Draw All People to Myself (African Mass - Fifth Lent B)

“Draw All People to Myself”

Fifth Sunday of Lent (Year B)
29th March 2009
Cathedral Church of St. John the Evangelist, Hong Kong
6:00 p.m. “African” Mass
Gospel Reading: John 12:20-33

God, breathe into us a desire to change— take away our hearts of stone and give us hearts of flesh. Amen.

Tonight’s scripture reading describes a scene that is a turning point in the Gospel of John. Several times previous to this passage, that Gospel explains that things we would expect to have happened in the story didn’t take place because, Jesus’ “hour had not yet come” (John 2:4; 7:30; 8:20). With the arrival of Jesus in Jerusalem for what John describes as his final Passover, and with the arrival of Greeks asking to see Jesus, suddenly Jesus declares that “the hour has come for the Son of Man to be glorified.” The Gospels of Matthew, Mark, and Luke all portray Jesus’ suffering and death as the necessary prelude to his being raised in glory from death. But for the Gospel of John, Jesus being raised up on the cross itself is the moment of true glory. John’s Jesus uses a parable to describe this: “unless a kernel of wheat falls to the ground and dies, it remains only a single seed. But if it dies, it produces many seeds.” Where the three Gospels describe Jesus in Gethsemane begging in prayer to be spared from the cross, and ultimately accepting “not my will, but thine,” John describes no prayer in Gethsemane. Rather he has Jesus say here, “What shall I say? 'Father, save me from this hour'? No, it was for this very reason I came to this hour. Father, glorify your name!'" Matthew and Luke have Jesus teaching his followers to pray, “thy name be sanctified, thy kingdom come, thy will be done.” John’s Gospel sees the lifting up and death of Jesus on the cross as the answer to this prayer. Last week, we saw that John’s gospel portrays looking to Jesus lifted up on the cross the means of salvation just as Moses’ serpent lifted on a pole was a means of healing. John’s Jesus says, “But I, when I am lifted up from the earth, will draw all people to myself."

Now the fact is, some people get very uncomfortable when you point out that the four Gospels tell very different stories about Jesus, and that John's Gospel tells a story that is in great part at odds with the other three's version. But I have always taken this as an occasion for great hope. You see, Christians were a diverse lot from the very beginning. The ministers of the Word and the Gospel writers who told these stories so close to the actual events made the stories their own and let themselves be moved by the Spirit in ways appropriate to each of them. And the Church has not insisted that we harmonize this, or censor all the versions into one. The Church has let the four Gospels stand in glorious disharmony, wonderful diversity. "I will all draw all people unto me," says Jesus here. That means the Church ought to have diversity, ought to have a variety of keys in which the Gospel tune is played.

Because of the Church's history of identifying heresy and bracketing it out, we often lose sight of this. It is important to remember that as the early Church sought to define its faith, there were individuals who wanted to eliminate all diversity and possible disharmony in scripture. Some wanted to get rid of the Old Testament. Others wanted to limit the New Testament to a single theological viewpoint. One such was Tatian who created a single harmonized Gospel (the Diatesseron) and wanted it to be recognized as Scripture instead of the Four Gospels the Church finally settled on. The Fathers, seeking to truly reflect the deposit of faith given in the apostolic age, declined Tatian's offer and rejected his single Gospel along with several other Gospels that bore the marks of having come from a period after the first couple of generations of Christians. The apostolic faith thus defined included the diversity we see in the New Testament.

We are celebrating mass this evening with music, prayers, and themes draw from the peoples of Africa, among the many peoples around the world whom Jesus has drawn to himself. African Christianity is one example of the diversity of our faith. It itself includes a great deal of diversity.

A Kongo Crucifix

In a 10th century North African hymn, we see the way some Africans have reflected on the theme of today’s Gospel reading, the cross of Jesus as the moment when glory, salvation, and hope arrived for us:

The cross is the hope of Christians
the cross is the resurrection of the dead
the cross is the way of the lost
the cross is the savior of the lost
the cross is the staff of the lame
the cross is the guide of the blind
the cross is the strength of the weak
the cross is the doctor of the sick
the cross is the aim of the priests
the cross is the hope of the hopeless
the cross is the freedom of the slaves
the cross is the power of the kings
the cross is the water of the seeds
the cross is the consolation of the bondmen
the cross is the source of those who seek water
the cross is the cloth of the naked.
We thank you, Father, for the cross.

