Sermon Date 03-17-2013 Patrick the Missionary (Chuck Gohn)
Any Irish people here today? A few. Well, sorry to burst your bubble about St. Patrick, I’m sorry, but as the video showed, a lot of the things we know about St. Patrick are myths. He really didn’t drive the snakes out of Ireland. He didn’t apparently use the clover to speak about the trinity. Some suspect that he wasn’t obviously Irish. Some believe he was British or possibly even Scottish. And that also there is still uncertainty whether or not he truly was designated as a saint. We know a lot of things that are false about St. Patrick, but one thing we do know that is true is that St. Patrick was a missionary. Someone who took what we call The Great Commission very seriously, and that is what we are going to look at today. We are going to open our Bibles to Matthew 28:16. If you have been with us for a while, you know that we are going through our core values of worship, discipleship, outreach, and community. You may be seeing that those values tend to blend together.
Today, we are looking at the value of outreach. As I have said about outreach before, there is no mystery about outreach. It is basically just reaching outside of yourself and beginning first and foremost serving others within the church or serving the church. I know there are a lot of people who serve within the church and I really want to just express my appreciation for that because we need people like you. The outreach also involves taking service out into the community; taking the service out into Bellevue. As you know, we have a lot of service opportunities, a lot of nonprofits that we support in Bellevue, but it also means taking the Gospel ideally or taking the service out into the Greater Pittsburgh area. We support ministries like His Place, like Urban Impact. As we see today as we look at the story of St. Patrick, we see that it also involves taking the Gospel into other countries, into other nations. That is what we are going to look at today. Before we discuss St. Patrick, what I wanted to do was go through and remind ourselves about this passage. Again, it is known as The Great Commission. I am going to read through the passage from Matthew 28:16-20 and then we are going to go back and highlight a certain number of words. “Then the eleven disciples went to Galilee, to the mountain where Jesus had told them to go. When they saw him, they worshiped him; but some doubted. Then Jesus came to them and said all authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me. Therefore go 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 I have commanded you. And surely I am with you always, to the very end of the age.” (Matthew 28:16-20) This passage is referred to as The Great Commission. In fact, if you are using the NIV Bible, you may see that title above the section called The Great Commission. Again, the Great Commission is just where Jesus basically gave the disciples their marching orders and told them to basically go forth and share the good news of Jesus Christ. This particular passage takes place right around the time of the resurrection where Jesus had just risen from the grave, and he was beginning to make his appearance to a number of people. He appeared to the disciples in Galilee and gave them this commission. A commission that is very familiar to many of us if we have been around the church for any length of time. Today, what I would like to do is quickly go through these passages a few at a time and highlight a few key words that I think are important to remember as we think about The Great Commission.
In the first couple passages, 16-17, it says “Then the eleven disciples went to Galilee, to the mountain where Jesus had told them to go. When they saw him, they worshiped him; but some doubted.” The first thing I want to point out is this word eleven. We could read over this really quickly, but I think it is a subtle but sad reminder by the gospel writer Matthew about what happened. The idea that we know that Jesus started out with twelve disciples but one of those disciples, Judas, decided to betray Jesus. He went and he took 30 pieces of silver in a reward to turn Jesus in so that he might be crucified. Judas felt such great remorse about that that we went back to the Pharisees. He threw those 30 pieces of silver on the floor of the temple, and then he went out and hung himself. He was filled with such great remorse that he hung himself. Again, this is just a subtle but a sad reminder about the betrayal of Jesus. What I want you to see in this passage is that before Matthew gets into this Great Commission, he basically lets us know that it starts with worship. It goes on to say when they saw him, they worshipped him. This is important because up until this time, with few exceptions, they didn’t really worship Jesus as Lord in the way that we worship him. They may have seen him as a teacher, as a prophet, as a carpenter, as a wise man or whatever, but they didn’t really worship him as Lord. Now they are coming into the situation where they see Jesus and they see the resurrected Christ, and they see him as Lord. We don’t know how they saw him. We don’t know if he just appeared before them. We don’t know if he was standing on a mountain or possibly hovering in the air. We really don’t know what was going on there. All we know is that something happened. When they saw the risen Christ, their hearts were open. They were filled with the presence of God, and they had no option but to get on their knees and begin to worship him. That is what they did. This is important for us especially when you think about this value of outreach. Outreach really starts with worship. It really does. It begins here. Until you get to the point where you move past this idea that Jesus might have just been a good teacher, might have been a good scholar or a rabbi, a carpenter, or even a mythical figure, until you get past that point and begin to worship him as Lord, you will never ever be effective in outreach because you will not have the passion and desire to share about Jesus Christ. You are not going to have the passion and desire to share about simply a guy who was a good teacher or a sage or a rabbi or whatever. This is an important point when we think about the value of outreach.
