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.

Just love?

A Sermon preached on 8^th October 2017, Pentecost XVIII at St. Augustine’s, Wiesbaden

Isaiah 5: 1-7, Philippians 3: 4b-14, Matthew 21: 33-46

Last weekend I and some other members of St. Augustine’s attended the Autumn meeting of the Council of Anglican Episcopal Churches in Germany. This is a unique organization, bringing together Church of England and Episcopal parishes to work together, learn from each other, and support each other´s shared ministry. While we share a common Anglican identity, there are however significant differences in how we worship and also in our theological outlooks, especially between the Episcopal parishes and a couple of the more Evangelical congregations of the CofE. These make our unity in mission a little difficult at times. 

The representatives of one parish questioned whether we were all preaching the same Gospel. All we preach, they claim, is love. But following Christ, they said, is more than that. It also requires self-denial, right behavior, and conformity of life. God’s love comes with requirements, they said. God will judge wrong behavior. They are both right and wrong. Of course, God has expectations. I just don’t think that these requirements and right behavior are all about human sexuality or that God rejects mutual, committed and sacrificial love between two people of the same gender, on the contrary this is as much as reflection of God’s love as is “traditional” marriage. That is where we differ. 

Our readings today, especially the Old Testament and Gospel, are about the balance between God’s love and God’s expectations, God’s grace, and God’s judgment. The parables in Isaiah and Matthew not only share the image of a vineyard, but also the concept of a God who judges. 

The prophet Isaiah says he will sing a love-song, and the beginning of the parable is a poetic description of all that God had given the people of Israel out of love. A fertile and fruitful land of their own, a watchtower to guard and guide them. All simply with the expectation that God’s love for them would be reflected in their love for one another, in a just and righteousness society. But God is disappointed: “he expected justice, but saw bloodshed; righteousness, but heard a cry” or outcry. That could also be a comment on the most recent mass shooting in the USA. Speaking as an outsider – I cannot and will not understand why the “right” to own a deadly weapon is given a higher value than the right to life.

God has expectations, not just for individuals but for the societies they form. If the house of Israel and the people of Judah do not change, Isaiah warns, the vineyard that stands for Israel will be abandoned and left without protection and care, until it becomes an overgrown waste. Not long after this prophecy, Israel was overrun by the Babylonians. Jerusalem’s walls were torn down, and both the city, and the great temple at its center, the watchtower of the parable, became overgrown ruins. 

Jesus begins his version of the parable in Matthew’s Gospel with a direct quote from the original version in Isaiah, but he then goes on to focus more on the wicked tenants. Their crime is put themselves over the landowner, over God. They want to keep the fruits of the vineyard to themselves. In Jesus’ version of the parable there is also violence and bloodshed – but directed at the messengers, that is the prophets including John the Baptist and finally the owner’s son and heir, clearly standing for Jesus, who is killed. The tenants, the leaders of Israel, are ungrateful, selfish, and faithless. Not long after this prophecy, and after a failed revolt, Jerusalem was laid waste by Romans, the temple was destroyed, and the city was rebuilt as a Roman colony with new inhabitants. 

So, God judges and punishes, destroys and kills? No. That would be us judging God by human standards. The disasters that overcame Israel and Judah were not God’s punishments, but the consequences of societies built on injustice and which put nationalism and personal power and advancement above God and God’s values. In Matthew’s Gospel it is not Jesus who says that the landowner “will put those wretches to a miserable death, and lease the vineyard to other tenants who will give him the produce at the harvest time,” but the chief priests and the elders. Jesus just says that “the kingdom of God will be taken away from you and given to a people that produces the fruits of the kingdom.” That is a milder conclusion and more on the lines of the last will be first, and the first will be last …. that is the loss of a privileged position. I know he goes on to say, “the one who falls on this stone will be broken to pieces; and it will crush anyone on whom it falls.”  But while this sounds violent and destructive, it is another OT reference, in this case to the Book of Daniel and in that story what is broken is a statue, not people, and the statue stands for kingdoms. 

Neither Isaiah nor Jesus are issuing threats, just warnings of the consequences of wrong choices and standards. The disasters are self-inflicted. By their actions and inactions, the tenants cast themselves out of the vineyard. Their exile results from selfishly acting as if the vineyard is all theirs and no one else’s, let alone God’s. This is not what God wants. God desires to reach and reconcile humanity. God is loving and gracious and all-giving. Isaiah’s story is a love song, but about unrequited love. Jesus’ parable is clearly also an allusion to his own death, a humiliating death on a cross, out of love and for forgiveness. 

That is of course the big difference between the parable of the wicked tenants and what is described just a few chapters later in Matthew’s Gospel. In the parable the son is seized, thrown out of the vineyard, and killed. He does not come back, only the owner with death and destruction. What we believe is that while the Son of God was seized, taken out of Jerusalem to a “green hill far away, without a city wall,” and killed, he returned. In dying he took on all sin and when he returned he brought not death and destruction, but new life and renewal. Then and now God can only offer this, it is up to us to accept the gift of forgiveness and the gift of love.

Our friends from the other Anglican churches who claim that all we preach is love are right. But the love we preach is not easy or about self-fulfillment. It cost Jesus his life and it still continues to cost lives. The love we preach implies demands. Properly understood, the love we preach will lead to self-denial, right behavior, and conformity of life. God’s way of grace and love is wooing us to respond to our good fortune of living in God’s vineyard by reflecting that love in our actions toward others. God’s love was poured out to us in such measure on the cross that if we allow it to, it can overflow from us, and through us onto all creation. The love we preach obliges us to love others and share with them the Good News of God in Christ. 

In the parables, the tenants ignored their calling and neglected God’s gift. At best they did nothing with it, except keep it for themselves, at worst they turned it on its head: love became hate. Through Jesus we have been given the vineyard, the kingdom of God – as a free gift. It is up to us in return, out of gratitude and faithfulness, to produce the fruits of the kingdom – justice, righteousness, love – in our lives and in the world.

Amen.