February 10, 2013

Clay Nelson

Last Sunday of the Epiphany     Luke 5:1-11

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Hold on to your pew. I’m a little nervous about it, but I have decided to come out to you today. Yes, I have hidden it long enough. I am at my core…wait for it… an Evangelical. I can hear my many critics now, “Oh no you’re not!” But yes, I am. I have always been one. I know it comes as a shock. As the word Evangelical evokes distasteful images of tent revival meetings, hell-fire and brimstone preaching, Bible-bashing of women and minorities, slimy TV evangelists extorting money out of widows, and Tea Party politicians in America intent on establishing a theocracy, it is no surprise you are surprised. “Can’t be true. No way,” you think. But yes it is, and I have impeccable credentials to prove it. 

I was trained at an Evangelical seminary in Virginia established in 1823 to send preachers to America’s western frontier and later, missionaries to cross the Pacific to carry the Good News. It has trained more theologians, parish priests, bishops, and missionaries than any other Episcopal institution. My faculty were some of the most prominent theologians and scholars of their age steeped in Karl Barth’s evangelical neo-orthodoxy. Many of them were trained by the most notable theologians of the 20th Century. While there, much to my amazement I chose to focus my studies on the Bible, studying both Hebrew and Greek to aid me in my endeavour. I fell in love with the Bible and remain so today.

Every weekday the first thing I did was attend Chapel (although it wasn’t a choice) where I stared sleepily at a window over the altar portraying the Ascension. Over the window was painted the last words Mark says Jesus spoke before his departure, “Go ye into all the world and preach the Gospel” (Mark 16:15).

The window was of interest to every entering class of students who wondered why it portrayed only 10 of the disciples. The most popular theory was that ebullient Peter was standing in front of his less assertive brother, Andrew, blocking him from view. By the time we graduated in that same chapel three years later most of us had come to understand that the window made room for each of us to be the eleventh disciple commissioned to carry the Gospel into the world.

Thirty years later, with the Pacific and a continent separating me from my alma mater, I still hold that commission dear. 

But in spite of that formation to carry the Gospel to all the world, I am repelled by Luke’s account we heard today of the miraculous catch that inspires Peter, Andrew and the Zebedee brothers, James and John, to follow Jesus. He says to them, “Do not fear. From now on, you will be catching people.” While I do not think Luke intended it, these words became fearful and destructive words used to pervert the understanding of evangelism I had been steeped in.

Luke’s account of how Jesus called his most high profile disciples does not appear in either Mark or Matthew. There is a similar story in John 21 but it comes after his death and resurrection and has a different emphasis. It appears that Luke felt a need to insert a post-resurrection story into Jesus earthly ministry to explain why these four disciples just simply left their work of providing for their families to follow an itinerant prophet. While answering that question it does raise another as to what happened to all the fish dumped on the beach that they then just left behind?

Those fish were caught against their will and foreshadow the many souls subjugated and trapped by the post-Constantine church that had become one with the power of the state. It is a very different picture of evangelism than that non-coercive imperative written over the chapel’s window and it is time to name the perversion of evangelism that has plagued the Church for these many years. Bearing the Good News to the world, the literal translation of evangelism, has been morphed into the task of convincing by any means those who are “outside” the church to come and be “inside” with us. It became a biblical justification for conversion by coercion by the 4th Century. It is not how Jesus understood his words to his disciples.

Luke’s story is the subtext to a cartoon I saw many years ago showing a crusader standing over what he considered an infidel with a sword to his throat. The caption had the infidel saying, “So tell me about this fascinating God of yours.”

There has been much blood spilt by Luke’s image of evangelism as catchers of people. The Crusades, pogroms, slavery, witch burning, the Inquisition all have their roots in it. It also stands behind the modern Calvinist work ethic which allows us to look at the poor as deserving their circumstances; capitalism which has created a society of “Haves” and “Have Nots;” the Just-war theory which has nurtured a military-industrial complex that promotes perpetual war against anyone different from ourselves and all forms of conquest. It made the church an important tool of colonialism that destroyed or led to ripping off indigenous peoples. As Bishop Tutu once noted, “When the missionaries came to Africa they had the Bible and we had the land. They said ‘Let us pray.’ We closed our eyes. When we opened them we had the Bible and they had the land.”

We have another example closer to home. Samuel Marsden was a fervent “catcher of people.” So fervent, he considered the lash a necessary tool of evangelism. The Devil was in anyone who refused to accept his understanding of Christian belief and practice and it was for their own good that they were tied to a tree and given as many as a 1000 lashes. In Australia he was known as the Flogging Parson for his fondness for its use, especially on the convict labourers who worked his extensive landholdings that were the Crown’s reward for his pious, yet severe, righteousness.

After failing to convert Aborigines and convicts by his harsh methods he became interested in bringing Christ to Pacific peoples. Today he is honoured in New Zealand for holding the first Christian service in Aotearoa, establishing missions in the Bay of Islands and playing a major role in bringing this land under English influence and settlement. From a Maori perspective being the fish in this catcher’s net has not been conducive to their health and long-term wellbeing. While he did not condone it, it was his missionaries who first traded muskets for food igniting the bloody Musket Wars, which resulted in an estimated 20,000 Maori deaths. 

Without listing all the atrocities heaped on Maori by Christian “catchers,” I look at the fruit of this gospel passage in our land today and cringe. The high level of poverty and the social ills that accompany it among too many of our Maori and Polynesian neighbours remind me of the fish caught and then left to rot on a beach in Galilee.

By the time I left the seminary chapel to do as it had instructed, the church had generally discarded the lash and the sword as evangelical tools. Instead it had to rely solely on my beloved Bible to divide us. Its message was distorted to define who was inside and outside its provenance. If you were an outsider who wished to avoid condemnation come inside was the message.

Recently, I met a victim of this message. She introduced herself as an “ex-gay.” As she shared her story it was clear she was very vulnerable. Abused as a child, neglected and then rejected by her addicted mother, she entered the drug culture; fell in love with a series of women until she came under the thrall of a modern evangelical who convinced her of her sinfulness. If she would only let Jesus cure her of same sex attraction she would be saved. She thinks she did and has now enlisted as a warrior in the battle to exclude the GLBTQ community from the church and society until they do the same. In the Sixties we used to say such a person turned off drugs and turned on Jesus without moving an inch. She continues to be exploited by Luke’s people catchers. From my experience it is difficult to follow Jesus if you see anyone as outside God’s love and acceptance. She has been left flopping on the beach.

So why, for God’s sake, do I continue to consider myself an Evangelical? Because bearing Good News is about seeking healing and wholeness for the world. Being an Evangelical is about sharing Jesus’ kindness and compassion with a world desperate for it. Sometimes doing so brings suffering, but for me, not others. Jesus gives me hope when it does. He did not reveal God’s love with out paying a price. Even so, his life reminds me that he was here to alleviate suffering, not cause it. Preaching the Gospel is about living the love we call God not shoving it down other’s throats. It is not some kind of bait to catch and control others. It is not about building up the church by putting more bums on pews in an ever-shrinking institution. It is not about coercion, it is about transformation. Jesus had no clue an institution would be founded on his ministry that needed to obtain power to grow and control. If he had he might have tried to stop it in its tracks. When he healed and preached it was not about making more Christians (a label unknown to him).

If Jesus had read Luke’s story he would have scratched his head in confusion. Jesus wasn’t about catching people, but showing people how to catch God. May we do the same.