Newspaper Columns by Bishop Paul V. Marshall
Churches Change by Doing, Not by Discussing
Bishop Paul V. Marshall
May, 2001Among the first missionaries to come to America were Moravians. They came to slaves in Georgia and the Carolinas.
The slave owners, though, would not allow slaves to be baptized. To do so would be to recognize them as equals. To gain access to the slaves, the missionaries sold themselves into slavery.
Think about that. They did whatever was necessary, at whatever personal cost, to bring words of hope to people who had no freedom. One stands in humble awe at such a story.
I can't imagine that these missionaries so delivered themselves for a "cause" or a freeze-dried idea.
I can imagine that they did it because of their perceived call to do the work of the Gospel and because they meant to be reformed in the image of Jesus Christ.
Each of us and our churches continually need to be so reformed. That happens not by debate or argument, but only in our doing the work of the Gospel.
As we increasingly commit ourselves to that work, the church changes and grows. There are no private Christians. We are part of an organism, the body of Christ. We are formed by experience, by what we do as we let the Holy Spirit lead. Surely that doing involves speaking, and our testimony needs to be clear, but it is by understanding ourselves as being in mission, that we come to rely on and experience the presence of God the Holy Spirit.
When Jesus said, "I am the way, the truth, and the life," he taught us that truth is not just an idea. In the long run, truth is a person: Jesus, living the wisdom of God, with and for all humanity. Knowing him sets us free. We can claim to be Jesus' followers when we commit ourselves to live out the truth that Jesus taught, the truth that Jesus lived, the truth that Jesus was.
We don't usually realize how annoying, threatening, infuriating Jesus was to the good, decent, and respectable people of his day, people like us, whether they were the supporters of the leading conservatives (the Sadducees) or aligned with the leading liberals (the Pharisees) or just trying to get along under Roman occupation. He was infuriating to the priests and theologians as well. If Jesus were to walk among us today, I suspect we'd ridicule him on a talk show. That's one of the ways we publicly execute people.
Jesus most dismayed, perplexed, and outraged the good people of his day by meeting on friendly terms with, and actually sharing meals with, the agents of foreign oppression, tax collectors like Matthew and Zacchaeus. Jesus outraged decency more in that he also met with people otherwise identified as sinners by even the enlightened and progressive minds of his day.
In one strand of the gospel tradition it is Jesus' befriending "bad" people that provoked plots to destroy him. But who among us could ask for a better epitaph than the charge contemptuously hurled at Jesus: "Look, this one receives sinners and eats with them."
As we offer ourselves as living sacrifices for the sake of others, our churches will change. As we become who we are in Christ for the sake of the world, slaves will be freed. Somebody we are led to care about will be helped. God's purpose will be carried out. Who could ask for anything more?
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