Mission and Crucifiction:
Living in – and out – the Gospel
Frederick A. Niedner

I was invited to talk about God’s amazing grace, and particularly about calling others into the realm of that amazing grace. That is, I’ve been asked to speak about mission and evangelism.

I should offer caveats. I’m not sure you should listen to someone like me talk about evangelism. My views may be tainted. Our athletic teams at Valparaiso University are knows as the Crusaders—a reminder of what remains perhaps the worst-ever model for mission work.

Most of us can think of many other negative examples of the church pursuing its mission or doing evangelism in inappropriate ways. We might recall literature such as Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart, or Barbara Kingsolver’s Poisonwood Bible, the story of a missionary who never learned the language of his listeners well enough to communicate clearly. He tried to teach them, “Jesus loves you.” Instead he promised them over and over, “Jesus will make you itch.”

Did you hear of the Southern Baptist Convention’s plan several years back to bring 100,000 evangelists to Chicago so as to convert the whole city in a single summer? I stayed away, so I don’t know if all those witnesses came to town. I do know that the plan didn’t work.

I have an old, yellowed Peanuts cartoon strip in my files. In it Lucy informs Charlie Brown, “I could become a great evangelist.”

“Oh? Why’s that?” Charlie asks.

“Well, you know that kid who sits behind me in school? I convinced him that my religion is better than his religion,” Lucy explained.

Charlie asks, “How’d you do that?”

“I hit him with my lunch box,” Lucy answers.

Another disturbing image has lingered in my own mind ever since a certain sermon I heard as a boy. A preacher at a “mission festival” who meant to inspire us to support mission work explained that if you lined up all the people in China four abreast, and marched them at one pace per second off a cliff, the column of marchers would never end. That’s how many they are, and how rapidly the Chinese people multiply. More importantly, the preacher explained, they’re all going to hell because they don’t know Jesus. But then came the real point. All this was our fault, because we didn’t give enough money to missions to stop this ongoing tragedy.

That sermon left me with troubling questions. First, why would anyone want to do that? March the Chinese people off a cliff, that is. It didn’t seem a very good idea. And second, what did it mean that our mission was really a desperate effort to get in God’s way and to stop God from doing all that damning? It seemed tough, if not impossible, to save all those people from God.

I think that’s what those people are trying to do who come around my neighborhood knocking on doors from time to time. I’m only a Lutheran, and thus not among the saved, not a true believer who has asked Jesus to come into my heart. So these visitors to my door want to give me one last chance. That way, at least, my soul will not remain on their conscience.

Any of us could go on and on about the ways of spreading the gospel that we reject or find distasteful and rude. Yet, we are disciples of a teacher whose parting words, at least according to Matthew, include a series of verbs, “Go, disciple, baptize, teach, and remember.”

Matthew doesn’t give obvious examples of gospeling, though later I’ll return to his powerful but unobvious instruction on how that’s done. Luke, however, in the book of Acts, gives us examples. I, for one, don’t find particularly helpful the various methods of the early evangelists as we’ve witnessed them in our Easter season lectionary selections from the Acts of the Apostles. Have you listened carefully to Peter’s sermons in Acts, beginning with the very first one, which we won’t read until the end of the sequence, on Pentecost Sunday?

“These are the last days,” Peter warned. . .

"You that are Israelites, listen to what I have to say: Jesus of Nazareth, a man attested to you by God with deeds of power, wonders, and signs that God did through him among you, as you yourselves know-- this man, handed over to you according to the definite plan and foreknowledge of God, you crucified and killed by the hands of those outside the law. But God raised him up, having freed him from death, because it was impossible for him to be held in its power. (Acts 2:22-24)

After that Peter goes on to use a lot of scripture passages in ways that would have got him flunked if he did the same in a paper for one of my classes. But do you remember what happened when he finished? Acts 2 reports that Peter’s listeners, smitten to the heart, asked, “What should we do?” Peter told them to repent and get baptized. So, 3,000 of them did, right then and there. It sounds a lot like what happened in the city of Nineveh when Jonah preached there—a whole city, including all the animals, repented in sackcloth after a five-word sermon of warning. I guess you had to be there.

