Do we need rules?

A Sermon preached on 29^th October 2017, Pentecost XXI at St. Augustine’s, Wiesbaden

Leviticus 19:1-2, 15-18, 1 Thessalonians 2:1-8, Matthew 22: 34-46

Today we celebrate that Luis and Lukas – or LuLu for short – are joining a family, in this case that part of the family of God that the Church represents. This is not the first family they have joined, that was their immediate birth family of their parents, and in Lukas’ case siblings. They also joined an extended family centered partially on the Wisper valley, partially around this church. In various constellations, the Pickersgills, Nelsons, and also the Richards spent much of their youth together. This church has played an important role in many of your life events. Julia was baptized here, Julia and Daniel were confirmed here, Julia and Florian were married here, Belinda and Daniel were married here, Lars and Hannah were baptized here, and now Luis and Lukas will be too. The church family they join today is also an extended family. It extends geographically to all corners of the earth, and it extends in time to include all Christians, both past, present, and future. That is a very big family – just be grateful that you don’t have to buy them all Christmas presents.

The church is a family that we join by choice, not by birth. On Luis’ and Lukas’ behalf their parents and godparents will confirm that choice publicly and will also agree to the “conditions” or “rules” of this family. All families have rules – when and how much TV to watch, when to go to bed, who does the washing up, and how to treat one another. Some of these rules are well known, they might even be written down on a sign or rota on the fridge, others are what we call the unwritten rules – they are understood implicitly. 

Two of today’s readings – from Leviticus and from Matthew’s Gospel – are also about rules. The Old Testament contains – I am told, I haven’t counted them myself – 613 individual commandments. Not just the 10 Commandments, but also all sorts of rules about what to eat or wear, about how to worship, about how to live together, about how to treat one another. 248 of the 613 are “positive commandments,” which describe what one is to do to faithfully follow the Torah, the teaching given to Moses. 365 of the 613 are “negative commandments”, sometimes described as one for every day of the year, where you are ordered not to do something. We heard a few of those this morning: “You shall not render an unjust judgment; you shall not be partial to the poor or defer to the great: with justice you shall judge your neighbor. You shall not go around as a slanderer among your people, and you shall not profit by the blood of your neighbor. You shall not hate in your heart anyone of your kin; you shall reprove your neighbor, or you will incur guilt yourself. You shall not take vengeance or bear a grudge against any of your people.” (Leviticus 19:15-18)

God tells Moses that out of respect for God’s holiness, for God’s otherness, God expects holy or special behavior, that we practice justice and charity in all our social interactions. I don’t think there is anything in these rules that we would not sign up to today. But sadly, much of our interaction is not based on justice, equity and charity, but on taking advantage, on being ahead – regardless of cost. And so, what should be normal rules of conduct are seen as special, or even exceptional.

In Matthew’s Gospel, when the “lawyer,” which just means one who had studied the Law, not an attorney or solicitor, when he asks Jesus “which commandment in the law is the greatest?” he is not asking for Jesus to choose his favorite commandment but to do just what Jesus did. To summarize the commandments, to describe what is at their very core, what in itself would fulfil them all. The first part of Jesus’ answer will not have surprised him or the other listeners. “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind.” This comes straight from the Book of Deuteronomy (6:5) and has always been seen as the greatest and first commandment. Jews are commanded to “bind these words as a sign on your hand, to fix them as an emblem on your forehead, and to write them on the doorposts of your house and on your gates.” (Deuteronomy 6:8-9) Today, they are still written on tiny piece of parchment that goes into the little box that devout Jews tie round their arms and to their forehead at prayers.

The second answer, though also taken from one of the first Five Books of the Bible – the Torah (Leviticus 19:18) - was probably a little more unexpected: “You shall love your neighbor as yourself.” But it shouldn’t be. If you look at them, none of the eight detailed prohibitions we heard this morning in Leviticus would be necessary if we just loved our neighbor as our self. Just as the Rabbis used to claim that the whole world hinged on God’s Law, God’s service, and deeds of loving kindness, so Jesus is now claiming that the whole Law depends on deeds of love.

Let’s look at those two “clauses” for a moment. First, we are called to love God with all our heart, and with all our soul, and with all our mind, or in the original in Deuteronomy, with all our strength. This means to be fully committed to our relationship with God –a loving, liberating, and life-giving relationship as PB Michael Curry calls it. The heart stands for our will: we choose to love God. The soul stands for our life, we love God in all that we do – worship, work, and play. And strength stands for our actions, everything we do is an offering to God.

This is also how Paul sees his mission to the Thessalonians. He came to them, preached to them, and worked with them not out of some hope of personal gain, not to please them, not to seek their praise, but to please God. Paul is motivated solely by the love of God and by his desire to share this love with the Christians in Thessaloniki, and beyond. He truly loves them: “So deeply do we care for you that we are determined to share with you not only the gospel of God but also our own selves.” (1 Thess. 2:8) For Paul, the first commandment, love God, leads automatically to the second, love the other. And the second commandment is really two – it includes the right to self-love. We can and must also care for ourselves, just not so much that we neglect our love for our maker and for our neighbors.

In the Rite of Baptism that will begin in a moment we will hear and repeat a number of detailed promises, rather like little commandments. Some are negative, when we promise to renounce, to not do a number of things. Most are positive promises, which we answer with “I do” or “I will with God’s help.” All of them could also just as well be summarized by promising to love God and to love our neighbor. Everything in the Baptismal Covenant is either an expression of our choice to love God and our neighbor. They name that faith or trust that comes from our unconditional love, they describe how we give our whole lives to God, and they define our acts of love for the other. We do not require that Christians know 613 commandments off by heart, nor that they can repeat all of the Baptismal promises without having a bulletin to read from. The godparents will be glad to hear that I will not be testing them following this sermon. 

All you need to know, and all you need to teach if you want to fulfil the promises you will make to be responsible for seeing that Luis and Lukas are brought up in the Christian faith and life and help them both to grow into the full stature of Christ are the two great commandments: Love God and love your neighbor. In choosing Baptism you have chosen, both for yourselves and for those you care for, a life based on love. You have chosen a new way of life in which with God’s help we are transformed, and through which we promise to transform the world. We believe that the family we belong to is such a great family that everyone should be part of it. But for today, and now, and as what Paul calls the first fruits, we will focus on our two soon to be newest family members: Luis and Lukas.

Amen.

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.