Evangelism: A Scary Word
John Shuck
First Presbyterian Church
Elizabethton, Tennessee
September 25th, 2005
Jesus came to Galilee proclaiming God’s good news.
His message went:
Congratulations, you poor!
God’s domain belongs to you!
Congratulations, you hungry!
You will have a feast!
Congratulations, you who weep now!
You will laugh.
Mark 1:14, Luke 6:20-21
Parallels: Matt. 5:3-4, 6, Thom 54; 69:2,
Source Q, Thomas
Scholars’ Version
Today has been designated by headquarters of the Presbyterian Church as
“Evangelism Sunday.” To celebrate we are going to have an altar call then send each of
you out two by two into the streets to knock on doors and to win souls.
The pastor nominating committee told me that y’all would really get into that.
I think the PNC might have been pulling my leg, just like I am pulling yours.
Evangelism Sunday. What do we do with that one?
I am going to come back to that. I want to take a detour first and talk about a Presbyterian celebrity. Her name is Kathleen Norris. She made it big a few years ago with the publication of her book, Dakota: A Spiritual Geography. Kathleen Norris was a hip and broke NYC poet who moved to western South Dakota with her husband. She inherited a farm. They started a new life there. She connected with a Benedictine monastery and a Presbyterian church in Lemmon, South Dakota. Her story is one of attending church as a little girl, leaving it as a young adult, then stumbling in through the back door during her mid-life.
She has written a number of books including The Cloister Walk, and one I want to talk a little bit about today, entitled Amazing Grace: A Vocabulary of Faith. I mentioned that she is a Presbyterian celebrity. She speaks and preaches at a number of conferences including the Covenant Network of Presbyterians conference in Memphis in early November. If you are interested, there are some fliers on the information table.
Her story of leaving the church at a young age then coming back at a later age is one in which many of us may resonate. Her book Amazing Grace, touches on an important aspect of this return.
That aspect is this: All the baggage we thought we left behind when we left the church is waiting for us at the door upon our return. When Kathleen Norris came back to church she was confronted with what she called the scary words of faith. I will use her words:
“When I began attending church again after twenty years away, I felt bombarded by the vocabulary of the Christian church. Words such as “Christ,” “heresy,” “repentance,” and “salvation” seemed dauntingly abstract to me, even vaguely threatening. They carried an enormous weight of emotional baggage from my own childhood and also from family history. For reasons I did not comprehend, church seemed a place I needed to be. But in order to inhabit it, to claim it as mine, I had to rebuild my religious vocabulary. The words had to become real to me, in an existential sense.”
Kathleen Norris, Amazing Grace: A Vocabulary of Faith (New York:
Riverhead Books), 1998, p. 3.
Whether we have been in church all our lives or have returned later in life, part of our spiritual growth and maturity is to wrestle with these scary words of faith. If we don’t, the emotional baggage of those words will still have power over us and we won’t grow. Kathleen Norris’ book was her way of reopening and dealing with that baggage so she could make peace with the tradition and move ahead.
One of the scary words she mentions and writes a chapter about is evangelism. I am not going to tell her story—you can read her book--I will tell my own.
I grew up in a church that ended each worship service with an altar call. Let me say this first: I appreciate and value my religious heritage. I am who I am because of it. I have a spiritual sensibility because of it. If I ever say anything critical, it is out of first being grateful. There are, however, parts of my religious background that I have either redefined or have left behind altogether. One of those parts has to do with that scary word evangelism.
Over fifteen years ago, I was getting ready to go to seminary. I was in my late 20’s and we spent the summer with my parents before moving to New Jersey. During that summer I went back to church--the church I had attended as a kid. It happened that an evangelist was in town that summer. These are the traveling guys who stir up the crowd and then move on. He did his hellfire and brimstone sermon and at the end had an altar call.
“With every head bowed and every eye closed….”
He went on telling people to raise their hands if they hadn’t accepted Jesus Christ as their
savior. Then he said the clincher, “Raise your hand if you don’t want to go to hell.”
At that moment, I had a realization. I was able to name it—to myself—but I named it. I said to myself that this was abuse. This had nothing to do with God. It had nothing to do with Jesus. This guy and this kind of religion were harmful.
I felt sad and angry and free. I was never going back to that kind of spiritual abuse. It no longer had a hold on me. But I still had to deal with evangelism.
I left the church in high school because of my distaste for that kind of religion. When I returned I still had to deal with it. I had to deal with why I came back. Why was I going into ministry? Why was I going to be a preacher? What is the purpose of the church?
Previously, I had learned that evangelism was the purpose. You shared your faith so that people would accept Christ as personal savior. If you didn’t, if you were too bashful, or if you didn’t do your homework and know your Bible, or if you didn’t seize the opportunity when it arose, someone would spend eternity in hell. Then how would you feel? The purpose of preaching was to get people to accept Christ.
“That was then. What was the purpose now?” I asked.
That night I had to begin rethinking what I have been rethinking for quite some time. If evangelism, at least in that sense of the word, is not the purpose of preaching or of the church, then what is the purpose?
This is a question the entire Church is facing. Our evangelical friends seem to be fine with evangelism. They scold the moderates and the progressives for not doing our jobs, for losing our way, for not proclaiming boldly that Christ is the only way to salvation.
