Their names were Courtenay and Alice.  They left America in 1893, saying farewell to their native Pennsylvania, boarding a steamer from British Columbia, bound for the far east, bound for China.  Her parents strongly opposed their going, fearing for Alice’s fragile health.  But go they did --to live in Beijing, where they lived and worked the next thirty years, where they compiled the first easily-used Chinese-English dictionary, undertook important translation work, where they survived the violence  of the Boxer Rebellion, where they set up schools, and, through it all, raised three children.

Their names were William and Frances.  They met when both were teaching at Berea College in Kentucky.  But soon William returned with Frances to China (where he had grown up) to work where his parents, Courtenay and Alice, had worked.  To continue the work his parents had started, turning schools into colleges, advancing the work of literacy and higher education, building cultural bridges between east and west.  To live through the Second World War, the invasion of China, the mass evacuation to west China, their home being bombed by the Japanese.  To serve in the O.S.S., supporting US Army intelligence in the war effort.  To leave China, finally, after the Communists came to power in 1949, to continue working in higher education all over East Asia for another quarter century.

And through all that work and tumult they raised two daughters, Sarah Alice and Mary Frances.  The daughters lived in China, in Nanking, in Chung Du, and Shanghai, until the revolution, sharing their parents wartime life, dodging the rain of bombs from the sky, learning and being young girls.  Back in America after the revolution, they married and had children.  Mary Frances would later recall the days in China to her own children.  Bedtime stories of summers in the coastal village of Bei-te-ho; playing with a panda bear in the neighbor’s yard; making dolls from holly-hock blossoms, being the "adopted younger sister" of homesick U.S. army flyers.  She would remember the visits of the local candy-maker, with his little glass pipe from which he would blow, like blowing glass, the sweet candy he made into fantastic and whimsical shapes.

By now you realize that Mary Frances is my mother.  And you may have guessed why I chose to preach today on the passage from Matthew we call the Great Commission, that passage which contains Jesus’s last instructions to his disciples and his last command to all who would be his followers.  I share with you today the lives of Christian missionaries, of real people I have known, who took Jesus at his word, who gave their lives to respond to his command, who took the gospel of Christ to every nation.

To be sure, when we speak of missions today, in the United Church of Christ, we have of different conception of the role of the missionary.  In fact, today, we invite Christians from other lands to come to our country, to share their faith with us, to renew, to revitalize, and to internationalize our understanding of the church and the good news of the gospel.  Still, for all that missions has changed, there remain some ways in which it is still the same work today.

So I wanted to share with you this morning the inspiration of a family of Christians who took the good news seriously and joyfully into a life of service, into lives almost epic in scale, lives that have so shaped and inspired my own.

It may be hard for some of us today to understand why people would do as my grandparents and other missionaries did.  It seems to us a great deal to ask of people that they leave their families, homes and countries, traveling to the far side of the earth, risking health and safety.
 
But why is it so hard for us to imagine doing what they did?  I think it is because, for all of the last century, our culture has been trying to make different people of us, trying to make people who cannot imagine such a thing.  You go into Borders or Barnes and Nobles, or you flip through the cable channels on TV, and you can see what American culture wants to make of us.  It is one show after another, one book after another in the popular genre of “self-help.”  From Jacques Pepin to Queer Eye for the Straight Guy, it’s mass media productions about how we can do this better, do that better, about how we can look better, feel better, think better, eat better, sleep better, speak better.  It’s a new make over, a new start over for whatever in us may need starting over.  Whether it’s for better health, better investments, better homes or better gardens, it is about being better and doing better.

Don’t get me wrong; I think our lives are often made better by all this.  I read Consumers Report, so I can make better decisions about how to use my money.  I read home and health magazines and, of course, like all sensible folk, I listen to Car Talk.   I am glad to learn how not to buy a lousy car, and I am glad to learn which washer and dryer have the features I need most.  And I’m glad to know there’s an army of people out there researching and writing for me and for my family. That’s news I want to hear.  That’s, well, that’s NICE news!  That’s nice to know.  That’s nice to hear.

But, you know, as I go along through my days, I find that I don’t long for the nice news; I long for the GOOD news.  And I think our world is longing for the Good News, too, the news of something that goes to the heart of our lives, that matters in a way that better homes and gardens can never matter, that speaks of hope and faith and goodness and justice and peace and gladness, yes, even joy, even in a world such as this!

The problem with all this nice news we get is not that it is bad or useless, but that it is all about us as individuals, all about me and my little family, how to build me up, how to improve my family’s lot in life. The Good News we yearn for is not about me; it is about humanity; it is not about my lot; it is about the common lot of humankind; it is about God’s love and caring for me and everyone else, for the whole family of us children of God.  It is not about self-help; it is about other-help, about service and works of kindness and mercy.  It is about life focused not on me, but on God and God’s creation.

And it is this one simple, brilliant truth that my grandparents understood, this one truth that guided their lives.  And, if we would have new truths to teach them about the daily work of missions, they have old and powerful truths to teach us about life as a work of selfless service.

As I look back at the lives of my grandparents, I think the even more important question is not why they did what they did, but rather how they did it.  For as I think back upon their recollections, as they were related to me, I find my self even more astonished by how they lived their lives of service than by what they did in them.  My great-grandparents diaries speak of the hardships and dangers they faced, but never at length, never in a complaining tone. There was rather always a tone of adventure, of excitement and inspiration in their words. They dwelt at length on the opportunities, the wonderful opportunities their lives afforded them.  There is in the tone of the words a sense of gladness, the richest possible sense of joy in what they had done and in the marvel of God’s power.

These were people who had read the words of Isaiah, who exclaimed with the ancient prophet:  “How beautiful upon the mountain are the feet of the messenger who announces peace, who brings good news, who announces salvation, who says to Zion, ‘Your God reigns!’”

I have thought so often of my mother and her bedtime stories of her life in China.  I love the stories themselves, the images and sounds I imagined as I heard them.  But more than those I remember something about my mother herself, and about my grandfather, something in their bearing and expression.  By chance, as I was choosing the hymns for today, I came across Washington Gladden’s famous hymn, “O Savior, Let Me Walk with You” -and there in the third verse were just the words, just the right words for that something in my mother and her father.  Gladden wrote of “work that keeps faith sweet and strong.”  Faith -that is sweet and strong.  That is what I saw in him and what I see in her.

When Jesus sent his disciples into all the world to proclaim the gospel, he knew what kind of work he was sending them to do.  He did not imagine it would be easy.  He knew it would require the very best in his followers, to forsake home and family and familiarity, to travel beyond the horizons of faith and share the gospel with strangers in places unknown.  But Jesus knew that such work, that such service in his name, would make in the Christian a faith that is sweet and strong.

The gospel is for us, brothers and sisters in Christ, for each of us and all of us.  But it is for each and all of us to give away.   It is that giving away that makes us strong and sweet, that can make in our hearts the courage and joy of the Christian life.  My grandparents and great grandparents were known in their day as workers in “foreign missions,” but what they had understood so well was that, in Jesus Christ, there is no such thing as a “foreigner.”

We do not need to go to the other side of the world, to leave our families and risk health and safety.  We do need to resist the urgings of a culture that would have us focus on nothing but our own lives, our own security and well-being.  We do need to refuse to live only or mainly for ourselves and look outward, beyond ourselves to the mission fields that may be as near as our next door neighbor, as common as the ordinary act of kindness.  That is my prayer for us today, the prayer my grandparents would say for us, that we may find what they found, by living as they lived, for God, for the world, for all the great wide world of God’s creation, that we, like them, may be blessed, and blessed the more.    Amen.   

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