I don’t recommend Peter’s example, even though I have colleagues who remind me that some people love to be shouted at and blamed. Here’s what I want to ask Peter: “Where were you when those others, whoever they were, killed Jesus?”

In fact, given how Peter talks in Acts, I’d like to pull a little joke on him some day, of the sort that happens in a story told about a fellow near death who worried that he wouldn’t be allowed through the proverbial ‘pearly gates’ and into heaven. He hadn’t lived the most exemplary life, and as he lay dying the man confessed his worries to his quiet, old priest. The priest listened and said, “Yes, just as you’ve heard, St. Peter will be there at the gates. He will ask you two questions. The first will be, ‘Is there any reason I should not let you in here?’ Answer honestly. Confess everything, no matter how shameful it sounds. Then Peter will ask, ‘Can you think of any reason that I should let you in?’ To that you need say only one thing. ‘Cocka-doodle-doo!!!!!’”

Yes, Peter, we killed the author of life. Including all who ran away claiming no connection to the Lord’s anointed. That’s our story.

And that’s the only way we have to evangelize, I believe—to tell our story, even if it’s not pretty and we’re not the heroes.

Partly that’s our only option because the gospel is, first of all, a story. It’s not a set of propositions—that’s theology. The gospel is a promise, and we tell it best when we weave that promise into the way we tell the stories of our lives and the stories of our communities, not only in scheduled moments when the world gathers to listen in assembly halls. It happens in the everyday places and in the ways we interpret our lives for ourselves and for those around us, in the ways we choose to give our pains and joys the framework of a narrative that gives them not only meaning, but gives them the meaning that comes straight from the promise of Christ’s cross and empty tomb.

But, we must live with people a while, or at least for a moment, before we can do that. There must be a context, an opening for our story. That’s why I can’t abide those door-bell ringers on Saturday mornings. Or why I could never line up the Chinese four-abreast and march them off a cliff, offering them one last chance to accept Jesus just as they fall. No, the only way to evangelize anyone, to “good news” them, is to love them, live with them, listen to them.

I love to plunk down with my students at the end of John’s gospel (20:30-31), where it says, “There’s a whole lot more that could be written here, but this much is just enough, so that you might believe that Jesus is the Christ, and in that belief, have life in his name,” and then ask, who is Jesus? And what’s a ‘Christ?’  How would you explain what a Christ is, and then what it could possibly mean to believe that Jesus is the Christ, if that’s what gives life? How would you explain that if your audience were the people of Omaha?  But I don’t mean Omaha in 2006. I ask that my students explain it to Omahans of 1006, which could also be Toledo or Bowling Green in 1006, which is the more realistic analogy to much of the world nowadays. Where would you start? And how well would you have to know those people before you could tell the story in a way that they could understand in their hearts?

We’re always telling our story, one way or another. Our stories are first of all a hedge against chaos. Everyone tells a story so that life has shape and meaning in our minds. It’s what we human beings do in the wilderness, the sometimes meaningless void of this world. We are a meaning-making species.

The baptized do that work in a very specific way, however. We reframe our lives so as to see and make them part of Jesus’ story, our master narrative. Our story is different from the one our “flesh” loves to tell—the one that’s full of excuses and self-justifications, or the kind that makes us mere victims of all that besets us in the world.

Secondly, we gospel those around us to the extent that our lives become service, and we ultimately live out what Jesus envisions when speaking, for example, of our closet prayers to Our Father who Art in Secret and then doing things that so shine before others that those others see and receive them can’t think of another way to respond except to thank God. That is, our ability to make sense in Omaha, 1006 AD, depends in part on how long we’ve been there, living with those folks, and how deeply we’d learned to love them.