But even so, as important as it is to worship Jesus as Lord, we see that a certain doubt is expected. It goes on to say “but some doubted”. Now we don’t know who that some is. Some suspect that it is the eleven. Some suspect that it might be other followers that just happened to show up for the occasion, and they were actually the ones that doubted because, after all, these eleven have seen the risen Christ so you know that they would no longer have doubts, right? Wrong. I think they still had doubts because even while Jesus was alive and he performed all the miracles and he walked on water and calmed the storms and gave sight to the blind and raised Lazarus from the grave, even so we always see over and over again throughout the gospels that they still doubted. That should give some sort of assurance to us or some sort of comfort to us because I suspect everybody in here at some point or another has doubted about their faith. I know I do. That is not a bad thing. What it usually means, if you have some sort of doubt, is that God is trying to take you to a new level of faith. He is challenging your existing faith and when you get past those doubts and you move forward, He is going to take you to a new level of understanding of Him and He is going to take you to a whole new level of faith. So again, doubt is not always a bad thing. So these initial passages, what they do is they set the stage for really the core of the Great Commission.
Jesus began to speak of that when he said “Then Jesus came to them and said, all authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me.” (Matthew 28:18) What he was saying is what I am about to tell you, what I am about to command you to do, I’ve got the authority to do. I’ve got the authority simply by my character, what I have done, and who I am, and what I am as I stand before you as a risen Lord. I have the authority to tell you to go out and make disciples. What he wants them to know is that that authority is not limited to Jerusalem or Samaria or whatever. He is saying that authority extends in Heaven and on earth. The heavens could be the galaxies. It could be the farthest star from the most distant galaxy, but it also the heavenly realms also often refer to the spiritual realms. The realms of angels and demons and that sort of thing. He is saying my authority is over them and of all the earth. What he is saying is every person, every place, every thing, every politician, every government, every institution, those are all under my authority right now again by virtue of who I am and what I have done. He is laying that foundation before he gives the great command. And then he goes on based on all what I just told you, he gives the heart of The Great Commission when he says “Therefore go and make disciples of all nations”. Let’s stop right there. This is the big “Therefore”. What he is saying, in light of what I just told you about who I am and what I have done, it is time now to go. In other words, school is out. You’ve graduated. You’ve spent three years with me. It is time to leave this classroom. It is time to go out and begin to do the work of making disciples. I suspect these guys were a little bit nervous at this time. They are probably thinking, what do you mean go and make disciples. You didn’t really tell us how to make disciples. We don’t know how to make disciples. We don’t know what to do. Maybe we need to go back and look at our notes, but I don’t think you gave us a clear outline of how to make disciples. They might have been feeling a little bit panicky. It reminded me of several years ago when I was a Chaplain at the Cleveland Clinic in Cleveland, OH. The Cleveland Clinic is one of the foremost hospitals in the world especially known for heart surgeries and that sort of thing. I was one of 15 Chaplains there. I remember the first day we showed up, and we sat around the meeting room with the supervisor and he gave us some initial introductions about different things like the HIPAA laws and all this kind of stuff. Then he basically said go out and be a Chaplain. What do you mean go? You are going to instruct us on this right? In a couple weeks we are going to learn how to be a Chaplain, and he said no, just go. Just go do it. Just go out in the emergency room. Just go in the hospital room. Go in the pediatric areas. Go in the cafeteria. Whatever you want to do. Go somewhere and just start being a Chaplain. Because their approach was he called it action-reflection-action. You go out there, you take action, you make your mistakes, which I made a lot of them, and you come back and you talk about it, you reflect on it, and then you go back again. Action-reflection-action. That is really a model of discipleship. We are not simply to sit back and sit in church and just take all this information and think about it. He is saying go and make disciples. Just do it. The sad thing is that Jesus doesn’t give us a manual, other than the Bible. He doesn’t give us a clear set of instructions on how to be a disciple. In other words, there is no canned program on how to be disciples. There are a lot of good books out there. There are a lot of good studies, but there is not one study, one program that tells you how to be a disciple. That is not a bad thing. I think the reason that Jesus did that was because he knew that discipleship had to be a one-on-one process. You see, everybody is an individual. Everybody is at different places in their faith. Some people have come from never being involved in a religion or a church. Some people have been in church all their lives. Some people have work situations. Some people have some family situation they have to deal with. Some people have some insecurities, some hang ups they have to deal with. The idea of discipleship is to treat everybody as an individual and begin to customize a plan for that person for where that person is in their spiritual journey. So it’s not a canned program. Even though he doesn’t give us a step-by-step guide, he does give us a few clues as we see here. He goes on and says this is where I want you to do it. I want you to make disciples of all nations. In other words, don’t just stop in Jerusalem or Samaria or Galilee. I want you to take the gospel and make disciples of all nations. All nations, which again speaks to us. We are not supposed to just make disciples in the church. We are supposed to make disciples out in the community. We are supposed to go out into the community, into the world and begin that process and make a discipleship in Bellevue, Pittsburgh, and beyond in all the different nations out there. In fact, if you see the little plastic blue card in your pew, you see all the world missions we support. So we are doing that. We are told to go out amongst the nations, not just to stay in the church and disciple the people that come to us.
