Translating the Gospel

A Sermon preached on 19^th October 2017 at the Opening Eucharist of the Convocation Annual Convention Wiesbaden on the Feast of Henry Martin

 Isaiah 49:1-6, John 4:22-26

One advantage of having a regular weekday service, in our case at St. Augustine’s a Wednesday service of Holy Eucharist, is that over time you get to know all our saints, Holy Women and Men, or Witnesses – to use some of the various names we call them by. If it is someone’s feast day, I will normally focus on their life and witness in my – very brief – homily at that service. But although I am now in my fourth year at St. Augustine’s I must admit that I had not heard of Henry Martyn until I started preparing this service and sermon. So, who was he and why do we remember him?

Henry Martyn was an English missionary in India, who died in Armenia, when he was only thirty-one years old. He had originally intended to become a lawyer, a fate he would have shared with quite a few priests in this room, but in 1802 he chanced to hear Charles Simeon, the already famous and inspiring Evangelical  Rector of Holy Trinity Cambridge speaking of the good done in India by a single missionary, William Carey, and on the spot Martyn resolved to become a missionary himself. In 1806 he was already on his way to India where he spent the next 5 years preaching the Gospel, founding schools and churches, and translating both the NT and the Prayer Book into Hindi, Urdu, and Persian. 

Ordered by his doctors to take a sea voyage and a rest, he obtained leave to go to Persia to correct and prefect his Persian New Testament – it appears there were already sabbaticals in the 19^th century! From Shiraz, he wanted to go on to Arabia, to produce an Arabic version of the Scriptures, but further ill-health and exhaustion caused him to set out for home via Armenia and Constantinople. In England, he hoped to regain his strength and also recruit help for the missions. But he never made it and died in the Armenian city of Tokat, now in Turkey. After his death and in his time, he became quite a hero, remembered for his courage, selflessness and his religious devotion.

We commemorate and celebrate people like Henry Martyn for their example. What example did he set and is there anything in his life and witness that we should be trying to imitate or emulate? Not his untimely death which seems to have been due, in part, to sheer exhaustion and overwork. While his selflessness is certainly worth holding up, it would have been nicer if he could have been selfless a little longer. Thankfully self-care is taken more seriously today and our mission field in Europe is a little healthier than 19^th century India, Persia and Armenia. 

Martyn’s devotion and desire to evangelize, to spread the gospel are certainly admirable. In our Old Testament reading we heard God tell the prophet “I will give you as a light to the nations, that my salvation may reach to the end of the earth.” Henry Martyn must have felt that this was his commission too. On his journey out to India he wrote in his diary: “I prayed that…England … might show herself great indeed, by sending forth the ministers of her church to diffuse the gospel of peace.” Martyn was convinced of the truth of the Gospel, but always open to a peaceful and constructive dialogue with other faiths. The Henry Martyn Institute in India founded in his honor is an Interfaith Centre for Reconciliation and Research. 

But most of all I think that Henry Martyn can be an example to us as a translator. I think that is what we as the Convocation, with its parishes, clergy, and peoples are called to be: translators of the Gospel. Now I know we have plenty of good local translations of the Bible that we can use. In Germany I can pick from at least 35 different ones: Catholic or Protestant, a German “Good News,” an inclusive language one and even several different Luther translations including the 2017 Luther Bible – I bet you didn’t know that blessed Martin was still at it, did you! But I’m not actually thinking of languages – even if we still have some work to do on our Prayer Book and supplementary liturgies. I am thinking of how we translate the Gospel to make it relevant to the situation of the people we encounter, how we translate the Gospel and our worship into our contexts, and how we translate the Gospel into action. Translation is our mission. 

Translating the Gospel to make it relevant does not mean discarding its timeless core truths and principles. It means making them understandable. We need to use modern parables as suitable to our context as Jesus’s fishing, vineyard, or wedding feast parables were to the people of his day. There is a desire for spirituality, there is a desire for ethical and moral guidance, but too often Christianity is not even considered as a possible answer and source, because of what others think we believe. Our task therefore is to translate the Gospel to show that it is as relevant today as it was 2000 years ago and 200 years ago when Henry Martyn was active. This is just what Jesus is doing in the short extract from John’s Gospel we heard. There is a risk that the Samaritan woman won’t listen to Jesus, he is after all a Jew who worships on the wrong mountain – Zion where Jerusalem is, rather than Mount Gerizim, which is the Samaritan holy site. Well, Jesus says, neither will be important in the future: “God is spirit, and those who worship him must worship in spirit and truth,” and he goes on to identify himself with the Messiah that both cultures shared.  

In our mission statement we say that we “celebrate our diversity of languages, cultures and nations.” Each of our churches works in very different cultural contexts, and each congregation is different in its make-up too. Our task of translation is to take our common worship, our Prayer Book and our supplementary liturgies, and to “translate” them to fit our various contexts. You do it already – offering services in local language, traditional or contemporary worship, Evensong – one of our great exports – contemplative worship and much more. Our flexibility and adaptability, within a shared framework, are one of the gifts of Anglicanism.

Last and certainly not least we are called to translate the Gospel into action, or in the words of one of our Mission Priorities, to go beyond our doors sharing the transformative power of the Gospel. I won’t even attempt to list the myriad ministries we support across Europe and beyond, most recently in our responses to the 2015 refugee crisis, or perhaps better challenge, that is still impacting our host countries and communities today. The Gospel is nothing without action. 

And our coming together here in Wiesbaden is all about translating it into action. We will learn more about the Jesus Movement, Presiding Bishop Michael Curry’s own modern translation of “Church in action.” In a 2015 video message he talked about our calling to “go into the world to share the good news of God and Jesus Christ.  To go into the world and help to be agents and instruments of God’s reconciliation.” “This is the Jesus Movement,” he said, “and we are the Episcopal branch of Jesus’ movement in this world.” 

The Strategic Plan that will be presented during convention has collected and translated ideas and wishes about our mission, our action, from all over the Convocation into a plan, that will then be translated into a profile for our next bishop. And he or she will, I am quoting from the plan, “inspire and lead us to new places, empowering clergy and lay leadership to translate the Jesus Movement into the European context.”

Henry Martyn’s mission was translation. Ours is too. May we be as inspired as he was by God’s love as shown in Jesus Christ to commit our lives and talents to that task so that God’s salvation reaches to the very end of the earth.

Amen.