The Meaning of Mission

by Don Headley, Mission Pastor

Each of us possesses our own theology. Each has a peculiar way of understanding God. However, we are all called to understand God as immanently present to us. The Elohist editor's words are clear as Yahweh's voice speaks to Moses from the burning bush. "I am". It is not about essence, but about presence. God is the one who needs no name because God is always present to us and to any situation that affects us.

"Presence" is God's true name. But this brings us its own problems. How do we recognize this "God as present" reality? God is not a being as we are a being. God is beyond us, not only immanent but also "the Other". We have no way of defining God's "Who" or "What". All God is interesting in telling us is God's "How". This seems to be the purpose in a key line of Genesis' creation account. We are created as God's very image to become God's likeness in the world.

God is Spirit. God is pure relationship. And we, struggle in our lifetimes to be as related to God and the world as God is related to us. In and as God's very image we grow into human life. Each of us has an interior and important life and beauty. God makes no junk. But I have a problem. I shall never see myself the way I must see myself unless I venture out of myself and embrace another.This is, for me, the meaning of mission.

Think of the multiple adventures of your life. Most of us have had parents who taught us to love ourselves and to see the way in which we can do what God does, approach another and relate. Parents train us to fall in love, to make friends, to learn to read from the signs on the bus, to set out with a peanut butter and jelly sandwich to the first grade, to not fear tomorrow, to embrace both the light and the dark.

We fall in love and embrace someone whom we cannot understand in a moment or in a lifetime. Even at the end of a life, we shall not yet have come to discover all the beauty of the one we have loved.

But then, this is always the case of leaving what is imminent and embracing the other.

I believe that we come to know who we truly are only because we have been graced with the opportunity of mission. We have opted for approaching the other who is strange to us and unknown in order to find that other's beauty and human fulfillment. Yes, the Spirit of God, creative and liberating is present to the other long before we arrive. Think of the story of Peter and Cornelius. How could the apostle deny Cornelius' household Baptism when the Spirit of God was already alive and well in his family?

This is somehow what the God who is both immanent to each and the challenge to approach the other tries to tell us. God is not absent in the Quechua, the Aymara, the Guarani or the Chiquenita of Bolivia. Our God is quite present to the Kikuyu and other tribes of Kenya, the southern island of the Philippines or the Navajo of the Diné Bahané. God is there, or is it here? There is no time in God. So, whenever we leave where we are or arrive where the other dwells, we will be on time.

Yet, time is definitely a singular type of arrow, the one dimension that goes in only one direction. Perhaps we should listen once again to the voice that speaks to Moses from that very weird bush: "I am the one who is present to you." The corollary to this answer is "And you? Where are you in all this?"

Perhaps we can understand and begin to move toward the other together. In this manner, we may also learn something about the immanent. Perhaps we can recognize ourselves as truly human, as related as Jesus himself is related, totally to God and totally to one another.