I’ve been away from St. Stephen’s a lot recently, so unless you’re directly involved in adult education—which is part of my diocesan day job and mostly what I’m called to do here—I’ve been missing you. But there’s a lot of great new adult classes starting soon, so stay tuned for opportunities to grow in faith. We’ll have classes for people who just want to drop in—what we call “sprinkle” offerings—and classes for people who want to make a deeper or more sustained commitment to learning. Those are what we’re calling the “splash” and “soak” versions of adult education. You get the baptismal metaphor, right? Wade in the water, sisters and brothers!
So if you’ve attended any of the classes we’ve offered over the summer and fall, you may have seen Lutheran pastor Nadia Bolz Weber on a video. She’s a pretty memorable character: tattooed from head to toe and kind of sarcastic in her presentation style, which—ironically—is probably why she’s such an effective evangelist. You don’t expect her to be a preacher, so by the time you realize what she’s up to, you’re immersed in the Gospel of Jesus Christ.
Gospel meaning Good News, of course. Euangelion in the Greek. Which is where we get our word “evangelist,” as in the evangelists Matthew, Mark, Luke and John, who crafted the four foundational books of the New Testament. But as Pastor Nadia pointed out in one of our summer video sessions on the Bible, the words that we translate as Gospel or Good News—referring to our sacred texts—would have sounded much different to people in Jesus’ time.
That’s because euangelion—good news—was the common headline for official pronouncements of the Roman empire, especially regarding military victories. In addition, addressing Jesus as the Son of God was to give him a title on par with the emperor. So to say something like “the Good News of Jesus Christ, Son of God,” would have been heard as a highly provocative statement. Kind of like saying “Jesus Christ , who is greater than the Holy Roman Emperor, has triumphed.” Good news for many, but profoundly threatening news for the protectors of colonial power.
Context and history matter when we read ancient texts. Part of what we do in adult education here at St. Stephen’s is seek to understand biblical texts as they might have been understood in their own time. So we always have to ask ourselves what the language of power and authority—which our Bible is full of—would have meant to the original hearers and writers.
But we’re also studying Holy Scripture with the assumption that it is a living document that has something relevant to say to us today. Which presents an additional challenge when we hear things like “Jesus Christ… [who] made us to be a kingdom… to him be glory and dominion” in this morning’s lesson from the Book of Revelation. Today the church throughout the world celebrates Christ the King Sunday, but for most of us in the United States, royal language seems anachronistic. Our closest point of reference might be the British royal family, which serves and an exemplar of sorts and sells a lot of tabloids, but doesn’t necessarily command loyalty or obedience.
Which brings me to another ancient word that’s become somewhat anachronistic in our time: obedience. Outside of a few situations and subcultures where unquestioning response to authority is necessary, we mostly don’t consider obedience to be a value, But the etymological root of our word obey—ob oedire in the Latin—has less to do with compliance than with listening. As in, for example, listening with the ears of the heart. So when Moses heard God say something like “obey my voice… and you will be a priestly kingdom and a holy nation,”—words from Exodus that are echoed in today’s reading from Revelation—he would have understood it as a command to listen deeply for the word of God. A word that was then, and now still is, difficult to hear amidst many other competing voices
I think it’s important to ponder this challenge for a moment, because we human beings have probably never lived in a era when so many voices compete for our attention. Compete for our obedience, if you’ll permit me the archaic usage. We are more globalized and have more communications channels than ever before in history, and the spectrum of voices that insist on our attention is highly polarized. Extremists of all sorts are saturating the internet, while historically reasoned voices—like the Episcopal Church, for example— host long face to face meetings about how to use social media. I know this because I just came from one such meeting in Baltimore.
There are pretenders to the throne of Christ our King. They would ask us to obey the compelling voice of fear, even though “fear not” appears more than 300 times in our Bible. They ask us to close our doors to refugees, even though the Hebrew scriptures repeatedly command us to feed, clothe and love foreigners, remembering that our own forebears in faith were refugees in Egypt. They ask us to hate, even though Jesus—himself a victim of violent extremism—said of his own executioners, “Father, forgive them.”
But if we don’t obey the voice of noisy pretenders, what or whom do we obey? Especially when we feel scared, prayerful silence is not a bad place to start our listening. When we give ourselves time away from threatening voices, we might find ourselves drawn into that uncluttered throne room of the heart where Christ is King and obedience is freedom. We can listen to our Holy Scriptures and the traditions of our saints, who lived through times at least as troublesome as ours. And we might also seek out the voices of those most directly affected by the violence of recent days, like the widowed Parisian father Antoine Leiris, who wrote in an open letter to the Daesh terrorists—
“Friday night, you took an exceptional life—the love of my life, the mother of my son—but you will not have my hatred. If this God, for whom you kill blindly, made us in his image, every bullet in the body of my wife would have been one more wound in his heart. So, no, I will not grant you the gift of my hatred. You’re asking for it, but responding to hatred with anger is falling victim to the same ignorance that has made you what you are. You want me to be scared, to view my countrymen with mistrust, to sacrifice my liberty for my security. You lost. We are just two, my son and me, but we are stronger than all the armies in the world.”
Amen.
