"Completing the Circle:
The Discipleship of All People"
Fintan Moore
Sunday, November 24th, 2002

A few months ago, I received a request from some university students. They wanted to interview me in connection with a class they were taking. I agreed to meet with them as I usually do.

It took me a while to find the Dunn Brothers Coffee shop on Elliot Park. I got a little nervous when I realized that Elliot Park is almost surrounded by North Central University - formerly known as the North Central Bible College. I don’t know about you, but I’m always a little nervous around Bible Colleges. I was greeted by two good-looking and enthusiastic young men and an equally good-looking and equally enthusiastic young woman.

My anxiety increased when they told me that they wanted to interview me for their anthropology class. They wanted to talk with a real, live, gay person. They specifically wanted to know if my family had disowned me or if I had been gay-bashed or discriminated against. They seemed very disappointed to learn that I have a wonderful relationship with my parents and my sister and my son, that I have not been beaten up - at least not since I was 12, and that I am very happily employed - at a church.

I began to feel like a member of a remote African tribe encountering old style European missionaries - and I think I was right to feel that way. These students had a picture in their minds of what a real disciple should look like and I was not it.

Their plan was to interview me, to learn my language, to find out about my queer culture. Their purpose was to become the Assemblies of God mission to the GLBT tribe. They would come back later to live with us and win us over with trinkets and gadgets and new agricultural methods. They would come back later to make real disciples of us, to baptize us properly, and to teach us the right way to be obedient to the teachings of Jesus.

Our interview degenerated somewhat and I found myself the object of their missionary zeal.

What does all this have to do with the words from Matthew’s Gospel we heard a few moments ago? I’m glad you asked. We just heard the part that says, “Go, make disciples of all the nations.”

Most scholars focus on the “missionary mandate” aspect of this reading. Few seem to notice that these are the final words of Matthew’s Gospel. Matthew is, in fact, the only one of the four Gospels to have an undisputed ending. Luke simply flows on into the Acts of the Apostles, it’s second volume and the original endings of Mark and John were so scandalous and unsatisfying to later editors that they changed them radically.

At the end of his Gospel, the author of Matthew chooses to describe the final encounter between Jesus and his disciples. They met again in Galilee - the backwater where Jesus first gathered people around him and where, together, they became disciples, friends, lovers.

Galilee - where Jesus had shared his wisdom and his love with his disciples. Where he had taught them that the essence of discipleship was to live as equals, to call no one their master, to be mothers and brothers to each other.

Galilee - where Jesus had taught them that the work of discipleship was to feed the hungry, to heal the sick, to restore people to their communities, to forgive debts and injustices.

They traveled a lot and once they trekked all the way up to Jerusalem - where things went horribly, horribly wrong. Within a few days of their arrival, Jesus and Judas were dead - one killed by those who feared him and the other by his own hand.

And now, at the end of Matthew’s Gospel, the disciples come home to Galilee. The geographical circle is complete but the circle that was the community of equals is shattered.

A great discordant note is sounded by the only number in this reading. The “eleven” disciples.

Eleven disciples? There should be twelve! I have this image in my mind of a circle of tall standing stones, similar to Stonehenge in England. There in the middle of a plain, rising up out of the mist are eleven gigantic stones arranged around a sacred center. It is obvious that there used to be twelve and the gap where the twelfth stone stood is hard to miss.

Of course, the missing stone, the missing person, is Judas. An ugly gap remains after his death, an emptiness that challenges Jesus’ very vision of a community of equals. The symmetry, the harmony, the faith is broken.

The authors of the New Testament treated this problem in very different ways.

Luke tells us that a lottery was held to find a replacement for Judas, to restore the twelve. St. Paul declares himself the new apostle. The author of Matthew does something very different. He does not fill up the gaping hole. He ends his Gospel with an instruction to the remaining disciples to replace Judas not with an individual, but with the whole world. “Go, make disciples of all the nations, baptize them, teach them to observe what I have taught you.”

We are the twelfth disciple. We complete the circle that is the community of disciples, the circle of equals.

