August 13, 2023
My friends, I speak to you in the name of God: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Amen.
Have you ever tried to talk to someone about something you didn’t know much about? Maybe you’ve had to fake your way through a presentation. Which is definitely not what I’m doing right now. Or you’ve needed to pass yourself off as an expert on something. It doesn’t work very well, does it? Most of us aren’t very convincing if we’re faking authenticity.
And I want us to put a pin in this idea of needing to know about the things we talk about. Because we’re going to come back to it. But first I need to say a few things about most Episcopalians’ least favorite subject. Evangelism.
We often think of evangelism with healthy doses of skepticism and fear. It comes with connotations of itinerant preachers or fundamentalists or those extraordinarily earnest people who knock on your door and offer you some literature while asking if you’ve found Jesus. Many of us are uncomfortable sharing our personal faith with people we know – let alone complete strangers who might be completely uninterested in matters of faith or spirituality. It’s just not the sort of thing we do in polite company.
Evangelism is one of many things Paul writes about in his letter to the church in Rome. To completely oversimply things, in this letter Paul instructs the Romans that God’s righteousness is revealed through Jesus’ teaching, death, and resurrection, which reconcile all people – both Jews and Gentiles – with God. In this restored relationship, the Spirit of God rules in place of sin, and empowers hope even in the face of suffering and pain. One of Paul’s purposes in writing is to invite his hearers to share in, and then pass on, this Good News.
In the portion of Romans we heard this morning Paul names the essential message of the Gospel – that Jesus is Lord and has been raised from the dead. But then he says that we need to have faith in our heart – to have inner trust – and to confess this message with our mouth – to evangelize. What does this mean? Is Paul demanding we live lives of private piety and street-corner sermons? The answer is no. It’s a little more complicated than that.
The challenge with evangelism isn’t with the methods we use. Whether we knock on doors or mail postcards inviting people to church or get into conversation about faith with a friend. The challenge isn’t the method, it’s the motive. Like anything else, we have to have a compelling “why” to do something.
The prevailing wisdom too often portrays evangelism as being about “saving souls”. That somehow our actions or words will “save” others. And that’s just human arrogance. The fact of the matter is that Jesus has already done the work of salvation. We can’t save other people through our own efforts. We can’t even save ourselves. Saving people is not a compelling “why”.
Introducing people to the God who has changed our lives is a far more compelling motive for evangelizing. In this kind of evangelism, we don’t need theological brilliance, or scriptural proofs, or doctrine, or dogma. We don’t need to worry about what’s in someone’s heart. Instead, we just need to talk about the amazing things God has done and is doing in our lives.
People will never meet the real Jesus if they only encounter him through the Gospel of Morality – where Christianity is a set of virtues with Jesus as teacher and moral example. When we tell our stories of faith, we turn our back on this caricature of Jesus that keeps him safely trapped on the pages of our Bibles, and instead we embrace the reality that he is alive and walking the Way of Love with us every day.
And this is where Paul’s connection between believing with our hearts and confessing with our lips comes into play. Paul is urging us to live authentic lives of faith – where the inner trust that comes from our experience of God enables us to live out the Word that’s within us. We may not be able to change anything ourselves, but faith working through us can change everything.
And here’s where we come back to the idea we put a pin in earlier. If we want to introduce people to Jesus, we have to know what God has done in our lives. Telling our stories of faith – of how being a follower of Jesus makes a difference in the way we live – is what gives our evangelism authenticity. We need to be able to do what Paul does in his letter – say what the Good News means for us. Not in some abstract way, but in our everyday lives. Where have we seen the Spirit’s work replace loneliness with community? Alienation with reconciliation? Where has Jesus’ message turned despair with hope? Where have we felt joy, happiness, or contentment? Answering these questions for ourselves is vital, because we can’t introduce people to God if we haven’t discerned how God is working in our own lives.
At the end of this passage from Romans, Paul quotes Isaiah – “how beautiful are the feet of those who bring good news”. God has good news for a world that can desperately use some. But God’s news is always brought by heralds – not just angels, but people like you, and me. What Paul teaches us today is that all followers of Jesus are sent into the world as he was – empowered and inspired through our experience of God to embody and proclaim the good news – that Jesus is Lord, and he has risen from the dead. The question I want to leave us with is: what does that Good News mean for you, and for me?
Amen.