The Great Co-Mission: The Call to Re-discipleship (Sermon 10.26.25)

Gifts from Creator Tells the Good Story (Matthew) 28:18-20 (First Nations Version)

It was now time for Creator Sets Free (Jesus) to return to the spirit-world above. It had now been forty days since he had come back to life again. So he gathered his followers, one last time, to give them their final instruction.

16 The remaining eleven of his followers journeyed to Circle of Nations (Galilee). There, at the mountain where Creator Sets Free (Jesus) had told them to go, they met with him. 17 When they saw him, they gave to him honor he deserved–but there were some who still doubted. 18 “All authority of the spirit-world above me and the earth below has been given to me,” Creator Sets Free (Jesus) told them. 19 So now I am sending you into all nations to teach them how to walk the road with me. You will represent me as you perform the purification ceremony with them, initiating them into the light of beauty and harmony represented in the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. You will then teach them all the ways I have instructed you to walk in.”

Creator Sets Free (Jesus) then looked into their faces with love and great affection. He lifted his hands towards them and spoke these final blessing words over them.

“Never Forget,” he said as he began to rise up into the spirit-world above. “I will always be with you, your invisible guide, walking beside you, until the new age has finally come.”

(The use of italics is original to the FNV translation. They mark words that the translators reasonably inferred, adding them to clarify meaning and to present Scripture as a “living, moving narrative.”)

Today’s scripture reading drops us into the very last scene of the Gospel according to Matthew. Here, Jesus visits with his disciples one last time. Judas’s absence among the original 12 disciples marks the traumatic events of Jesus’ betrayal, arrest, and crucifixion. 

Jesus’ followers must have been deeply disoriented after witnessing their leader’s brutal public execution. In a mere few hours, the great hope that had been kindled within their community had been extinguished.  

So when Jesus met them once more in Galilee, the place where it had all begun, his final words provided great comfort and renewed purpose. He was sending them out—not in fear, but in love. These were not words of farewell, but of empowerment: 

Go now on my behalf! 

Bring people from all cultures into the movement! 

Share all that I have taught you!

And know that I am with you always. 

Jesus’ parting words are often called The Great Commission. If that phrase doesn’t sound familiar, you’re not alone—I didn’t learn it myself until seminary. At its heart, this commission calls Jesus' followers to live out his teachings and to witness to the good news of God’s love and grace in the world. 

But as history shows us, efforts to spread the “Good News” of Jesus Christ haven’t always equated to good news for the people on the receiving end.

This has been especially true of the experience of Native Americans. From the beginning of European colonization, Christians justified the theft of native lands and the mistreatment of native peoples as God’s will. 

How could this be so?

The Exodus story—the story of God leading the Hebrew people out of slavery into the promised land—has long revealed God’s liberating purpose. Across time and place, from diasporic Jewish communities, to enslaved African Americans, to poor Latin American villagers, oppressed peoples have found in this story God’s desire for their freedom and dignity.

It is startling, then, to read the Exodus journey end with a story of conquest. The Hebrew people’s search for the land of milk and honey, a place of safety and abundance, comes at great cost to the original inhabitants of the land of Canaan. 

In Deuteronomy 7, we hear these troubling words:

“When the Lord your God brings you into the land you are about to occupy... you must utterly destroy [the seven nations greater than you]. Make no covenant with them and show them no mercy.”

Now we might be tempted to say, well, that’s the Old Testament! And we are New Testament people! The Old Testament God was wrathful, but we follow Jesus! 

However, this idea implies that the God we worship as Christians is somehow different—or even better—than the God of our Jewish siblings. Yet this is the very same God whom Jesus himself worshiped.

And second, history makes it clear that Christians can’t claim innocence when it comes to these kinds of toxic theological beliefs.

Two millennia after the slaughter of the Canaanites in the book of Joshua, European colonizers reached for the very same stories to defend their claim to this new “promised land”—the Americas—and to rationalize the destruction of these new Canaanites, the Native peoples who lived there.