And we have that same mission: “Go, make disciples of all peoples, baptize them, teach them to observe what I have taught you.”

How do you feel about this mission? How do you feel about making disciples of all the nations, baptizing them, and teaching them to be obedient to Jesus?

More importantly, how did the indigenous peoples of the Americas feel when they heard these words on the lips of conquistadores, royal missionaries, and pioneers? How did the Celts and Picts of Europe feel when their Gods and Goddesses were deposed by the disciple-makers, the baptizers, and the Jesus-teachers? How do our Islamic brothers and sisters in Palestine, in Afghanistan, in these United States feel about our mission to make disciples of them, to baptize them, and to teach them to be obedient to Jesus?

All too often, making disciples has meant making THEM look and behave like US, all too often we see the world in terms of masters and followers. What if it’s all about a circle of discipleship? What if we were all meant to be equals? What if the power imbalances so evident in our world were removed?

But we are not equals. We play out power games everyday, we dominate and we submit, we divide and we conquer, we colonize and we are taken advantage of.

This is especially true when it comes to our sexuality.

Sexuality and discipleship have a lot in common. Both are about connectedness: deep connectedness with the sacred, deep connectedness with the human. Both can be the source of incredible blessing. Both have inspired our greatest creativity. Both can transform the universe. Both have been enslaved to colonization, occupied and possessed by demonic power struggles.

We live in a culture of estrangement - to borrow from the Contemporary Reading.

We are estranged from the children in Iraq who die each day not just as a result of UN sanctions but as a direct result of US and British manipulation of the sanctions and the so-called Oil for Food program.

We are estranged from the Indonesian workers who toil for less than $1.75 a day to make our Nike’s and who are soon to lose out even more as corporations stampede over to China where the labor and environmental regulations are even more favorable to them.

We are estranged from the women - here in this state, here in this county - who have been imprisoned on drug conspiracy charges. Women who have lost their liberty and their children because their “man” used their home, their phone, their car to deal.

We live in a culture of estrangement and in a culture of estrangement, it is well nigh impossible to see ourselves as equals.

Starhawk reminds us in Dreaming the Dark, that our sexuality “is the realm in which the spiritual, the political, and the personal come together.” I am pretty sure that, for the students who interviewed me for their anthropology class, MY sexuality had spiritual, political, and personal connotations.

Perhaps we can begin to dismantle the culture of estrangement, the culture of domination, the culture of taking advantage. Perhaps we can begin by healing our sexuality, by liberating our sexuality, by learning to trust our sexuality.

We don’t know much about the sexuality of Jesus and his close companions - and I certainly don’t want to make any anachronistic projections, but we do know that Jesus and his companions were counter-cultural. We know that they separated themselves from the patriarchal family system - a system of domination that used sex and gender and marriage to control and determine people’s lives.

Is it fair to imagine what sexualities ensued in a group of people who experimented with sexual, spiritual, and familial liberation? Is it fair to imagine that these liberations were intertwined, that liberation from an oppressive patriarchal-sexual system allowed men and women to live as equals, allowed teachers and disciples to live as equals, that allowed Jews to consider Gentiles as equals?

And what about our world, our culture?

Could we change the course of our universe by healing and liberating and trusting our sexuality to bring us to places of shared power rather than domination?

Do the minority sexualities in our world hold truths that can set the rest of the world free? Is there something to be learned from the sexualities of queers and the disabled and the elderly and the very young?

Our sexuality “can become the bridge that connects feeling with doing; it can infuse our sense of mastery and control with emotion so that it becomes life-giving instead of destructive. In the dialectic of merging and separating, [our sexuality] can confirm our uniqueness while affirming our deep oneness with all being.”

Jesus and his loving disciples came together one last time, back home in Galilee, far from the noise and the bad memories of Jerusalem, back where their journey started.

Jesus entrusted his own mission to them: to complete the circle of discipleship, the circle of equality; to join themselves with their brothers and sisters across the face of this planet; and, I believe, to reclaim their sexuality as a tool of integration and liberation - and then Jesus stepped aside, confident that they could do it, confident that we can do it.