There are other questions we could ask, like, “Why would anyone want to join our family?” (Because we’re nice people? Because we’re right about things?)  We might also ask, “Exactly what is the point of being Christians, followers of Jesus?”

But we’ll stick today to the ways we do our gospeling. Let me suggest how our stories get shaped, and how we learn to tell them, when we’re part of this community, living in amazing grace, “marked by the cross of Christ forever—claimed, gathered, and sent for the sake of the world.”

We are shaped in part by the oft-repeated story that the liturgy of our assemblies imprints upon us. Hence, we are quite literally, physically even, marked with the cross of Christ—forever—in baptism. You have been marked on the forehead, and on the breast, as a sign that you have been redeemed by Christ the crucified. Maybe you don’t remember receiving that mark, since so many in our circles were baptized as infants. Most of us, however, remember much more clearly the cross of gritty ashes smeared on our foreheads each Ash Wednesday, as the one who marks us says, “Dust you are. And unto dust you shall return.”

These markings tell the two, central truths of our lives. In a way, they tell our whole story. We are dust, with so short a time to be something more, something that moves about above ground, to live, to love, to laugh, to sing and make poetry, and then to return. But the same cruciform mark tells another truth, that each of us is a child of God, beloved, the delight of God’s soul. This is the paradox of our nature, specifically as people joined to each other and to God through our baptism into Christ.

We are dust. We are children of God. That’s our story, and we’re sticking to it.

The oldest example we have of gospeling through story isn’t really Peter’s preaching in Acts. It’s the story Paul weaves through all those letters he sent to his friends and that we have snatched from others’ mailboxes, duplicated, and read as if they were addressed to us. Here’s the story of someone who grew up righter than right, more right about things than God, perhaps.

Paul should have won some reward, some title, some honor. But no, he got knocked to the ground and blinded. Everything he believed and all he stood for came to dust and ashes. Eventually, when he set out to write about all this, he said it was God in Christ who knocked him off his donkey and threw him into the ditch. But I’ll offer you ten to one odds that wasn’t his first thought when it happened.

Somehow, through the faithfulness of those who picked up that broken zealot Saul, a new fellow we know as Paul came to confess that he could not find his own way, could not cling to God. But God had clung to him, most tightly and fiercely when he himself was ruined, destitute, and without hope.

I cannot believe that Paul wrote only theoretically when he says in the Letter to the Romans:

Likewise the Spirit helps us in our weakness; for we do not know how to pray as we ought, but that very Spirit intercedes with sighs too deep for words. And God, who searches the heart, knows what is the mind of the Spirit, because the Spirit intercedes for the saints according to the will of God. We know that all things work together for good for those who love God, who are called according to his purpose. 

What then are we to say about these things? If God is for us, who is against us?  (Romans 8:26-31 )

Imagine, a Pharisee, a professional prayer, caught without words! But when reduced to nothing, he finally saw the truth of his life.

“God did not let me go. The Spirit gave words when all mine came to nothing.” That’s Paul’s story.

“In losing our lives we find them,” Jesus had explained. “Come, take up your cross. Haul around with you the very instrument of your own execution. Follow me.” And Paul had learned to do exactly that.

The next oldest story to declare that and to imprint the pattern of gospel on our own story is the one that appears in the narrative we now call the Gospel according to Mark. Much of the world takes this as “Jesus Lite” because it doesn’t begin with angels, virgins, shepherds, and wise men. Just a lot of stuff happening “immediately.” Jesus gets baptized, named Son of God, then does all manner of remarkable deeds. He stills storms, cures the sick, raises the dead, and feeds multitudes in the wilderness, and yet, so curiously, he tries to keep all this a secret! And what is the consequence? Has a new age dawned?

Hardly. The disciples and even Jesus’ family remain frightfully and woefully confused. “Who is this? What can this mean? He’s crazy!” they say.

