August 10, 2014
Ordinary 19A
Ginter Park Presbyterian Church
Messengers
How lovely are the messengers that bring us
the gospel of peace
How lovely are the messengers that bring us
the gospel of peace
The melody is by
Felix Mendelssohn. It’s from a
chorus found in the second part of his oratorio Paulus, or Saint Paul. Mendelssohn’s text was originally in
German, and the English version serves as a rather loose translation/paraphrase
of the original, meant to fit Mendelssohn’s melody as much as to translate the
German text accurately. Even so,
the original German text here has nothing about “feet” in it, which I suppose
is just as well; most of us don’t have what we’d call beautiful feet, if one
wants to be literalist about such things.
The verse that Mendelssohn
appropriates here, and which appears in today’s reading, is dropped into the
oratorio after the dramatic moment in which Barnabas and Paul are set apart –
by the Holy Ghost, no less – for the work of proclaiming the gospel. It is of course a key moment in Paul’s
career, as the book of Acts describes it, and even if this verse is pulled in
from Romans, it does serve well its dramatic purpose.
Our reading tells
us that Paul is quoting – “as it is written,” he says plainly – and in this
case it’s from Isaiah 52:7. In
that context the statement is elaborated a bit:
How beautiful upon the mountains are the feet of the messenger
who announces peace, who brings good news, who announces salvation, who says to
Zion, “Your God reigns.”
Not surprisingly,
Paul is happy to latch on to that one phrase ‘’who announces salvation” and
translate it into his own context; for Paul, of course, the gospel is salvation.
How lovely are the messengers who bring us
the gospel of peace.
Feet or no feet,
Paul’s appropriation of Isaiah here serves to complete a rhetorical point that
has been at least ten verses in the making by this time. Today’s reading includes several
passages from Hebrew Scripture intended to support Paul’s key claim that all – all, not just Jews but “Greeks” also –
all who call upon the Lord’s name will (in the words of Joel 2:32) “be
saved.” From this end point Paul
walks his readers back to the necessity of those “messengers” – how can they
call upon one in whom they have not believed, how can they believe in one of
whom they’ve never heard, how can they hear unless someone proclaims, how can
anyone proclaim unless they are sent?
It’s no surprise that this passage pops up in ordination services on
occasion. It does seem to offer a
clear rationale for the office of a preacher, or a “teaching elder” in
Presbyterian-speak, as one “sent” to proclaim the name of the Lord on whom all
are invited to call.
Of course it isn’t
all peaches and cream. Paul
himself has experienced firsthand, by the time he writes this letter, a great
deal of rejection of the gospel message, not to mention opposition to it,
sometimes violent. He knows fully
well that “not all have obeyed the good
news,” and turns again to Isaiah for support, or is it consolation – “Lord, who has believed our message?”
[Isa. 53:1]
It particularly
grieves Paul that many of those who have rejected the gospel are those to whom
it was first proclaimed; namely, the people of Israel, or the Jews (Paul
usually calls these people by the collective term “Israel”; let us not confuse
it with the modern state). The
whole discourse from which today’s reading is selected begins with a striking
lament from Paul over this, in Romans 9:2-3:
I have great sorrow and unceasing anguish in my heart. For I could wish that I myself were
accursed and cut off from Christ for the sake of my own people, my kindred
according to the flesh. [Rom. 9:2-3]
Even as Paul spent
his missionary career among primarily Greeks, even as this career proceeded
under the adopted name “Paul” instead of his given, Jewish name “Saul,” he
carried in his heart this grief over the general rejection of the gospel among
“Israel.” Obviously this was not a
universal case; there were Jews among the Roman Christians to whom Paul was
writing, as well as citizens from many other parts of the Roman Empire. Still, he grieved over the rejection by
Israel of the Messiah, one of their own.
How lovely are the messengers who bring us
the gospel of peace
As beautiful as
this passage and this key verse is, though, there is danger here. Many of those churches who use this
passage expect that, once this new pastor is ordained and installed, he or she
will then take care of all the proclamation duties, allowing them to sit back
and, well, be off the hook from that scary and maybe embarrassing business of (shudder) talking about religion. It’s scary because people might say
“no,” or worse they might change their opinion of us. We might not be one of the “cool kids” anymore. It’s embarrassing because we live in a
world, and in an American society in particular, which has seen more than its
fair share of bad evangelism, preaching so permeated with hatefulness and
exclusivity that any hearer would rightly wonder what’s so good about this
supposed “good news.” Just this
week the rather infamous neo-Calvinist preacher Mark Driscoll was asked to step
aside from the leadership of Acts 29 Ministries, an organization that he founded, because his association
was bringing disrepute upon the organization due to his own errors in behavior
and preaching. To be honest, it’s
perfectly fair to be reluctant to be seen in such a light.
