It is an exciting day today! We have new members joining us. They have felt your welcome and want to call this place home. We have our Costa Rica Mission Trip send off. This team has been helping our friends in Costa Rica build homes and have contributed 19 of the 166 homes that ministry down there has built! And we have our annual budget meeting. A time to look at our financial health and goals and step out in faith for the 201^st time.

It’s exciting to me as our scripture tackles 2 great passages. The first is Matthew’s great commission. And the second is the Ascension of Jesus in Acts.

In Matthew, we are post Easter. The disciples go to a mountain in Galilee and meet the risen Christ. And I love this… “They saw him, they worshipped him; but some doubted.”

They are there post-Holy Week. Post Last Supper. Post Betrayal by Judas and denial by Peter. Post abandonment by the rest. Post-Crucifixion. Post Resurrection. And some doubted.

Yet Jesus says to all of them, believers and doubters alike, “Go and make disciples of all nations.” All nations. Not just the ones you like.

Professor Jeff Jaynes is scholar of church history. Specifically maps. He’s a theological cartographer. His favorite map is this Medieval Christian map of the world. Each section has a part with the disciples in it. The tradition holds that James went to France, Spain, and England. Peter went to Rome. Thomas to India. Matthew went to Lebanon. Others to Africa. These maps remind us to greet others in Christian love. To say that God is already active in these places and that we will find friends and disciples of Christ there.[1]

This is a big deal in a time of colonialism. Colonialism means to deny other’s ways of life and make them conform to yours. There is no learning in colonialism. There is only the threat of convert or die. Yet this early map is trying to give the message of a universal Christ. A global God, not a tribal god with a myopic view.

The Costa Rica mission trip can attest to this. Year after year, they have gone down and built homes. They have developed friendships with Maximo, the other workers, and the families they have worked alongside. They are discovering what Jesus has been saying to his disciples all along: God is bigger than your view. God is at work in other lives than just yours.

Maximo’s mission has built 166 houses in the Nosara area. And there has been a trickle effect in the community. There’s an effect in area churches. There’s an effect in each of the lives of our mission members who have gone down there. We hear it from our team members who go each and every year. We hear it from our teens who head down every 4 years. We hear it from those from Nosara who come up and visit us.

God is active in the world. Waking us up to who is our neighbor. Waking us up to who we are. We find out who we are by stepping out of our culture into a whole other one when we travel. Often we find that we’ve been free from catagories we didn’t even know were boxing us in. This helps us discover who we are. We have a new sense of self. We have a bigger view of who are neighbors are. We discover that we are not just individuals. I think author Gil Rendle puts it best. “It is easy to argue that individualism, unchecked, leads to consumerism that produces emptiness, that it leads to greed that robs us of meaning, and that it leads to personal security that endangers others. Empathy reminds people that they are more than individuals; they are also community that are responsible for the establishment and care of a common good.”[2]

Jesus puts no boundary on the common good. It’s not my common good, and it’s not yours. It’s not America’s common good and not Canada’s. It’s “For God so loved the WORLD.” All of it. Even those we thought were outside of God’s love. In Christ Jesus, God shows up and hangs out with those people first!

We hear this echoed in our scripture in Acts 1. Jesus says, “You will be my witnesses in Jerusalem, all Judea and Samaria, and to the ends of the earth.” To put it another way, “You’ll be my witnesses from here to there.” Everywhere.

But the disciples were struck and stood staring at Jesus going up into the air. Two men in white robes said, “Why do you stand looking up to heaven? Jesus has been taken up from you into heaven, and will come in the same way.”

Now I’ve never have seen anyone floating into the sky. I’ve never seen a portal work in real life. I don’t know what the disciples saw and neither did they by the sounds of it. They needed those two men to wake them up to their reality. And that reality is that God is already with us, and in us and ahead of us, calling us to join up. We don’t always see it as we’re trying to figure things out.

Here’s what I know. There are times when the clouds part and we see God staring at us through another’s eyes. It has happened to me in food kitchens and homeless shelters. It has happened in hospital beds. It has happened when folks show up on my doorstep with freshly baked bread. It has happened on mission trips abroad.

The Rev. Dr. Robert Meyer told the story at the MLK service at St Matthew’s this past Monday how he and his church went abroad. They build homes and dug wells in Africa. He was able to preach at a few churches there. The churches loved it. They don’t always get to see a white person preach. They said to Dr Meyer, “You must have a great relationship with the local black pastor in town!” How his church and their church must have a great relationship since they came all this way to do the same thing here in Africa.

Dr. Meyer realized he didn’t even know the black church or pastor in town. Or if there was more than one.

Sometimes the clouds part, and we hear the voice of our Still-Speaking God with our very own ears. We perceive God in new ways. Sometimes we have to go all the way around the world so that we can return home and see it again for the first time.

Sometimes we can fear what lies beyond our borders. So we think, “Well, not in my backyard. I have so much work here, why would I go anywhere else?!” It is so God can speak to us in new ways. It is so we can experience God at work in other lands, in other people, and through that experience, we are changed. In our transformation, we find new avenues to improve our own home. This could be through working more closely with Habitat for Humanity to help them build houses within the county. It could be through establishing new relationships with our neighbors. With other churches and pastors not like us.

We receive new members this morning. They have journeyed to us through various churches. They have great stories. Yet they journeyed to what they thought was Judea, Samaria… someplace other than the places they’re used to. And they have found a home. A home they are claiming with us today.

That’s how this works. Jesus knows that we’ll find our people not just here in Medina, but also in the county, the state, the nation and to the ends of the world. Even Africa. Even Costa Rica. They will find that we are their people as well.

It is a holy and remarkable thing. When the clouds part, and we see Jesus in our neighbor.

For me, I’ve been so inspired by this mission to Costa Rica that I seek to join them soon. For then I will know as Vicki, Tammy, Judy, Kent, and so many more already know… That “when the Holy Spirit comes on you, you will be able to be my witnesses in Jerusalem, all over Judea and Samaria, even to the ends of the world.”

Works Cited

[1] This map and others can be found in Dr Jaynes book: Christianity Beyond Christendom: The Global Christian Experience on Medieval Mappaemundi and Early Modern World Maps

[2] Gil Rendle, Quietly Courageous: Leading the church in a changing world. Rowman & Littlefield publishing. Pages 174-175