A Sermon from Falmouth Congregational Church…

A Sermon offered by the Rev. Ian F. “Jack” Steeves in the public worship service of the Falmouth Congregational Church United Church of Christ in Falmouth, Maine on the Fifth Sunday after Epiphany, February 7, 2010. The scripture readings were Isaiah 6:1-8 and Luke 5:1-11.

“Do not be afraid; from now on you will be catching people” (Luke 5:10).

 “A Unique Mission”

God has given each of us a personal mission. Although the mission is personal and unique to us, it is not private. It is exercised among ordinary people and in the ordinary places of the everyday life. It is to those persons and places that God sends us.

“Do not be afraid; from now on you will be catching people.” Jesus spoke his “call” to Peter and the others. He called them to be evangelists, bearers of the Good News.

Many of us recoil at the mention of the word, “evangelism.” It conjures up images of a rigid biblical literalism and intrusive professions of concern for our eternal destiny. We assume that being an evangelist means accosting others with questions such as “Are you saved?” We conclude that evangelism is an arrogant attempt to bring others, at all costs, into our particular religious fold.

At this point, let me offer an etymological sidebar. If you take the time to track down literal meaning of “evangelism,” you discover a beautiful word. The word, in Greek, has a prefix (eu) meaning “good.” Then it also, perhaps you never noticed, contains the lovely word “angel.” An angel is a messenger, one who brings news. So evangelism is nothing other than the bringing, albeit by a human being, of the Good News.

Evangelism is not about convincing others of our truth or getting them to accept our beliefs (only the Spirit can do that). Evangelism is the human practice of sharing and living the Word that has transformed our lives with such grace and power that we can not help but tell the story.

It is important to make a distinction between the suspect methods of evangelism we sometimes see and the call to evangelism. Reject some of the methods we must, but the call to evangelism, to share the good news, remains our call. We should not give it up or have it taken from us.

We are uncertain evangelists. We are too aware that, compared to our miles of doubt, our faith will scarcely fill a footprint. Our experiences of God are often fleeting and tenuous. When we whisper an affirmation of faith, we do not want to say aloud what we do not know with certainty. When God is present in our lives as a still, small feeling or voice, we prefer to use a still smaller voice in response. We act less like we are spreading the Good News and more like we are keeping the good secret.

Evangelism begins with what we have seen and heard and experienced of the mystery of life, more commonly called “God.” It begins with talk, with words about our lives and the times when we sensed our lives intersecting with the life of God. Stories of faith can and do stand alongside stories of doubt. When we have no story to share, we can still be uplifted and sustained by the stories of others. We do live in community.

We place our stories alongside other stories, found in the Bible and elsewhere. Our stories are caught up in the net of the larger story. The God who seems to steal in and out of our lives is the same God who is bound in covenant with us and has promised never, never to abandon us. We and others are sustained by the larger story of which our stories are a part. And because we are sustained by this larger story, we share it, too, with others.

Martins Luther, the great Reformer, once defined evangelism as one beggar telling another beggar where to find bread. (Perhaps it is no coincidence that among Luther’s dying words were, “We are all beggars, everyone.”) If we derive our strength from God, it is our obligation to share that with others who seek strength. If we receive peace from the presence of Christ, it is our obligation to share that with those who yearn for peace. If our lives find meaning in the Christ story, it is our obligation to share the story with those who themselves long for meaning.

Our task is not to hook people and drag them in under any pretense. It is rather to cast the net of God’s love far and wide, open to all the world, and then wait with, at times, great patience for the Spirit’s work and to see if any are transfixed by God’s vision and grace.

Evangelism is an invitation: an invitation to personal faith, an invitation to a community of faith, and an invitation to be a servant in the world.

If we think we have got something worth having, then we ought to think we have got something that is worth sharing. To say that our faith is personal is not the same as saying that our faith is private. Faith is personal in that it involves an individual commitment of one person to another – Christ and you. If faith were private, however, we would not share it.

Needless to say, when we are inviting others to encounter our gracious God, our invitations must be gracious invitations. They must be freely offered and to which another person may respond or not respond freely. The invitation we offer is an open invitation and not “time limited,” open both to the workings of the Spirit and open to a variety of human responses. Our actions may be a most powerful manner of visible witness, but a word, at times only a single word, is necessary for our witness in the world to take the form of an invitation.

Evangelism is a human attempt, using the writings and worship of the Church, to express the inexpressible, wrestle with the inexplicable, and learn to live with the incomprehensible.

We, too, are continually being invited to new understandings of God and renewed relationships with God. We are called to speak the good news and to hear it ourselves, but never in a proprietary way. Only God knows what a difference we can make. Many of us have had an experience of God at work in our lives.

What would happen if that experience changed your life, our life together, in such a way that we could not help telling the world all about it? Then, every child of God touched by a ministry of this church might yet hear a word of good news so compelling that their lives, too, would never be the same. There are plenty of people out there who will hear what you have to say. So, then, let us be up and out of the boats and on our way, and let us not be afraid.