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| This We Believe |
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November 11, 2005
I have become all things to all people so that by all possible means I might save some. (1 Corinthians 9:22)
I recently came across a creed written by missionaries to the Masai tribe in Africa. It’s based on the Nicene Creed, the traditional creed originally written in the fourth century and still recited today by many believers. The Masai version goes like this:
We believe in the one High God, who out of love created the beautiful world and everything good in it. He created man and wanted man to be happy in the world. God loves the world and every nation and tribe on the earth. We have known this High God in darkness, and now we know him in the light. God promised in the book of his word, the Bible, that he would save the world and all the nations and tribes.
We believe that God made good his promise by sending his son, Jesus Christ, a man in the flesh, a Jew by tribe, born poor in a little village, who left his home and was always on safari doing good, curing people by the power of God, teaching about God and man, showing the meaning of religion is love. He was rejected by his people, tortured and nailed hands and feet to a cross, and died. He lay buried in the grave, but the hyenas did not touch him, and on the third day, he rose from the grave. He ascended to the skies. He is the Lord.
We believe that all our sins are forgiven through him. All who have faith in him must be sorry for their sins, be baptized in the Holy Spirit of God, live the rules of love and share the bread together in love, to announce the good news to others until Jesus comes again. We are waiting for him. He is alive. He lives. This we believe. Amen.
I’ve heard it said that Christianity is the only world religion that is not tied in one way or another to the language and culture of its founder. I think it’s generally true; while a westerner can certainly convert to, for example, Islam or Judaism or Buddhism, in doing so he or she will have to embrace a different language and/or cultural practices to one degree or another. The Masai creed is an illustration of the adaptability of Christianity. The good news of Jesus is good news in whatever language it is proclaimed. The life of Jesus transcends cultural particularities. Paul can tell first-century Greeks that Jesus “went around doing good and healing all who were under the power of the devil” and the Masai can affirm that he “left his home and was always on safari doing good, curing people by the power of God” and nothing is lost in the translation. The psalmist can write “you will not let your holy one see decay” and the Masai can recite “the hyenas did not touch him” and each can kneel side by side at the empty tomb.
This adaptability of the gospel is testimony, to the authenticity of the faith. Dismissals of Christianity as a “western religion” by the intellectuals of our world aside, the gospel is not confined by language or cultural trappings to a particular time or place. It finds soil in hectic cities and quiet countryside. It takes root in the African bush and in Asian metropolises. It finds open, hungry hearts in gated communities and housing projects, Ivy League campuses and factory towns. Jesus Christ finds a way to communicate the good news through his church, and people everywhere find the words to say “this we believe. Amen.” The gospel speaks to the longings of human hearts, not just western hearts. It is universal because it is true.
When I was in college, a former missionary to Africa named Monte Cox taught a missions class that I was a part of. He told a story about the difficulty of translating Jesus’ statement that he is “the bread of life” into the language of the tribal people to whom he was sent. It wasn’t that there was no word for “bread” in their language; the problem was that these people only had bread to eat on the most special of occasions. To call Jesus “the bread of life” would have risked implying that Jesus likewise only played a limited part in the lives of his people. It would have obscured the point.
The solution was to describe Jesus in terms of a food that the people ate regularly, every day, and so Jesus became for the Kalenjin people of Kenya the “corn-meal mush of life.” Doesn’t exactly roll off your tongue, but it described Jesus in a way those people could hear.
This Sunday I’ll be preaching in our Spanish-language worship service. Our Hispanic minister, Carlos, will preach in the English service. I’m looking forward to the experience because it will give me the chance to try to understand the story of Jesus through the eyes of people different from myself. That’s important, because it’s easy for us to get hung up on our own preferred cultural packaging for the gospel: to sing only a certain range of songs, to pray only for the things most easily recognized on our cultural radar, and to focus only on the preoccupations of our own time and place. We need to be shaken out of that rut sometimes so that we can be more conscious of the way the gospel speaks to people different from us.
I’ve also been invited to go, in the next couple of weeks, to a Saturday night church service on the west side of Chicago. The church – and I’m still having trouble thinking of it as a church – is called “The House,” and it’s more a hip-hop concert than it is a traditional church service. It represents the calling a couple of guys I know have felt for proclaiming the gospel in some of Chicago’s most economically depressed neighborhoods. It will no doubt feel and sound and look strange to me, but it’s one more example of the power of the gospel to overcome the limits of time and place.
I’m telling you all this so you’ll see that all these innovative ways of proclaiming the “old, old story” came about because someone took what they had come to believe and translated it into a language that others could hear. That’s an amazing responsibility and privilege: to proclaim the good news across boundaries of culture and language without losing any of it.
And that’s the responsibility of the church in general. And of you specifically. You have missionary opportunities every day as you cross cultural boundaries at your office, or your school, or in your neighborhood, or in your home. You meet people, you talk to them, you learn how they think and what matters to them and how they see the world. And then you have the sacred calling of telling them the story of Jesus in the language they speak. You have the privilege of helping them come to the point of “this I believe.” You won’t always get it just right. But you’re not on your own, either. God through the Holy Spirit is with you and in you and will help you. It is, after all, God’s desire that every person come to know Jesus.
This we believe.
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Unless otherwise indicated, all Scripture quotations are taken from The Holy Bible, Today’s New International Version TNIV (r), Copyright (c) 2005 by International Bible Society. All rights reserved.
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