Before reading the sermon, you may wish to click here and read today’s lesson from The Acts of the Apostles, chapter 17, verses 22-32.
+ In the Love of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.
During my Sabbatical two years ago, I had some conversations with Ian Mobsby, a priest in the Church of England and a leader in the Emerging Church movement. He recommended that I read this book, Christianity Rediscovered (New York, Orbis Books, 2003), for insights into the Emerging Church movement. The book’s author was Vincent Donovan, an American Roman Catholic priest. Father Donovan was a missionary in what is today called Tanzania, and one of the tribes in his diocese was the Masai.
I finally got around to reading his book last week, just in time for this morning’s sermon!
Forty-five years ago this month, in 1966, Father Donovan wrote a letter to his bishop, which read in part:
“I know what most people say. It is impossible to preach the gospel directly to the Masai. They are the hardest of all pagans, the toughest of the tough. In all their hundreds of years of existence, they have never accepted anything from the outside. . . .
“But I would like to try. I want to go to Masai daily safaris― unencumbered by the burden of selling them our school system, or begging for their children for our schools, or carrying their sick, or giving them medicine” (p. 14).
And that’s what Father Donovan did.
He went to the elder of one of the villages, and told him he had something important to talk about. So the elder called some of the other elders from the neighboring villages. When they had all arrived Father Donovan told them that although his fellow missionaries had been building and running schools and hospitals for many years, their real purpose in coming was to explain to them the message of Christianity. One of the elders looked at him with a puzzled expression and asked him “If that is why you came here, why did you wait so long to tell us about this?”
So Father Donovan began his adventure of telling the Masai the message of Christianity. And here’s how he began it:
“I told them I believed that they knew about God long before we came, and that they were a devout and very pious people in the face of God” (p. 20).
Does that sound like anything you’ve heard recently?
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[today’s reading from Acts 17:22-34]
“Paul stood in front of the Areopagus”―
Does anyone know what the Areopagus was?
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[the name, in an English translation from the Latin, would be Mars Hill. And Mars Hill is where the poets and philosophers of Athens would gather to judge whether a new poet or philosopher was worthy. In other words, the Areopagus was a kind of cultural court.]
“Paul stood in front of the Areopagus and said, ‘Athenians, I see how extremely religious you are in every way. . . . The God who made the world and everything in it . . . gives to all mortals”― including the Masai as well as the Athenians― “life and breath and all things. From one ancestor he made all nations to inhabit the whole earth, and he allotted the times of their existence and the boundaries of the places where they would live”― including the Masai as well as the Athenians― “so that they would search for God and perhaps grope for him and find him—though indeed he is not far from each one of us.’”
Now in this passage from Acts, Paul says that God “made all the nations.” The Greek word for “nations” is ethné― and you can hear that the English word “ethnic” comes from this word. This realization led to Father Donovan’s first insight for his work among the Masai:
“Ethne would refer more to the ethnic, cultural groups, the natural building blocks of the human race [than to a political nation as we understand it]. . . .
“It is surely here in the midst of the cultures of the world, and not in the church, that the ordinary way of salvation must lie. . . .
“As I began to ponder the evangelization of the Masai, I had to realize that God enables a people, any people, to reach salvation through their culture” (p. 23)― “so that” as Paul puts it, “they would search for God and perhaps grope for him and find him.”
This is the insight that also fuels the Emerging Church movement. For example, Ingrid and I visited St. Mary’s Church in West London, where there’s an Emerging Church community called Grace. One of the members of Grace has written this:
“[Our] alternative worship was wanting to re-engage with the depth of [Christian] tradition but in a way that connected with postmodern culture.
“A lot of my peers feel they live in one world six days a week, and then on Sunday you go to church, and it feels like you’re going to another world, and then you go back into the real world afterwards. So I think we were very much wanting to engage with the richness of the traditions of the church, but in a way that means you don’t have that kind of parallel universe thing going on.”
Here’s another quote:
“The Emerging Church wants to be living out faith in culture, in a way that is creative and imaginative. It has a very strong desire to be in the culture rather than seeing culture as a negative thing to be railed against. It’s much more discovering where God is in a community already and joining in with what God is doing.”
Or this:
“[We] have a passion to close the divide between church and the rest of life, seeking a culturally authentic expression of church.
“What prevents traditional church from becoming emerging church is the mission assumption― ‘come to us as we are.’
“When church members ask instead, ‘How can we sponsor a different expression of church suitable for this group we don’t reach?’ then traditional church changes gear.”
In a very small way, when The Gregorys play a Bob Dylan or Sting song in church on Sundays, we’re engaging our culture. This summer we’re trying to see if we can throw some sort of “Back to School Bash” in partnership with the School of Rock. If we make that happen, then that’s a way in which we at St. Gregory’s can engage the culture in our community in an emerging church sort of way.
Notice that Paul didn’t quote Scripture when he spoke to the Athenians. Instead, he quoted their poets and philosophers― in other words, he engaged their culture.
But when we engage our culture, or any culture, we need to be prepared for any sort of response. For example, some of the people scoffed at Paul’s message; but others, like Dionysius the Areopagite and Damaris, believed it.
And here’s what happened to Father Donovan:
“I remember the very first week of instructions when I asked the Masai to tell me what they thought about God. I was more than startled when a young Masai elder stood up and said, “If I ever run into God, I will put a spear through him” (p. 32).
“Then they told me of God . . . who loved rich people more than poor people, healthy people more than sick, the God who loved good people because they were good, and rewarded them for their goodness. They told me of God who hated evil people . . . and punished them for their evil. Then they told me of the God who loved the Masai more than all other tribes, loved them fiercely, jealously, exclusively” (p.33).
In response, Father Donovan said this:
“. . . the God who loves rich people and hates poor people? The God who loves good people and hates evil people . . . ? There is no God like that. There is only the God who loves us no matter how good or evil we are, the God you have worshiped without really knowing him, the truly unknown God. . .” (p. 35).
Sounds just like St. Paul, doesn’t it? And that’s the message of Christianity that we, and our culture, and all cultures, need to hear, again and again and again and again: that God loves us.
Thanks be to God.