At the end of Mass today, I
shall sing the words “Go in the peace of Christ, alleluia, alleluia”. This part
of the Mass is called the ‘dismissal’, and in the Latin original it is “Ite
missa est”, which seems to be a very matter of fact announcement: literally,
“go, it is the dismissal” or, “it is the sending”. Latin was a language of
empire building rather than speculation and philosophy, so it tends to stick to
the matter of fact. Go, it is the dismissal.
Now that word dismissal, in
Latin missa, is what gives us the word “Mass”.
And that is the word that most commonly came to be applied to the
Eucharist, in the Western Church. So the Mass, what we are doing in church
today, is named after its conclusion: the dismissal, the sending out.
Another word that comes from
missa is “mission”. Mission is sending. And today the risen Lord appears to the
disciples in the upper room, and sends them.
“Peace be with you. As the
Father sent me, so I am sending you.”
Three things to note about this
sending.
Firstly, it is a mission of
peace; specifically, the peace that Jesus gives to his disciples in that locked
room where they are huddled in fear. They are to go out bearing that peace. The
peace that opens up the closed-in places of fear so that the Lord can come in.
The peace that opens up closed-in hearts to his presence.
Secondly, it is addressed to
people who have been through a time of great darkness and doubt but have now
met the risen Lord. Meeting the risen Lord has changed them; their lives have
been turned around.
Thirdly, Jesus sends the
disciples as he has been sent by the Father. It is that relationship he shares
with the Father that they are to bear into the world.
The disciples can do this
because they have met the risen Lord. That encounter draws them into the new
life of faith. They come to believe and so enter into the life which Jesus
shares with the Father in the Holy Spirit. The resurrection means coming to
live in God in whom there is no death.
Today Jesus tells them, and us,
what that means. The life of God is not something static and self-contained,
but is super-abundant, inexhaustible, continually pouring itself out in the
work of creation. God’s utterly vivacious loving alive-ness bursts out in all
directions.
Jesus has been sent into the
world from the Father to complete the work of creation, to bring all to
perfection and to enable the creation to share the life of God. And the risen
Lord has opened the way to the Father, so that we can enter in and live with
his life.
That means we also share in the
movement of God’s life into creation. The resurrection draws us into the
sending of the Son and enables us to become its continuation in the world.
Those who believe in Jesus become part of God’s movement into creation to
redeem creation.
That is what the church’s
mission is. It comes from meeting the risen Lord, because it is his mission,
his sending into the world from the Father.
The mission of Jesus, which is
our mission, arises from the heart of God and pours itself out into the world.
It is God’s movement that we receive and participate in. We are sent. We don’t
send ourselves. This is an important distinction. The mission of the church is
not something we devise ourselves. The church didn’t sit down after Jesus had
departed into heaven and say to themselves, well then, what are we going to do
now? No, mission is God’s movement, carrying the good news of the resurrection
into all creation. Our task is not to devise that, but to take part in it.
In the same way, the Church did
not devise the sacraments. They are given to us by Jesus, and in them we meet
him in his risen power. The sacraments are things we receive and take part in,
because they are part of that same sending, part of that same movement of God
into the world. So it is by baptism that we are made
members of Christ, sharing in his risen life; it is by the Eucharist that we
become his body. In the Mass Jesus is re-membered, that is, the opposite of
being dismembered; his body is formed under the signs of bread and wine and in
the people who are fed by them. And it is from the Mass that we are sent on our
mission which is God’s mission given to us by Jesus.
We are sent out at the end of
every Mass to our daily lives, to live out our mission, the mission we have
received from Jesus. But today as we are sent out we will go first to the
church hall, for our annual meeting. That’s entirely appropriate. Our annual
meeting is about the nuts and bolts of God’s mission, what we need to plan to
do, who can share the many tasks that face us, how we will fund them, and so
on.
One of the big things we will
discuss will be our Mission Action Plan. That is, what form the mission of God
will take in our local community for the next few years. How we are to make
known the good news and live the resurrection life in this particular place and
time with its particular needs.
The way we will discuss this,
after being sent out from Mass, mirrors our mission itself. At the core of our
mission is the Eucharist, the summit and source of the church’s life. And that
mission flows out into the world in peace, forgiveness, witness to the risen
Lord, and bringing people to faith.
And, of course, also in care
for the marginalised and those in need. And that love and care is
unconditional, because it is an expression of God’s love which is
unconditional. But this is always going to be rooted in our resurrection faith
and life, in meeting the Lord in the Eucharist and being sent out by him to
live with his life in the world.
In one way or another, the
answer to the question, “why do we care?”, comes back to the hope that is
within us because Christ is risen, and he has come to us to draw us into
relationship with him and to send us into the world.
So I hope we won’t see today’s
annual meeting as a bit of boring bureaucracy that we just have to get through.
I hope we will see it instead as the continuation of what we begin gathered at
the altar. Here, we meet Jesus, risen from the dead. From here, he sends us out
to continue his mission in the world.
So we will go in the peace of
Christ, joyfully bearing his mission, ready for the tasks it entails. Because
Christ is risen, because he has called us, he has sent us to bring all the
world into the embrace of that relationship with him in which we say “my Lord
and my God”.
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