Preached at Family of Christ Presbyterian Church, Greeley Colorado, 10/10/10
A couple of weeks ago, Jenn, Nate and I were sitting at the picnic table out in front of the church talking about a bunch of things, including this month’s emphasis on world Christianity. I was excited because World Christianity was one of the best classes I had in seminary and I am always anxious to share what I learned with others. Then they invited me to preach this Sunday and I had to figure out how to put all that excitement and information into a sermon.
This is what I came up with, “Naomi, Ruth and The Perry Fairy: A Drama in Three Acts.”
But before we get to act one, I should introduce you to our three characters:
First come the two that we met in the scripture reading, Naomi and her daughter-in-law, Ruth. But who is this mysterious third character, The Perry Fairy?
I could tell you that the Perry Fairy is a mystical creature that travels through the world, bring Christianity to new places and new people, and, in a way, it is.
My fellow students and I first learned about the Perry Fairy in our Eucharist and Church Mission class the second semester of our first year, and then returned to meet the Perry Fairy one more time in our World Christianity course the second semester of our final year.
What those classes had in common was a professor named Carlos Cardoza-Orlandi, who at the time was the World Christianity professor at Columbia.
I think Dr. Cardoza-Orlandi may be the best lecturer I have ever had, but there were moments when his accent made it difficult to decipher exactly what he was saying.
Perry Fairy is an example of that that stuck with us through the years, It’s simply the way that Dr. Cardoza-Orlandi pronounced the word, “periphery.” And when you take a class from him, you hear a lot about the periphery.
Now that you know the players, Naomi, Ruth and the periphery, let us begin our play.
Act I: Transmission
Naomi didn’t set out to be a missionary, she didn’t leave her home, her family and her friends so that she could spread the good news or convert the heathens.
No, she went because her husband went, because there was a famine in Judah and they had heard there was work and food to be found on the plateau of Moab.
When I imagined a world Christianity class, I made the assumption that I think a lot of people would make, that it would be about different styles of worship and church life. We’d learn about what the church looks like in other places, how people in Africa, Asia, South America and other places order their lives and their worship.
Well, some of the class was about those kinds of things, but by far they were not the most important things that we studied and learned.
Much more important was learning about how Christianity got to those places, How it moves from the center out to our friend the periphery, that is to say, we studied mission.
What is the mission of the church? Through the years, the answer to that question has come from the end of the Book of Matthew and Christ’s Great Commission: “Go forth and make disciples of all nations.”
Through the centuries, the church has responded to that commission in different ways. From the time of Constantine onward through the crusades and into the time of the Conquistadors in Latin America, it was done with military might. The government and the church worked together to spread the Gospel at the end of sword and through the barrel of a gun. Christendom ruled large swaths of the world.
But, starting with the Protestant Reformation, and continuing through the America Revolution and the Enlightenment, Christendom lost much of its power and the church’s way of responding to the Great Commission had to change.
Enter the missionary, The person who goes out, sent by a church to the heathens, to deepest, darkest Africa to show those people what they are doing wrong and get them onto the right path.
The missionary is an iconic image in our culture, from David Livingstone, of “Dr. Livingstone, I presume” fame to Rose Sayer, Katherine Hepburn’s character in the African Queen to countless missionary and cannibal jokes.
In World Christianity, we looked at how the missionary process has functioned and where it has gone wrong.
The first step in the missionary process is transmission. People go out or are sent out from a church to carry the Gospel to the periphery. That step takes several different forms:
In his book, Mission: An Essential Guide, Dr. Cardoza-Orlandi identifies a number of models that mission has fallen into through the years.
The first is what he calls the “mission as an overseas task” model, which in many ways is what we’re used to thinking about when we talk about mission. The church is doing something for those people over there and there’s a very clear distinction between the senders and the receivers or as he puts it, between the subjects and the objects of mission. One of the big problems with this model is that the local church itself is divorced from the work of mission, it gives money and sends the people out, but then it’s involvement is pretty much done.
The second model is “the efficiency model of mission.” This when the church says, “we’re going to show those people how to do thing better.” We’re going to fix their problems and make their life better and through that we’ll show them the importance of the church and of the good news. This, in some ways, sounds like a good idea, especially to liberal churches who don’t feel comfortable with “Evangelism” but who feel like they can make the world a better place, if they can just fix all the problems.
Where that model fails, or at least stumbles, is when it doesn’t take into account the cultural context of the people it’s trying to help. “The efficiency model of mission assumes that the missionary culture comes to solve the perceived chaos of another community without considering the cultural configuration that is in place in that perceived chaotic culture. Efficiency and productivity replace careful study and engagement with the missionized cultures.”
Next comes what he calls the “nostalgic model of mission.” This looks back to what is seen as the Golden Age of American Mission, when churches and missionary organizations sponsored schools and mission operations in foreign lands to show the heathens not only how great the Gospel is but also how great God’s chosen land, America was. Quoting Dr. Cardoza-Orlandi:
The passion found in the nostalgic model of mission is striking. First, the nostalgic model romanticizes past memories of a perceived time of glory and triumph. It is nurtured by the religious messianism that has so intensely shaped the identity of the United State—an elected country for the salvation of the world. It is linked to patriotism and cultural superiority, identity factors deeply ingrained in the North American psyche.
Any critical engagement with these formulas is considered to be a sign of disbelief and distrust in the “gospel of Jesus Christ.” In many Christian congregations and organizations to approve of these formulas is to be a legitimate Christian; to disapprove of them is to relinquish the faith. Furthermore, in many circles the nostalgic model of mission is a fundamental criterion for evaluating one’s commitment to the Christian faith.
