Click Here for the Link to video for Missions Day 2021        

 

 Bishop George Sumner's Sermon for Mission's Day:

Diane Stanton was not able to be with us this morning, and we pray that she would be feeling much better soon.  Obviously her name is synonymous with international mission around here.  I thought I could be a kind of Charlie McCarthy, to forward her thoughts on what world mission teaches us about this moment in mission and evangelism in the context before us, but, though talented, Diane is not, as far as I know, a ventriloquist..  Still, by way of appreciation for her remarkable work in Uganda, the pearl of Africa, (though as a former missionary from Tanzania I would say there is more than one pearl), her work in education as well as health development, I want to think for a few moments to put these two unlikely times and places of comparison next to one another, our situation and that of Buganda a little less than a century ago, when the Revival sprung up there. 

      How different they seem to us, one a cultural moment of emergence into modernity, perhaps, one out of it, perhaps.  Let us leave these words aside, which do not throw much light.  Still I do think that we can gain a great deal by considering what the historian Barbara Tuchman called a ‘distant mirror,’ a moment in the past which surprisingly helps us see ourselves more clearly.  And since this is also a homily, I had better shoehorn the lections from the Word of God in there too!  To begin, it was a time of massive social change, as villages came to be included in a national, and more modern, economy and communication. The claims of the old and the new clashed against one another, for example as some young people went to school.  Many had been traumatized by the events of the Great War, and of the industrial demands it brought. Even east Africa felt the great depression.  In the midst of all this people expressed a sense of being powerless, and sometimes resorted to older ways of seeking spiritual control. There was a sense of being dislocated. So the particulars were very different than for us, but the import of them quite recognizable.

     In such a moment as this, the Holy Spirit did a great work whose fruits may still be found in Anglicanism. I want to offer three challenges that Bugandan Christians faced. Then I want to highlight the centerpiece of their message. And finally I want to point out three results in their church life which are relevant to today.  The first, by way of confession an example you may have heard me use before, comes actually from several generations earlier, when the Gospel first came to the kingdom.  The story is found in the book about the growth of the Church in Buganda by the great evangelical missionary- bishop John V. Taylor.  He explains that when local people first heard the Gospel, they were shocked and surprised. But the thing that amazed them was not so much that God’s Son should become human. They lived in a world vibrant with spiritual forces active among them. But they also believed in a high creator God, the only problem being that He was too great to worry about the troubles of these anti- like creatures, the humans. He had receded to the highest heaven, leaving humans to fend for themselves spiritually.  They were shocked then to hear, in the words of a contemporary hymn. ‘how deep the Father’s love for us.’  In time the Church would formulate this shocking claim in the doctrine of the Trinity, which we focus on this week.  And though we moderns have wrestled with the claims of the incarnation and the atonement, as well we might, we have some kinship with those Bugandans, don’t we post-moderns? Don’t we too suppose some times that He exists, but has receded, headed for the coast?  Is their shock so different from that which we should feel too, were we to hear this message in as fresh a way as they did? This helps us to hear those wonderful verses from Romans chapter eight from yet another angle. Not only is the Holy Spirit able to pray through our groaning, and not only are we grafted by adoption  and grace into Sonship, but it is to the ear of the very Father himself that our words of praise and lament are conveyed- beautifully shocking in a threefold way.

      As you know, there is at this moment in time a great struggle, I would say with more heat than light, about racial reconciliation. It roils our politics, not least here. It has certainly become a huge issue in evangelical circles.  And here is the remarkable fact in our distant mirror from the 1930’s half the globe away- it began as an issue of racial reconciliation, this the great revival of evangelistic fervor in our tradition!  You see there were tensions between the old Anglo missionaries in the Rwanda Mission, an extension of the Anglican mission in Buganda.  African leaders felt those missionaries to be too slow to share control, too set in unhelpful ways of thinking. Finally, over hours, even days, they put their antagonisms ‘in the light,’ as they said, before the Lord. And they came to a deep mutual forgiveness and a deep mutual reconciliation.  And this acted as a kind of jet propulsion for the evangelistic effort, across several borders, in the years that followed.  The Holy Spirit used reconciled messengers of the message of reconciliation in Jesus. This was not some political accommodation, but that speaking the truth in love made possible by the Holy Spirit within the body of the faithful.  That was in fact the moment of lift-off for the east African revival.  This fact challenges efforts to divvy up what is political and what is spiritual in such a question.

     If you were to read that book by John Taylor I mentioned earlier, you would learn that Bugandan society was in a time of upheaval, not least in how they understood intimate relations and especially marriage. A remarkable number of parishioners were unable to receive communion due to irregularities of polygamy. Nor did this issue vanish at the onset of the Balokole movement, as the revival was named. But renewal did not mean arguments or debates, but rather the married as a witness anew on behalf of the whole, that they might be ‘a symbol of Christ and the Church,’ (as Ephesians 5 says), in a time of great change and confusion,  though they were occasionally judgmental in ways of which they repented.

