John
1:29-42
Out in the hallway beyond the bell
tower every Sunday there are people who have gift cards available for various businesses. The church gets a small portion of the funds
back and that goes to support of our Kitchen Ministry. Some of the stores where the cards can be
used also give points toward discounts on gas, so it can be a good way of
stretching money that I would have spent anyway.
I have no trouble passing along
helpful hints like that. Much, if not
most, useful information gets shared by word of mouth. How many times have you either offered or
received advice about which place makes the best cheesesteak or who does a good
job with stucco? Those are practical
questions with practical answers.
Sometimes
people share more serious advice with someone who doesn’t even know they need
it until it’s offered. I knew of an
executive who worked at a company (now out of business) whose female employees
always warned any new woman hired, “Don’t let him help you on with your coat.” Even better advice came along later when
someone else said, “We need to go to HR about this.”
There’s
sort of a spectrum here. It’s easy
enough to ask about or to bring up everyday, surface sorts of issues. It’s tricky to know if, when, and how to
raise more personal matters that reveal our vulnerabilities (and we all have
those). It can be downright frightening
to address anything that can go right to the heart of how we see the world or
what makes us live our lives the way that we do. Specifically I’m thinking about what it takes
to share our faith.
Faith
does have to be shared from person to person.
Rarely does someone think their way into it, although for some people belief
can be very much connected to thinking things through logically. Even when it is, there’s often some
irrational or unexplainable nudge that underlies the search. This week I was listening to a podcast called
“Radiolab” that’s comes up weekly on National Public Radio. The host made a comment about himself, almost
as an aside, that jumped out at me. What
he said was:
“I generally move through
the world with the assumption – which is – which has been proven over and over
again to be true – that I don’t know how the world works. Like, somehow I missed that day in school or
something. …I’m referring to a general sense that somehow, like, Oz is out
there behind the curtain pulling levers and I’m just always going to be stuck on
this side, you know?”[1]
I
would say that there’s a lot in that statement that is akin to what was going
on inside Andrew when he first encountered Jesus. The fact that he had been hanging out with
John the Baptist is a big hint. John was
all about telling people to prepare for the coming of somebody who would be
able to put all the pieces together. So
one day when, as Jesus was walking by, Andrew and another of John’s disciples
heard him say,
“Look! Here is the Lamb of God!” [John
1:36]
or,
in other words, “Here’s whom you’ve been waiting for,”
“they followed Jesus.” [John
1:37]
So,
John tells Andrew, and then Andrew, who was Simon Peter’s brother [John 1:40]
“first found his brother
Simon and said to him, ‘We have found the Messiah.’” [John
1:41]
That
was how it was then, and how it is now.
One person tells another and then that person either does or does not
tell somebody else. But if they do, that
person sees for herself or himself and then either goes and tells someone what
they have found, or they keep it all inside and that line of connection ends
with them. We never hear again about the
man who was standing with Andrew that first day. We do hear about Andrew again, and about
Peter whom he invited to meet Jesus. Later on in the New Testament we hear about
Peter speaking to a centurion named Cornelius, and on and on and on.
There are, however, two conditions
that effect how this kind of faith-sharing turns out. One is whether it’s done in an appropriate
way, and the other is that it’s genuine.
By “appropriate” I mean that there are
times that someone is just not in a position to hear what you might have to
say. I really do believe that coming to
trust the Lord is a key part of someone addressing those things that can make
them vulnerable to addiction. But that
is long-term. When somebody is going
through withdrawal, what they have is a medical situation where they need
medical attention and somebody there to hold their hand through the worst
moments and talk them into eating their soup when they are nauseous. That is not the time to push someone to look
into their heart and soul.
By “appropriate” I mean that the act
of sharing your own faith has to be an act of caring that centers on that other
person, not on trying to make yourself feel good, or trying to come across as
the person with all the answers. You
cannot somehow “fix” somebody, and just being there with them may leave you feeling
totally helpless. Faith isn’t some sort
of spiritual narcan to be administered on an emergency basis because you’ve run
out of other resources.