It wasn’t until 1537 that Pope Paul III declared that Native Americans did, in fact, possess the humanity and capacity for Christian salvation. This softened—but did not erase—the racism of earlier views, replacing explicit dehumanization with the paternalistic notion that Indigenous peoples needed to be civilized through conversion to Christianity and assimilation into Euro-American culture. This was basically the official policy of the United States until 1978, with the passing of the American Indian Religious Freedom Act. 

This shift, however, did not stop the violence of colonization; it simply gave it a new face. 

In her powerful poetic essay entitled “Resisting the Great Co-Mission,” which you can find in the book “Unsettling the Word: Biblical Experiments in Decolonization,” Mitzi J. Smith writes: 

“In the age of imperialism, a tragedy of the so-called Great Commission occurred—the collusion of Church and Crown. Together, the two—a great co-mission—went forth in God’s name. 

To conquer and expand 

territories and holdings, 

To deplete and ravish

  land, resources, and peoples

Smith asks, how did Matthew 28 become synonymous with Jesus’ Greatest Commandment? Who made colonization sacred?

Continuing, she writes:

“It was a great co-mission 

Of evangelicalism and colonial politics…. 

Forced conversions… 

Demonizing cultures... 

Removing children from their homes

Depositing them in boarding schools 

A great miseducation.  

In the name of the cloroxed Christ.  

While this partnership between Church and Crown is far older, the term “the Great Commission” didn’t show up in popular print until the 1850s, when British missionary Hudson Taylor coined it to recruit people to serve in international missions. The term was basically a catchy marketing slogan for the modern missions movement.

A slogan that, for the majority of its history, assumed a white Christian nationalist agenda disguised as God’s good news. 

Smith reminds us that as Christians, our greatest calling is not to “go out and teach others,” and it is certainly not to go out and teach others how to be, think, and act exactly like white people. 

Rather, our greatest commandment is to “Love the Lord your God, and to Love your neighbors as yourself.” 

How might we rethink the meaning of the Great Commission through this lens of love? How might we “go out, discipling all nations, baptizing, and teaching,” in a way that is more in line with this greatest commandment? To love God, ourselves, and our neighbor? How might we, as Sicangu Lakota theologian Richard Twiss asked, help to rescue the Gospel from the cowboys?

These questions do not deny or diminish the power of Jesus’ words in Matthew 28. Rather, it magnifies them and offers them new meaning. It calls us to see the Great Commission not as a command to convert, but as an invitation to embody love. 

Perhaps this is why the First Nations Version of Matthew 28 seems so much more infused with Jesus’s loving character? For these translators know what could go wrong if that love were to get lost. 

One of the important details in Matthew’s account is the repeated use of the word “all.” Especially the line “Make disciples of all nations.” 

The purpose of God is reconciliation with all humanity—every nation, every culture, every race. Throughout Matthew’s Gospel, Jesus’ ministry was centered among the Jewish people. But here, at the end, the boundaries widen. The circle grows. The invitation stretches to embrace the whole world.

The command is not to take the gospel to the nations, but to make disciples of all nations—to nurture communities of learners, followers, and friends. Just as the first disciples learned from Jesus, these new disciples are invited to live out his teachings together, embodying his love and justice in their own cultures and contexts.

For this shared mission—this co-mission—was never meant to be an alliance between Church and Crown, or Church and State, but a willing partnership between God and God’s people. And God’s people, Jesus has repeatedly shown, includes all people. 

I recently heard someone put it this way: “The Church does not have God’s mission—God has a Church for God’s mission.”

Jesus then instructs his followers to baptize in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. This act of baptism marks more than a personal declaration of faith—it’s an initiation into a shared life. We are not called to be solitary believers, but to be formed together as disciples within the body of Christ. 

That is why in most Christian traditions, baptism occurs in the presence of the gathered church. In the Presbyterian tradition, the congregation also makes promises to walk alongside the newly baptized, to nurture their faith, and to grow together as companions in God’s ongoing mission of love.

Baptism marks our beginning, but it’s also our sending. We rise from the water as people claimed by God’s love—and called into God’s mission. Each time we remember our baptism, even if we can’t literally remember our baptism, we remember that we are claimed by God’s love and that we are part of God’s ongoing work to heal and restore the world. 

