84). A keen observer of nature, Dillard has encountered both that which appears to be a cruel waste of life and that which appears to be wholly gratuitous beauty (p. 84). Dillard recognizes that it is at such times, when we encounter pain or gratuitous beauty, that we want to make sense of the world, and thus we ask, for what purpose did God create the world? Provocatively, Dillard asks, could it be that God created heaven and earth in jest, or could the cynic be right that God created the world only to turn his back on it?

Writing about the awesome beginnings of the world as recounted in Genesis, Leon Kass notes its earth-centered focus, its terrestrial perspective. Genesis “addresses us as terrestrial beings and as seeing beings, looking around and about and, especially, up” (Leon Kass, The Beginning of Wisdom, p. 29). From our terrestrial perspective, we cannot see with comprehensiveness the purpose for which God created the world. But when we look out and around, we can observe, as Annie Dillard does, the myriad and remarkable ways in which creatures interact with each other and their environment. And from these observations, we might well conclude that no, God could not have created the world only to turn [God’s] back on it. The world God created and called “good” is absolutely “tuned for relationship” (David Abram, The Spell of the Sensuous, p. ix). Everywhere we see evidence of this divine purpose. Furthermore, we have received from Jesus the promise that indeed he will be with us until the end of the age. It is a promise the church can believe in, because it is a promise the church can make true. For wherever there is love of God and love of neighbor, there we will find the body of Christ, and wherever people are reminded that they are children of God, created in God’s image and sealed by the Holy Spirit, there too Christ will be present. May we, knowing Christ’s purpose and promise for us, behold the horizon, take our bearings, and venture out. Amen.