EASTER VI        May 16, 2004

Sometimes I say things that sound like I am opposed to evangelism. For example, that I don’t think everybody needs to be a Christian.

Now, for some people that contradicts what evangelists refer to as "the great commission" where, at the end of the Gospel according to Matthew, Jesus says, "Go, therefore, and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit".

Outside of the fact that such a formula seems too formulaic to really have been spoken by Jesus, and more probably reflects the early mission of the church, I focus on one word there. The word that is translated as "of" in the phrase "make disciples of all nations". The word in Greek can mean "of", but it can also mean "from", which is how I choose to interpret it and that makes a lot of difference.

What Jesus could be saying is that this new covenant, unlike the old covenant, is not limited to one nation, one chosen people, but that disciples are welcomed after being called from all nations.

Even more radically, it could mean that what is really important is not that everybody be made into a Christian but that there be a core, a piece, a representation of this Way in each nation, from each nation, and that that would be enough. It would mean that disciples are planted, are given as servants, to bring God’s love everywhere – no matter what path the rest of the population of those nations follows.

It’s like, I think it’s from the Hopi tradition, that they see their religious practice as essential in keeping the sun moving across the sky, and thus keeping the world alive. It’s enough for them to do their job, not everyone needs to do that job. It may be enough for Christians to be Christians, without everyone having to become Christian. Jesus often uses the metaphor of leavening in the f lour ("a little leaven leavens the whole lump"). The purpose of leaven isn’t to turn all the flour into yeast; it’s to make the whole loaf rise. That may be out job too as disciples from this nation, to make the whole rise.

I am opposed to cultural imperialism, which often masquerades as evangelism. That kind of thing involves a double error.

First is the confusion of Christian faith for the cultural context, in which that faith is received and expressed, that creates what Kirkegaard talked about as a kind of cultural "Christianism", rather than true Christianity. And then secondarily, this Christianism gets imposed upon some non-Christian culture, society, or institution almost always as a support for political and economic control.

This process is so far from the spirit of Jesus that to refer to it by the holy name of evangelism comes pretty close to being blasphemous.

In a more innocent form it involves the trappings of Christianity, being offered as if the trappings would automatically carry the core teaching. I have talked before about my first visit to the mountainous province in northern Luzon in the Philippines back in 1977.

When the US took over the Philippines after the Spanish-American War, the protestant denominations divided up the country for evangelical efforts. Out of deference to their Roman Catholic cousins, the Episcopal Church didn’t go to any already Catholic areas, but instead focused missionary efforts in the Moslem south, in Mindanao, and in the pagan villages of the mountain province of Luzon. As far as I know, we never converted any Moslems in the south, but part of the mountain province became almost entirely Episcopalian. Now, I’m sure there was a solid religious faith that was grasped, but when I went in 1977 it was really strange to go into a village, with fairly timeless primitive conditions (thatched roof huts, people in native dress with tribal decoration), and still they had acolytes, and lay readers, and an altar guild and a vestry and the blue United Thank Offering boxes, and the Girls Friendly Society. It was as though all the stuff of a northern Virginia or middle Tennessee parish had been air-lifted to this Igarot mountainside, (along with country music, incidentally.)

Of course, if you’ve ever read James Michener’s Hawaii you know that this Christianization process can have a much darker side. And when you move on to the conquistadors, and the missionary efforts in parts of the Amazon or New Guinea, it gets hard to tell the difference between evangelism and cultural genocide.

Evangelos, with the prefix "eu" meaning good – as in eugenics or euthanasia – and angelos meaning message or messenger -- from which we get "angel" -- Evangelos means "good news". To evangelize simply means to share the good news, the good news of the love of God, the good news of the freedom offered through the life of Jesus, shared and offered in a way that people can incorporate it into their lives. And that last part is the tricky part.

One of the major moves of the Reformation in England and elsewhere was the translation of the Bible and the liturgical services into English and other vernacular languages.xcv The Gospel, the reformers insisted, had to be presented in a language that the people understood. And yet, translation is always a compromise. The Moslems refuse to acknowledge that any translation from the Arabic of the Quran is not the real Quran, and they may have a point.

The promulgation of Christianism is really based on one extreme of this dilemma. It insists that to really understand, accept, and incorporate the faith you have to conform to the whole cultural context in which it is presented. We know that Saint Paul objected to that. His first and biggest argument with the apostolic, Jerusalem based, church was whether Gentiles had to be circumcised, had to become fully Jewish, culturally Jewish, in order to become Christian, in order to receive the good news. And yet today’s story from Acts about Paul and Barnabas shows the problem on the other end. The people at Lystra took what Paul and Barnabas were saying and doing and interpreted it within their cultural context leading to deep misunderstanding. (We do that when we distort the Christian message just to make it popular)

What is needed, I think, is balance that can discern the core but adapt its presentation. Two examples of that are the Virgin of Guadalupe and Paul’s speech from Acts to the Athenians.

In spite of all the power and pressure of the conquistadors and secular authorities the indigenous people of Mexico did not convert to Christianity easily. It was only when cooler and wiser minds prevailed in the missionary effort that, rather than impose Spanish culture, Spanish theology, and Spanish saints on the Mexicans a way was found, through the story of the appearance of the Virgin Mary to a native peasant, at a site that was sacred to the Aztec moon goddess, and using the symbols of that sacred mood goddess, and at the time of the festival of the same moon goddess, that a bridge was opened between the two cultures that allowed the good news to be heard as well as spoken.

In his speech to the Athenians (the description of which is, incidentally, used as a lesson for this same Sunday in Year A of our lectionary cycle of readings) Paul looks around at all the statues of the Greek gods and says, "Men of Athens I perceive that you are a very religious people. Why I even see here a statue that is dedicated to "the unknown" god, and that is the God I want to talk to you about."

Now people have questioned both of these efforts. "If it talks like a moon goddess and looks like a moon goddess and acts like a moon goddess", some people may say, "what makes you think it’s Mary?" The early church father Tertullian asked, "What does Athens have to do with Jerusalem?" He was questioning the practice common in his day (and I think essential to successful evangelism)…the practice of drawing parallels between Jewish religion and Greek philosophy.

It’s never an easy question: tradition vs. adaptation, relevance vs. compromise, continuity vs. change. But the underlying call to true evangelism is not an option. We are called to share the good news of God’s love in all our life. We don’t live a Christian life by coming into the church from the world, but by going out of the church to the world.

How in your life are you called to evangelism? Maybe it is by inviting someone to church. I’ve never understood why people are less ready to recommend their church to a friend they thing would like it than they are to recommend a movie or a restaurant. Somebody you know must want what we have.

But usually evangelism doesn’t have anything to do with church or even religion. It involves being a peaceful, loving, accepting presence in someone’s life. A lending of your secure foundation in faith to someone who may not have one – usually without their ever knowing it.

If you think you don’t know how to do all this, remember that He sends the counselor, and that Spirit will be with you when you come to need it the most.

Thanks be to God.