In fact, to share your faith
effectively may mean letting yourself be more helpless and more
vulnerable. That’s what I mean when I
say, “genuine”. It may mean – again,
when the time is right – sharing your own story with someone and admitting that
all of us are alike in having those moments of need and weakness that Jesus has
somehow entered into with healing or strength, with patience or pardon. It involves a recognition that none of us
have everything all together. We may
even have seasons of our lives where we are a total mess. (Here’s where my own style of evangelism
comes in, which would be to say that if we weren’t all a mess, we wouldn’t need
a Savior; and that what Jesus saves me from is mostly myself.) Some people get that. Some don’t.
Some people may want you to tell them your own story to verify your
claim. Some people understand their own
situation well enough not to need that.
Maybe, too, your story won’t
resonate with everyone. That’s okay. It’s not about us anyway. Or maybe you are part of a team whose members
you haven’t even met, and what you say or do doesn’t matter as much on its own
as it matters because it becomes part of a series of witnesses that someone
encounters over time. If you’re going to
do what Andrew did, you’ve got to live with those “maybes”. Like I said, there’s a good deal of
vulnerability built into the process.
A nineteenth-century Presbyterian
missionary to Japan named Thomas Theron Alexander left behind him in Osaka a
community of Christians that survived the wars of the twentieth century, when
Christianity was suspiciously non-Japanese, and is still around today. Within his own family, faith had dimmed for
generations. His great-grandaughter,
Joanna Reed Shelton, writes how she occasionally was taken to church as a child
but grew to see the world in basically secular way. In some ways she did well. She writes,
“… my life
was occupied by college, graduate school, and a high-flying career as an
international economist and trade negotiator in Washington, DC. Eventually, I
became deputy secretary general of the Organization for Economic Cooperation
and Development (OECD), which offers policy advice to member governments.
Stationed in Paris, I was the first woman and youngest person to serve in that
role.
During those
years, I held religion firmly at arm’s length. When I considered its divisive
impact on human affairs, as well as the hypocrisy that flourishes even among
the so-called faithful, I felt it wasn’t for me.”[2]
Her position
meant that her name came up when someone at the church in Osaka googled to find
Rev. Alexander’s descendents to invite to an anniversary celebration.
Now, Presbyterian clergy are not
known to be the most expressive people in the world, and men of his generation
in general were very much expected to be the stiff-upper-lip type, but
somewhere he confided something of his own inner life that his great-granddaughter
came to know. She went to Osaka for the
anniversary and says,
“As I
listened to the minister’s preaching, my gaze fell on the organist. I thought
about my great-grandfather’s struggles to control his emotions during Sunday
services following the sudden death of his 14-year-old daughter, Ella, who had
played organ at the same church.”
Her hosts
had taken her to visit the child’s grave the day before. They had recited the Lord’s Prayer and sang “Amazing
Grace”. (I wonder how it sounds in
Japanese?)
That weekend set off Dr. Shelton’s search to learn more
about Rev. Alexander. She found a lot
more.
“I knew
that if I hoped to understand what drew him into ministry in Japan, I needed to
learn more about Christianity. So, for the first time, I began to read the
Bible in a meaningful way, under the guidance of two devout relatives. A
long-suppressed inner flame burned brighter as I read and contemplated the
Scriptures. …
For the first time, I felt I understood the true
meaning of faith, as hope in things unseen. I understood, too, how Jesus taught
us what it means to be God’s people, loving one another as we love ourselves.
Only through love can we help bring God’s kingdom to life on earth as it is in
heaven. …
You might say I’m the latest convert of a man
whose work clearly was not done when he died more than a century ago.”
Aren’t we
all?
[2]
Joanna Reed Shelton, “My Missionary Great-Grandfather Led Me to Christ” in Christianity
Today (November 23, 2016). https://www.christianitytoday.com/ct/2016/december/my-missionary-great-grandfather-led-me-to-christ.html
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