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Evangelism
SERMON - 10.15am, Emmanuel Church, Pokfulam, Hong Kong
Sunday 25th December 2006
Revd. Matthew Vernon
Mark 1.29-39.
Tomorrow I'm having lunch again with my interfaith group.
We are a group of friends from different religious traditions.
• Carola is Buddhist.
• Peter is a New Ager.
• Arshad is a Muslim.
• Ashok is a disciple of Sai Baba, an Indian Guru.
• Michael is Jewish.
• John is a Christian.
It will be another good lunch with interesting discussion;
• another chance for us to learn about each other and learn from each other.
For some Christians, a meeting like that would be an opportunity to evangelise –
• to tell other people about Jesus, in order to make them Christians.
Like Paul, in our second reading, "so that I might win more of them [for Christ]"
He says, "To the Jews I became as a Jew, in order to win Jews … To those outside the law I became as one outside the law … so that I might win those outside the law."
I confess that is not my goal.
In fact, I'm not at all interested in my friends becoming Christian.
We often teach each other about our respective faiths,
• but my friends are already holy, kind and close to God.
You see it seems to me that pride is behind a lot of Christian desire to share our faith with others.
Many Christians have the arrogant belief that their faith is right so other people's faith must be wrong.
There's a story about this.
A Christian visited a Zen master and said, "Let me read the Sermon of the Mount to you".
"I will listen with pleasure" replied the Master.
The Christian read a few sentences and looked up.
The master smiled and said, "Whoever said those words was truly enlightened".
This pleased the Christian so he read on.
This time the master interrupted him and said "Those words come from a saviour of mankind."
The Christian was thrilled and kept reading.
When he finished the master said, "The Sermon on the Mount was spoken by someone radiant with divinity."
The Christian was overjoyed.
It was late in the day so he left determined to return the next day to persuade the master to become a Christian.
On his way back home, he saw Jesus by the road.
"Lord," he said, "I got that man to confess you are divine!"
Jesus smiled and said, "and what good did that do you except inflate your Christian ego."
There's a deep irony about what I'm saying.
If it wasn't for Paul and him winning people of Christ we might not be Christians;
• we might not be here in this church.
It was Paul who made Christianity a global religion,
• rather than a Jewish sect.
Paul who took the new faith out from Israel to the Roman world around the Mediterranean.
Others helped too, of course,
• but that drive to share the Gospel led to the astonishing growth of the early church.
Today, though our situation is very different.
The first Christians were trying to distinguish themselves.
Jesus was Jewish,
• as were all of his disciples,
• as was Paul.
The first Christians needed to distinguish themselves from their Jewish heritage,
• in order to establish this new faith.
Not all religions are evangelistic in this way.
Islam seeks to convert people.
But Judaism and Buddhism generally don't.
It's to do with their origins.
Islam was a strong reaction against the polytheism that Muhammad saw in Medina.
Muhammad was very open to the Jews and Christians of his day.
But he reacted strongly to the polytheistic mess around him
• and sort to convert people to the truth that there is only one God.
Judaism on the other hand developed more slowly as a people's identity developed.
Judaism is a nationality as well as a religion.
People are born into it, rather than converted.
Today our situation is very different to the first Christians' and to Paul's.
We don't need to distinguish ourselves from another religious tradition.
But we do need to distinguish ourselves form the current dominant view:
• secularism.
The belief that there is no God.
Or at least the belief that God should be pushed to the edge of society and religious faith shouldn't affect our way of life.
This view needs to be challenged.
And it seems to me that we need to work together with people of other faiths
• to promote the values of God;
• to remind people that God hasn't gone away.
• to teach people that giving and forgiving and the ways of God.
This is the motivation for courses like Genesis.
Genesis is the course we are running at the Cathedral.
Its about to begin for the second time.
It's an opportunity to explore Christianity in a relaxed atmosphere;
• an opportunity for people to explore Christian faith on their own terms
Our goal is not necessarily to win people for Christ,
• but to help them along their journey of faith.
Christianity has helped us know God's love,
• it defines who we are,
• perhaps it will help others too.
Apparently Genesis helped people the first time we ran the course before Christmas.
More than 30 people were baptised or confirmed at St. John's in December.
But I need to be careful not to boast or brag.
It's not my doing,
• but those people's and God's.
As one member said,
• "You have (both) led in the most effective way possible by presenting the message and letting the Holy Spirit do the rest."
It's God that works in people's hearts.
God who calls people home.
God who people are journeying towards, wherever that journey takes them.
The Gospel reading this morning was from Mark.
Did you notice a couple of things?
Mark says that Jesus was healing the sick and casting out demons.
"and he would not permit the demons to speak because they knew him."
Later, the disciples say to Jesus "Everyone is searching for you."
Jesus responds by saying they should move on to other towns.
These illustrate a feature of Mark's Gospel.
Jesus is concerned about becoming too famous and people knowing who he is.
On other occasions he tells the disciples to keep his identity secret.
It's as if he wants to avoid becoming a cult figure.
People too easily see him as a celebrity miracle worker
• and miss the real point that he is the Son of God.
This feature of Mark's Gospel is known as the Messianic Secret.
It has intrigued Biblical scholars for a long time.
It reflects Mark's spiritual awareness.
The spiritual dangers of celebrity figures and cults.
These are dangerous because God often works in secret.
If you remember, I talked about this a few weeks ago in relationship to Jesus' Dad, Joseph.
Most of Jesus' life is hidden –
• the years between his birth and his public ministry.
Even Jesus' public years were invisible as far as most people where concerned.
That tells us something about God that is easy to miss.
God prefers to work in secret.
Our world insists on publicity, celebrity, popularity and maximum exposure.
God is often anonymous.
In God's sight, the things that really matter seldom take place in public.
Now Christianity is a world religion;
• millions of people utter Jesus name every day.
Yet it all started with God becoming lowly and hidden,
• almost invisible in the baby of Bethlehem.
That's what makes me nervous about "successful" churches.
Mega churches are in the news a lot at the moment.
Often in the US, these are churches with thousands of members.
Literally thousands of people pack auditoriums for worship.
Willow Creek Community Church outside Chicago has parking spaces for over 4000 cars!
I've been there and it is amazing.
There was even an article in the Economist over Christmas: "Churches as businesses".
Perhaps we're doing something wrong here at Emmanuel,
• but something makes me nervous about such apparent success.
No doubt it works for the people who go to these churches,
• but it reminds me of another story.
A preacher said to a friend, "We have just had the greatest revival our church has experienced in many years."
"How many people did you add to your church membership?"
"None. We lost five hundred."
Experience shows that sadly religious conviction bears as much relation to our personal holiness as a man's dinner jacket to his digestion.
We need to tread carefully when sharing our faith with other people.
After all, it's not our faith.
Its God's gift to us.
God who is at work in people's lives whether we evangelise or not.
God who is waiting silently in people's hearts.
God who even works through my stated adversary, secularism.
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