In the second half of the story, Jesus goes to Jerusalem, where he suffers and dies, abandoned by his friends, betrayed by his own people, and taunted even by those who simply pass by on their travels. In the end he cries out in dereliction, “My God, you, too?” But then the heavens are torn open once more, and for the first time in Mark, someone unaided by demons, the centurion, says, “Surely this man was the Son of God.” The way he died had revealed the full truth. In this death the heavens opened, the curtain parted, and along with that startled soldier, we catch a glimpse of God.

Mark’s gospel was written, I believe, for persecuted people, marked not only with the cross of Christ, but marked for extermination by Nero’s malicious design and hunted down like animals in and around Rome in the years between 64 and 70 CE, the time after the great fire that Nero blamed on Christians. They knew the story of someone who lived in secrecy after getting baptized. They knew about betrayal, abandonment by their friends, and being put on trial.

“You will run out of words,” Jesus told his followers just before his arrest in Mark. “You will be betrayed, hauled up on charges, called to testify before councils and kings. But don’t worry over what you’ll say. The Holy Spirit will give you words.”

Then Jesus follows his own advice. He stands silently while on trial. (The Spirit gave him no words, apparently.)  At last, he speaks but one word on the cross: “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” Plus, no doubt, the rest of what we call Psalm 22, which declares that the praying one will wait patiently in this condition until God does something—after all, it’s hard to do much else when pinned in that position.

These few words, and the faithfulness they convey, bring the executioner to the same confession for which Christ died. It’s not hard to imagine what the centurion was accustomed to seeing and hearing at crucifixion scenes. (What would you say? I can think of a few choice things I’d love to say to those who have occasionally nailed me! What more is there to lose?) But this is different, the hardened soldier sees. This man frames his life another way.

After that, we don’t see Jesus again in Mark. Instead, we meet up at the empty tomb with the newly clothed “young man,” the neaniskos (the “new guy,” in Greek) who’d fled from Gethsemane, leaving nothing behind but his burial cloth. He’s the one who testifies, “You’ll see him in Galilee. Go!”

We know that young man’s story, too. We’re always losing our clothes, being exposed as cowards, and worse. But we’ve also been through a night when we lost our grave-clothes, and then endured Christ’s death—buried with Christ by baptism into his death, so that we might also rise with him. That’s how we tell our story. The worst thing that could happen to us already has! We’ve been crucified!

And so we, too, along with those women who ran away afraid, have gone on to Galilee, land of the Gentiles, and yes, we have seen him, which is why we are here today, gathered in his name—marked with the sign of his cross forever.

And we tell our stories differently, in a gospel-formed, cross-marked way. We are not persecuted like Mark’s first readers and listeners. But that doesn’t mean cruel predators don’t stalk us.

Some of you know that my colleague and friend Walter Wangerin has faced in these last months a life-threatening, aggressive, metastasized cancer of the lungs. He doesn’t tell the story of this turn of events in the language of victimization, or injustice, or even the vocabulary of war—battling, struggling, and hopefully beating this dreaded attacker. He speaks instead of “adventure,” a journey which isn’t all that pleasurable, but is nevertheless filled with learning, and marked by an astonishingly wide embrace of community—which includes many of you. And more than anything, he testifies to learning anew the truth about life, himself, and God that the scriptures, the sacraments, and even the catechism have imprinted over a lifetime on his heart, his mind, and his story-telling tongue. He preached in our Chapel on Easter Sunday, and he testified that he’s now living out Mark’s gospel. He’s headed for Galilee, wherever that is, and the risen Christ has gone before him. There the two will meet up. And he is not afraid.

A couple weeks ago my wife asked me to tell my own story. Our youngest was being confirmed, and to give him something by which to remember the occasion for a long time, my wife asked all members of our extended family to send brief accounts that told of times they had felt close to God. Some of the accounts were remarkable. My sister wrote of the day she was told she needed a heart transplant. One of my brothers reflected on how he had spent the 19^th year of his life, as a rifle-toting Marine in Vietnam.