This is what baptism is—a sign of new life and belonging. What it is not is a badge of spiritual superiority. And perhaps that’s why I find it so fitting that Jesus tells the disciples to baptize first and then teach.

Of all the Gospels, Matthew’s is the most teaching-oriented. He structures his account around five major sections of Jesus’ instruction—so it’s no surprise that the Great Commission ends with a call to teach. The charge is not just to make converts, but to nurture lifelong learners who live out all that Jesus taught.

That includes the parables—like the one about the mustard seed we read last week—a wild, unruly image of God’s Kingdom as a living, growing, ecological garden. It also includes the powerful vision from Matthew 25, which we read the week before, where Jesus reminds us that whenever we care for “the least of these,” we meet him face to face.

This is what it means to teach as Jesus taught—to live what we profess, to let our actions bear witness to our beliefs. Matthew reminds us that faith without faithful living is empty, and that discipleship is a lifelong education in love. 

In recent years, Highlands—alongside many other predominantly white congregations—have been awakening to the deep and painful legacy of colonization and systemic racism. This journey has opened our eyes to the call for repentance and repair, not only in our personal lives and relationships, but within the institutions and systems we inhabit. Because just as faith is never a solo endeavor, neither is the work of justice and restoration.

This journey has included a great deal of re-education about the history of our country and the church, especially how it relates to the historic and current mistreatment of Native Americans. 

Together, you asked — what does it mean to worship on stolen land?

This discernment question guided you on a journey of re-education about the true history of this land. You read books such as An Indigenous History of the United States and Braiding Sweetgrass to deepen our shared understanding of the atrocities committed against Indigenous peoples, but also their wisdom and resilience. 

After this initial period of discernment, you decided that we needed to do something! 

Now I wasn’t here for all of this, but from my own understanding, this decision was a natural result of Highland’s previous commitment to the Matthew 25 movement, which encourages Presbyterian congregations to engage in three interwoven commitments. 

1. Building congregational vitality. 

2. Dismantling structural racism. 

3. and eradicating systemic poverty. 

You can see why our reparations work weaves together with the work of Matthew 25, with Hunger Action, and Earth Care. 

And so we committed ourselves to the work of reparations. 

• To address systemic racism and institutional poverty, Highlands created a permanent endowment fund at Central Wyoming College (CWC) to support Native American students from the Wind River Reservation and surrounding areas as they pursue their education. 

• This summer, I had the privilege of meeting with Ivan Posey and Corey Daley, who administer the fund, and hearing firsthand about the difference it makes in students’ lives. The most common requests is for gas money, so that students can afford to get to class. 

• Beginning in January 2023, Highlands began paying a monthly  “land tax” of $500. These funds were then set aside specifically to support tribal-approved projects on the Wind River Indian Reservation. 

• And this past summer, we disbursed our first check of $20,000 to the Sweetgrass Food Lodge to help establish a food bank serving Wind River residents. Already, some of us have had the chance to visit the new site and witness firsthand how those dollars are already making a difference

• And there are many other things you all have supported—including protesting at the Capitol against the Pilot Butte Project, a victorious campaign! 

I think what makes Highland’s efforts stand out—and this is something that encourages people I’ve spoken to on the Wind River Reservation, where there is understandably a lot of suspicion towards White Christians—is that we are not approaching this work as “outreach” to Native people. We are not discipling native people, but rediscipling ourselves. Relearning and reworking what it means to follow Jesus in light of Christianity’s brutal colonial history. I think this is an important and humbling reminder of our role in indigenous reparations.

This involved engaging in cultural events and community celebrations, like our most recent visit for Indigenous Peoples’ Day.  It also means remaining open to future educational opportunities that could benefit ourselves and other non-Natives, opportunities to meet material needs—like our ongoing coat drive for the Buffalo Youth Nation—and new partnerships with Native organizations to foster collective healing. 

Friends, we are invited to join in a great co-mission—not between Church and Crown—but with God, who is already at work in the world, healing what has been broken and reconciling what has been divided. May we go forth, then, as lifelong learners and co-laborers in God’s mission of love—for all nations and for the whole of creation.