And yet the
messengers are still needed. And
if we look, we can actually find those who show us a better way to be those
messengers, bringing good news.
We might look at
Dr. Kent Brantly, a physician from Texas who ended up in the headlines this
week as the first American to be diagnosed with the deadly Ebola virus raging
in Liberia and other parts of Africa.
Those who know Dr. Brantly spoke of a person who was called to be there,
even as dangerous or as difficult as it is to be a physician working in
inhospitable conditions to combat a disease with no known cure.[1] Bizarrely, Dr. Brantly has become an
object of derision for certain American commentators, who apparently believe
it’s his own fault for going off to a foreign country to do dangerous work when
he could have stayed in the US and not put himself in danger. But even a physician can bring a
message of peace.
We might look at
the people of Grace Presbyterian Church, in El Paso, Texas. As thousands of refugees fleeing
violence and murder in Central America – some children with parents, many
children alone – the members of Grace Presbyterian were challenged by their
pastor to step up and help provide for the needs of those detainees being
redirected from south Texas to other locations due to the overwhelming numbers
and lack of facilities. The Grace
Church members, working with a local shelter and a Catholic charitable group,
began to take on the task of feeding, gathering donations, assisting at
shelters, and perhaps most remarkably, listening
to the stories of horror and deprivation the refugees had experienced. After not only their travails in
fleeing from the violence in their home countries but the spartan and difficult
conditions of makeshift processing centers set up by US Customs and
Immigration, the refugees were at first confused by the hospitality shown them
by the El Paso churches and groups.
“Here you were good to us,” some of the refugees said, remembering the
concrete floors in the detention centers in south Texas. “Why did you care so much about making
us feel safe?”
It might be easy
to imagine that Grace Presbyterian is some kind of large, well-staffed, and
financially secure church to be able to take on a task such as this. On the contrary, three years ago there
was no Grace Presbyterian Church; it was instead three separate churches, each
on the brink of collapse, who merged with each other despite their differences
for the sake of survival.[2] Even a shaky, querulous church can be
full of messengers, bringing the gospel of peace to a group of refugees who had
known nothing but violence and fear.
We can look to
some of our own. Many of you might
have heard Ruth Brown describe her experiences working in the troubled
Democratic Republic of Congo. Our
congregation also supports educators, like Jeff and Christi Boyd in the DRC,
Grace Yeuell working with US military bases in Germany, or Richard Hamm at a
university and seminary in Korea.
We might see those names on the back of the bulletin every Sunday. Messengers, bringing a gospel of peace.
We might look at
each other. Whether helping
provide a meal or a night’s stay for the clients of CARITAS, or helping
maintain a community garden on the grounds of the church. For, you see, Paul slipped an important
point into his discourse, practically when we weren’t looking. Notice verse 8: “the Word is near you, on your lips and in your heart”; “one confesses with the mouth and so is
saved” in verse 10”; and then those feet, those beautiful feet in verse
15. Our faith, our gospel is not
confined to the mind, but it occupies all of us from lips to feet, from head to
toe. Our witness is embodied. We are messengers of the gospel of
peace in not just what we say, but what we do. The hand of fellowship extended to the one we don’t know,
who may have ducked in just to escape the heat or the cold or the rain; the
word of the greeting to the coworker holed up in the cubicle next door; the cup
of cold water given in Jesus name.
Our message is not just spoken, but enacted daily, even when we may not
realize it.
The message is not
only embodied in each of our own individual bodies, it is embodied in all of us
as the body of Christ. Our witness
in staying together, being not merely in our neighborhood but being part of it,
our welcome to those that others, even other churches, declare unwelcome – this
is a gospel of peace. To be
messengers of the gospel of peace, all of us – not just the preachers, is not
optional; it is inevitable.
How lovely are the messengers that bring us
the gospel of peace.
How lovely are the messengers that bring us
the gospel of peace,
The gospel of peace.
Thanks be to
God. Amen.
Hymns (all from Glory to God: The Presbyterian Hymnal):
"Here, O Lord, Your Servants Gather" (311)
"Take My Life and Let It Be" (697)
"How Clear Is Our Vocation, Lord" (432)
[1] “Send me: U.S. doctor treated for Ebola drawn to mission work since youth,”
http://edition.cnn.com/2014/08/02/health/ebola-kent-brantly/index.html
(Accessed August 8, 2014)
[2] “Grace for
Refugees from Central America,” http://www.pcusa.org/news/2014/7/28/grace-refugees-central-america/
(Accessed August 8, 2014).
NOTE: In case you're not familiar with it, the Mendelssohn chorus can be heard here.
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