He has not given real specific instructions except in this case. He says you need to baptize them. I know baptism is one of these terms that gets people all riled because everybody has an opinion about how you should be baptized and when you should be baptized. As an infant, as an adult, by sprinkling, by emersion. I don’t want to get into that, but the bottom line, this is clear, is that baptism is part of the Christian experience. That much cannot be denied. We are told to go baptizing others. Now just because you are baptized does not mean you are a Christian. I have baptized a lot of people that I guarantee were just as dirty coming out of the water as they went in the water. Baptism is important but just because you’re baptized doesn’t make you a Christian. The question you want to ask can a disciple not be baptized? That’s not for me to decide. That is between you and God. This verse seems to make it clear that we are to go and baptize others. So even if you decide you don’t want to be baptized but you are a disciple of Jesus Christ, it sounds like you are supposed to be going out there and baptizing people. If you don’t want to do that, then bring them here and we’ll do it. I love baptizing people even though it’s cold sometimes. He is talking about baptism is an integral part, and there are a lot of things that can be said about baptism but I don’t want to get into to, but at a minimum, it is an initiation into the community of faith that we call the church, into the body of Christ. I see it more than that. I see it as an initiation into discipleship. It’s an initiation. It’s the first step I think in true discipleship. So, yes, we are called to be baptized. And he tells us how we are supposed to get it done. We are supposed to baptize in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Some of you may be familiar with this. This is called the Trinitarian formula of baptism. When you are here and we do a baptism, assuming you can hear and see, when we are in the water after I have the people give the confession of faith, what do I say? I say I now baptize you in the name of the Father and of the Son and the Holy Spirit. When he talks about name back there, it is not about how we talk about name. Back then, when you said name, you are talking about all authority, all the power, all the might that went behind that name. When I am standing up there or one of the leaders are standing up there or whoever is standing up there and baptizing somebody, they are not doing it under their own power and authority. They are doing it by the authority of the Triune God. I guarantee if the Triune God gets involved, there is something being shaken up up there. I can’t explain it. I’m not going to try and explain it, but I know when you baptize in the authority of the Triune God, the heavens are shaken up. If you don’t believe me, go back and look at Matthew when Jesus was baptized. He came out of the water and it says the heavens were tore open and the spirit of God ascended upon Jesus. What did the Father say? He said this is my Son Jesus whom I love and am well pleased. Again, I look at baptism as something very special. Some people say it’s an outward sign of an inward change. That is too simple for me. There is something amazing going on in the spiritual realm when somebody is baptized. When a true believer makes a decision for Jesus Christ and is baptized in the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.
Having said that, baptism is not your ticket out of hell. I know some people have used that in the past. I have baptized people and then they were gone. They had no desire to become disciples. They had no desire to take the next step, which is being taught and teaching others. He goes on to say “and teaching them to obey everything”. What is everything? Everything is a lot. Where do I begin. Well you may recall that Jesus, even though he gave a lot of commands, he narrowed it down to two. Love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your mind, and all your strength, and love your neighbor as yourself. If you don’t know where to begin, begin there. Come to church. Be nice to your neighbor. It starts there and then it just begins to unfold. You can spend a lifetime teaching just on those particular two commandments. The problem is we are not very good teachers. We are all teachers. I look around here and I know most of you have been Christians for years. The problem is we have sat in too many classes. We have sat in too many home groups. We have sat in too many Bible studies, men’s studies, women’s studies, sermons. Absorbed all this information like a sponge. So many people say great sermon pastor, great bible study pastor. My answer is so what? Some people want to absorb information like a sponge and they never squeeze the sponge to let the living water come out and flow into somebody else’s life. If it’s so good, then tell somebody about it or don’t even mention it. If it’s so good and so life changing, tell somebody about it because you can go out on the authority of the Triune God and begin to work with people and begin to transform people by the power of God’s word. It’s not about learning. It’s about teaching others.