      I mentioned the name of the movement, the Balokole, which comes from the Bantu word for redemption. The most important thing of all, more important than all we might say about context before the revival or about Church structure after, was the powerful sense they had that Jesus has accomplished redemption for them. Amidst many shortcomings, they put the centerpiece at the center, and made the main thing the main thing. It is the one thing we need to be able to say about any era and any branch of the Church. Jesus does what we cannot- he says ‘be forgiven’, and what his word says springs into being. 

     The Bugandans had their unique culture, and so do we. And every missionary moment has its danger of putting cultural stumbling blocks in the way of people. The missionaries made such errors- so do we.  But what matters most is not to remove all stumbling blocks, but to leave the great stumbling block where it needs to be, at the claim of Jesus alone to open the door to the Father, the claim of Jesus to speak us forgiven of our very real sins and offenses. That is why in the Gospel begins with the young man being commanded to obey all that is required of him- to fulfill what is best in human culture we might say. But the story ends with leaving home and family, to which he has obligations!, to follow Jesus. The forgiveness of sins does not wipe out the fulfillment of the law- the law remains holy and good- but it surpasses us, and it for that treasure we would sell everything. Revival happens wherever and in whomever that challenge is met and by grace received.  And this means that while there are insights of great worth in our unique moment, ways of putting the question, the answer is no less scandalous and no less the same.

       For the Balokole, we may note the consequences for Church life that followed.  First of all lay people became tireless evangelists. The movement spread rapidly from Rwanda and then Uganda into Kenya and Congo and Tanzania and beyond.  They had in their DNA, as we say now, this tight connection between their redemption from guilt and confusion, and their sharing, as the great Indian evangelist DT Niles said, around the same time, as one beggar to another telling of a great cache of food.  With remarkable examples like Apolo Kivebulaya,  (near where Diane has helped in Uganda), they began to find those unreached peoples which has continued into our own time. And as they evangelized they had words of exhortation and rebuke at times for the sleepier and more compromised parts of the Church, as they saw it. But they never left. They remained as a force of renewal within Anglicanism, in sharp contrast for example to those revivalists called the Methodists two and a half centuries earlier. The fire of the Holy Spirit remained in the fireplace, to quote the title of a book about Anglican renewal by Charles Hummel. Renewal we need, but churchly and patient (albeit challenging) renewal.

       The Balokole were not like Methodists brothers and sisters around us in that they stayed in our Church. But they were exactly like them in this way: a faithful walk as a disciple of our Lord requires face to face accountability, often in small groups.  When we have such groups, we ‘come away stronger,’ as a book by the sociologist Robert Wuthnow says. We need to gather in small groups to hold one another up and hold one another accountable, just as the Balokole did. This seems particularly important in this time in which we return somewhat gingerly to that embodied, face to face nature of Church life which is essential. We surrendered it for a season for a valid reason, but we cannot carry on over the long haul without that embodied inter-personal accountability of discipleship which is a pillar of the Church.

       We do well to think together about mission. We strive to do what God puts in our mind and our hand to do. What becomes of it all his His affair. The Balokole did not set out to transform the Anglican Church. Nor can we ourselves come up with a strategic solution to the problem of post-modern post-pandemic Church renewal. Beyond our paygrade, thank heaven. But we must think speak and pray together about what God is putting in our mind and heart, as we seek in the Holy Spirit to, as the Quakers say, proceed as way opens.  Still, it encourages us by looking at the altogether amazing and unlikely things the Holy Spirit can do, beyond what we can ask or imagine. Balokole, born of necessity and distress in a corner of east Africa, has contributed to the growth of a worldwide communion of Churches, the most rapidly expanding being those who share its evangelical roots.  And of this Communion we are a part, not an isolated parish or diocese or even a national church- these too are who we are, but alone they do not suffice to understand the words we stand and proclaim ‘I believe in the one holy catholic and apostolic Church.’ Our missional and cultural perplexities must be put in a larger context, that of the inheritance of the apostles, or the ecumenical family of churches, of the Anglican Communion, itself one expression of the celebration and the coming of all the nations we sang of this morning in the Jubilate, Psalm 100, and in the Song of the Redeemed from Revelation.  We are but one corner of one such nation, diverse in background though we be, taking comfort in that wider company catholic, a reminder of which is those like Diane with cross-cultural ministries. That we are one across centuries and continents, including Uganda, we give thanks this morning as attend by grace with what the Holy Spirit gives us to do. Amen.