Note here that the theology of the cross is not one of sorrowful suffering, but rather of triumphant life even within suffering. While not minimizing the sufferings of our Lord nor the hardships each of us faces in this world, this African hymn’s theology of the cross is one of joy. Joy is one of the core themes recurring again and again in prayers and hymns from Africa.

There is a prayer from Ghana in West Africa that speaks to me. It sums up what I consider to be the essential joy and thankfulness of the African spirituality that I encountered again and again while living in Africa for three years in the mid-1990s:

Lord, I am happy this morning,

Birds and angels sing and I am exultant.

The universe and our hearts are open to your grace.

I feel my body and give thanks.

The sun burns my skin and I thank you.

The breakers are rolling toward the seashore,

The sea foam splashes our house.

I give thanks. Lord, I rejoice in your creation,

and that you are behind it, and before, and next to it, and above

-- and within us.

Part of the joy and affirmation of life that we see in the faith of Africans comes from the tenuousness of life itself there. Faith matters there, and indeed the hope that faith provides is there often a matter of life and death.

Often how people traditionally greet each other tells you about their experience and shared culture. In China, where famines and natural disasters have been a fact of life since ancient times, people traditionally greet each other by saying “have you eaten?” In Benin, West Africa, where I lived for three years, people greeted each other in the local language by saying, “Oh, you woke up this morning.” In a place with high infant mortality, endemic disease, and relatively short life spans, waking up in the morning was not something that you assumed.

Generalizations about a place with such an intense diversity of peoples, languages, ethnic groups, political structures and cultures are inherently prone to be oversimplifications and overstatements. But in my experience, the poverty throughout much of Africa, its relative lack of development, the prevalence and severity of disease, and the youth of its rapidly growing population with a relatively short life span—all of this makes life very precious there. People generally thank God for the good they have, and rejoice in their lives while they can.

But the tenuousness of life there also produces a sober honesty about what all of us share—the fact that we all one day will die, we all get sick, we all need help, we all experience bitterness and harshness in life together with its exquisite joys. In my experience, Africans in general have a great honesty in recognizing the reality of evil, and how easily it can find place in every human heart.

It is this honesty coupled with a true thankfulness and joy for life that makes African hymns, prayers, and worship forms so attractive to many Christians throughout the throughout the world.

Here are two prayers, both from African Christians, that show this honesty and practicality in dealing with the reality of evil.

O thou great Chief, light a candle in my heart, that I may see what is therein, and sweep the rubbish from thy dwelling place.

God in Heaven, you have helped my life to grow like a tree. Now something has happened. Satan, like a bird, has carried in one twig of his own choosing after another. Before I knew it he had built a dwelling place and was living in it. Tonight, my Father, I am throwing out both the bird and the nest.

Christ in an Ethiopic Gospel Manuscript

The Church in the global south is growing and gaining strength, even as it appears to be weakening and shrinking in the global north. This is in no small part due to the strength of African faith.

It is important to note that this fervency is not simply the product of simple, unreflective hope, or the fundamentalism that seeks simple, sure, and certain answers in a rapidly changing and threatening world. African Anglicanism produces people like Desmond Tutu as well as like Peter Akinola. Differing parts of the Church in Africa have reacted to the current controversies within the Anglican Communion differently. A residue of resentment among churchmen built up because of colonialism and imperialism and the slowness of some colonial churches to develop local leadership is a major driver in African reactions to developments in North America and Europe.

The issues under discussion are viewed through very different lenses in Africa.

On the GAFCON side-- The 19th century young Christian men whose martyr blood was the seed of the church in Uganda, for instance, were tortured to death for disobeying a royal order to submit to their King’s abusive sexual advances. Such a history is bound to color how one views discussion of sexual ethics and same-sex partnering. In countries where Muslims make up a major part of the population, news reports of recent developments in North American and European Anglicanism that are patently offensive to conservative Muslims have on occasion provoked attacks on Christians. In several countries where polygamy is still widespread and the family clan is the still major constitutive and positive force in most people’s life, the discussions of Europeans and North Americans about equality between the genders look overly individualistic, far removed from day-to-day experience, and threatening to social support networks. The submission of the individual to traditional conceptions of purity and order is a main concern in the Churches who have reacted in this way.

On the Canterbury/Lambeth middle or the North American Church side-- A major part of the struggle against Apartheid in South Africa was the theological battle against a Calvinist fundamentalism where the doctrines of predestination and a chosen covenant people were mixed with a hateful and anti-scientific political doctrine of racism. Such a history tends to make one suspicious of any appeal to scripture to justify the oppression or marginalization of any group for something which they seemingly have little choice about. Christian commitment to social justice is the major concern here.

