Readings for the Day:
Reflection:
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Recently I had a conversation with a man from South Africa. He was telling me about an important tree in his culture, the Marula Tree. Curious, I asked him to share more about it. He told me that the tree is believed to be connected to the ancestors. In short, it is believed that the ancestors’ spirits reside there, and that one day you will reside there too. In fact, a large part of the funeral arrangements in his culture are for your loved ones to find a tether for your spirit so they can bring you back to your ancestors’ marula tree. Then you will reside with them and as they continue, with you, to offer advice to those in the family who come after. This, in short, is what he told me.
Even though my Faith teaches me something different, I still took time to listen to him. I felt it was important to do so. Really my Faith demanded it of me.
We know in the West how important missionaries were in establishing colonies. These men would come in and share their Faith exactly as it had come to them in their upbringing.
If we look back into the past, we can clearly see that the “Faith of our fathers”, i.e. the first Apostles, looks slightly different from the “Faith of our fathers”, i.e. our European ancestors. The core message is the same, but some of the particulars look different. For example, Western art often depicts Jesus, and other scenes from Scripture, in Western settings that would have been very foreign to the people in Biblical times.
We often forget that early Christians took the Faith and explained it in a way our European ancestors could understand. In fact, this is what Scripture itself calls us to do.
In Acts 17, Paul is at the Areopagus, also known as Mars Hill. This is the place of the judiciary and the market place in Athens, just down hill from the Acropolis.
Now Paul was a Roman Citizen, but he was also a Jewish man from Israel. His understanding of Faith was very different from the Greco-Romans whose territory he was in now.
For example, the Greco-Romans had many gods in their religion. They felt they needed to appease each and every one of these gods or something bad would happen. Their habit was to throw a coin into any shrine they happened to pass in order to stay in their gods' good graces.
As a safety catch-all, they set up a shrine “to an unknown god”. That way if there was a god they were unaware of, they’d be able to appease that deity too.
This understanding is completely different from the monotheism of Paul. Yet he uses it to help the Athenians understand the Truth. He uses this shrine to share with them the Good News of the Lord and lead them to Christ Jesus. As we see later in the chapter, this works for some while others around him leave. Yet all are listening and have the opportunity to accept Jesus Christ as Lord.
When we follow Paul’s example and make the Gospel accessible to those we meet, we create something beautiful. One of the most popular prayer books in the Anglican Communion is the New Zealand Prayer Book. This book combines Anglican forms of worship with the New Zealand’s indigenous peoples’ understanding and culture. When I was serving at St. Peter’s in Montana, there was a service called Togendowagan designed for and by First Peoples of America. This service brought together understandings of their culture with Episcopal worship in a way that personally helped me better understand aspects of worship like the Confession of Sin. Even in places like South Africa, worship often reflects the area people live in by using traditional languages such as isiXhosa in services.
One of the things my friend from South Africa said at the end of our discussion was that he hoped our spirits would pass each other on the road. My hope, I told him, was the same. If I had more time, and I wish I had, I could have used this to speak of Resurrection as the path that leads us to that road, the way we all are searching for really. In this way, I would have used his understanding to bring him to the Good News of Christ Jesus, just as Paul calls us.
When we share the Gospel, we can’t just relate it as we understand it. We must connect it to others in a way they can understand. We cannot forget that in our Faith we are all called to be evangelists, to share the Good News to all we meet. We cannot do that if we fail to use all tools at our disposal. One of those tools is to make the Gospel relatable to all we meet in the better hope that others will be able to understand it. In this way we can help at least a few come to Christ Jesus, just as Paul did for the Athenians.