Men Who Shook The World

The whole world is still shaking from the events of September 11, the hijackings, the buildings destroyed, the mass deaths and destruction, the world efforts to put together a coalition to finally stamp out terrorism, the layoffs and financial troubles of the airline industry, the upset of the stock market. It will be a long time before things settle down again.

It’s a graphic and tragic demonstration of what just a few determined people can accomplish. The FBI’s best guess is that there were 19 men who did the actually hijackings. How nineteen men shook the world!

And they paid a price for it. They left their homes to live here in the United States for… how long? At least a year, probably more. Some of them spent a lot of time learning how to fly a commercial jetliner. Somebody put a lot of money into it. I can’t imagine that flight school is cheap. There were a lot of expenses for daily living and travel. Just the tickets for the travel scheduled for September 11 must have cost a lot, 19 tickets that were supposed to go from the east coast to the west coast. It sounds like some of them left wives and children behind. They were all ready to die for what they believed in, and they did die.

Ossama bin Laden picked a select group of followers, used political connections to build safe retreats for training them, gave them an ideology, financed them and sent them out. And they shook the world.

What if the church could raise up young men and women who were also dedicated to shaking the world, but their focus was on love and not hate, their focus was on building rather than destroying, healing rather than hurting, their time frame was patient instruction to all people so they could have time and the information they needed to choose what is right rather than impatiently imposing their way on people who didn’t even have any warning or know what the battle was about? Does a church that has grown comfortable, often indifferent, often confused about what it is even here for have anything at all to respond to this threat?

We have the military power now to respond and hopefully, in time, remove Ossama bin Laden from the world scene. But what can we do preemptively in the future, before things blow up again? People are desperate all over the world with hunger, ignorance, disease, injustice and oppression. Many parts of the world are being torn apart by ancient conflicts between groups of people, with both sides able to name long lists of atrocities done by the other side. Do we have any power at all to clean those things up before they explode? Can we shake the world for God? Can a few Christians dare to dream of making a difference today as the 21st century begins?

The answer to that question was given to us long ago. We saw it done. Jesus of Nazareth took just 12 men, not 19, and he worked with them for what we guess was probably three years, and he didn’t have much money and he didn’t have any political connections at all and no safe havens. He had very little formal education by modern standards. The 12 that he picked were not the ideal material, not what you would expect for a project to shake the world at all. But he did it. And sometimes you wonder if the church has it in it any more to do any shaking at all, but our God has not left us. The power can still be there.

The challenge for the church in the 21st century is the same challenge that Jesus gave us in the 1st century, to make disciples of Jesus Christ, people who will make a difference. And as we think about where we are going as a church, goals for coming years, making disciples for Jesus needs to be near the top of the list.

In the climax of Jesus’ teaching of his disciples, his last message before ascending to heaven, he told them to make disciples. We heard it in our first lesson, “And Jesus came and said to them, "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, and teaching them to obey everything that I have commanded you. And remember, I am with you always, to the end of the age." That’s our job.

It’s affirmed for us in the Book of Discipline of the United Methodist Church, “The mission of the Church is to make disciples of Jesus Christ.” If we do that well, if we mold ourselves to think like Jesus, to act like Jesus, to do the things he told us to do, we can shake the world for God.