In a word, how Africa’s diverse but fervent Christian faith is preached and how its communities are administered in large part depends of the theological orientation and local experience of its communities. Often the difference stems from the theological persuasion of the missionary society that spread the faith to that particular part of Africa.

But to look at these differences to the exclusion of seeing what all African Christians have in common would be like noticing each tree and not noticing that you are in a forest. Listen to the fervency, honesty, and joy in this African prayer:

I implore You, God;
I pray to You during the night.

How are all people kept by You all days?

You walk in the midst of the grass;
I walk with You.

When I sleep in the house,
It is You with whom I sleep.

To You, I pray for food and water to drink,
and You give it.

Set me free, I implore You with all my heart:
If I do not pray to You with my heart,
How can You hear me?
But if I pray to You with my heart,
You know it and are gracious unto me!

Even something as traditionally Anglican as the great Canticle for Morning and Evening Prayer, Benedicite Omnia Opera, takes on new freshness when rephrased by Africans for Africans:

All you big things bless the Lord.
Mount Kilimanjaro and Lake Victoria
The Rift Valley and the Serengeti Plain
Fat baobabs and shady mango trees
All eucalytptus and tamarind trees
Bless the Lord. Praise Him and highly exalt him forever.

All you tiny things bless the Lord.
Busy black ants and hopping fleas,
Wriggly tadpoles and mosquito larvae
Flying locusts and water drops
Pollen dust and tsetse flies
Millet seed and dried dagaa
Praise the Lord. Bless Him and Highly Exalt Him Forever.

In all these songs, drumbeats, dances and prayers, we see Africa’s faith: young, vibrant, yearning for the justice and holiness of God.

Let me close with an Ashanti Christian prayer, from Ghana.

O Lord, O God, creator

Of Our land, our earth, the trees, the animals and humans, all is for your honor.

The drums beat it out, and people sing about it.

They dance with noisy joy that you are the Lord.

It is You who pulled the continents out of the sea.

What a wonderful world you have made out of the wet mud,

And what beautiful men and women!

We thank you for the beauty of this earth.

The grace of your creation is like a cool day between rainy seasons.

We drink in your creation with our eyes.

We listen to the birds' jubilee with our ears.

How strong and good and sure your earth smells, and everything that grows there.

The sky above us is like a warm, soft Kente cloth, because you are behind it,

Else it would be cold and rough and uncomfortable.

We drink in your creation and cannot get enough of it.

But in doing this we forget the evil we have done.

Lord, we call you, we beg you: Tear us away from our sins and our death.

This wonderful world fades away.

And one day our eyes snap shut.

All is over and dead without you.

We are still slaves of the demons and earth-fetishes

When we are not saved by you.

Bless us. Bless our land and people.

Bless our forests with mahogany, wawa, and cacao.

Bless our fields with cassava and peanuts.

Bless the waters that flow through our land.

Fill them with fish and drive great schools of fish to our seacoast, so that the fishermen in their unsteady boats do not need to go out too far.

Be with us youth in our countries, and in all of Mother Africa, and in the whole world.

Prepare us for the service that we should render.

In the name of Christ, Amen.


PRAYERS OF THE PEOPLE
(Adapted from the Kikuyu Peace Prayer)

Praise ye Lord,
Peace be with us.

R: Im Pharadisi, where all the dead are living (3x),
May we one day join there with them.

Say that the elders may have wisdom and speak with one voice.
Peace be with us. R.

Say that the country may have tranquility.
Peace be with us. R.

And the people may continue to increase.
Peace be with us. R.

Say that the people and the flock and the herds
May prosper and be free from illness.
Peace be with us. R.

Say that the fields may bear much fruit
And the land may continue to be fertile.
Peace be with us. R.

Say that the spirits of our ancestors, and loved ones now dead
May have light and joy, and may watch over us
Peace be with us. R.

Say that we to may join with them in Paradise.
Peace be with us. R.

May peace reign over earth,
May the tool match the task,
The gourd cup agree with vessel.
Peace be with us. R.

May our hearts be one, and every harsh word be driven out
Into the wilderness, far from us.
Peace be with us. R.

A KENYAN BENEDICTION

May God raise you up
Above everything.
May He make you be abundance that never ends,
Spread out like water of a lake,
Never changing.
Be like a mountain, solid.
Be like a camel, enduring all.
Be like a cloud that brings rain always.
And the Blessing of God Almighty,
†the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit
Be with you and abide with you always. AMEN