The Gift of Mission

By Rev. Gusti Linnea Newquist

Sermon March 18, 2012

Fourth Sunday in Lent

Isaiah 61:1-4; Matthew 21:12-17

In the year 1999, on the cusp of a new millennium, in the Season of Lent, churches in the United Kingdom embraced an advertising campaign designed to encourage lapsed churchgoers to return to the pews for Easter Sunday. They wanted a campaign that would grab the attention of a fickle public, that would shake them out of their religious complacency and inspire them to a renewed commitment to the faith of their forebears.

Church leaders worked with an organization called the “Churches Advertising Network” to develop a marketing strategy. They settled on a poster for their outreach. An outline of Jesus was inked in black on a deep orange-red background. It was adapted from a famous photo of Che Guevara, the Argentine Marxist revolutionary who was a leading figure in the Cuban revolution and other Latin American liberation movements.

The poster was plastered over billboards and bus stops and subway stations throughout the British nation. And although we did not have Facebook or Twitter or Youtube at the time, the poster “went viral” on the internet in this country, as well.

“Meek. Mild. As If,” the poster says, under the picture. “Discover the real Jesus.”

Did it get your attention?

There was backlash, as you would imagine. It was “grossly sacrilegious,” one commentator declared. And in the Season of Lent, in the year 1999, on the cusp of a new millennium, the debate raged on throughout the UK over what was and was not an “appropriate” image for the “real” Jesus.

Church leaders and the campaign creators defended the poster. “Jesus was not crucified for being meek and mild,” they said. He challenged authority, they said. He was a revolutionary figure, they said. Even more revolutionary than Che Guevara, they said.

And the controversy raged on.

As much as they defended the poster, church leaders and the campaign creators were quick to point out that the revolution of Jesus was purely non-violent. He did not, in the end, take up arms against his oppressor, even though others in his time did. And even though others in his time wanted him to. But as non-violent as Jesus was, they insisted, the real Jesus really was anything but “meek and mild.”

Our Scriptures say the same thing.

Our Call to Worship this morning shares the message of Jesus in the first sermon he ever preached. You could, I would argue, call it his “mission statement.” “The Spirit of our God is upon me,” Jesus says, “because God has anointed me to bring good news to the poor. God has sent me to proclaim release to the captives and recovery of sight to the blind, to let the oppressed go free, to proclaim the year of our God’s favor.”

And of course Jesus is preaching from the same Scripture that is our Old Testament reading. It is Isaiah’s prophetic witness from the 61^st chapter, a text in which Isaiah inspires the people of God to rebuild their Jerusalem temple and indeed their entire nation after a period of crushing exile in Babylon. But, Isaiah cautions them, as much as God is urging you to rebuild, make sure you do so in a way that honors God’s covenant with “the least of these” in your community. Make sure you comfort those who mourn. Make sure you display the glory of your God. Make sure the poor and captive and infirm and oppressed are ever before you as your barometer of social justice.

And of course this Scripture is most emphatically not fulfilled. 500 years after Isaiah’s proclamation, when Jesus comes to preach his very first sermon on Isaiah’s text, the Jerusalem temple has been restored as Isaiah has said it should be, but it has been on the backs of the poorest in the land. With human bodies literally built into its walls because Herod the Great’s timeline refused to yield to their fundamental need to rest and he ordered the workers to just keep building around those ones who had fallen behind.

500 years after Isaiah’s proclamation, when Jesus comes to preach his very first sermon on Isaiah’s text, the Jerusalem temple has indeed been restored as Isaiah said it should be, but the elite temple hierarchy is as corrupt as ever, and they are deluding themselves into believing they are keeping their people’s identity alive through their collaboration with the imperial violence of the Roman Empire. 500 years after Isaiah’s proclamation, the temple has been restored, but the very rules and regulations of that temple keep the poor and the captive and those with physical ailments and those who are oppressed from entering through the temple gates. The very people who serve as the barometer of social justice in the kingdom of God are kept from entering the temple of God. And remember that they believed God’s physical presence literally resided in that temple. And so they were literally kept from God.

