ORDINARY SUNDAY 15 (July 10th)
1988
It was
Yahweh who said … “Go, prophesy to my people Israel”
(Amos
7:15)
Shake off
the dust from under your feet
(Mark
6:11b)
A friend of mine was once standing
in the foyer of the Main Building of our university. He was a new Christian,
and a Charismatic, boiling within with the desire to communicate his new found
faith to all and sundry. As he stood there in the foyer he watched a group of
loud and aggressive mail students behaving in the way that only loud and
aggressive male students can. And as he watched them he agonised with himself,
“what is holding me back from telling these people about Jesus?”
Now I don’t wish to propose that my
friend would have achieved any significant results had he done what he was
considering, rushing up to the strangers and ear-bashing them with his beliefs.
It may well have been good human psychology, otherwise known as common sense,
that held him back. But I do want to stress that his heart was in the right
place. His desire to communicate Jesus to the world around him was a real and
burning one and for that he was to be commended. Let us leave him in the foyer
for a while.
In their wisdom the compilers of
the lectionary, by which our readings are chosen each week, have seen fit to
describe the theme of this week’s worship as the theme of “faithfulness.” Now I
beg to differ (as is often the case). For I find a far stronger theme
underlying each of our readings today, and it is a theme that we ignore only at
great peril. For in each of our readings we find the central figure, author or
actor in the drama, recognizing the distinctive flavour of their faith, knowing
it to be something about which there is a sense of urgency and excitement, and
knowing it to be something that must be proclaimed to the world around them. In
each reading we find the compulsion, the urgency of the responsibility of God’s
people to proclaim God’s lordship to the world. And these people of God are no
superstars, no Rambos of their religion, but ordinary people. Says Amos,
I am no
prophet, nor a prophet’s son,
But I am a herdsman, and a dresser of sycamore
trees;
The Lord took me from following the flock,
and the Lord said to me, “Go, prophesy to my people Israel.”
Amos was a simple shepherd, with
none of the normal qualifications of one who might be recognised by society as
a suitable mouthpiece of God. He was a simple shepherd, but one who lived in a
time of great complacency and comfort. And he was not too simple to see clearly
that the comfort extended only to those who belonged to the middle and upper
classes of his society. One might be reminded for example, of the “two Britains”
of Thatcherism, which in the south flourishes at the expense of a largely
neglected north. Or we might care to look closer to home, to find comparisons
in our own community, for here too sectors of the community may benefit at the
expense of others from the policies of our leaders.
But in seeing the injustices, Amos
knew himself to be called to act. Writes one scholar,
He
savagely assails the oppression of the poor and the cheating of the poor … the
corrupt judicial system which denied them any hope of attaining justice … With
equal vehemence he attacked the pampered upper classes … who could not have
cared less for the plight of the poor.
John Bright, Covenant and Promise: the Prophetic Understanding of the Future in Old
Testament Israel (Philadelphia:
Westminster, 1976), 83.
Again, in Mark’s gospel we find a
subtle warning against complacency and comfort amongst the people of God.
When you enter a house, stay there
until you leave the place.
Mark, the earliest gospel writer,
is warning his people against the dangers of social climbing. If our first
hosts live in squalor, nevertheless their hospitality must be seen to surpass
all comfort, and the gospel visitor must not accept opportunities to move out
to more luxurious surroundings.
The point that both Mark and Amos
grasp so strongly is the sense of compulsion that we as servants of God are
under to proclaim God’s message to the world. Without personal benefit. Martin
Luther’s famous maxim was, “Here I stand, I can do no other.” Do no other but
to proclaim the standards of faith and justice to the world and to the church
that we believe to be essential to relationship between God and humanity. Our
Archbishop[1]
frequently makes the statement that a church that is not on about evangelism,
or proclamation as I prefer to call it, is not a church at all.
So we are left with two questions
for ourselves at St. John’s, East Bentleigh: are we on about evangelism, and
related to that question, what forms of evangelism are appropriate for us to
embrace?
Even our reading from Ephesians
today, that glorious hymn of praise to “the God and Father of our Lord Jesus
Christ” fits our theme here, for the author of those words, who may or may not
have been Paul, has seen passionately the power in which we as Christians
operate within the world God gave us. Incidentally, if you ever encounter Jehovah’s
Witnesses at your door claiming that belief in the Trinity has no biblical
foundation, you could do worse than to refer them to this passage in Ephesians.
Few passages are more clearly trinitarian in their language, and few are more
celebratory of the power that the Trinity can have in human lives.
In him you also, who have heard the word of truth, the
gospel of your salvation, and believed in him [the Son] … were sealed with the
promised Holy Spirit.
This writer saw Christians as a
distinctive people with a belief worthy of enthusiasm and excitement. We have a
message to proclaim. We are possessors of a distinctive belief, a distinctive
relationship with God. We are a people sealed at our baptism with the Spirit, and
that same Spirit has drawn near to us to be our comforter and to be our
strength, literally our pneumatic force.
This thought brings me back to my
friend in the university foyer. As he stood there in the foyer he at least knew
only too well that he had a task to perform. Had he spoken to the group of
macho males he may or may not have achieved tangible results, and those results
if tangible may or may not have furthered the cause of the Kingdom. For the
moment such niceties are irrelevant. The point is he knew he had a task to
perform.
And so again the questions we must
ask ourselves at St. John’s are the same as those faced by my friend. Are we or
am I on about evangelism, and if so, what is effective evangelism in our life
situation? What do we understand evangelism to be, and are we doing it? Does
God, Father, Son, and Spirit, excite us, or do we as church, men and women,
simply belong to another community service club?
Finally, I want to make it quite
clear that I do not believe that what my friend was about to do – and didn’t – in
the foyer of that university would have been an effective form of evangelism.
Indeed, I do not believe that much of what the church in this and other dioceses
is on about today is effective evangelism. But I do believe in evangelism, and
I do believe that if you and I together do not spend some time together in the
coming months grappling with the two questions I have raised then we will have
no future as a church, as a community of faith.
Those questions again are “are we
on about evangelism,” and “what is effective evangelism in this situation?”
May I leave you with a final
thought? I began with the text “shake off the dust from under your feet.” But
we cannot shake off the dust that is on our feet if there is no dust on them.
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