In summary, you have this idea of making disciples, going out amongst all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, and when you do that you have a guarantee that Jesus is with us. He says “And surely I am with you always, to the very end of the age.” In other words, he says if you are truly a missional person, a missional church, if you go out under the power of the Triune God, something is going to happen and my presence is going to be with you. When my presence is with you, people’s lives are going to be changed. Churches are going to be changed. Individuals are going to be changed. Entire nations will be changed.
That brings me back to good old St. Patrick. We know a lot of myths about St. Patrick. We do the parades. In the midst of the parades and the shamrocks and the myths about Patrick, what gets lost is the story, and it is an amazing story about a man who took The Great Commission so seriously. In the remaining minutes, I would like to give you the Reader’s Digest version of St. Patrick. The story of St. Patrick begins when he was born about 387 A.D. He was born in Britain. He was born basically to at that time a Christian family. Now Christianity had not yet become the official religion of Britain, but there were Christians there. It is believed that his parents were Christian. It is believed that is dad was a deacon in the local church. It is also believed that the parents spent time with Patrick teaching him the basics of the gospel. Teaching him the basics of the faith. Teaching him prayers and teaching him scriptures. But like all youth and teens, he didn’t want anything to do with the religion of his parents. He said I’m out of here. I’m really not interested in this. Until one day, his life changed in a drastic way when he was kidnapped by some pirates in his village. A little bit of context on that. At that particular time, Britain was part of the Roman Empire. You don’t think about Britain being part of the Roman Empire but at that point, the Roman Empire expanded as far as Europe, the Middle East, and even Africa. It was huge. The Roman Empire would provide protection for all these neighboring little countries in the farthest part of the Roman Empire. But what happened about that time Rome was losing its power. Rome was beginning to be dismantled. Rome was beginning to fall. You’ve heard of the fall of the Roman Empire. They began to fall socially, politically, economically, and eventually their military began to dismantle. So all their resources were concentrated on Rome because they were being attacked by the barbarians from the north who were trying to siege Rome. Consequently, all the military might was taken from the outlying parts of the Roman Empire so they were left without protection. One day, as the story goes, Patrick is in his village and this whole band of pirates show up from Ireland, and they come in and they set the village on fire. They ransack the village. In the midst of the chaos, Patrick is running house to house. He is running through the people and the pirates snatch him and drag him off into a boat that is bound for Ireland. That is where he spends the next six years. He spends the next six years there as a slave. When he got there, he was sold in slavery to a warrior chief who was not a nice guy. He was a mean guy. In fact, he was in the habit of chopping off the heads of his oppressors and putting them on stakes and surrounded his fortress just as a reminder of what happens to those that would oppose him. This is the place where Patrick was living. But he was given a job. His job was to care for the pigs in the hills surrounding the fortress that belonged to this warrior chief and that is what he did for six years. It wasn’t a very good life. He would be cold, hungry, thirsty, and isolated for years.
During those times of isolation, it is there that he began to recall the stories of his youth. He began to remember the stories that his parents told him about the bible characters. He remembered the prayers that they taught him. He remembered the scriptures that they taught him. If you are a mother or father and you are putting them to bed at night, pray for them. Given them scriptures. They might not say anything about it. They might pretend like they are not listening. Someday they are going to recall those prayers, those scriptures. Anyway, in the midst of this isolation, this bad situation, Patrick’s faith was beginning to grow. It grew so much that he became a man of God that really focused a lot on prayer. We have few historical records of Patrick, but in the record called Patrick’s confession, he writes “I would pray constantly during the daylight hours. The love of God and the fear of him surrounded me more and more. And faith grew. And the spirit roused so that in one day I would say as many as a hundred prayers, and at night only slightly less.” A hundred prayers. I have trouble even saying three. A hundred prayers. During this time, living in the hills, barely surviving, he developed this intimate relationship with God. As the story goes, God spoke to him through a dream. In that dream an angel or something came to him and said it’s time to leave Ireland. It’s time to go back to your homeland, to go back to your people. He ran for 200 miles to the southeastern coast of Ireland where he convinced some trade merchants to take him on a ship back to Britain. He made it back to Britain, and when he went back to Britain, he was a changed person. He bore the scars of the trials. He was a changed person because now he knew that God had a divine purpose for him, but he didn’t know what it was.