All of these models have two problems: They are start from an unbalanced, or asymmetrical view of the two cultures involved in the transmission and reception of the message. In each case, the transmitters see themselves as reaching down to help those who are lesser than them.
As I said, that asymmetry is one of the two problems that Dr. Cardoza-Orlandi identifies with classical models of transmission and it is probably the easier one for people to see.
The second problem, that is so difficult to see, is that the gospel that they are trying to transmit is deeply embedded in their own cultural matrix. As much as they may think that they are transmitting the pure Gospel of Jesus Christ, they can’t help but see it and understand it through the lenses of their own culture and experiences.
Facing those two problems, asymmetry and cultural bias, are the key to successful transmission. It’s not necessary to eliminate them, in fact it’s impossible, but awareness that they exist and that they can stop the message from getting through can be enough.
One of my favorite images of mission from my World Christianity is that of the cereal aisle.
Picture the cereal aisle at King Soopers. There are dozens of different flavors and types of cereals from one end of the aisle to the other. Now imagine that you have created a new cereal that you want to sell. What’s the first issue you’re going to need to deal with? Getting it a space on that cereal aisle that is already crammed with other competing cereals.
Doing mission work, brining Christianity to a place that it hasn’t been before is like selling a new cereal, first you’ve got to get it out there where the people can buy it, can choose it. That’s our first act, that’s transmission, but that’s not the only problem.
The second problem in selling our cereal leads us forward, it’s not enough to just be on the cereal aisle, your cereal needs to be one that people will buy, and that’s our second act:
Act II: Reception
So Naomi has gone to the periphery, carrying with her, consciously or unconsciously, her faith and her culture. There on the periphery she meets the second character in our drama, Ruth.
What we can learn from the end of our scripture passage is that Ruth bought Naomi’s cereal. Ruth, I think, represents the dream outcome for a missionary:
She say’s to Naomi:
Do not press me to abandon you,
To turn back from following you.
For wherever you go, I will go;
Where you lodge, I will lodge.
Your people become my people,
Your God is now my God.
But, of course, it doesn’t always work out that neatly or cleaning, in fact it almost never does.
We’ve seen how transmission is always affected and formed by the cultural matrix of the senders, how there is no “pure” gospel to transmit.
Well the same thing is true of reception, the hearers are embedded in their own cultural matrices and they filter the message they receive through their own lenses.
Transmission and reception then becomes not a clean simple process of speaking an being heard, but much more like the old party game of Telephone, where a message is whispered from one ear to another and filtered through the mind of each participant, until the message is changed into something almost completely different from where it started.
When I studied biblical languages and the history of biblical translation, one of the most important things I learned was that it is impossible to translate the Bible with also interpreting it. Every translation is an interpretation, every translation is mediated through the cultural lenses of the person or people doing the translating.
We learned the story of one of the first translations of the Bible into an African language and how it failed because of the different cultural understandings of the translators and the receivers.
The failure hinged on one word. The word for spirits.
The traditional religion of this African culture taught the people that the spirits of their ancestors watched over them and protected them in a very real way. These were good spirits, good ghosts.
But the lenses of the missionaries who were translating the Bible didn’t allow for the idea of good, gentle, protective spirits. For them, ghosts and the like were always the agents of the devil. So in their translation, they used the native word for the spirits of their ancestors to represent the demons and evil spirits that Jesus casts out of people in the Gospels.
And in that little mistake, that one word not fully understood, they lost the people they were trying to reach. They got their cereal on the aisle, but no one would buy it, because it tasted awful to them.
As a counter example I think of the work of Dr. Frank Laubauch and the Laubauch Literacy foundation.
The Laubauch Literacy program which Dr. Frank developed as a missionary in the Philippines in the 1930s has been used to teach more than 60 million people in more than 100 countries to read in their own languages.
One of the reasons that it has been so successful is that, from the start, it has relied on the receivers to propagate it. Dr. Frank’s big idea was “each one teach one.” Each person who learns to read in the program is also expected to teach someone else to read and so the message and the learning is spread not by a top down imposition from outside the culture but by word of mouth on the inside. Dr. Frank’s cereal sold because the people made it into what they would buy.
If your interested, mother will, I’m sure, be happy to tell you the stories of Dr. Frank and the Pilipino warlords.
Now we’ve seen transmission and reception, so what’s the third act?
The third act is why I picked Ruth as our text for today. The Bible is full of stories of people going to the periphery and changing things out there, what makes Ruth interesting to me is that it also tells the story of what happens when those who have been on the edge return to the center.
Act III: The Return.
Naomi comes back, back home, back to the center and she brings Ruth with her.
Often over looked in the story of mission and in the history of the church is that the missionaries come back and when they come back they bring with them the new learnings that they have found in at the periphery.
We learn from them the ways and the forms of the faith in those distant lands and cultures and in small ways, those new forms change the church.
Perhaps the most obvious place that happens is in the integration of new music and new words into our worship.
But those little changes combine to blur the line, to shorten the distance between what was the center and what was the periphery.
The church in the world looks completely different today than it did 100 or even 50 years ago. Today the churches of the global south, of Africa and South America are the growing, dynamic heart of “Christendom.” Today they are sending missionaries to America.
Dr. Cardoza-Orlandi has predicted that in as little as 50 years from now, the face of the church in the world will be dark skinned and the phrase “white Christian” will sound as odd to people as “black Swede” does to us today.
Think about the change that Ruth brought. Ruth marries Boaz, they have a son named Obed, Obed grows and has a son named Jesse, Jesse grows and has a son named David who grows to be King of Israel. Many years later, one of David’s descendants, Joseph, has a son who changes everything.
But it all started with one person coming back from the periphery.
The word goes out, the word is heard, and the word returns. Quite a drama in three little acts.
Alleluia and Amen.
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