In a sense, they are right. That understanding of evangelism holds no interest for me. If that is my job, I am not doing it. While Christ is a way, I think there are many ways. I find myself in the position of a searcher. Maybe I have lost my way. But I seek and occasionally I find, and I seek again. And I am pretty ok with that.
I don’t think I am totally lost at sea.
I think the church does have a purpose. I think this congregation has a purpose.
And it may have to do with revisiting that scary word, evangelism.
Let’s spend some time with it.
Evangelism comes from the Greek word euangellion. It is related to the word messenger or angel. One who brings a message from the gods is an evangelist. The writers of the four gospels are called evangelists. The Greek word we translate as gospel is euangellion. It also translated as “good news.”
Gospel, good news, messenger, angel, evangelist, are all the same thing.
Previous to the writers of the Gospels, the word had pagan roots. The writers of the Gospels borrowed that word and its meaning and applied it to their understanding of “good news.” That is the good news of Jesus the Christ.
Before Jesus, for the Romans, Caesar was the subject of the good news.
Listen to this announcement about Augustus Caesar’s birthday.
By the way, how many of you celebrated Caesar’s birthday this year? It was Friday, September 23rd. Oh, how the mighty are soon forgotten.
This was an announcement found inscribed on a piece of marble dedicated to the Roman Empire and to Augustus. This inscription contains the rationale for establishing Augustus Caesar’s birthday as the beginning of the new year.
“Whereas Providence…has…adorned our lives with the highest good: Augustus…and has in her beneficence granted us and those who will come after us [a Savior] who has made war to cease and who shall put everything [in peaceful order]…with the result that the birthday of our God signaled the beginning of Good News for the world because of him…therefore…the Greeks in Asia Decreed that the New Year begin for all the cities on September 23…and the first month shall…be observed as the Month of Caesar, beginning with 23 September, the birthday of Caesar.”
Decree of calendrical change on marble stelae in the Asian temples dedicated to the Roman Empire and Augustus, its first emperor.
John Dominic Crossan, Jesus: A Revolutionary Biography (HarperSanFrancisco, 1994), p. 1.
Doesn’t that sound a lot like Luke’s Gospel?
And the angel said to the [shepherds], “Be not afraid; for behold I bring you good news of a great joy which will come to all the people; for to you is born this day in the city of David a Savior, who is Christ the Lord.”
Luke 2:10-11
And the angel said to [Mary], “Do not be afraid, Mary, for you have found favor with God. And behold, you will conceive in your womb and bear a son, and you shall call his name Jesus. He will be great, and will be called the Son of the Most High; and the Lord God will give to him the throne of his father David, and he will reign over the house of Jacob for ever; and of his kingdom there will be no end….The Holy Spirit will come upon you and the power of the Most High will overshadow you; therefore the child to be born will be called holy, the Son of God….”
Luke 1:31-35
The Gospel writers were incredibly creative. They used that same royal divine language that had been used for Caesar in reference to their hero, Jesus. In a sense, they spoofed that high royal language to introduce Jesus as the anti-emperor. They were familiar with what the Empire and Caesar had tried to pass off as good news.
But Jesus was nothing like Caesar. The empire he proclaimed was nothing like the Roman Empire. Jesus had no armies, no palace, no history. He had no political clout. He never even wrote anything. He may not have even known how to write. His good news--his gospel was for those for whom Caesar’s good news was never received as good news. His good news was for the poor, the hungry, and the weeping.
His good news was very simple.
Congratulations, you poor!
God’s domain belongs to you!
Congratulations, you hungry!
You will have a feast!
Congratulations, you who weep now!
You will laugh.
Congratulations! The divine domain belongs to you.
Congratulations! God cares for you.
The term “congratulations” may seem unusual. It is a contemporary translation. You may be familiar with “blessed” as in “blessed are you poor.” But no one says ‘blessed”—unless you are in church. “Congratulations” helps us get to an important sense of the message.
This message is not one of pity. It is one of celebration. It is a message of empowerment. It is a message of honor. It is a message of hope. It is a message of caring. It is a message of dignity.
Who are people who are never congratulated? The poor and the suffering. They don’t receive awards or honorary degrees. No one throws a party for them.
You don’t congratulate the poor. You pity them. You don’t say the domain of God belongs to them, you wonder why God has forgotten them.
Jesus turned it all upside down.
Jesus celebrated those whom the emperor forgot.
These are people who had and who have nothing to offer the empire—except perhaps their bodies when it is war time. They are a problem. They are a nuisance. They are expendable. They are the ones who when Hurricane Katrina hit had nowhere else to go except to be frisked, pushed, shoved and herded into the Superdome. They were left there weeping, without any possessions, without food, without water, without any message—any good news—of rescue or of hope. They were forgotten by the emperor.
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Yet,
There were people in that Superdome that night and in the following days, who were angels, messengers, and evangelists. They were herded in there, like the rest, with no other place to go. They, in the midst of confusion and squalor, offered encouragement. They said to one another perhaps with words, perhaps just with their presence—“God is here—God is for you. You matter. You are an honored guest at God’s table.”
Yes, the evangelists were there. They offered caring without strings and compassion without a hook. They told jokes. They held hands. They sang songs. They told stories. They prayed. They offered what they had. They wept too.
Sometimes they took turns being the givers and the receivers of God’s good news. We may never hear the stories of those evangelists. But they were there. You can bet on it. They always are.
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So, what is the purpose of the church?
Maybe it is to turn us into evangelists after all.