Growing Our Mission

A Sermon for Sunday, May 4, 2008 (edited)

Every Saturday morning, I wake up to Heidi’s alarm clock. I don’t think she wakes up right away, but I do. And it’s always the same thing – Randy Lemon’s Garden Line on KTRH. There’s helpful information about what to plant when, what numbers of fertilizer to use, how short – or long – the grass shall be cut.

I think she thinks that my hearing Garden Line first thing on Saturday morning will inspire me to do some yard work. Other than cutting the lawn, and sometimes pulling weeds, that strategy really hasn’t worked for her.

But our theme this morning, and throughout the month of April, has been Growing Our Mission. So for our readings this morning, I went looking for passages about growth.

Perhaps you recognize this morning’s first reading, from Isaiah 61, as the text Jesus used for his inaugural sermon at his hometown synagogue in Nazareth.

The spirit of the Lord God is upon me, because the Lord has anointed me. He has sent me to bring good news to the oppressed, to bind up the brokenhearted, to proclaim liberty to the captives and release to the prisoners … to comfort all who mourn.

Jesus closed the scroll, sat down, and preached a 15-second sermon: “Today this scripture has been fulfilled in your reading.”

But Jesus probably read more from Isaiah than Luke records.

Let’s consider the situation into which Isaiah spoke these words of promise.

He was preaching to former exiles who came back home to Jerusalem – to Zion – to find an absolute mess. They had left well-established lives in Babylon to find their family homes -- mostly the homes of parents and grandparents -- destroyed. The Temple -- the dwelling of the Most High God -- was destroyed too. Imagine our neighbors from New Orleans going home after Katrina. Their spirits were low.

But God had a plan for those newly repatriated exiles:

They will be called oaks of righteousness, the planting of the Lord, to display his glory.

What was the prophet promising the people? It was something like this: the Babylonians uprooted you, but the Lord will re-root you. Your roots will run deep and grab hold of the soil. You will not be easily toppled. You will draw water and nutrition from deep below the surface.

Friends, God wants to give this rootage to each of us. God wants our spiritual taproot to run deep, and our network of secondary roots to run wide. God wants each of us to have a wide and deep base – to provide stability, and to provide nutrition.

The author of the letter to the Colossians takes it one step further, and tells us in whom we are rooted.

As you therefore have received Jesus Christ the Lord, continue to live your lives in him, rooted and built up in him.

The author of Colossians gives us the image of Jesus as the soil which roots us – keeps us stable and strong – and nourishes us. St. John tells us that "the word became flesh -- a human being who took on the humus -- the earth itself." We can be rooted in Jesus. In our baptism, that's exactly what happens. God plants us "in Christ."

We need to keep in mind that our job is tending the plant – not creating the growth. Paul wrote this to the congregation in Corinth, whose members were declaring allegiance to one evangelist or another:

I planted, Apollos watered, but God gave the growth. So neither the one who plants nor the one who waters is anything, but only God who gives the growth. The one who plants and the one who waters have a common purpose, and each will receive wages according to the labor of each. For we are God’s servants, working together; you are God’s field, God’s building.

Think for just a moment about the acronym we’ve used around here to describe discipleship: PoWeR SuRGe.

These are ways of tending our plant of faith:

P – Praying Every Day
W – Worship Every Week
R – Read the Bible Every Day
S – Serve others
R – Relational Groups for Prayer, Support, and Accountability
G – Giving Proportionately of Your Income and Resources (Power Surge, Mike Foss)

If you take just the consonants, you have a way of remembering a pretty complete description of a disciple of Jesus Christ – someone who is committed to growth in grace.

These are ways of tending the plant of our faith – our discipleship. They are ways of growing the root system of faith, so that the fruit we bear might be sweet and nourishing.

This is a vitally important for us as we consider the theme Growing Our Mission.

Why? God uses growing disciples to grow his mission. I would go so far as to say this: there is no growing mission without growing disciples.

We have some God-sized dreams at Lakeside: building a new wing for youth, adults, and music. We dream of calling a minister for youth and family ministry. We want to do more with our publicity in phone books, newspapers, and the internet. We dream of an enhanced ministry of worship -- more musical instruments -- more ensembles -- and using computer-generated projection technology.

Those things take money. There's no getting around that. We are inviting your financial commitments today with the prayer that they will enable us to move forward in ministry.

But let's remember that the things of God are priceless, offered freely to us.

The Word of God -- Christ crucified and raised -- for us. All costly to God. All free to us. That's the Good News we have to share -- by every means we have at our disposal.

So you see, Growing Our Mission is, first and foremost, growing ourselves -- as individuals and as a congregation -- so that God might use us to make Christ known to the world God loves.