500 years after Isaiah’s proclamation, Jesus is furious. “Today this Scripture from Isaiah is been fulfilled in your hearing!” he declares. Finally! And then he thrusts himself into the heart of that same temple in our Gospel lesson from Matthew, where he over-throws the tables of the money-changers and drives out the religious pilgrims who have bought into the system of economic exploitation that thrives at the Temple and condemns the collaboration between the elite religious establishment and the Roman imperial domination that controls every aspect of their lives.

What Jesus is doing in our Scripture lessons for today is what those who study social justice movements call “direct, non-violent action to disrupt a corrupt political and economic system.” And it works. And it leads directly to the crucifixion. Which is why the British advertising campaign for Easter 1999 adopted the Jesus-as-Che-Guevara-poster. Which is why Christians who take the message of the gospel as seriously as we take its messenger are still at risk when we experience the Spirit of our God upon us to bring good news to the poor, release to the captives, recovery of sight to the blind, and freedom for the oppressed.

It is far easier to buy into our popular Western religious imagination that still wants to sanitize who Jesus was and what he said and how he said it. To keep Jesus “meek and mild.”

But . . .

The Madison Square mission clearly states that we are called “to serve actively and creatively as an agent of love, reconciliation, peace, and justice in the community and in the world.” And the gospel message clearly states that we must bring good news to the poor, release to the captives, recovery of sight to the blind, and freedom for the oppressed.

And so we must.

The good news for Madison Square is that, as far as I can tell, this congregation already is doing just that. Witness the forty people gathered at City Hall last Wednesday to call upon our elected officials to endorse a Department of Peace at the federal level of government and the ten or more others who told me you were gathering with us in spirit even though you were not able to gather in person. 

Our advertising campaign in the season of Lent has been the bright blue t-shirt and radiant smile adorning our collective “Body of Christ” as we rallied in the heart of our own small San Antonio temple. And no, we didn’t turn over any tables or call the City Hall a “den of robbers.” We simply collected our voices together in a communal lament of the $508 billion dollar annual price tag of violence in our society. $508 billion dollars spent on incarceration, hospitalization, draining our judicial system, and burdening our police force in response to violence. And we asked our City Council members to endorse, instead, an investment in non-violent methods of conflict resolution.

Our advertising campaign in the season of Lent has been the prayers for peace and justice that permeate our worship every Sunday and the prayerful action that carries us from this sanctuary into the world at war with itself, as we live out our mission “to serve actively and creatively as an agent of love, reconciliation, peace, and justice in the community and in the world.”

Of course this was one Wednesday night witness with one really cool bright blue t-shirt is but the tip of the iceberg. But make no mistake. Every witness matters, every act of courage strengthens the hearts of those who fear to speak, every movement toward a more just and equitable society leads us further toward the peace that passes understanding. And with God, no good effort is wasted.

We do not have any idea—yet—what the results of our peace-making, justice-seeking, Jesus-inspiring Lenten advertising campaign will be. But rest assured there will be results beyond anything we can imagine. And rest assured that the peace-making, justice-seeking, Jesus-inspiring Lenten meditation on the Madison Square mission is shaping us in ways we can are only beginning to see bear fruit.

And it will lead to resurrection joy in the end. I promise you. It will.

In the meantime we are here, a little more than midway through the Season of Lent 2012, meditating on a Madison Square mission that just might grab the attention of a fickle public. And shake them—and us!—out of our religious complacency. And inspire us to a renewed commitment to the faith of our forebears. Which includes “to serving actively and creatively as an agent of love, reconciliation, peace, and justice in the community and in the world.” With an advertising campaign in a deep blue t-shirt that says, “Ask me about a Department of Peace.” And through our witness it will be so. Amen.