We don’t know what happened in the next 10, 15, 20 years because there was a gap in the timeline there. What is expected is that he went off to seminary in France, and he began to study theology. He began to study the deep things of God in a way where he could begin to teach people. About 20 years into it at the age of about 45 or so, he got another dream. This time it wasn’t an angel saying you need to leave and go back to Britain. This time it was hundreds and thousands of Irish people begging and pleading that Patrick would take the Gospel to Ireland. That is what he did. He responded to the call. Went off to Ireland where he spent the next 30 years. That was a tough time. You have to imagine he left Ireland as a slave and when he went back things hadn’t gotten any better. They were worse. It was still a country full of barbarians. It was still a country full of pagan idol worshippers, magicians, all these people. That is what he went into. That is the environment he went into. One of the worst oppressors was the group known as the druids. We don’t know a lot about the druids, but apparently they were people that delved into black magic or the magical arts. They were people that believed in reincarnation. They were people that sacrificed animals and even humans. With all their bad characteristics, they were actually considered scholars. They were experts in history and law. Consequently, they were able to be advisors to the tribal kings. They weren’t very happy when they heard about this guy Patrick. Because again Patrick is trying to bring in this new thing called Christianity. They didn’t like that. They didn’t like it so much that they really were out to kill him. Patrick didn’t care. He wasn’t afraid because he knew he went by the authority and the power of God. He goes on to write “Daily I expect murder, fraud or captivity, but I fear none of these things because of the promises of heaven. I have cast myself into the hands of God almighty who rules everywhere.” He knew it. He got it. He wasn’t afraid. Although he didn’t understand it, he knew that the Triune God had authority over everything and that he somehow would be protected from all these people. So he stayed there. In fact, he became one of the greatest evangelists. He came up with a very ingenious technique. He realized that if you are going to convert a nation, the way you start is by converting the kings. By converting the leaders of the country. In fact, it is believed one of the first people that he converted was the former warrior chief that he was enslaved to. What he did, he would go around to these various villages, and he would convert the kings. Once he converted the kings, then the rest of the village would be converted. After he converted them, he baptized them. In fact, rumor has it that he baptized over 10,000 people during his time in Ireland. He wouldn’t stop there. Again, what is the next step? He taught them. He would establish schools and monasteries and churches where he would set up discipleship courses that would teach the people on the basics of their faith. When he saw somebody who had a little bit more potential, he would often install them as a deacon or as an elder or in some cases a bishop who would preside over a larger area. This is the Patrick of Ireland. This is the man who had a heart for reaching the lost. A person who believed died on March 17 about the year 461. Again, we have a lot of myths about St. Patrick, but we have to look at the man behind the myth. We have to see Patrick as a great missionary who had a heart for taking the gospel into the nations. When you came in today, you might have received one of those cheap coins. That is all we could get on the Saturday before St. Patrick’s. Everybody is out of stuff. They had green beads, but I thought coins were probably the best. We got you these for a reason because when you leave today, some of you Irish people are going to go out and eat some corned beef and cabbage or some shepherd’s pie or possibly drink a green beer or two, which I know nobody’s going to do right? You are going to go out and when you are sitting there and you put your hand in your pocket and you feel this cheap coin, think about the real St. Patrick. Maybe even if you are with some friends or relatives, tell the real story of St. Patrick. Begin to carry out that great commission. You have to understand the man behind the myth. That St. Patrick was a missionary who took that commission seriously. Hopefully, it is a reminder that we understand the man behind the myth. In other words, we understand that there is a real living God out there. His name is Jesus Christ. Because he is out there, because he is alive, because he has risen, we go out under the authority of Jesus Christ. We are able to take the good news into the land. It doesn’t have to be foreign nations. It could be the local bus stop. It could be the schools. It could be the businesses, the hospitals. Wherever it is, wherever God finds you, wherever you find yourself, taking that good news out there. Sharing the good news of Jesus Christ, doing what Jesus commanded you in this passage. Again we read “Therefore go 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 I have commanded you. And surely I am with you always, to the very end of the age.” (Matthew 28:19–20)