As I went to write my story, I had to admit that despite my profession, I’m one who doesn’t “feel” all that close to God. Indeed, I mostly cannot distinguish between the presence and absence of God. I could tell my son how much I longed for God’s presence when he and his siblings were born. Each time there was danger and difficulty, and I could see each time the borderline of life and death.

I also wrote about a more recent occasion to stand at that same boundary when my father, in the 80th year of his life, developed an inoperable and untreatable cancer that took his life. It so happened that I was on sabbatical leave and could go for the last weeks of this border crossing to impersonate a hospice nurse so Dad could die at home.

In a few months time cancer took his strength, then his sense of balance, then his memory, his speech, and finally his breath. About two weeks from the end of this wilderness trek, my father had lain silent, heavily medicated, and seemingly oblivious already for several days, when on a Sunday evening two of the littlest children of my siblings’ families who’d gathered to say good-bye, stole away while the rest of us did dishes. They climbed onto their silent, old Papa’s hospice bed, set up as it was in the dining room. We didn’t know where they’d gone ‘til we heard singing. “I am Jesus little lamb,” they sang. And, “Jesus loves me this I know.” I’m sure there was a Barney song in there, too, among the songs that four- and five-year-olds know.

About the time we thought this had gone on long enough, we heard a third voice—a raspy, old voice, but a clear voice—singing along. He even started one song himself. “Away in a manger, no crib for a bed,” which seemed oddly appropriate there where a dining room and resting place had become the same. Those children’s songs had reached someplace in Dad’s soul that cancer could not keep silent. My father woke up to sing.

We quickly decided to have church—a last supper. We collected what we needed and did the whole liturgy, including a homily with contributions from all parts of the room. At the end, I said what we always say: “Go in peace, serve the Lord.” My father responded as firmly and clearly as anyone, “Thanks be to God!” That was the second-to-last thing he ever said.

He left us thanking God, and I’ll always believe that we all received that gift because of those little children’s songs that lived deep within him, thanks to the ways the community marked with the cross of Christ has formed and shaped him, and with songs, prayers, and powerful stories made him a cruciformed person and a singer of God’s truth.

This is the work of the Spirit, who clings to us when we have lost our grip and still gives us words when we come to the end of our rope, our strength, our days. We are not persecuted like Mark’s audience, but we are betrayed and laid low in other ways. God’s Spirit will not let us go, however, but hangs onto us by means of strong bonds—including those songs.

It was the same for our Lord Jesus, who in his own dying moments did not rail on his tormentors or curse those who failed him. No, he sang one of the songs of childhood, the one we call Psalm 22. I believe that whenever any child of God sings one of those songs in such a moment, every voice that ever did the same in any time or place joins in. What a choir joined the Son of God that day outside Jerusalem! No wonder the curtain of the temple was torn in two.

Back in the dining room, several days later, as my father breathed his last, my mother and I knew what to do. The Spirit gave us words, too—more songs, some in German, some in English, and all by heart. At the very end, we sang the Nunc Dimittis. And in the wordless silence when breath had departed, I marked his forehead with the sign of the cross, even as his father had done 81 years earlier on the day of his baptism.

Marked with the sign of the cross forever. It begins for most of us when we’re young. And we don’t know really just how carefully we’ve been marked, shaped, and claimed until we walk through the valley of the shadow, and we find then, in the birth canal of that final crossing, that we’ve landed in the company of the crucified, and we claim the same identity. You are my child, by beloved, the delight of my soul. Forever.

And for now, we tell our story that way, riddled and laid low as we are with our own terrors, weaknesses, addictions, confusions and failures. We don’t scream or taunt. Instead, we sing the faith, with words the Spirit grants to the wordless.

The centurion will hear our extraordinary song. And though we die without hearing a response, we have the Spirit’s promise. The gospel never fails to make its mark.

[Session Two - Saturday]