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Commit, Transmit

23rd Sunday : 9 September 2012  : Mark 7: 31-37

Roger Herft, Bishop of Waikato, invited to talk to the Christchurch clergy school about mission, told us a story about his encounter with a German hitchhiker. Having offered a ride to the young man, he decided to use the next hour of their combined journey to talk about the Christian faith. Here was an opportunity to persuade someone to faith in Christ. As he dropped the young man off and drove into the distance he was feeling pretty pleased with himself that he had behaved like a mission minded Christian. Then suddenly the thought struck him, "I never asked his name."

Learning to give away our faith is like learning to play golf. We are always forgetting something important. In this case the fact that personal relationship is everything in evangelism. We don’t follow a stranger in the important decisions we make in life. It is people we know and like and trust who lead us into most of the new beginnings we undertake. Think about it. Why are you here now? Did you become a Christian on your own, or did someone invite you along, and encourage you, and support you to get started with God and the Church?

As you are listening to these words like "evangelism" and "mission," and phrases like "giving your faith away," take a check on the pulse of your comfort register about how you feel about this kind of language. People in our tradition don’t talk like this, or think like this much. We leave that kind of thing to evangelicals, or missionaries, or zealous clergy.

So what are we to make of that wonderful encounter between Jesus and the deaf mute? Jesus is away from home, in gentile influenced territory, outside his cultural comfort zone. He behaves with great consideration taking the man into a quiet, private zone knowing how frightening the roar of the crowd will be for someone who has suddenly received their hearing back. It is interesting how the first thing the healed man hears is the praise of the crowd as they hail Jesus as the one who does "all things well, a phrase that calls to mind Genesis 1: 31, which describes God’s work in creation. So there is tie up here between what God did at the making of the world, and this particular work of recreating and making whole a damaged part of creation, a man who has lost the ability to communicate.

Confronting human suffering is at the heart of what happens here. But an interestingly different detail is that whereas we direct the ministry of healing towards insiders, church members we know well, this act of healing is for an outsider. It is itself an act of the kingdom that conveys the message. And that is in the main who Jesus healed. People outside his household of faith whose desperate need brought them to him.

The end result of this healing is that the man can hear the message and his tongue is loosened to speak clearly - to confess his faith, a confession echoed by the astonished bystanders.

Bishop Samuel Wilberforce said that there are four stages in the Christian life - admit, submit, commit, transmit. Maybe a lot of us have struggled to get to commit, and are feeling daunted by transmit. But the interesting thing is that often new Christians who are full of the enthusiasm of starting their walk with Christ are the ones who find it easy to tell others about the wonderful things that God has done for them. They tell their friends and bring them along. The enthusiasm and idealistic energy of these new beginners is a precious resource that the Church must nurture and sustain.

But for those of us who have been around awhile the challenge is the transmit stage of the Christian life. The issue is how congruent is the faith dimension of our life with the other parts of our essential character. The more at ease we are with God, with our membership of the Church, the better we will be able to speak with a sense of relaxed conviction about why Jesus Christ makes all the difference to us. An intense raving on puts people off. An ashamed inarticulacy does not give others the chance to hear about the hope that is within us. There is a tone and a voice register that is natural to us when we speak about the things that really matter to us. That is the one we should reach for when letting others know about what makes us tick in terms of faith, and hope, and love.

There is a powerful reason why all of us need to become mission minded Christians. W.B. Yeats summed it up in that famous phrase of his; "the best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity."

We are living in a time when Churches with a clearly defined sense of identity, and a strong conviction about the central priority of God, are doing well. They are where the liveliness and the growth are occurring. But they are not always altogether wise about the expression of their faith. They lack a sense of history, they are rarely ever liturgical in their worship, they are so focussed on the local expression of Church that they don’t have much sense of being a part of a greater whole, they can be down right sectarian, and they sometimes have trouble fitting faith and reason together. In other words they often lack a sense of catholicity.

We have those magic ingredients. And we also have a clearly defined sense of identity, and a strong conviction about the central priority of God. But we have a lot to learn from the churches of which I have been speaking about the priority of giving your faith away, and of organising your Church life so as to make that more of a possibility.

"Dignified, warm, understated, tolerant, devout and holy." That is how the virtues of Anglicanism have recently been described. We could add also theological depth, respect for scholarship, a warm appreciation of culture, and a commitment to the social expression of our faith. That is what I understand the Anglican Church in general, and St Peters in particular, stands for. And my message to you this morning is simple. If we want that kind of religion to go on into the future - If we want that kind of balanced Christianity to be the most resilient and vigorous in our world - then we will need to get out there and tell others about it, and bring them back to Church with us!