Incorporeal Works

This morning St. Paul’s Episcopal church in Chattanooga hosted a guest preacher, Nadim Nassar, an Anglican priest who is a Syrian Christian, born to a Presbyterian father and a Greek Orthodox mother. Father Nassar is director of the Trinity Institute for Christianity and Culture, an organization for broadening understanding between Christians and those of other religions. In a world increasingly subject to cross-currents of different faiths, family backgrounds and cultures, the Reverend Mr. Nassar is a walking sampler of diversity. His message, as he preached on the Gospel reading for today, Matthew 9:35-10:23, was one of a unifying commitment to the message in the reading, described by Reverend Nassar as “this tough Gospel.”

Drawing on his experiences growing up in a fragmented and increasingly violent part of the world, the preacher stressed what he meant by the “toughness” of today’s Gospel. Jesus in the Gospel is commissioning his new disciples to minister in his name and carry his message throughout the world. The message is one of love and acceptance of each person’s access to the grace that through Jesus is being offered without purchase or cost other than acceptance. Jesus, as Father Nassar said, was not the sanitized, ethereal figure of conventional popular convention. He fully understood the perils and difficulties his disciples would face from hostile audiences whose lives were being challenged, and from leaders of existing synagogues, from under whose feet the message of Jesus would cut the ground away, and shake their world to its foundations. Jesus cautioned his followers, “See, I am sending you out like sheep into the midst of wolves; so be wise as serpents and innocent as doves.”

An odd combination of similes, but the allusions and evocations are very apt, and cut to the thorny heart of the Christian message as understood by Father Nassar. Love that cannot answer hate and violence in kind, but which must find another way, reaching even the most implacable of enemies if possible, and withdrawing from direct conflict while still preserving the message the disciples are charged to deliver.

The terrible images of the civil war in Lebanon and elsewhere summoned up by the preacher, who had lived through them, including the 1967 Lebanon war, were delivered with urgent passion and compelling relevance for us in the wake of September 11, 2001.

I heard Father Nassar preach at the 8:00 a.m. service, then listened on the radio to him again for the 10:30 a.m. service. Preaching without notes, Father Nassar varied slightly in his two versions of basically the same message. In the earlier sermon, he cited the Iraq war as an example of the wrong response to violence, aiding rather than hindering the terrorists. This reference was not present in the later address. Considering that we are in a presidential campaign featuring sharp differences on this very subject, perhaps the Reverend Nassar decided that such a topical reference did not aid his central message. I thought it quite relevant, myself.

My lumbering description does not do justice to this wonderful sermon, one of the better I have ever heard anywhere. Selah.